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.