Of course, as ever, it’s not just about new technology, but considering how this technology can help give your teaching staff an opportunity to rethink their approach to assessment and feedback. Encouraging the implementation of appropriate changes could benefit your students, helping them to develop skills for the future.

Let me share with you the guidance, tools and tips emerging from the Jisc Assessment and Feedback programme which could help get your students ready for the world of work.

A top tip for getting started

A good starting point is to consider the purpose of assessment, and whether your assessments are encouraging and evaluating the key skills and attributes your course is aiming to develop in learners. This includes those skills which are attributes for success in the workplace, such as self-evaluation and critical thinking.

Top trumps example

There is a great example of technology being used successfully for this purpose is at The University of Exeter. The COLLABORATE project have developed a six-dimensional model of assessment for employability to support their staff in planning their approach to work-integrated assessments.

This model is backed up by a set of ‘Top Trumps’ cards, which help tutors to identify off-the shelf technology ‘winners’ for each area of the assessment process, such as the PeerWise tool which can be used to support learners to peer review each other’s work, a skill critical for the workplace.

Advice from the experts

To hear more about how technology-enhanced assessment and feedback could support your learners and help graduates get ready for the workplace I would suggest having a listen to our e-Learning radio show Jisc on Air.

The show explores the issues with traditional assessment and feedback practices, and introduces some of the ways technology is being used to deal with those issues, for example at Cornwall College, where they are redesigning their assessments to help develop transferable skills such as self-evaluation and reflection. The University of Exeter also introduces the practical tools they are using to engage staff with redesigning their assessments to better meet the needs of employers.

The panel includes:

• Michele Shoebridge, deputy registrar, University of Exeter
• Doctor Gwyneth Hughes, senior lecturer of higher education, The Institute of Education
• Adele Oakes, programme manager and Tony Harris, project manager of the FAST project, at Cornwall College
• David Nicol, emiritus professor, University of Strathclyde.

Practical guidance and tools

You can find more information in the Effective Assessment in a Digital Age guide. This provides an introduction to the application of technology for assessment and feedback; with accompanying case studies providing examples of technology-enhanced assessment practices.

The assessment and feedback topic pages on the Jisc Design Studio provide a range of information and resources to help you explore how technology can be used to tackle your assessment and feedback challenges. These challenges include supporting peer assessment, helping learners better engage with feedback and meeting employers needs.

If you would like to know more about how technology can enhance assessment and feedback I’d be happy to chat.

Image courtesy of Fremlin on Flickr

I was working late in my office the other night, at Chesterfield College when there was a knock on the door.  Without waiting for an answer in strolled a furry looking chap who put the kettle on and settled himself down at my conference table.

“Who are you?” I asked puzzled.

“I’m curriculum,” he said with a toothy smile.

“No way,” I shook my head in denial, “curriculum has been deployed and is working hard in the classroom.”

“Ahh,” he said. “That’s my little brother the 2012/13 curriculum.  I’m the 2013/14 curriculum.”  He took his cap off and showed me his pointed ears and just for a second his eyes seemed to glow with a strange yellow hue.  “I’m bigger, badder and need to be Wolf compliant.”

If you are working in further education then it is time to look at your 2013/14 curriculum with a critical eye. The implications of the Wolf review of vocational education and the corresponding changes to funding methodology are significant and will form the cornerstone of your planning cycle.  Wolf requires providers to reconsider their mainstream provision and ensure it meets local and national needs.  Also to offer substantive programmes that don’t lead to ‘cul-de-sac’ qualifications while promoting English and maths, work placement and employability.

What can you do to prepare for the changes ahead?

Chesterfield College planning for 2012/13 was subject to a good practice case study for our innovative use of technology in securing an outstanding curriculum with significant efficiencies.  This year we have to go one better and secure a Wolf compliant curriculum with additional significant efficiencies.  We are starting from the ground up to build something fresh and innovative with the technology at our disposal.  It is exciting and exhilarating to build a curriculum with the power to transform lives and we are continuing to receive great support from the East Midlands RSC and curriculum network groups which have been assisting our innovations and ‘sense checking’ our developments.

I believe the key to building a strong curriculum is in the groundwork; good preparation and teamwork are everything.

So… if you sitting comfortably, I’ve provided what I hope is some helpful advice for senior managers.  Let’s begin.

1. Audit, Audit, Audit

How does your current curriculum stack up against your shadow allocation, and what the Wolf report requires? You might be lucky, you may be better off or see no change, but I’d be prepared to bet that it is an ugly picture for some providers and that there are some worried senior management teams up and down the land.

Audit your 2012/13 provision against the funding bands in the new methodology.  How many of your learners sit just below a funding band?  What could you do to gently topple them over?  Have you planned for rolling starts throughout the year to increase your participation number?  How will you build this into the 2013/14 plan?

Top Tip – Think about which teams you’re going to need extra support from such as your management information systems (MIS) team and forewarn them that you’ll need their time.

