Making an existing assessment activity more efficient

One of the 'additional' modules that sought our advice was Human Physiology - School of Life Sciences. Within that module the students were already engaging in peer assessment.

The peer assessment activity brought many learning opportunities but some of the hoped for time savings were lost with students immediately questioning the marks given by their peers.
Staff were engaged in time consuming activity associated with moderating the marks.


ESCAPE involvement sought to support the existing work but use technology to drive more reflection, try to get the to students' understand their strengths and areas for improvement and also require the students to present a considered and evidenced-based argument where they believed they were over or under marked.

The use of a web based data collection facility (offered by the ESCAPE project) provided some great data, encouraged the learning and also saved staff time.

The story was presented as a poster at the Fifth International Blended Learning Conference and represents a really good example of ESCAPE in practice.

Poster can be found here

Poster and Video

This last week we have been involved in the production poster and video in preparation for a joint meeting of the curriculum design and the curriculum development projects in Manchester on the 13th and 14th of October. The poster is a visual representation of the stages and mechanisms of the project. It captures the journey through the project by the stake holders and illustrates the approaches taken at the various stages of the project by the ESCAPE team. It was influenced heavily by the change management development activities that we were involved in at our last CAMEL meeting. One of the aspects of change management was looking at a four stage model of change management, viz:

• Awareness
• Interest
• Trying
• Adopting

It was interesting mapping our project activities to these four stages and realising the the stages were not atomic- that is to say that they could overlap - and that it was possible for stakeholders to drop back a stage( or two!).

The poster does not really capture the complexity of what we are doing - for example we are working with 9 different module teams, with some module attempting quite complex and innovative changes in assessment practice, but is a good start as a "top layer" map of the project.

I am now working on a three minute flip cam video that will introduce the ESCAPE project and include a stakeholder voice. This along with videos introducing all the other projects, can be found at www.youyube.com/jisccdd - a JISC dedicated channel on YouTube.