Academic Development Centre

At lunchtime today I attended a JISC webinar on the Curriculum Design Programme project ‘Viewpoints’ entitled ”Tools to support effective assessment and feedback: the Viewpoints project”. The webinar was presented by Alan Masson and Catherine O’Donnell from the University of Ulster and had a focus on workshop tools that the Viewpoints project (http://viewpointsproject.blogspot.co.uk/) had developed to support effective assessment. These are my few notes from a very informative session:

The workshop tools were designed around best practice in the areas of :

• Assessment & Feedback – outputs from the REAP Project (http://www.reap.ac.uk/ )
• Information Skills – SCONUL Pillars (http://www.sconul.ac.uk/groups/information_literacy/seven_pillars.html )
• Student Interactions – 8 Learning Events Model (see http://www.labset.net/media/prod/8LEM.pdf )

The key elements to the toolset are a learner timeline and a set of principles for each of the above themes. Each of the principles are published on a card with a series of examples on the back. A Staff group attending a workshop are issued with a worksheet, timeline and a set of cards. The first step is for each group to agree their main objective for attending and then map the principles to the learner timeline (e.g. Induction, first few weeks etc). The next step is to turn the cards over and consider the example implementation ideas.

They found that the number of cards was important – too many or too few stifle reflection and debate with the optimum being 9 +/- 2. The principles were action based for consistent meaning with the principle that the cards would promote reflection, discussion, and provide ideas for consideration. Following the workshop participants were provided (via Flickr) with photographs taken during the sessions, along with the typed up / photographed worksheet. Staff feedback seems to have been positive and that the project outputs have been fully institutionally embedded (see http://ee.ulster.ac.uk/assessment_and_feedback/).

Interestingly there was some interactivity introduced into the webinar beyond chat using Collaborate’s inbuilt voting tool to implement a couple of activities based on the principles. This worked quite well.

The project resources including the cards have been made available under Creative Commons via the project wiki: http://wiki.ulster.ac.uk/display/VPR/Home and available in PDF and as Illustrator files. Work is also ongoing at the University of Bolton to develop some widgets for implementing aspects of Viewpoints online (http://coeducate.bolton.ac.uk/2012/03/24/widget-beta-8lem-learning-design/ ). See also http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/page/29227748/Viewpoints%20project .