In his conversation with Mary Richardson at the UCL Education conference earlier this year Professor David Boud laid out the unavoidable truth  that “students are profoundly affected by how they are assessed, it provides messages to them about what really counts”. He explained that assessment “has to contribute to students learning” as student learning behaviour is both framed and driven by assessment. In essence good assessment is imperative in ensuring good education. At UCL we are lucky to have a dedicated Digital Assessment team based within the Digital Education team in ISD. This gives us a real opportunity to improve the assessment journey for both staff and students.

A little history

Back in 2020 the AssessmentUCL Project (or product) was established  to “procure and deliver an end-to-end digital assessment delivery platform to support online assessments”. The project successfully purchased and implemented Wiseflow – the first part of the platform known as AssessmentUCL. During the first exam period of 2020-21 more than 1,071 assessments were delivered in 48,742 sittings. This increased to 1,717 assessments at 57,590 sittings in 2021-22. Throughout the process the product team have listened to feedback on experiences from staff and students, and shaped regulations and policy accordingly.

To support the transition to online assessment at UCL, the Digital Assessment team was formed in September 2021 and led by Anisa Patel. The new team initially comprised of a team of five Digital Assessment Advisors (DAA) responsible for different faculties and a Learning Technologist. Over the last year the team has worked incredibly hard. They have developed hands-on training (running 45+ training sessions over the last year) and comprehensive guidance covering the AssessmentUCL platform, they have championed the capabilities of the platform and tested all aspects of functionality. They have also spoken at length with faculty colleagues to understand their assessment needs and requirements. In some sense they have been acting in an ‘ambassador’ role – making sure students, academics and professional staff are heard. This has resulted in positive enhancements for both the platform and wider assessment practice.

Plans for this year

The team continues to evolve and right now we have three DAAs: Eliot Hoving, Isobel Bowditch and Lene-Marie Kjems; one Learning Technologist: Nadia Hussain and one Senior Learning Technologist: John Spittles. You can read more about the team on the Digital Education Team site, and which faculty they are responsible for supporting on the Education support contacts page. I have recently taken on the position of Head of Digital Assessment at UCL, moving on from my previous DAA role.

Digital Education Team. Top row: Eliot Hoving, Marieke Guy, John Spittles. Bottom row: Lene-Marie Kjems, Isobel Bowditch. Nadia Hussain joined after this photo was taken.

In the 2022-23 academic year our approach two pronged.  Firstly, we plan to ensure scalable and effective support for AssessmentUCL. We will do this through improving our support model and training resources, continuing to push forward improvements to the AssessmentUCL platform and ensuring the effectiveness of current policies and practices. Some of the areas we will be looking at including the use of formative assessment and on-campus digital assessment using a lockdown browser. And secondly, we will look at other areas in which we can support good assessment design and delivery more widely. We want to explore and promote best practice and be leaders in the assessment area. For example, we have begun work on an academic integrity and misconduct project to help us better understand the issue from both staff and student perspectives, and to identify strategies to promote academic integrity and support in this area. Whenever possible we will be working in collaboration with Arena, our academic colleagues, the Central Assessment Teams and the AssessmentUCL product team. It is likely to be a busy year!

We have started a team blog to share our activities and support wider assessment discussion, and also plan to post more regularly on the Digi-Ed blog.

“In a digital era, how can we design assessments differently and better?” 

This is the question that a group of more than 35 key partners in UCL’s teaching and assessment community gathered to consider last week. Hosted jointly by ARENA and Digital Education, the group comprised academics, students, the Digital Assessment team, Faculty Learning Technologists, professional services staff and representatives from UNIwise (suppliers of our digital assessment platform, AssessmentUCL).  

Attendees were split into teams of mixed disciplines to share their experience of assessment at UCL and bring forward ideas and recommendations on how digital assessments could look in the future. 

The breadth of representation made for a rich and varied discussion and enabled each partner to express their principle areas of focus: 

• From our student representatives we heard a genuine desire both for continued improvement enabled through assessment feedback not just marks and for assessments to test modern-day marketplace skills (e.g. distilling information, writing reports).   
• Our academic representatives expressed their overarching concern to do the right thing by our students: seeking to understand and share methods and tools for designing assessments to help students in future life.
• Our Digital Assessment team focussed on ways to build and share capabilities within faculties enabling us to connect academics, students and technologists and ways to understand and share how technology can support innovative assessment design both now and in the future.  
• Like our students, our Faculty Learning Technologists focussed on the importance of feedback (or “feedforward”) which is easily accessible, timely and meaningful: enabling students to act upon it.  
• Our Professional Services representatives focused on how to connect people to ensure that fantastic work around assessment design is shared widely and to ensure that academics and faculty teams are all aware of the tools and supporting resources available to them. 
• Our UNIwise representatives were interested in all points raised: keen to consider how future enhancements to the AssessmentUCL platform might facilitate the continued evolvement of digital assessment. 

Group discussions were wide ranging and often raised more questions than answers but surfaced a clear desire to continue the conversations about the issues raised and to focus on how we share knowledge to maximise the depth of expertise in assessment design across departments. 

Next steps 

As a result of the discussion, Arena and the Digital Assessment team will focus their attention on the following key themes over the coming months:  

1. Enabling assessment design knowledge sharing: Helping academics and others involved in assessment design to understand what is possible and how to achieve it. Ensuring clear information channels and networks are established to enable academics and others involved in assessment design to share experience and learn from the experience of others as well as raising awareness of existing resources and support.  
2. Continuing to improve the markers journey: Exploring how to enable flexibility in marking where one may allocate all work to all markers and each takes one off the top of the pile and can go to the next unmarked (or not yet started to mark script), to ensure that there is no loss of marks when marking allocations change pre/post marking. 
3. Continuing the conversation: Building on the foundations and links established during this event, we plan to set up a learning lab through which staff and students can continue the discussion around how we can design digital assessments differently and better using existing mechanisms like the Chart tool, as well as rethinking how assessments are delivered currently to make them more applicable to real-world situtations and careers.
4. Working collaboratively with suppliers and academic colleagues to shape enhancements / design solutions to particular issues: We hope to connect key members in Departments with our suppliers Uniwise to workshop and work through desirability and current system functionalities.
   

If you would like to join events like this in the future, please let us know by contacting assessments@ucl.ac.uk.