Today I attended the webinar hosted by the  JISC Assessment and feedback project at Glamorgan http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/assessmentandfeedback/glamorgan.aspx

I was particularly interested in their evaluation of the Grademark tool for feedback, which is part of Turnitin. There are some nice video of tutors using the tool and reflecting on how they found the experience at http://estream-wms.lrc.glam.ac.uk/ContentGlobal/7235_4r~SFdyPAeY.mp4

I had come away from the 17/18  Oct JISC events in Birmingham feeling that our Assessment Careers project was part of a wider shift in emphasis in the sector towards longitudinal feedback. I speculate that 15 years ago there was a big drive for writing clear learning outcomes for programmes, for modularisation and breaking down programmes in order to increase transparency for students. Now these aims have largely been achieved, but it feels like there is some disquiet about what may have been lost, in terms of the holistic and developmental nature of programmes. So, maybe now the pendulum has swung back and many of us want to enable a developmental trajectory for students through their programme of study, rather than taking a smorgasbord of modules.

In Birmingham I found many JISC projects were also looking at how students can take feedback from one module forward into the next, to develop their ‘assessment careers’,  so this has given us a shopping list of tools to investigate:

1. The InterACT project at Dundee is doing exactly what we want to do; every piece of feedback students receive over a programme is in one place with prompts for reflection on it. They used Moodle wiki’s as blogs are not programme specific, but it works well so we thought this was really worth looking at.

2. Assessment Diaries includes an evaluation of Grademark as part of Turnitin (Glamorgan)

3. Open Coursework Management (Exeter)

4. Lightwork

5. Portfolio software like Mahara