Banking on Success

We've started to roll out our latest project based training initiative this week with a full house at the first of our 4 sessions. I enjoyed the day. It's good to work with teaching practitioners again as these days I seem to have had more contact with curriculum managers and senior staff in our supported institutions and it's good to get back to my roots.

Bank on Success is aimed at showing staff the most painless way to create eAssessments that can be uploaded and integrated into their learning platform. In fact processing and uploading can be quite a tedious operation that follows routine procedures that I'm not sure many teaching staff would want to do. The focus of our project is on the design of good, reliable eAssessments rather than the technicalities of getting them to work ( in my opinion a task more appropriate for a learning technologist unless the lecturer is a hybrid model with sufficient skills to ensure that ROI time-wise is practicable). Demonstrating the processes involved though is undoubtedly helpful to staff and allows them to see what's involved from start to finish.

If I'm honest I think e-Assessment is something that we've struggled to support effectively. Perhaps it's the term that puts people off as we've had plenty of offerings over that last couple of years but not many takers. In terms of learning materials it really is (technically speaking) eAssessment that provides interactivity. Looking at materials, even those that include multimedia is a rather passive activity and it is the activities such as web-quests, crosswords and quizzes that engage learners and provide the interactivity. All are technically forms of eAssessment. Maybe finding and alternative name for these types of activities that form such a critical part of the learning process is needed. I'll get my thinking cap on!

Anyway feedback from the day was great and my colleagues and I are greatly encouraged by the positive response we've had to the initiative so far.

Bank on Success - more information