As promised ore on eAssessment. The UK Jisc has launched an interesting project - Assessment futures: What will assessment look like in 2035? As part of this they are running workshops to explore some future scenarios around assessment. There are comprehensive reports of the activity online by Marieke Guy, a Digital Assessment Advisor at University College London, and Paul Bailey who is co-design lead for JISC. There is also access to a Miro Board if you are interested in seeing the work in progress.
Perhaps the most important lesson from the first workshop is that If we are going to change and evolve, we need to look at the whole ‘learning and teaching process’ not just think about the end assessment. This involves looking at assessment at political, economic, social, and technological levels.
As well as looking at innovative assessment approaches and developing scenarios, a number of assumptions emerged from the the workshop:
- Transforming assessment will require transformation of the learning and teaching. We might also assume that if there is no change to existing learning and teaching approach, then it is only a translation of existing practice into a digital platform.
- Most innovative and transformed assessment approaches we can imagine already exist; the challenge is in scaling them. This is a rehash of William Gibson quote “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet”.
- Digital assessment will be necessary for education to transform and scale. The move to digital is enabling transformation of assessment. However it won’t be sufficient on its own.
This is all work in progress and I am looking forward to seeing how the different scenarios pan out.
