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Pembrokeshire College: online student assessment
Added: (Fri Apr 02 2004)
Following successful trials of online screening of the initial numeracy and literacy skills of 500 new students using a new computerised online system, Pembrokeshire College is to extend the system to all new students this year (2004).
The new assessment system is tightly integrated with the college’s Managed Learning Environment from FD Learning, e-learning and IT specialist for the education sector. Integration facilitates a single login for students and staff and seamless access between the two systems, providing instant access to results, which is vital for quick and effective course decisions.
FD Learning has aligned its Managed Learning Environment (MLE) with Questionmark’s Perception for online assessments. Perception is regarded as the best-of-breed software for online assessments and its smooth integration with the Pembrokeshire MLE has made access between the two systems flawless for the college’s staff and students alike.
700 staff work with 2,000 full-time and 8,000 part-time students at Pembrokeshire College. The institute has won three Beacon Awards in as many years and offers courses from foundation level to degree courses and work-based NVQ training.
“The use of online assessment was an area that needed development at Pembrokeshire,” said Dr Geoff Elliott, the college’s ILT manager. “One of my first jobs was to drive the introduction of objective testing throughout the college and to identify key areas where the most significant benefits could be reaped. The first area was to make sure that we identified the levels of numeracy and literacy of incoming students.”
Colleges today are more conscious of the fact that they have greater responsibility to their students to provide the right tuition for each individual’s needs. Failing to do so causes learner dissatisfaction that can lead to losing learners - or in some cases legal proceedings - and can prove costly to institutions that already struggle with resourcing issues. Such problems can be avoided by establishing early on where potential learning difficulties might lie.
Objective testing of students to ascertain their levels of literacy and numeracy is a great starting point for spotting potential areas of concern. This allows the colleges to identify areas where students require additional tuition and can highlight specific courses that would best suit a particular student. Of course, this was not a new approach for the college. Before automating assessment, it was carried out on a manual basis with handwritten assessments for numeracy and literacy skills performed for all new students.
The manual system was both time-consuming and laborious, taking several weeks to carry out and tying up staff time with marking rather than providing support to learners. Online assessment was most definitely the most appropriate path to take. Pembrokeshire identified that this would free up staff time, leaving staff available to discuss other student issues and to better meet student needs.
It would provide instant records of numeracy and literacy skills to help in the course decision process and in determining whether any extra support is required. And it would remove the laborious process of marking that all staff must dread at the beginning of a new year.
Dr Elliott adds, “We wanted to be sure that the new online system for objectives assessment ran smoothly when it was introduced in September 2003. We did this by writing the question banks and testing them on a group of 500 students. The results were passed from Perception to our Managed Learning Environment so that tutors could find the results quickly and learning support tutors could make support decisions quickly. We felt that 500 students was enough to be sure that the system was robust and to demonstrate the great benefits to both students and staff alike. It was a resounding success. Not only did it save an enormous amount of effort for the college but it represents a real cost saving.”
The college’s senior management decided that the project had proved to be so successful that it would roll the system out to all higher education students. The same process was followed and a number of SVT students with learning difficulties were included to test the ease of use of the new system. It was again a great success and all students were able to interact easily with the technology. In fact, the projects have been so successful that the college intends to test all new entrants in 2004. This will increase the number of tests to around 1,500 students.
Of course, there are many other areas within the college where online objective testing will be a useful resource within general teaching programmes. There are currently regional talks in progress to determine how the college can further use such assessments.
Dr Elliott concludes, “We are already using Perception for assessing our lecturers’ knowledge of eTeaching and how it can be used to support traditional methods of teaching. That has been extremely useful. We also undertake student induction programmes whereby each student fills out a portfolio. These will be delivered by Perception in September 2004 when we pilot the new online portfolio. So, we are planning to extend use of formative and summative tests using Perception across the college and the initial successes will only help to increase demand for this resource.”
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Notes to editors:
Pembrokeshire College
www.pembrokeshire.ac.uk
FD Learning has over 20 years experience in the field of management information software for post-16 education and training. It is now an IT applications and services company specialising in solutions for management of learning and one of the pioneering developers of online learning in the UK education sector. Its e-learning applications and services help providers to deliver, track, measure and manage personalised learning over the Internet or via the intranet, integrated with traditional classroom learning.
FD Learning’s heritage is in further education (FE) where it can count over 25% of further education colleges on its client list and where its management information system (MIS) ebsTM is a market leader. With increasing government emphasis on raising standards, FD Learning’s solutions and services are designed to help its customers in the learning and skills sector meet targets for quality and effectiveness. As well as further education colleges, customers increasingly include adult and community learning providers and workplace learning providers. FD Learning is a Tribal Technology company and a member of the Tribal Group offering consultancy and professional support to the education sector in the UK.
www.fdlearning.com www.tribaltechnology.com www.tribalgroup.co.uk
For further information, please contact:
Catherine Dhanjal, TheAnswer Ltd Tel: 0208 655 0953 or 0794 166 9925
Email: catherine.dhanjal@theansweruk.com
Date: 2 April 2004 Ref: TA-206