A recent conference at the University of Cranfield (25-26 Nov) highlighted some of the key current activities in e-assessment. Formative assessment plays a major role in the ways in which online or onscreen assessment is used both in HE (eg. German at University of Warwick), and FE/pre-16 (eg. ‘SCHOLAR’ programme – see blog post of 15.10.08). Feedback is highly significant – immediate, high-quality feedback is highly valued by learners, and students are generally very happy to engage in well-structured interactive onscreen questions. Question-authoring can be quite an art, and in HE in particular, commercial enterprises such as Questionmark Perception are prominent especially where assessment is summative and/or high-stakes (ie. leading to a key qualification). However, there are plenty of open-source alternatives, and the possibilities of the ‘Quiz’ block in Moodle were mentioned several times (particularly as the OU are developing this further using OpenMark). It was agreed that investing time to train teachers/lecturers in question-authoring techniques pays dividends in terms of time saved in marking and in the consistency and flexibility of assessment.

The use of the internet offers lots of other assessment options, of course eg. wikis, blogs, but these did not receive much coverage at this event.

Many of the participants at the conference, and many key case studies, are mentioned within JISC’s ‘Effective Practice with e-Assessment’