The issue of online marking has polarised academic staff for a number of years but recent years have seen some large scale shifts in attitude and widespread moves towards online marking. The pattern of institutions moving gradually to impose e-submission and e-feedback but leaving marking practice to the discretion of individual academics is a common … Read more
Walsall College is using an integrated suite of technologies to support the whole of its assessment and feedback lifecycle: read more about its implementation here. Background and context Walsall College is a general FE College that also delivers HE level provision. Its FE level provision is purely vocational and does not include A levels. The College … Read more
A commonly reported issue is the difference in student and staff perceptions of feedback: students, as evidenced by the NSS and other research, do not feel that they receive enough useful feedback whereas staff believe that students do not make effective use of the feedback they receive (and indeed there is evidence that much feedback … Read more
EMA offers enormous benefits for students, staff and situations alike but we need to ensure that issues of accessibility and inclusivity are adequately addressed. In an earlier blog post we looked at the debate around whether anonymous marking really helps to ensure fairness and there is also a need to consider whether any bias in … Read more
Managing anonymous marking has cropped up a lot in our discussions about EMA. There are however a wide spectrum of institutional views on this issue. In response to our online questions almost a quarter of respondents (23%) said this area was ‘very problematic’ whilst a similar number (24%) said it was ‘not a problem’. So … Read more
One of the big issues for HE institutions is the fact that commercial EMA systems do not readily support institutional marking processes. Some of the institutions we talked to are pessimistic about ever achieving effective technology supported workflows because of the range of different marking processes adopted in different disciplines. Others have done some research … Read more
Our earlier blog post invited discussion on an assessment and feedback lifecycle developed by Manchester Metropolitan University. The same model has been used and adapted by the University of Edinburgh who have looked at it from the perspective of staff, students and the support group. We are grateful to the author, Mark Wetton, for permission … Read more
The assessment and feedback lifecycle shown below was developed by Manchester Metropolitan University and has already been adopted/adapted by a range of other HEIs. At our EMA Think Tank on 14th May we discussed the model with a range of HE providers and there was general support for the idea that a generic model could … Read more