Dr Simon Paul Atkinson (PFHEA)
Enhancing Institutional Outcomes
First posted on Substack The AI arms race still rages. Students will identify AI writing support tools, educators will rearm themselves with AI-aware plagiarism-detection software, and students will source apps that can bypass the detection software. Institutions are increasingly prioritising the ease with which mass assessments can be marked. Governments are revising legislation that banned …
Continue reading “Ipsative Portfolio Assessment: a response to AI”
There is a looming skills deficit across all disciplines currently being taught in Universities today. The vast majority of degree programmes are, at best, gradual evolutions of what has gone before. At their worst they are static bodies of knowledge transmission awaiting a young vibrant new member of faculty to reignite them. Internal reviews are …
Continue reading “Psychomotor outcomes and A.I.: the future of learning design.”
The threat to the integrity of educational assessments is no longer from ‘essay mills’ and contract cheating but from Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is not so long ago that academics complained that essay mills, ‘contract cheating’ services, and commercial companies piecing together ‘bespoke’ answers to standard essay questions, were undermining the integration of higher education’s …
Transcript Welcome all. Please feel free to share this video if you think it would be of interest to your colleagues. I want to talk today about some of the terminological differences that we have across the English language teaching world, particularly the terms, evaluation, assessment, and feedback. In North America, the word evaluation is …
Continue reading “Evaluation, Assessment and Feedback (Guidance to Educators)”
In this short video (5’52”), Simon touches on three basic principles of programming assessments. The first is that it should be programme wide, the second that assessing outcomes not content provides future flexibility, and the third that summative (or credit-bearing) assessments do not have to be final or terminal assessments. Assessment is one of the …
Continue reading “Designing Courses: Thinking about Programming Assessments (5’52”)”
In this short lecture (9’38”), Simon outlines the basic structure of sound assessment. Describing reliability, validity, and fairness in assessment and exploring a range of different assessment forms. These range from diagnostic to synoptic (capstone), to formative and summative. Being familiar with some of the language around assessment is important in order to get the …
Continue reading “Designing Courses: Assessment – First Principles (9’38”)”
Student expectations are serious constraints on imaginative assessment processes. Students are taught through their educational experience that ‘final grades matter’ so it is natural that they become fixated on the final assessment. A transparent design that closely reflects the ILOs within the teaching activity and assessment will necessarily engage students in a broader and deeper …
Continue reading “Developing a Meaningful Assessment Strategy (5/8-SLDF)”
There are social conventions, unwritten rules, around feedback in a formal education setting. Most students associate feedback as coming from the voice of authority in the form of red marks on a written script! It is important to redefine feedback for university and professional learners. In this short overview video (3’30”) Simon outlines four ‘contractual’ …
Continue reading “Four contractual agreements to make with your students about feedback (3’30”)”
In response to a question from a client, I put together this short video outlining four types of assessment used in higher education, formative, summative, ipsative and synoptic. It’s produced as an interactive H5P video. Please feel free to link to this short video (under 5 mins) as a resource if you think your students …
Continue reading “Four Types of Assessment (Video 4’42”)”
Some recent work with programme designers in other UK institutions suggests to me that quality assurance and enhancement measures continue to be appended to the policies and practices carried out in UK HEIs rather than seeing a revitalising redesign of the entire design and approval process. This is a shame because it has produced a …
Continue reading “Simplifying the Alignment of Assessment”
Why is it that whenever we want to reward academic staff, the incentive is to “buy yourself out of teaching”, or at the very least “offload some marking”? Of course, the answer is often that the alternatives are to remove yourself from service or administration (and the place grinds to a halt) or, God Forbid, …
Continue reading “Will Lightwork make a Mark?”