Abstract:

This paper outlines a series of key developments and interventions that have enabled a platform for digital innovation in the management and administration of the assessment and feedback processes within a top 10 UK University.

The joined up platform of technological solutions and associated transformative staff practices demonstrated a wide impact on efficiency and productivity across the organisation. The initiative adopted new approaches to innovation and change to help deal with two major challenges:
1. Addressing the technical, organisational and cultural complexity of such a programme of work.
2. Addressing the challenge of limited resources with which to deliver lean, practical and useful digital solutions that can be efficiently and effectively adopted by staff and scaled up across the institution.

Our challenge:
Members of staff use a disparate set of learning technologies and desktop software to create and deliver assessments and to mark work and provide feedback to students. Each department and School tended to operate using a different set of procedures and forms to issue assessments and collect submissions, register participation and provide feedback. There was no clear and consistent mechanism to return work back to students or to check the consistency and quality of feedback. Individual practices and attitudes varied and academic staff needed to be convinced that new ways of working would be better for themselves and their students, especially with regards to adopting and accepting new technologies.

Our approach:
This paper describes the pragmatic and agile way in which a small team set out to try and improve things one step at a time with the limited resources that were available to them. This initiative was a community driven activity taking an agile and very lean approach to change. It was recognised that changes to pedagogic and administrative practices, as well as development of a variety of digital solutions would be required.

The solution:
The digital platform developed (containing 5 components) comprises; features for assessment planning; communication; collecting data on submissions; collating data on feedback and returns; using the data to provide actionable insights in student engagement and staff practices; support a feedback dialogue between multiple staff and students; create a digital platform architecture underpinning multiple assessments, submissions and feedback types and applications; the creation of an assessment and submission data standard in order to join up data in disparate systems.

Digital innovation:
All staff embraced new social and technical methodologies to address pedagogic practices and technical hurdles. 2014/15 marked a significant year in the process of development and adoption. The CASPA application became a mature, useful and highly used product. The roll-out of stand-alone kiosks and integration of assessment and submission data into the tutoring system Co-Tutor, was so successful, that adoption went from 4 departments to 9 in one year with minimal need for advocacy or support. Systems integration work via a data warehouse, creating a taxonomy for assessments, submissions and feedback data, is innovative in the sector allowing multiple learning technologies to ‘talk to each other’ effectively.

This paper will be of interest to practitioners and IT staff who are involved in the development, implementation and embedding of systems and process in their own universities.

Keywords:

Innovation, learning technology, development processes.