Final Cluster Meeting

We have just had our last cluster meeting, which was held at the University of Exeter. The theme of the meeting was to give each project a chance to present what had been achieved over the two years and to look to the future - beyond the official end of the projects at the end of October. It gave us a chance to per critique each other projects. We presented on the work of ESCAPE and Mark demonstrated aspects of the ESCAPE Toolkit. Themes that we covered included:

• the development of a set of ESCAPE Principles


• mapping the current assessment landscape to these principles


• considering efficiency verses effectiveness


• what does transformative change look like


• demonstration of some of the "themes in practice" videos

We talked about how the project has laid a foundation for staff engagement with a year long university wide assessment project that is running post ESCAPE.

The meeting was in the usual format of a two day timetable with meeting spread over lunchtime on the Thursday to lunchtime on the Friday. Helen Beetham joined us on Friday to facilitate a session on exploring what we have learnt as a cluster. We were looking to build upon the collaborative efforts of our joint cluster presentation at the University of Greenwich e- learning Conference. There were some interesting ideas for further collaboration including a collaboration with the University of Exeter (INTEGRATE Project) with a sharing of resources from our projects.

We agreed that beyond the final programme meting in October we would look to meet in 12 - 18 months to look at what impact our projects have had.

Feedback

We have sought numerous opportunities to collect feedback throughout our project and not just at its end. In fact, we are awash with data and feedback. It will be a real challenge to use the data and feed it into our final evaluation. We have so many threads of activity and so many things we would want to share.

But I do want to post here one of the observations made by one of our ESCAPE partners. In many ways the quote captures everything we're trying to do. Support our partners, help them with their practice and allow them to take the work we are doing with them into other modules. i..e Spreading the learning and benefit.

The quote came from a conversation between our ESCAPE partners and was not solicited in any way. You can imagine my scrabble for a pen and paper!

The ESCAPE project has made me think about the way I give feedback and it has changed my practice in all modules.

She went on to say that

I now organise myself such that I am able to give feedback straight away. I now plan my diary around large coursework to free up 2-3 and re-arrange teaching sessions so that I can get a chance to give feedback.

Arguably, the above quotes demonstrate the transformative nature of the project and shows that the learning and benefit is not constrained to the modules we are working with.


Great stuff!