Assessment in Higher Education A free, open, online course

OK – two minutes to tell us who you are and why you’re here. Go to … OK – two minutes to tell us who you are and why you’re here! Go to ….. and add your introduction. If you’re reading this later, you can still add information about yourself later on. Remember this is publicly available, don’t put anything you don’t want the world to be able to see. We may use this information later to suggest working groups Introductions

Use the polling pod to tell us: Who you are. Where you are from Use the polling pod to tell us: Who you are? Where you are from? And briefly why you have joined the course? 2 minutes 

Useful features

What is the course for? This online course looks at the relationships between learning, teaching and assessment in Higher Education and at the design of appropriate assessment tasks. It is intended as an opportunity to meet new people interested in assessment in higher education and to share experiences and conventions from other universities. Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) staff can gain 15 credits towards a Post Graduate Certificate or Masters’ qualification in Academic Practice by completing an assignment linked to this course Saturday, May 25, 2019

Format Six weeks duration Each week: One question One task The questions will be discussed within the google community area, with one area for each topic If you post your task responses to the community area by Thursday each week, then Rod, Anne or Rachel will comment on them by Monday of the following week. Discussions are supported by suggested readings – please share others you know about or find

What makes a good choice of assignment task in higher education? What do you need to consider when designing an assignment task? What support do students need when preparing for an assignment? What should marking criteria look like and how should we use them? What is feedback for? What can we learn from reflecting on past assignments? Weekly Topics The topics are staged to prepare you to do a systematic review of an individual assignment task for a particular course or an assessment strategy for a course.

Technology Wordpress blog for key information Wordpress blog posts to initiate weekly discussion activities Use your preferred tools to share documents and files with us. We will post file to Wordpress on your behalf on password protected page. Twitter for updates/tweetchats Adobe connect for webinars You can suggest other systems, approaches and so on eg you could share a link to a file in Dropbox if you want. Be careful to respect intellectual property and copyright of others when posting links and documents. Let us know if you have technology problems and we’ll try to help if we can.

Working Groups If you have particular interests such as feedback, electronic submissions, assessing groups, assessing key skills or whatever, let us know via the registration form and we can try to set up some working groups in Google plus. Saturday, May 25, 2019

Questions? Suggestions? Contributions? Now over to you…. Saturday, May 25, 2019

Topic 1: What makes a good assignment task in Higher Education? There are some prompt questions in the topic area. Can we move beyond the descriptive examples of good tasks? What was it about the tasks you remember or use which make them good? What do we even mean by good, in relation to assignment tasks? Saturday, May 25, 2019

Task 1 Analyse an assignment you are familiar with (as student or tutor) Is it well aligned to the intended learning outcomes? Are you always happy with the submission(s)? Is the teaching of the course planned effectively to prepare the students to complete the assignment task? Is there anything you would do differently? Download the template from the Wordpress site (use any alternative reflective format that you like). Email your reflections to Rachel and/or Rod We will then add these to a password-protected page on this site. Read and comment upon other people’s reflections Saturday, May 25, 2019

Questions? Suggestions? Contributions? Now over to you again …. Saturday, May 25, 2019

What makes a good choice of assignment task? Can you think of an assignment task that you particularly enjoyed completing during your studies? What kinds of assignment tasks do you most enjoy marking? Which tasks enable your students to best demonstrate their progress? Which tasks help students to develop transferable skills? Do you always have enough time to complete the marking properly? Saturday, May 25, 2019