Design Readings

1. Creative and Systematic Solutions

The creative part of the process actually started in the previous ‘Analyse ‘section when we started to understand your working context. You will have gathered a lot of information and asked probing questions about your own working situation and the wider institutional setting. By examining these factors and asking questions and setting yourself tasks you are already getting into ‘the zone’ of creativity; where potential answers appear. As the inventor Thomas Edison famously observed ‘Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration’.  The Assessment Redesign Template that we introduce below will help and make collaboration much easier. We found in our project that things can be a lot easier if you have colleagues to work with and set some time aside to work through these issues together.

This is good point to remind ourselves that we are concerned with developing e-assessments in an institutional context not just at an individual lecturer context. Moving away from paper-based assessments makes the traditional ‘lone ranger’ model of teaching and assessment much more difficult to sustain; as there are so many external dependencies involved - as we explored in the previous section. A more abstract way of expressing this is that in e-assessment the locus of control no longer resides with an individual teacher or, in fact, a department - instead it is spread out through a system and is composed of teachers, technology, support staff as well as the traditional administrative functions (which may have to change to adapt the new technology). And not forgetting the students whose access to and expertise with the technology used for the assessment will be critical to your success. So, when you are designing your e-assessment you are not just designing tests and questions – you are involved in the redesign of the complete assessment lifecycle that we described earlier in the ‘Getting Started’ section. Once you get this aspect of the exercise, things get a lot easier to deal with.

2. Assessment Design Template

We have produced a simple design template, it can be downloaded from the links show here ; the file is called ‘Assessment Template Blank’ and is available in several file formats to download and adapt to your needs: - PDF, .doc and .docx. The idea behind the template is very simple – to provide a common basis for describing an e-assessment design problem, the proposed solution, and a common way of sharing this with others. It also doubles up as a very useful Verification / Quality Assurance tool by enabling the recording of the changes made and how the verifier / inspector can find the information they need. Besides this, the template provides a useful tool for reflection and collaboration. You can, and should, alter it to suit your own needs - the main thing is to start recording your ideas and the rationale behind them.

2.1. Background to the Design Template

The design template is based on concepts coming out of the fields of Instructional Design, Learning, and Jisc sponsored work on Learning Design. These theoretical ideas have been combined together into a simple and practical tool, by using a method from the discipline of architecture called design patterns.