Assessment and Feedback workshop - Radiography

Catherine O'Donnell and Dr Vilinda Ross facilitated a Viewpoints workshop on Friday 25th March with 9 diagnostic and 2 therapeutic Radiography colleagues preparing for revalidation in 2012.

The team were keen to explore how they could develop and use their assessment strategy to promote students' learning:-

· At module level
· At course level

Part of the session involved them looking at one module as a demonstration of how they could employ Viewpoints prompts at modular level. The rest of the session involved the radiographers using the Viewpoints tools and process to begin looking at their overall course perspectives.

Slides are available online at Slideshare (an online presentation viewing facility):

Viewpoints Assessment and Feedback workshop - Radiotherapy 25th March 2011

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Photos are available online via the photo-sharing site, Flickr:

Nursing revalidation workshop, Jordanstown campus

Alan Masson today facilitated a Viewpoints workshop on Jordanstown campus for nursing professionals who are considering course revalidation.

The workshop consisted of twelve nursing practitioners, and included staff from the University of Ulster, Queen's University and a variety of Northern Ireland health trusts.

The teams focused on two specific themes for the workshop: Assessment and Feedback and Learner Engagement.

The workshop was received enthusiastically by all staff, with one participant commenting that the Viewpoints process was "a good starting point for [the] curriculum design and development."

Photos of the workshop outputs are now available for view or download via our Viewpoints Flickr photostream.

Assessment and Feedback workshop for Ulster PgCHEP course

Dr Alan Masson (Magee Campus) and Catherine O'Donnell (Jordanstown Campus) delivered 'Week 6: Assessment and Feedback' on the Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education course (PgCHEP) today.

This lesson included an introduction to Viewpoints curriculum design materials and an Assessment and Feedback workshop for PgCHEP students.

Students worked in small groups while considering a scenario of their own choice. The sessions were well received and the Viewpoints team have been asked to do a similar session on the course in 2011.

Photos from the sessions are available on the Viewpoints Flickr photostream.



The slides from this session are available via Slideshare.

Assessment and Feedback PgCHEP workshop, Oct 27th 2010

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Assessment and Feedback/Creativity session - Economics

Catherine O'Donnell, Roisin Curran, Karen Virapen and Jill Harrison today delivered a workshop session looking at assessment and feedback strategies and creativity in the curriculum. This session was delivered to staff from the School of Economics.

The group wanted to focus around the first year experience, particularly looking at assessment and feedback strategies for this group. They have some retention and student engagement issues with first years, so are keen to revise their curricula. They also need an overall look at their course strategy in preparation for revalidation next year, and so Roisin Curran gave them a talk on how they could bring creativity to their courses.

Some groups were initially unconvinced as to the merits of using the workshop approach in revising their assessment and feedback strategy, but by the end of the process all the groups were able to come up with a suggested plan to move forward and revise their courses for students.

Slides for this session are available here:

Curriculum Design - Economics workshop

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Assessment and Feedback workshop - School of Law

Catherine O'Donnell and Karen Virapen today delivered an Assessment and Feedback workshop for a group of academics from the School of Law.

The School of Law are currently undergoing a First Year Review, and in relation to this, the group wanted to look at realigning the first year curricula to give students a more relevant challenge, and help teach students how to develop independent study skills. It seems that first year Law students sometimes struggle with transition, some core law modules, and with the assessment workload.

With this in mind, three teams from the School looked at three different modules with a view to revising them. They looked at redesigning their assessment and feedback strategy at module level. The workshop generated a lot of lively debate, and hopefully this will help kick-start the process of redesigning assessment and feedback strategies for first year students.

Photos of the group outputs and progress are available here:

Slides for this session are also available online through SlideShare:

Curriculum Design, Assessment and Feedback: School of Law First Year Review

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Business Subject Planning Away Day - Assessment and Feedback/Creativity sessions

Today Dr Alan Masson and Catherine O'Donnell delivered two one hour workshops, one on Assessment and Feedback and another on Creativity in the Curriculum. These workshops were for academics from the Ulster Business School, who were taking part in a (Revalidation) Business Subject Planning Away event.

Slides from the workshops are available here:

Curriculum Design, Assessment and Feedback

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The workshops provided some focus, assisted group discussion, helped staff consider challenges and helped them plan what they need to do while preparing for revalidation.

