On 1 May, UNIwise co-hosted a “Digital Assessment Futures” workshop with Jisc at their head office in London. Led by Paul Bailey, Jisc’s Head of Codesign, the workshop brought together a number of higher education institutions from across the UK to discuss the future of digital assessment in the face of a number of hypothetical scenarios and challenges. 

The event started with a short icebreaker, so attendees could learn a bit about others and their institutions, and then everyone proceeded to identify current perceived assessment problems. 

Following this, the attendees were divided into groups based on which “thought-provoking” question they wanted to discuss. The questions were based around hypothetical future scenarios, for example: “what if we used digital to scale an existing innovative assessment format/approach.”  

The groups were also faced with problems within these scenarios, such as: “climate and environment: a significant proportion of your essential campus infrastructure was severely damaged due to extreme weather.” The attendees then had to plan out how they would deal with these hypotheticals in the face of such challenges. 

After lunch, groups presented on their discussions and scenarios to the rest of attendees, sparking some interesting and engaging discussions that explored future-gazing assessment.  

UNIwise left the workshop with a deeper understanding of the perceived issues and remedies to current and future assessment challenges. We want to thank Paul Bailey and the team at Jisc for making the event such a meaningful and impactful one for all involved. 

If you want to read more about the specific scenarios and challenges discussed during the workshop, see Paul’s own reflective blog post here.