Initial market testing of the Assessment & Feedback Reflective Tool

Fiona Doherty has been meeting with academic staff from across various faculties to carry out some initial market testing of the Assessment & Feedback Reflective Tool. This involves showing a mock-up screenshot of the Assessment & Feedback Reflective Tool and interviewing staff to get their feedback on it.


The staff provide their views on: the tool concept, how to use the tool, potential issues, and the possible application in their own practice – processes such as new course design, revalidation and evidence for staff probation.

This initial market testing has helped to prove the validity of the tool. The feedback will help refine the tool - moving it forward to the wire-framing phase and the development of the tool prototype.

Professor David Boud visits Ulster

The Centre for Higher Education Practice organised a series of useful events with visiting Professor David Boud this week.

Professor David Boud has been involved in research and teaching development in adult, higher and professional education for over 30 years and has contributed extensively to the literature.

The events this week included:

• Assessment of group work – Case study presentations from Ulster staff
• Research Day – Pedagogic research and getting published
• Assessment Futures – Website resource providing ideas, strategies, examples and support relating to key assessment elements.

The assessment sessions were of particular interest to the Viewpoints project, as David Boud’s literature has informed the REAP principles which are being used in the Assessment & Feedback Reflective Tool. The Assessment Futures resource takes a similar approach to the proposed Assessment and Feedback tool – by beginning with assessment elements and using ideas and examples to encourage reflection and help to enhance practice.

Visit to the University of Strathclyde

Alan Masson and Fiona Doherty spent today with the Principles in Patterns (PiP) project at the University of Strathclyde. This provided the opportunity to follow up on identified synergies established at the initial cluster CAMEL event in April - giving us the chance to share ideas and practice and allowing for discussion and debate around both projects.

The day began with David Nicols and Catherine Owen briefing us on the REAP change model. They explained how the REAP project supported academic staff by embedding the REAP principles into successful curriculum designs, resulting in measurable improvements and institutional change. In the afternoon Fiona Doherty updated the PiP team on how the Viewpoints project is proposing to make use of the REAP principles and techniques in the Assessment & Feedback Reflective Tool and how all proposed tools will work together at the curriculum design level.

Alan Masson also briefed the team on the various tools developed by the Ulster CETL Institutional E-Learning Services (CIES) including the Hybrid Learning Model, Practice Exchange Repository and the E-Learning Tools & Technologies Database.

We also met up with Sheila MacNeill, Assistant Director, JISC CETIS, to update her on the progress of the Viewpoints project. We discussed many aspects such as: project outputs, base line approach, evaluation process, the projects unique selling point and preferred data schemas. Sheila has posted details of this meeting at: http://prod.cetis.ac.uk/projects/viewpoints

Many thanks to the PiP team, in particular Catherine Owen, for organising and hosting the meeting.

Queen's CED Assessment and Feedback Conference

Instructional Technologists Fiona Doherty and Karen Virapen attended Queen's CED Assessment and Feedback Conference, held over two days on the 19th and 20th May in the Lanyon Building.

This conference is particularly relevant and timely, as Viewpoints are currently developing an Assessment and Feedback tool as part of their suite of reflective curriculum tools for University staff.

Keynote speakers at this conference were Dr Chris Rust from Oxford Brookes University, and Professor David Nicol from the University of Strathclyde. David Nicol is the director of the REAP project, as well as working on one of the JISC Curriculum Design Projects in our cluster group, PiP (Principles in Patterns).

Both Rust and Nicol stressed the need to engage and empower students regarding assessment and feedback. Both keynote speakers presented ideas of what constituted good practice, along with numerous examples of how to put these principles into practice. Their evidence showed that good assessment and feedback practices enhance learning in the following ways:

• Improved student satisfaction
• Better student grades
• Decreased teaching/preparation time for staff
• More enjoyable experiences for staff and students alike.

Queen's academic staff presented a series of interesting and engaging parallel sessions, covering a range of topics such as using Jing screencast software for feedback, skills assessment, online assessment tools and making feedback effective.

JISC Curriculum Design programme meeting

Viewpoints staff Alan Masson, Fiona Doherty and Karen Virapen attended this one-day JISC Curriculum Design meeting at the Aston Lakeside Centre, Birmingham. 50 delegates from the 12 different Curriculum Design projects were invited.

The theme of the day's workshop was 'Transformation: managing and measuring change'. We looked at change strategies, ways to measure change, and stakeholder engagement.

This event was a good opportunity for the two Instructional Technologists, Fiona Doherty and Karen Virapen, to meet key members of the JISC programme team, including Sarah Knight and Marianne Sheppard.

We also had a chance to talk to delegates from the other JISC-sponsored projects. The final discussion session with our Critical Friend Peter Bullen and members of our JISC cluster group allowed us to follow up ideas from the CAMEL meeting which took place in April. Catherine Owen, Project Manager of the Strathclyde PiP project let us know that the cluster has had a paper accepted for the ALT-C Conference in September of this year.

Stakeholders Engagement meeting with CHEP

The Viewpoints team were invited to a meeting in Magee to brief staff from two of the Centre for Higher Education Practice working groups, Creativity in the Curriculum and Research and Practice in HE.

This meeting was a chance for the team to brief staff on the work of Viewpoints to date.

Presentations on the day included the following:

• Alan Masson gave an introduction and overview of the Viewpoints project.
  


Viewpoints Briefing 30 April 2009 Am
View more OpenOffice presentations from Viewpoints Project.


• Catherine O'Donnell presented her work on curriculum processes within the University.


Curriculum Design Processes
View more OpenOffice presentations from Viewpoints Project.


• Karen Virapen demonstrated the beta version of the Student Profiler tool.


Student Profiler Introduction
View more OpenOffice presentations from Viewpoints Project.


• Finally, Fiona Doherty talked about the development of the Assessment and Feedback tool.


Assessment & Feedback Reflective Tool
View more OpenOffice presentations from Viewpoints Project.

The meeting generated a lot of useful debate on assessment, student cohorts and curriculum design processes, and the feedback from this meeting will inform future development of Viewpoints tools. We also identified synergies in the work that we are doing and looked at possible ways we could work together with CHEP members.

This is the first in a series of Ulster stakeholder engagement meetings that will take place in the next few months.

CAMEL Meeting, University of Strathclyde

This two-day event was a chance to re-connect with the other projects in our cluster, for the first time since the programme start-up meeting in October. It was a good opportunity to find out what work was going on in both the PiP project (University of Strathclyde) and the Open University's curriculum design initiative.

On the first day, all three projects introduced the work done so far. PiP are building on the work already done as part of their University's REAP project, and are now busy trying embed the principles within University practice. They aim to do the following:

• take a new approach to curriculum design
• articulate what is happening now in curriculum design, including the gaps/blocks
• streamline institutional processes
• discover what materials would be useful for staff.

The Open University are reflecting on what constitutes 'good practice' - good pedagogy, cost-effectiveness and innovation - and they shared information on some of their initiatives to date, including Compendium, a tool for visualising learning designs, and Cloudworks, a social bookmarking tool for academics to share designs.

Feedback on our own presentation was useful and thought-provoking - and highlighted various challenges to our own project, which will inform further work.

The second day's work focused on ways to represent curriculum design and map it at curriculum level - and for a detailed discussion on this, see Gráinne Conole's e4innovation blog.

The CAMEL meeting seems to have created more questions than answers, but it stimulated a lot of lively and often thought-provoking debate!