Getting started with digital assessment
Digital assessment refers to the digitisation of the assessment and examination process, for both staff and students, and can come in many different forms. It can also have various names, such as online assessment, e-assessment and remote learning.
When higher education institutions decide to make the move to digital assessment, they will choose a digital assessment platform for this transition. A digital assessment platform can support a university’s entire examination cycle, from assessment set up and authoring to participation and invigilation, all on one end-to-end digital system. It will also support the feedback lifecycle for students and assessors.
There’s no doubt that digital assessment is becoming increasingly popular across the higher education sector. For example, in 2021, more exams were conducted on our digital assessment platform, WISEflow, than ever before, with a record 3.6 million assessments taking place. With so many making the transition to an online platform, why should you choose digital assessment?
There are many reasons for transitioning to a digital assessment platform at your institution:
Digital assessment reduces the administrative burden
Creating, circulating and manually marking exams on paper is an immensely time-consuming process, which can be centralised and digitised through a platform like WISEflow to make the whole process quicker and easier.
Digital assessment saves your institution money
Linked to this reduction in administrative burden is the cost-effectiveness of having a digital assessment platform in place. Having an end-to-end assessment platform means that the entire examination process, from creation and delivery to marking and invigilation, takes place on the same system. This means less spent on paper and exam halls, amongst many other savings. For example, following University College London’s transition to WISEflow in Spring of 2021 they reported savings of up to c£1.2 million for the academic year!
Digital assessment platforms are scalable
There are no in-person restrictions to using an online system. Over 120 institutions from across the globe use WISEflow, with these universities varying greatly in size and scope. This means it is necessary to have major flexibility in our system, and great scalability to accommodate all needs – from small numbers of users to peaks of more than 90,000 students on the platform at one time. WISEflow’s handling capabilities also scale without performance degradation at any point.
Digital assessment promotes accessibility and inclusion
Using a digital assessment platform ensures that students can access their institution’s system from anywhere, enabling institutions to support distance learning and thereby continuing to revolutionise the learning process for students worldwide. With WISEflow, students can complete their assessments on their own devices, known as bring your own device digital assessments (BYOD). WISEflow adheres to the WCAG2.1 (ISO/IEC 40500:2012) and WAI-ARIA standards and recommendations, which are produced by W3C. Within WISEflow, we pursue the principle of Universal Design, where design is ‘the design and composition of an environment so that it can be accessed, understood and used to the greatest extent possible by all people regardless of their age, size, ability or disability.’
Digital assessment platforms allow for the creation of many different formative and summative examination types
Assessments can be tailored specifically to suit desired learning outcomes. Digital assessment can also enable more authentic assessment that better prepares students for what comes next. For example, Brunel University London used WISEflow to replace their usual three-hour Politics and History exams with an extended exam that allowed more expansive questions to be set – a format that’s closer to a real-life experience and one that the department will continue to use even without the drivers of the pandemic.
Making the digital switch can be a big decision for an institution, and there are many things to consider when making the transition.
Define your institution’s needs and objectives
One of the best places to start is to identify why your institution wants to move to a digital assessment platform. Outlining your university’s needs and objectives is an important step because this informs the search for a platform that best suits you. One way you can do this is by identifying the ways in which you currently assess, and then identifying any areas in need of improvement, and working your way on from there. Warwick University discusses these considerations here.
For example, if your institution holds frequent oral examinations, finding a platform that can effectively allow you to hold high-stakes oral assessments effectively might be a need to focus on when finding a platform. For example, FLOWoral, from WISEflow, enables administrative support of oral exams. The manager can schedule the examinations over several days and distribute the participants as needed, and the assessor can take notes digitally, as the participant performs live at the exam
Similarly, if you are currently unhappy with the quality and efficiency of your feedback lifecycle, identifying a platform that is end-to-end and has expansive feedback capabilities may be at the top of your agenda when searching. WISEflow offers rubrics as multidimensional sets of scoring guidelines to provide consistency in evaluating student work.
