Reducing the administrative burden, ensuring flexibility and providing authenticity: the Arctic University of Norway on the benefits of digital assessment

Context  

The Arctic University of Norway (UiT) is a research university that contributes to knowledge-based development at the regional, national and international level. There are 17,500 students and 3,800 staff studying and working at UiT, and it has been working with WISEflow since 2013. 

What follows is a conversation with Maria Mykelstad, Administrative Manager at UiT.   

Background to the digital transition  

Maria: I have been working at UiT since 2012, starting as an examination officer in the faculty of Economies, Biosciences and Fishery. From the time that I arrived at UiT, there was a push towards digitising exams. Several departments were looking into it, and I joined this push quite quickly, as I was fresh into the role! While the license was centrally bought at our institution, the push towards a digital transition started as a faculty initiative.  

Back in 2013, the initial driver was faculties that were interested in trying something new and optimising their processes. Eventually a project manager was hired to implement the system for the whole university. The whole university is now using WISEflow, and has been doing so for some time. Students use it for their take-home exams, approximately 80% of on-site assessments also take place on WISEflow – so close to 3,500 exam units took place on the platform in the last academic year.  

Reducing the administrative burden  

Nowadays, my department is responsible for how we do exams at UiT. The central administrative examination group ensures that there are available resources for all new academic staff, as well as providing courses and webinars throughout the semesters, to ensure everyone is given adequate support and training.    

A lot of what we would consider the ‘administrative burden’ is now almost non-existent at UiT. All the time spent registering grades, scanning paper, sending exams to assessors, and ensuring external moderation – we don’t even regard this as work anymore. With WISEflow, this work is automated and streamlined. This has become business as usual for us.   

WISEflow also allows us to create flows that can be used across multiple campuses. UiT has four main campuses, and ensuring consistency across these used to be far more difficult because we did not have everything on one central platform. Now, it’s so much easier! We are able to include all campuses within one concurrent flow, and then just filter and sort by examination rooms. Simplifying aspects of assessment administration at UiT is just the baseline from which we have built.  

Beyond the creation and distribution of exams and grades, we also experience significant administrative benefits in communication to both staff and students. The WISEflow message centre plays an important part in informing students and is integrated with our SIS for easy accessibility. WISEflow streamlines many of our processes…

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