Awards
The Scottish e-Assessment Awards, launched in 2009, recognise excellence and
innovation in using e-Assessment to improve the educational experience of learners.
The winners in 2013 were announced at last year’s conference.
For the Awards last year, rather
than employing the services of a panel of judges to select winning entries, we
trusted to the wisdom of the crowd to vote for the best examples of e-Assessment.
The process started with an open call for nominations in three categories: Product,
Process and Individual/Team* – and for
the week of the conference, anyone attending one of the three eAssessment Scotland
events was eligible to vote.
* The Awards were open to indviduals/teams
based in Scotland, and products/processes developed in Scotland, or being used
within Scottish settings.
Award Categories
A description of each category can be found below:
Winners
Below were the winning entries for the Scottish e-Assessment Awards:
Individual/Team Award
UWS eLearning Team – Innovation and collaboration in assessment
The recently formed eLearning Team at the University of West of Scotland, led by Bill
Steele, has made a huge contribution to supporting innovation in e-learning and
assessment both within the institution and across the wider Scottish education
sector. The team has led on a range of new initiatives including an evaluation of
the Rogo assessment platform and have shared their experiences openly with
colleagues at other institutions in a spirit of collegiality which has raised the
profile of UWS and embodies the type of collaborative approach recommended in the
recent Von Prondzynski report into Scottish Higher Education.
Process Award
Angus College – Fair Assessment at a Distance
I commend Angus College under the ‘Process’ category for their excellent work to
support distance learners. Not all students are able to attend the main campus site
in Arbroath but are situated more remotely within the wider geographical area. The
college needed to find a way to duplicate the support and assessment opportunities
that were available to the campus-based students. I admire the way that the college
knew where it wanted to go on this problem, but was prepared to experiment with the
means of achieving it. At the end of their journey the college arrived on using
Adobe Connect to monitor required student interactions, even though the path to that
outcome was not straightforward. By so-doing, the college has solved its distance
assessment problem in an informed and iterative way, showing a willingness to be
flexible and learn from mistakes. This has led, finally, to a situation where
off-campus students can be confident that their assessment chances are equal to
those available to their on-campus peers.
Product Award
CompendiumDS
U101, The Open University’s entry Level design course, required the creation of innovative assessment software and processes to allow students to learn to design in a distance-learning environment. The software, CompendiumDS, is a ‘digital whiteboard’, in which ‘nodes’ can be arranged spatially, similar to a mind-map. Nodes can consist of a variety of media and these can be connected to allow complex patterns to be represented. Students use this to communicate the process they undertake and it is this that is assessed – not the final output itself. The entire assessment process is designed to fit into existing institutional systems.
This mode and method of assessment is unique in design education – we assess process, not product, at a distance, and promoting the idea that design is better learned, not taught.
For a full description of the software and how it’s being used at the OU, download
a summary of CompendiumDS here.