DIGITAL ASSESSMENT: TRANSFORMATION AT SPEED
CONTEXT
Getting assessment right is crucial for any university. At University College London (UCL), where the exam period would see 87,000 candidates, volume is huge, so when COVID-19 hit and the university went into lockdown, UCL made the quick decision to pivot to a digital assessment platform.
For the initial pivot, it used its virtual learning environment (VLE), Moodle, but once the main exam period of 2020 had passed, UCL made a bold decision: it would deliver all exams and assessments online on a new platform in the 2021 academic year. UCL selected UNIwise as its preferred partner, and launched its own platform as ‘AssessmentUCL’, to all students in Spring 2021.
What follows is a conversation with Derfel Owen (DO), then Director of Change and Improvement, Joanne Moles (JM), then Head of Assessment Delivery and Platforms, and Simon Walker (SW), then Director of Programme Development.
THE ROAD TO DIGITAL ASSESSMENT
DO: Covid was the main driver of AssessmentUCL (AUCL). There were lots of discussions taking place, and had been for some time, about transforming assessment practice, digitising assessment and teaching and learning practice. We were slowly moving in this direction and were at a point where we were ready to start experimenting with the market, but the crunch moment came when the pandemic hit. We made a very quick decision to lockdown the campus and pivot overnight to digital provision. We put our foot on the accelerator and just said “let’s go for it, let’s not inch our way into the coming year.” We made quite a bold decision.
JM: It was always the intention to onboard digital assessment (DA), but the pace would’ve been slower and the scale much smaller – we would have been dripfeeding it through pilots – COVID accelerated that.
SW: Of course, we’d also been discussing the fact that we were still putting students into large assessment halls and getting them to write for hours on paper until their arms started aching. It didn’t make any sense, but the question was, “what do we do about it?” Educationally, we were wondering, “why do we still test with exams when the world is not set in that particular way?” We realised that there had to be new forms of assessment. When we started looking into the different platforms, we realised there’s lots you can do – video, podcast, work in teams. The list went on.
DO: The space was there to be occupied. We took that opportunity.
A "BIG BANG" APPROACH
DO: We had a conversation where I said “we’re not piloting this year. We’re doing it all.” We knew we could do it because we’d done it once with the VLE, and that wasn’t designed for assessment at scale. So, why wouldn’t we have the confidence to go the whole journey with really broad engagement across the institution, using a platform that was specifically designed for assessment? That would be 50,000 or so exam sittings delivered in the summer and various other assessments delivered at the same time. Had there not been a pandemic, we probably would have had lots of pilots with enthusiastic cheerleaders across the university, which is obviously important. But instead, we took an approach where we touched every corner of the university straight away. There was no part of UCL that had not engaged with DA or AUCL.
JM: We weren't just driving the project from one area. DA was the key to training, teaching and onboarding. Exam delivery, however, was all about regulation and delivery. From the delivery point of view, it was critical that decisions were made, and we stuck with them.
SW: We moved together, as a united front in the university, towards all the things that we had wanted to do for a long time.
CHANGING PRACTICES AND CULTURE
SW: The biggest hurdle we encountered on the academic side was the culture. That’s where the real interest came about. How do you shift that mindset when you’ve got successful academics who haven’t, on the whole, ever used DA? They’re happily versed in their own subject – meanwhile you’ve got this amazing intervention of change coming about and you’re trying to convince people to move forward and change, obviously with some degree of evidence.
Luckily, UCL put huge amounts of resources behind this change. We were able to employ dedicated DA advisors – a whole team of people – who worked with our digital education advisors and our pedagogical advisors, alongside faculty tutors – creating big, robust teams. If an academic said an assessment wasn’t working, or it needed to look a certain way to prepare students for a post-graduation world, they had a place they could go to for help.
DO: It’s really important to understand that digitising assessment in itself isn’t a solution. We still had to change the practice associated with it, the experience students have, the volume and nature of assessment and usefulness of feedback. There was a constant need to work with our DA partners to find new and different solutions that helped our academic colleagues with whichever part of the assessment journey they might be struggling with and give them reassurance we’re making it better for them.
ADVIDE FOR INSTITUTIONS CONSIDERING THE DIGITAL SWITCH
JM: Communication has to be over-arching, for staff and students together. Town halls are familiar at UCL, and they help because it’s a quick way to speak to lots of people. One of the lessons we learned is that you have to get your communication right the first-time round, otherwise you can be picked up with policy later on.
SW: Constant encouragement – it’s the way UCL operates. Always, always through wider consultation – it’s not a managerial university and that’s beneficial, as opposed to having someone taking an uninformed decision and saying, “sorry this is the way it’s going to be.”
DO: Having a plan is essential. Make the big decisions early and communicate them, and then be clear with colleagues where there is further room for discussion. We really got into the groove of doing this.
It’s very helpful to get a large community of people together and have colleagues highlighting to each other what they think is the right sort of compromise. You need to get people to understand that in a large, complicated organisation, when you’re looking out from your own little rabbit warren, everything seems very simple, but when you see there are 200 other rabbits peeking out their warrens, you realise, “okay there are going to have to be some compromises made here to go forward.”
JM: I would also say it's important to use the data you are collecting. We paid particular attention to student queries. What that enabled us to do for the first time is quantify what the ‘noises’ being made actually were. If you receive five or ten emails, the issue seems huge, but when you have data, you can see that the issue is only affecting a few people. This really helped us with our regulation review.
I would also say that having commitment institutionally from UCL and across divisions was phenomenal. Kudos to the senior leadership for investing in the transformation. It wouldn’t have happened without the investment of those key decision makers and executive support. That was probably the biggest influencer for change.
THE IMPORTANCE OF A STRONG PARTNERSHIP
SW: We had a partnership within the institution, and we saw UNIwise as another partner. There was a sense of equality, we all moved forward, we consulted each other, and we were taking one another seriously.
DO: There was almost daily communication with UNIwise. Initially, we were trying to get across that we’re big, we’re going out to all departments, we’re going to touch areas of the university you’ve never been exposed to. It really did feel like, every step of the way, we were both fully committed to delivering the best possible solution for the students.
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