For the past couple of months, vendors such as TurnItIn, Blackboard and Elucian, as well as a number of UK Universities, have been working on a solution for assignment interoperability in the IMS Assignment Task Force. This is highly relevant for the Jisc’s Electronic Management of Assessment (EMA) project, because it holds the promise of … Read more
Background and context From 2010 to 2011 Keele University was supported by the Jisc Building Capacity programme to undertake project STAF: technology supporting assessment and feedback. The University does not specifically use the term EMA but there was a general feeling that they were not making effective use of technology to support assessment and feedback … Read more
This is probably the most problematic component of the life-cycle as it is the area where variety of pedagogic practice results in a situation where the fit between institutional processes and the functionality of commercially available systems is least well matched. We heard a very clear message from the sector that existing systems do not … Read more
Approaches to marking and feedback are often highly personal and conditioned by preferences for online or off-line marking. Some staff prefer familiar tools such as Microsoft Word but find the lack of integration with other EMA systems a drawback (e.g. the need to return work to each student separately – involving an email per student). … Read more
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
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