2. Substantive Long Programmes

Are all your full time programmes substantive?  Even those little awards and certificates that you think no-one will notice?  Your programmes need to be substantive and coherent.  If you have been maximising your standard learner numbers (SLN) you now have some hard choices to make in terms of what to keep and what to remove.  The ‘perverse incentives’ to funding short courses often referred to by government always seemed to me like a fabulous opportunity to provide learners with a top notch suite of qualifications which made them more employable.  Have you looked at the implications of the loss of these qualifications of your 2013/14 staffing analysis?

Top Tip – Look at the implications of the funding methodology on staffing before your middle managers start too.  You may need to be ready to field some tough questions.

3. Labour Market Intelligence (LMI)

Are you using effective labour market intelligence to inform your curriculum choices? How do you explain all those hairdressers you are training then?  Robust LMI is now at the heart of an effective curriculum and should inform your choices about what to launch and what to retire.  You need to gather significant LMI from a variety of external and internal sources.  You can’t just roll over the same curriculum you’ve always had with annual ‘tweaks’ – it is the educational equivalent of putting go faster stripes on an Austin Allegro.  Your learners and employers deserve better than this.

Top Tip – Don’t reinvent the wheel, the Skills Sector Councils hold significant amounts of up to date LMI, use it to your advantage.

4. English and maths

What does your maths and English provision look like?  Are your functional skills success rates outstanding or crying in a corner after being beaten up by the GCSE bullies?  You need to ensure your 2013/14 curriculum has English and maths written all the way through like a stick of Skegness rock.  Ensure all learners are given the opportunity to develop their English and maths skills via comprehensive and inclusive GCSE provision, stand alone qualifications and functional skills.  If you have high proportions of learners who already have GCSEs at grade C or above then offer them the opportunity to extend their knowledge with an AS alongside their main provision.

Top tip – Don’t assume because learners have grade C or above you don’t have a responsibility to stretch them further.

5. Work placements

Under Wolf more learners than ever will be required to undertake work placements.  How are you going to plan for this, especially with hard to engage sectors, such as construction?  Are your work placement protocols and systems ready for significant growth?  You need to ensure your local environment has sufficient opportunities for placements and plan accordingly.  Nothing will annoy employers more than multiple departments calling to secure work placements with zero coordination between them.

Top Tip – Use your customer relationship management tool wisely.

And my final piece of advice would be to highlight the best defence against the big bad Wolf.  Don’t build a curriculum made of straw!

Find out how your local RSC could help you.

Read the Wolf report.

See our case study.

Read our blog on embedding digital literacy into your curriculum.

Advice and guidance on how to keep your curriculum relevant at a time of rapid change.

Image courtesy of Fremlin on Flickr.

There are a number of reasons why students drop-out of education due to issues such as financial pressures, difficulties with their home lives, dissatisfaction with their course or problems with assessment.
Therefore I think it is no surprise then that there has been a renewed emphasis on ensuring that student perspectives are actively sought on their educational experiences and expectations.

This is evident in initiatives such as the recently published HEFCE/NUS report on Students perspectives of technology, the Committee of Inquiry into the Changing Student Experience, and the learner experiences research JISC has been undertaking in this area.

I see, more than ever, effective engagement, contact and communication are vital to students completing their courses and digital technologies play an ever increasing role in support of this.

Digital technologies can have a positive impact on student retention by helping institutions:
enhance curricula
ensure quality
match educational experiences with everyday life
assess learning more effectively and deliver learning experiences that meet with or exceed student expectations.

A good example of the improvement in student retention is clearly shown in our work with making the new diploma a success project at Lewisham College – making. We worked with the college on the development of a learner portal to support staff and to provide students with access to online tools from different locations, resulted in an increase in retention on their Higher Diploma in IT from 62% to 92% over the full 2 years of the study.

In the latest edition of our radio show JISC on Air we are exploring how digital technologies are helping universities and colleges to better meet students’ requirements and improve retention. In addition, we have expert input from Stephen Jackson, Director of Reviews for the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) and Alex Bols Head of Education and Quality for the National Union of Students (NUS) who discuss how the appropriate use of technology can support learners with their studies and lead to improved retention.

In this show, Kim Catcheside speaks with Richard Francis, Head of e-learning at Oxford Brookes University and Ellen Lessner, e-Learning Coordinator at Abingdon and Witney College about how their institutions are better preparing their learners for their experience of learning with technology. Both institutions participated in the JISC Supporting Learners in a Digital Age (SLIDA) study and their case studies are available here.

Kim also speaks with Helen Beetham, co-author of the JISC-funded Learning Literacies in a Digital Age (LLiDA) study and recent Review of Digital Literacies, about what support students require to make more effective use of technology for their learning.

Listen now
Episode 3: Student retention (Duration: 18.17)

Subscribe via RSS

Subscribe via iTunes

Download MP3