News

The Director of ASKe is delighted to announce that the Routledge Education Class 2011 has been awarded for their most downloaded published paper "Feedback: all that effort, but what is the effect?" by Price, Handley, Millar & O'Donovan. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education Vol 35, issue 3, 2010.
Free download available here

More information here

Two very prominent cases of copying in doctoral theses prompt soul-searching but is plagiarism on the rise? Includes comments from Jude Carroll of Oxford Brookes. Link to article.

After attending one of Professor Rust’s workshop last year (as set out below), I remodelled
the assessment tasks in one of our core Financial Accounting Units, AYB200, to include
Peer-Reviewed/Marked, Weekly Assessment Tasks.
Read more...

The National Teaching Fellowship Scheme (NTFS) is part of an overall HEA programme to raise the status of learning and teaching in higher education.  Each Fellow will receive an award of £10,000 to be used in developing their work.

Berry O’Donovan, Head of Learning and Teaching Development at the Business School, is a national expert in assessment and has been working in the area of large first year business classes. She believes that assessment, rather than just being a method of marking and grading can be used to encourage and steer students in new directions.

For example, she runs workshops where her students learn how to evaluate their own work prior to an assessed task. This approach empowers students, equipping them with a deeper understanding of assessment requirements and criteria. Another initiative is the module assistant scheme which employs students to help lecturers with the administration of their modules. “Everyone benefits,” she says. “Students gain insight into academia from ‘the other side’ and valuable work experience while staff learn to work in a productive partnership with their students.”

The Business School is to spend £50,000 setting up a new feedback scheme, where first and second year students meet face-to-face with lecturers to discuss an assessed piece of work.

Jude Carroll, Principal Lecturer in the Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development (OCSLD), has led hundreds of educational development workshops around the world that make use of creative and innovative activities to help colleagues deter plagiarism.

When Jude began investigating plagiarism in 2000 it was a little-discussed issue, but interest grew, due largely to the impact of her book, Deterring Student Plagiarism in Higher Education.

She helped set up an innovative system for managing plagiarism cases quickly and fairly, using strategies which are now in place in many other institutions. In 2008, she started a one-year secondment in Sweden to share the lessons learned in the UK.

Jude has a reputation for suggesting practical, realistic approaches for teaching the growing number of international students in UK universities. Her book, Teaching International Students: Improving Learning for All (2005), co-edited with Dr Janette Ryan, serves as a textbook in several European countries and is widely cited and positively reviewed.

For more details of the Scheme, visit www.heacademy.ac.uk/ourwork/professional/ntfs

The project, Programme Assessment Strategies (PASS), confronts a fundamental issue for every course/programme leader in HE: how to design and deliver an effective, efficient and sustainable assessment strategy to meet the main course/programme.  This project will review the available evidence to identify principles of best practice and then demonstrate how these can implement effective programme assessment strategies.

The project strand of NTFS presents opportunities for higher education institutions to work with National Teaching Fellows to build on current expertise for their own benefit and that of the wider higher education sector. Teams can bid for funds of up to £200,000 for use over a period of up to three years and this project has been awarded £199,500.

http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/projects/detail/ntfsproject_bradford09

The ASKe Directorate, the head of the FDTL, and a cross-University working group contributed to its writing. Chris Rust chaired the working group which submitted the final version for the approval of AESC. Subject to some further development of the implementation guidelines, the Compact has been approved by Academic Board for implementation from 1 September. It was also the subject of the keynote speech that Chris gave at the Brookes Student Learning Experience conference on 3 April 2009.

Oxford Brookes Students' Union and the National Union of Students have described the Assessment Compact as "exemplary practice, progressive and, if implemented effectively, will be a real win for the students of Oxford Brookes University".

Download the Brookes Assessment Compact

PDF format

Angus, Tommi, Bexs and Harry.  Having fulfilled ASKe’s criteria for their event be feasible, build community and break even, they were invited to implement the ‘Meet and Balls’ event and gain accreditation.  Team ‘Green Street’ won the £100 cash prize so well done to them for an excellent performance.  Lots of positive feedback was received from attendees:

“Very social, met some new people today”
“The way they brought it all together was really good”
“This kind of event gives us a break from studying”
“We would like to see this kind of event again”
“Everyone being together is the best part of the day”

supported by ASKe’s international advisory group as well as 30 leading national figures in the field of assessment. ASKe believes that, in the current climate, there is an over-emphasis on assessment of learning at the expense of assessment for learning. The manifesto aims to address this concern and is offered with a view to stimulating debate and as a first step towards bringing about much-needed change in the sector.

