Dr Alex Gillett / The York Management School

 Year 2 undergraduate module  200-ish students split into 36 teams  Teams comprised blend of Home and Overseas students, males and females, various degree routes.  Formative assessment:  Produce a project proposal for a new business venture  Ten pages, A4  To include terms of reference for group-work  Formative assessment as precursor to summative assessment

 Ability to provide detailed qualitative comments that help students understand the strengths and weaknesses of their proposed projects.  36 ten page (A4) proposals, average 2000 words plus figures and tables.  To be marked by a remote team: module leader (York) + 2 part time staff (Harrogate, Manchester).  Turnaround:  Hand-in 12noon on Monday 2 nd February (Spring Week 5).  Feedback provided electronically around ten days later (Spring Week 6).  Debrief with students in subsequent seminars (Spring Weeks 6 & 7).

 Fast turnaround  Relatively easy for students to access any time, any place, any where  Could provide comments on specific elements of the work  No problems of trying to interpret handwriting  Markers could see each others’ comments:  Part-time staff could see a few I’d done before beginning their own marking for the first-time.  I could check the first few that the part-time staff did to let them know if on the right track.

 Doubts about the marked rubric being visible to the students  To ‘grade’ or not to ‘grade’? :  can be very time consuming,  perhaps requires additional internal moderation,  possibly mis-leading because not marked to same mark scheme as summative assessment ▪ Possibility of students considering formative grade to be an agreement i.e. ‘you are on for a first in this module’.  Raised expectations – but would be very difficult to repeat turnaround and accuracy for summative assessments for which a more rigorous marking process is involved.

 Risks to Health & Safety of so much marking in so short a time (strain on wrist, neck, shoulder, eye sight)  Training required for new staff in how to use the technology  Could not simply download everything as a single document/report  Had to download overall comments separately by ‘copy & pasting’ into MS Word.

 Could not access the documents with in-line comments once marking ‘submitted’ via grade centre  Tried to set up areas for each marker in grade centre so we could just access our own marking allocation  Problem was that it split up the team submissions viewable in the ‘still needs marking’ area to individual students (i.e. a list of 9 teams became a list of 50-ish students!)  Therefore we just used the ‘still needs marking’ area after all.

 Very useful for formative assessment  Students seem to like it  Part-time staff seem to like it  Facilitates remote working and speedy turnaround  Requires administrative support (i.e. downloading the marked docs and feedback)  Student feedback about ‘ease of use’ misleading because they didn’t know about the stuff they couldn’t see!  Student feedback about what would make it better also skewed because they couldn’t access all that we had provided.