Principle two - support the personalised needs of learners

Why is this important?

There is no such thing as a standard learner. Disability, neurodiversity, cultural and religious background, work and family commitments and personal preference all play a part in shaping our experience of learning.

Moreover, these factors combine to make the learning experience individual. Disabled students are no more a homogenous group than learners that have been bundled together under the unhelpful label BAME (black and minority ethnic)2.

Accessible and inclusive

Good assessment and feedback practice should allow a learner to apply their own individuality to demonstrating their knowledge and competencies.

We are increasingly aware of the need to make assessment accessible ie to ensure that people with disabilities do not face barriers because of the format or tools used. We need to promote similar awareness of the benefits of making it fully inclusive ie fair and equal to all students regardless of their diverse backgrounds.

Offering different means to demonstrate achievement of a learning outcome is an important way to comply with disability discrimination legislation. Applying this as a design principle goes further and enhances the overall assessment process to benefit all students.

Assessment designers need to be familiar with the law relating to accessibility and related guidelines such as WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). For example, offering a digital paper as an alternative to hardcopy examination is only useful and legally compliant, if the digital copy meets accessibility compliance regulations. Software and resources used for digital assessment are legally required to meet the compliance standards. This needs to be considered in purchasing decisions and in-house development.

The emphasis on inclusivity relates to a broad agenda to ensure that our curricula are not skewed - for example to a particularly ‘white’ view of the world. There is much good work being undertaken on decolonising curricula and we need to ensure that assessment design reflects a global, multicultural perspective on the subject matter.

Compassionate pedagogy

Since the start of the pandemic there have been growing calls for us to develop more ‘compassionate pedagogy’.

As online classes have taken us into one another’s homes, teachers have gained a different kind of understanding of the conditions under which students study and the competing demands of work and family they have to juggle.

Digital poverty is only one aspect of this, time pressures and access to a suitable place to study are equally relevant and need to be factored into how we design learning and assessment.

Inclusivity means that no one’s socio-economic background should be a barrier to learning.

Promoting mental health and wellbeing

Promoting mental wellbeing is high on the agenda amid survey evidence from higher education that both student and staff mental health has declined in recent years. Assessment points are often the trigger for stress and anxiety related illness.

"Recognise that assessment times are often the breaking point for both staff and students."
Sally Brown, consultant

An approach that allows for individual needs, and is founded on compassion for the learner, can help.

This is a topic that cuts across a number of our principles. Implementing principles number five: manage staff and learner workload effectively and number six: foster a motivated learning community will also have a positive impact.

"When it comes to mental health and well-being, avoid tokenism - don’t offer me yoga sessions give me practical help."
Sally Brown, consultant

Some of the ways technology can help

Using digital tools makes it easier to implement universal design for learning (UDL) guidelines by providing multiple channels and options for engagement with learning and assessment activities.

Digital technology offers a vast range of assistive tools that allow learners to respond to the same activity or content in a way that is adapted to their personal needs. Examples include screen readers and braille keyboards for blind students, video and audio captioning for learners with hearing problems, the ability to change font size and colour to support dyslexic students or certain types of visual impairment. Some locked down virtual desktops and third-party tools used for summative assessment do not permit the use of the assistive technologies required by some learners. This is an issue that should be fully investigated before using such tools.

Aside from these adaptations, taking a summative assessment in familiar surroundings using familiar digital tools, may prove less stressful than a traditional example setting for many learners. In some cases, formal examinations may be one of the rare occasions where a student uses a pen.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is enabling the development of ‘adaptive’ learning tools that respond dynamically to student responses in order to personalise learning pathways. Their main use is in formative testing. For example, a student can be presented with progressively more difficult questions based on what they answer correctly.

We are increasingly used to technology providing us with friendly reminders when we need to do something in many aspects of our lives. Digital tools provide various ways to give learners ‘nudges’ and reminders about upcoming deadlines and important due dates via email, text, mobile app or reminders in the VLE, helping to provide clarity and alleviate stress.

Putting the principle into practice:

• For help with the basics, see our guide to getting started with accessibility and inclusion
• For regular updates see our accessibility blog
• You can also join our accessibility and assistive technology community group
• You can listen to our Beyond the Technology podcast: using AI to support and enhance formative assessment 
• Read this report from Advance HE - Assessment and Feedback in a Post-Pandemic Era: A Time for Learning and Inclusion

Making large classes feel small

A decade ago, the University of Sydney was unable to find a tool that could help solve the problem of engaging students with feedback and giving them personal care when cohorts could consist of thousands of students and learners felt lost in the crowd.

They developed a student relationship engagement system (SRES) which integrates with any learning management system using LTI and is now freely available to other universities. SRES is described as a ‘Swiss army knife for instructors’.

Today over 3,000 teachers are using SRES across more than a thousand courses at the University of Sydney. There were over a million student interactions with the portal in 2021 and 92.4% rated it as helpful. This is enhancing the learning experience of almost all 75,000 students at the University of Sydney with many more users worldwide.

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Elements of the student relationship engagement system (SRES) approach.

©University of Sydney

All rights reserved

This diagram shows the elements that are important in contemporary approaches to helping students get the most out of assessment and feedback. Most importantly, they all exist within a wrapper of positive relationships with the tutor and others in the learning community.

SRES allows tutors to curated data from various sources in tailored dashboards that tell them what they need to know in order to best support their particular learners.

Data about logins and grades can be accompanied by other information that helps the instructor get to know the students. This could involve asking students about their preferences, what helps them learn and even their dreams and ambitions. Another example is that students can record an audio clip of how to pronounce their name.

These questions are embedded in the learning management system (using LTI) so to the learner they appear seamlessly alongside an introductory course in module information.

Highly personalised feedback can be created within the context of data such as whether the student has submitted on time or how they say they are feeling.

SRES also helps turn feedback into a dialogic process. Before submitting an assignment, students can say what they would most like feedback on, so they are primed to be more likely to engage with that feedback. Tutors can also close the feedback loop by asking students to respond and say what they thought about the feedback and what they will do differently next time. It is also possible to hide the grade until the student has responded to the feedback.

SRES also supports a wide range of peer-to-peer feedback activities.

Another use is to facilitate learning from both self and peer feedback. The portal can present results of student self-assessment alongside the evaluation given by their peers encouraging them to reflect on how this makes them feel and how they plan to improve on the next task as a result.

"SRES can provide some interesting ways to connect our feedback to student comments and to contextualise learning activities alongside students’ own stated goals and expectations. I think that’s quite a powerful shift with the potential to help students take greater control of their learning."
Ben Miller, University of Sydney