E-Marking & Feedback:Wholly online marking workflow within the VLE, utilising annotations, overview comments and interactive rubrics for large group submissions.

Dr Alex Gillett / The York Management School

Business Planning

Year 2 undergraduate module 200-ish students split into 36 teams Teams comprised blend of Home and Overseas

students, males and females, various degree routes.

Formative assessment: Produce a project proposal for a new business

venture Ten pages, A4 To include terms of reference for group-work Formative assessment as precursor to summative

assessment

Needs

Ability to provide detailed qualitative comments that help students understand the strengths and weaknesses of their proposed projects.

36 ten page (A4) proposals, average 2000 words plus figures and tables.

To be marked by a remote team: module leader (York) + 2 part time staff (Harrogate, Manchester).

Turnaround: Hand-in 12noon on Monday 2nd February (Spring Week 5). Feedback provided electronically around ten days later (Spring Week

6). Debrief with students in subsequent seminars (Spring Weeks 6 & 7).

In-Line Comments

Rubric

Strengths

Fast turnaround

Relatively easy for students to access any time, any place, any where

Could provide comments on specific elements of the work

No problems of trying to interpret handwriting

Markers could see each others’ comments: Part-time staff could see a few I’d done before beginning

their own marking for the first-time. I could check the first few that the part-time staff did to

let them know if on the right track.

Weaknesses Doubts about the marked rubric being visible to the students

To ‘grade’ or not to ‘grade’? : can be very time consuming, perhaps requires additional internal moderation, possibly mis-leading because not marked to same mark

scheme as summative assessment▪ Possibility of students considering formative grade to be

an agreement i.e. ‘you are on for a first in this module’.

Raised expectations – but would be very difficult to repeat turnaround and accuracy for summative assessments for which a more rigorous marking process is involved.

Weaknesses

Risks to Health & Safety of so much marking in so short a time (strain on wrist, neck, shoulder, eye sight)

Training required for new staff in how to use the technology

Could not simply download everything as a single document/report Had to download overall comments separately by ‘copy &

pasting’ into MS Word.

Weaknesses

Could not access the documents with in-line comments once marking ‘submitted’ via grade centre

Tried to set up areas for each marker in grade centre so we could just access our own marking allocation Problem was that it split up the team submissions viewable in the ‘still needs

marking’ area to individual students (i.e. a list of 9 teams became a list of 50-ish students!)

Therefore we just used the ‘still needs marking’ area after all.

In Conclusion

Very useful for formative assessment Students seem to like it Part-time staff seem to like it Facilitates remote working and speedy turnaround Requires administrative support (i.e. downloading

the marked docs and feedback) Student feedback about ‘ease of use’ misleading

because they didn’t know about the stuff they couldn’t see!

Student feedback about what would make it better also skewed because they couldn’t access all that we had provided.