Thursday 2 April 2009

ESCAPE: The first outing: HEA Assessment and Feedback Event

The first outing of ESCAPE came at the HEA event on Assessment and Feedback. This event was created by the HEA to support the JISC Curriculum Design and Delivery programme. There were not too many other C-Delivery/ C-Design teams there.

I presented to a quiet room of just about 50 participants. It was after lunch and so maybe that’s why they were quiet! Hmm, maybe it was just me and my soporific presentation style!

I was given 10 minutes – I used it all. No time for q’s either :-( I did not spend any time outlining the case for assessment. It is already well made ! and was reinforced again by Brenda Smith in the morning session. I showed some of our approach in the hope that it might raise questions about what we are doing. I wanted to show a practitioner focus and evidenced based activity.

I showed our ‘mapping of the landscape’ and noted that this gave a great opportunity to ask the Schools if the map reflected what they wanted. i.e. did their conception of learning and their view of what their graduates attributes would be was supported by the landscape map?

I showed a modified landscape that I would have more allegiance with. i..e less reliance on final examinations and more opportunities on assessment for learning..

I spoke about capturing the secondary effects and showed that although we are only working with five modules by tracking staff and logging secondary and tertiary effects we are able to see how other modules have benefitted. We are really keen that a good assessment experience is the right of all of our students and not just those that happen to be taught by a member of staff that understands about assessment, alignment and the importance of feedback.

I then showed a technology-to-assessment-principles grid. This grid is intended to help staff make purposeful decisions about what technologies to use and how the different technologies’ relate to principles of good practice. The grid also shows how the technologies are being considered in terms of their likely
* Effectiveness
* Risk
* Cost

I.e. accepting that practitioners are likely to have different skill sets and resources. These skill sets and resources, as well as the ability of the technology to meet the Principles, are likely to be considered when selecting technologies.

Finally I presented the location of assessments on an efficiency versus efficiency matrix. I then tried to show how can make incremental change to separately improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the assessment.

I had fun animating all of this on the train!

No time for questions – let’s see if we get contacted after the event.

2 comments:

Malcolm said...

Always good to get the ideas out there for peer scrutiny - even if after lunch with no time for questions is the context - well done.

Happy Easter!

MarkRussell said...

Thanks Malcolm,

yep, sure was good showing some thoughts -but it felt rather cramped and not as dialogic as I would have liked.