JISC

Overview

There is wide consensus that e-assessment promises many potential benefits to the JISC community, ranging from lowered costs, higher productivity, and faster feedback, through to assessments which are more accurate, more detailed, and more robust under critical scrutiny and audit. There is equally wide concern that these benefits seem relatively slow to materialise, and may be negated by poorer quality assessment which fails to reliably provide acceptably valid measures of actual student achievement and capability, particularly at the higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy of the cognitive domain. The issues confronting staff concerned with the quality management of e-assessment suggest a pressing need for evidence, for information, and for guidance.

Aims and objectives

The project intends to provide a report on the quality assurance of e-assessment in Higher Education (HE) contexts both in the UK and overseas. The resulting report includes case studies, consolidated conclusions, consolidated findings, and recommendations for future JISC activities to support uptake of e-assessment.

Project methodology

First, e-assessment practice in UK HE will be reviewed, and a selection of institutions will be recruited to participate in case studies. In the second stage, information will be gathered from a variety of sources about e-assessment quality management and assurance. In the third stage, the picture of best practice developed in stage two will be applied to the evidence and data collected from stage one. In stage four, the evaluation outcomes of stage three will be reviewed and integrated so as to identify and finalise guidance and recommendations on appropriate e-assessment quality management and assurance procedures for UK HE.

Anticipated outputs and outcomes

The project and the resulting report will focus on four areas:

• the theoretical underpinning for quality assurance of e-assessment;
• current practice in Higher Education (HE) contexts both in the UK and overseas;
• current practice in professional, commercial, and industrial contexts; and
• recommendations for future practice in UK HE.