Dr Emma Medland

Student satisfaction with assessment and feedback is the sector’s "Achilles’ Heel" (Knight, 2002, p.107). Students commonly report that the feedback they receive is not useful, often because it is not clear how to enact the advice, and how to synthesise comments across modules. Through a HEFCE-funded project, we engaged with students’ perspectives on the utility of feedback in order to inform the design of a feedback portfolio within our VLE, which supports students to synthesise and act upon their feedback. This portfolio was developed in partnership with students using co-design methodology (Iivari, 2004).

In this workshop, we will invite delegates to participate in an interactive exploration of the co-design method, tracing the journey from the initial design workshops to the finished portfolio. In the first co-design workshops, students used creative media such as playdoh and post-it notes to represent their experience of receiving feedback. Having introduced them to the concept of learning analytics, we then asked them, both individually and in groups, to design their ideal feedback portfolio. We will invite delegates to explore artefacts from the design sessions, and to consider what is being voiced by the students through these artefacts. Student interns will be co-facilitators of the workshop, sharing their perspectives on the student voice.  We will then demonstrate how students’ perspectives are directly reflected in the design of the portfolio.

Our evaluation of the process demonstrates that students felt ownership of the tool, and recognised that staff had listened to their views on feedback and taken them on board. We aim to give delegates insight into co-design methods as a way of engaging with the student voice to close the feedback loop. We will share ways in which we are currently using the method to develop a range of digital tools in partnership with students.

The quality assurance ‘regime’ that spans the higher education (HE) sector internationally is underpinned by a number of unchallenged assumptions. Nowhere is this more apparent than within the external examining system - an instrument for the professional self-regulation of HE in which an impartial peer reviewer who is external to the host institution provides quality assurance in relation to an identified programme / qualification. One of these unchallenged assumptions is that external examiners are assessment literate. Within HE, assessment literacy is a concept in its infancy, but one that arguably has the capacity to reverse the deterioration of confidence in academic standards. Whilst the concept is becoming integrated into the sectorial vernacular, its fluid and negotiated nature is under-conceptualised. The primary aim of this session is to outline a research project that investigated the extent of external examiners’ assessment literacy and to use this as a base to initiate a discussion surrounding the development of a shared discourse of assessment literacy, thereby providing a tool for greater conceptualisation of the concept.

The primary aim of this session is to outline a research project that investigated the extent of external examiners’ assessment literacy and to use this as a base to initiate a discussion surrounding the development of a shared discourse of assessment literacy.