TELFest lunchtime panel session on assessment and feedback...

1. Assessment and Feedback
session

2. Questions
• What do you regard as a good assessment?
• How can technology enhance assessment?
• What do you regard as good feedback?
• Do students engage with it?
• Is the current technology offering enough to help with feedback?
• What would you like technology to offer around assessment feedback?

3. What do you regard as a good assessment?
• Captures different levels of performance from excellent to a clear
fail.
• Captures student attention and effort.
• Closely linked to skills and knowledge you want students to obtain
(learning outcomes).
• Requires time input proportionate to its value.

4. How can technology enhance assessment?
• Efficient marking.
• Rapid feedback.
• Enables more interesting and authentic assessment than can be
done on pen and paper (exams in computer rooms).
• Can be done in students own time and place.
• Can enable independent learning and independent generation of
feedback.

5. What do you regard as good feedback?
First we should define what we mean by feedback. Ultimately
feedback is only information and then it is only ‘ever’ good in any
sense if the student does something with it.
GOOD FEEDBACK IS INFORMATION WHICH STUDENTS REFLECT
UPON AND USE TO IMPROVE THEIR SKILLS.
Perhaps a more important point is, what sort of information can
students make the most use off? That of course depends upon the
student and the scenario.
Good feedback is student led because then it is tailored to their
individual need and student desire to make use of it.

6. Do students engage with feedback?
Don’t waste your time producing what the students do not want or will
not use.
They must be proactive in this process.
Make feedback available to students who actively seek it
out.

7. Is the current technology offering enough to help
with feedback?
• Technology is good at facilitating independent generation of
feedback, for example through quizzes, forums, chat rooms, web
searches, software tools and so forth.
• This enables students to take charge of their own learning needs and
also reduces the time pressure on staff to produce copious written
feedback (often of little real value) that few students would use
effectively.
The bigger issues are:
1. staff awareness and promotion of the tools.
2. students acceptance, effect use of and recognition of all the
feedback available.

8. What would you like technology to offer around
assessment feedback?
• My main request is would be some form of voice activated software
that enabled staff to look at a student document on the screen and
edit or mark this by a combination of a some form of screen enabled
pen (circle a point) and an audio capture system.
• Currently ‘feedback software’ is still some what archaic in being
mouse driven and somewhat clumsy/slow to use.
• It is a lot easier to speak feedback than to write it.
• Audio tools in general could be integrated into MOLE much better,
for example in the discussions board, so staff can talk to a
microphone and this is linked to the discussion with no need for
other software, sign in, saving files, etc.

9. Session Feedback
We would welcome your feedback on this session, via this URL
http://goo.gl/ReRYkH
Thank you