Visiting a WebPA adopter

Earlier this week, we went down to the University of East Anglia (UEA) to the Medical department to meet with two staff members heavily involved in the assessment of students. They had found the WebPA project and system, and seen how they can apply it to their situation.

The implementation of WebPA they will use will not at first exploit the full system. They are looking at using the system to gather the data needed from the students against the form criteria. This is where the break comes, UEA will not be using the algorithm, but exploiting the form reports (hopefully we will be providing a tailored report). The system will address the need to asses students abilities as part of the General Medical Councils guidelines on fitness to Practice.

This forms an interesting break from both how the system was designed to use into an interesting area for the project to explore. It is only the flexibility that the system provides that allows this to happen. If the project had gone down the route of producing a more stringent process focused system UEA may never have been able to use the tool.

All in all watch this space and see how the use of WebPA develops for a new type of assessment.

Landing on our feet again...

Next week will see the annual CAA (Computer Aided Assessment) Conference at Loughborough. Back in February when they where asking for abstracts, I did think of writing a paper and submitting. But then there where more pressing things staring me in the face, including all the work for the project and the IMS Learning Impact Awards. As a result the time to sit and write an abstract escaped.

Since the dark days of February, I never really thought much more about the CAA Conference until towards the end of May when some one mentioned that they might see me there. A general assumption that I would be attending as it is at Loughborough. But again this was soon forgotten.

However, everything changed on Tuesday this week. After a meeting related to another forth coming conference (Engineering Education 2008, again at Loughborough) it was mentioned to see if we could get our posh banners up during the CAA. Following this I duely emailed those organising the CAA, to receive the response of;

... as it happens we have a free slot in the programme on Wednesday at 11.30 a.m. if you'd like to present a demo, also we'd be happy to distribute your publicity material to the delegates.

Well I'm not one for turning offers like this down. So we have jumped in both feet first. This has resulted in an increase in work for a couple of days and I have to pull together a presentation for 45 minutes, but hey we have more than enough expertess and information on this project not to be able to do this. Also those at the CAA conference are also part of our community, well not directly the WebPA community, but the wider assessment community so it will be good for us to be there.

Assessment and feedback

Today the BBC are running an interesting story about assessment and in particular feedback from the student perspective. Well really they are just reporting on the TQI survey results. But it is interesting to see where the project partners are in the list.

The report, however, has shown that the weakest responses to the survey questions where in relation to assessment and feedback. This is where we on the WebPA project see the benefits of using our tool. This way if the tool is used formatively then you may be able to increase the level of feedback the students are receiving. But as with anything the use of WebPA should be used in moderation other wise students may feel swamped with assessment, as in schools.

At the moment I have been discussing the feedback that WebPA provides at the moment to see if we can improve it. One of the issues that has been raised about the feedback mechanism here at Loughborough is due to the lack of understanding that the academic users have about the system. I have found that once the mechanism is explained then they are more comfortable with the current method. However, one of the major hurdles is not what and how the feedback is given, but what is it for and why do academics want it. If we could fathom this out then we could improve the feedback so that it can be used effectively and possibly then fed into the PDP for the students. These are the types of questions that we will pose to our fledgling community of practice when appropriate.

However, we still will need to gather how feedback is provided to students and how it is formulated to help us assess how best we can provide the feedback for WebPA. Any pointers in the right direction are always welcomed.