Photos of the group outputs and progress are available here:

Assessment and feedback session with PhD students

Fiona Doherty and Catherine O’Donnell delivered a Viewpoints assessment and feedback workshop with PhD students today, as part of their ‘Assessment for Learning’ session with lecturer Dr Patricia Kearney.

The students used the assessment and feedback cards and the module worksheets during the 45 minutes group work activity-based session.

They planned an assessment and feedback strategy for teaching a Masters dissertation module focusing on chosen theme(s). One student from each group presented their final output to the rest of the group at the end of the session.

Photos of the group outputs are available here:



Slides from this session are available here:

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.

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.

Visit from our Critical Friend, Peter Bullen

Today, all the Viewpoints staff met our 'Critical Friend' for our JISC Curriculum Design cluster, Professor Peter Bullen.

Peter currently works as director of the Blended Learning Unit (BLU) at Hertfordshire University, as well as advising the three projects in Curriculum Design Cluster C (University of Strathclyde, the Open University and ourselves).

His role is to give us advice and guidance of what's going on in the sector, encourage us to review our progress, act as an ambassador for the project and to foster links between different projects, where possible.

Our all-day meeting covered a lot of ground. After introductions, Project Director Alan Masson gave a condensed account of the project's aims and direction.

This was followed by a brief presentation of Version 1 of the 'Student Profiler' - an interactive tool to allow staff to think about their student cohort, and the opportunities and risks that might involve. This tool takes the form of a wheel that staff can manipulate to give them an insight into the student group. The simple, yet effective, visual representation lets them think about the course from the student perspective.

Fiona Doherty then presented the second item in development - an interactive tool to help staff with assessment and feedback in their courses. This tool is based around the University of Strathclyde's REAP principles of good assessment, and works by letting staff apply these ideas to a typical student timeline.

Peter was encouraging about the work done so far, and suggested that we be more open about our ideas, showing people outputs as early as possible, in order to get informed feedback early on. To do this, we are creating an invitation-only Ning network online, where we can demo work in beta and get feedback.

Catherine O'Donnell, our Academic E-Learning Consultant and adviser, is involved in mapping all the current curriculum processes in the University - a huge task, but a vital one, as it tells us where Viewpoints work can fit in with current University of Ulster practices.

Peter flagged up our upcoming JISC CAMEL meeting, where our cluster will discuss links, ideas and areas for collaboration. The next CAMEL meeting will take place in Strathclyde in April.

Finally, we talked about stakeholder involvement, thinking about ideas like 'train the trainers' workshops and targeting key figures in each of the academic schools.

It was good for everyone to finally meet Peter and get his perspective on our work - and we look forward to working with him more.

Assessment and Feedback Workshop, Higher Education Academy

Instructional Techologists Fiona Doherty and Karen Virapen attended the HEA Assessment & Feedback Workshop in York, designed to support the JISC Curriculum Design and Delivery programmes. This one-day event looked at general overarching issues in assessment.

During the day we were presented with examples of how change in assessment has become embedded in the curriculum in institutional practice. Presentations were delivered from the HEA and several universities, all of which are available on the HEA website.

JISC Curriculum Programmes – Case Studies

This event gave us the opportunity to find out more about two other JISC Curriculum programmes, the University of Hertfordshire ESCAPE Project and the University of Westminster eReflect Project.

Mark Russell from ESCAPE talked about how they are mapping technology to learning using Chickering & Gamson’s Principles and mapping technology to assessment using the REAP Principles. This has similarities with current Viewpoints work mapping C&G and REAP to a student timeline. Further information on the ESCAPE project is available at: http://escape-uh-jisc.blogspot.com/

Gunter Saunders, eReflect, University of Westminster explained how the eReflect project is developing a student centred process for reflection on feedback.

REAP Project - embedding good practice principles

Catherine Owens from the University of Strathclyde and Steve Draper from the University of Glasgow talked about the success of the REAP Project. In a case study of 1st year Psychology students, student performance improved considerably after the REAP Project redesigned their assessment and feedback practice based on REAP Principles.

This was a very useful and informative day for our project, as we are currently developing the Assessment and Feedback tool for Viewpoints, and a lot of the information has synergies with the work that we will be doing.