There has been a very positive response to the manifesto so far and, as a result, ASKe will be promoting the manifesto much more widely over the next two years, with the aim of bringing about concrete changes at a policy level. We are currently working with various institutions with a view to them adopting the manifesto. The manifesto has already been circulated to the HEA, Universities UK, HEFCE, GuildHE and the QAA and we are now in discussions with the NUS. And, whenever possible, the ASKe Directorate seeks to promote the manifesto at workshops and presentations across the country.

These titles cover a broad spectrum of topics ranging from using the software package Turnitin to making peer feedback work effectively. The individual titles are:

‘Adopting a social constructivist approach to assessment in three easy steps!’

‘Using Turnitin to provide powerful formative feedback’
‘Making peer feedback work in three easy steps!’
‘Cultivating community: why it’s worth doing and three ways of getting there’

This brings the total number of ‘1,2,3’ leaflets produced by ASKe to eight. Other topics covered by the leaflets include improving students’ performance using ASKe’s assessment intervention, reducing the risk of plagiarism, making feedback work, and using generic feedback effectively.

All of ASKe’s ‘1,2,3’ leaflets can be downloaded from the ASKe website

Sue Robbins; Principal Lecturer in the Student Experience at the School of Life Sciences

Greg Benfield; who is presently working as an Educational Developer at OCSLD

Alysa Levene; joining us from the School of Arts and Humanities, where she  is a Senior Lecturer in early Modern Urban history

Teresa Finlay; who works in the School of Health and Social Care as a Senior  Lecturer in Healthcare Practice

We wish our new fellows every success and look forward to working with them throughout the coming year.

Queenie, our new placement student, will be taking on the role of Project Assistant. Queenie, who is currently studying for a degree in Business and Marketing at Oxford Brookes University, joined the ASKe team in September and so far has covered a lot of ground; organising meetings, managing the Casual Technical Advisors (CTAs), assisting with the implementation of the Peer Assisted Learning (PAL) scheme for 08/09, and has had some hands on event management experience at Wheatley Carnival and OX33.com’s River Party.

Birgit and Laura make up ASKe’s new research team. Laura, who is currently completing a PhD, will be involved in various projects focussing on student assessment and feedback. Laura’s research interests fall into two areas; education and migration and she has previously worked on a number of Social science projects.

Birgit holds an MA in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Amsterdam and is in her final year of studying for an MA in Coaching and Mentoring at Oxford Brookes University. Birgit has been involved in ASKe’s work in the past on the FDTL project looking at student engagement and feedback. In her new role Birgit will be researching the understanding of assessment criteria among teaching staff.

The group, whose name plays on the Wheatley Campus postcode and the word community, aims to increase the number of social events both offered to Business school students and the number of events held at wheatley Campus. Evaluation of Wheatley carnival, hosted by ASKe in induction week, showed a huge demand from staff and students for similar events to be run at the Business School throughout the year. OX33.com will go some way in addressing this.

For it’s first year ASKe will manage a lot of OX33.com’s activity ensuring that the group is able to fully establish itself within the Business School and at Wheatley, with a view to eventually handing complete control over to it’s student members. Students who become members of OX33.com will be the first to hear about events being run by the group and ASKe, will make up an advisory panel for ASKe; to aid our decision making process when planning student orientated events, they will be able to help plan, organise and run events, and even out on their own events, if they so wish, funded by ASKe.

We hope that OX33.com will help to create a greater sense of involvement, belonging and community at the Business School, whilst making Wheatley Campus a stronger base for Business School students who study here.

Read more about OX33.com

Wheatley Carnival gave students the opportunity to socialise with their peers and contemporaries for the first time outside of the structured and academically orientated meetings they had experienced so far during induction week.

Freshers were able to take advantage of a free BBQ, ice cream van, live DJ and various street theatre performances from the likes of Bedlam OZ: Slinkie Love, Jason Maverick and Mike Hancock: The Hip Hop Cop.

The Carnival was a hit with both students and staff at the campus and there has been a huge call for similar events to held throughout the year. It is also worth mentioning that during the afternoon introductory meetings were held with personal tutors and many tutors have reported an increased turn out on last year citing the Carnival as being responsible for this and the positive mood of their tutees, which is a great bonus.