The Vice-Chancellor’s Education Excellence Awards aim to raise the status of education at Newcastle University by rewarding individuals and teams who make a marked impact on the student educational experience.
The deadline for submission of applications is 12.00pm Wednesday 19 April 2023.
Categories and eligibility for award
The award is open to all members of staff at Newcastle, NUIS and NUMed, whose work enhances the student educational experience. In addition, applications are welcome from staff of associated employers with direct and substantive involvement in the delivery of the student experience at Newcastle (e.g. staff of INTO Newcastle University). Groups of colleagues who work closely together are invited to apply for the team award.
Up to five awards will be made across the following two categories:
Category one: Individual award
Individual members of staff (academic or professional) whose contribution to education at Newcastle is exceptional.
Category two: Team award
Teams of staff (either academic or professional services staff, or teams consisting of both) whose contribution to education at Newcastle is exceptional.
The Jisc Digifest 2023 was held on 7-8 March at Birmingham ICC (it was also online) and I was fortunate enough to attend this year’s event.
According the Digifest website Digifest is:
‘a celebration of the creative minds who think differently, who introduce new ideas and technologies to their organisations. Whether it’s the researcher at the cutting edge of vaccine development, the lecturer inspiring the next generation or the manager leading digital transformation, Digifest is for the innovators of tomorrow.’
Ben, our man on the inside
The two days both had a packed agenda of exciting talks, presentations, discussions, and great catering. The agenda was based around celebrating innovation in all its forms using three key tracks:
Learning, teaching, and resources
Research
Leadership and culture
The agenda was so packed, you couldn’t get around everything. Here are some of my highlights from the event and some useful links to follow up if you wanted to know more.
The event started on the Tuesday with Heidi Fraser-Krauss, chief executive of Jisc, welcoming everyone to Digifest 2023.
Heidi Fraser-Krauss, welcoming delegates to Digifest 2023
This was followed by a great keynote presentation from Inma Martinez, a digital pioneer and AI scientist, and a leading authority in the sectors of digital technology and machine intelligence. Since the 1990s, Inma has been a revolutionary figure within the technology industry and has become well known for her talent to create social engagement through technology. She’s been recognised as one of the top 50 AI influencers to follow on Twitter and one of the top 20 women changing the landscape of data.
Inma’s session was called ‘How artificial intelligence will ignite human creativity and help pave the way to human and machine innovation’: AI is making incredible (and fast) inroads into the innovation processes of many creative industries. This session explored how education will benefit from an AI that enhances human creativity, and how the future of innovation is a collaborative sandbox for humans and machine intelligence. The key takeaway from Inma’s session was not to panic. Although Open AI is here and it’s probably not going anywhere, the question is, how we can use it, rather than how is it going to change everything. AI can’t replicate our own imagination and emotional intelligence. Neoteny (a new word for me) is something that only we as humans go through and this how we can use AI to our advantage rather than panicking about how AI might change our industry.
Before lunch (which was very good), I managed to catch three further sessions.
Firstly, a lightning talk called ‘Fostering authentic assessment and feedback to hone 21st-century skills’. In this session, Abdulla Dilimi showcased how TU Dublin, OsloMet, and Deakin University cultivated high-quality feedback and authentic assessment with the help of pedagogical technology. The session was very good. As you’d expect, it was giving high praise to authentic assessment, focusing on how authentic assessment could combat some of the negative aspects of open AI technology; and how personalised feedback is a key benefit to authentic assessment.
The second session was called ‘How green is your campus? Supporting a student friendly, sustainable hybrid campus’. In this 30-minute session Anne Robertson, head of EDINA services, University of Edinburgh, gave a presentation of simple and fast location data solutions that:
Support students to find their way around campus, highlighting sustainable travel solutions and helping them find and book study spaces.
Enable estates colleagues to sustainably and safely manage the physical estate.
Assist with effective energy management, in a hybrid working world.
With the use of campus maps and real time analysis, University of Edinburgh helped students to become greener and get the best out of their time on campus. To maximise the use of university spaces and ensure that students could find a space to study with friends or individually across their vast campus.
The final session before lunch was a session about using virtual reality in teaching and learning practical skills. Josephine Grech, biology lecturer and digital excellence leader from Cardiff and Vale College gave a demonstration of how virtual reality is used in training learners for WorldSkills competitions, but also how it is applied in the classroom to increase engagement and learning outcomes. This was really engaging as a viewer and clearly engaging for the students. It is also student-led and student-developed to enhance the learning for others.
The first session in the afternoon was a keynote panel discussion with:
Paul Burne, customer success/service lead – hybrid edge, Amazon Web Services (AWS);
Karen Cooper, senior director – offer management, Honeywell;
Gareth Piggott, major accounts manager, Fortinet;
Richard Jackson, lead cloud security specialist, Jisc.
The title for the panel was called ‘On the Edge’ and was about a cloud-based programme called Edge Computing. This session was quite interesting and went through the benefits of this product.
The final session of the day was around Micro Credentials and how these have been utilised at Abertay University. They have seemed to get the best out of micro credentials using them across multiple courses in stage one and providing students with skills outside of their discipline.
The second day opened with a truly inspiring keynote presentation by Dr Sue Black, entitled ‘If I can Do It, So Can You’. Sue told the story of her life and career, the ups, the downs, and how by putting herself out of comfort zone, she was able to achieve so much and support so many other women.
Dr Sue Black, delivering her keynote presentation at Digifest 2023
Sue talked about her passion for getting everyone excited about the opportunities that technology offers, how she brought her family out of poverty and built a successful career through education, and a determination to succeed.
This was a great way to start day two of the conference on International Women’s Day.
Here are some links to find out more about Sue, her work and how she saved Bletchley Park:
Tech Up – retraining women from underserved communities into technology careers.
#Techmums – #techmums is here to take the mystery out of technology. Whether it’s helping you to reconnect with old friends via social media, chatting to your child about online safety or finding out how to use technology to help you at work, #techmums can help!
The rest of day two I managed to take in these sessions.
Firstly, Richard Buckley and Kate Whyles from Nottingham College delivered a session called ‘What does that button do?’ Shifting digital culture and growing innovation, engagement, and attainment at Nottingham College. The presentation went through how a small but perfectly formed team of six is at the forefront of developing and promoting a culture of digital curiosity, innovation, and increased collaboration to help drive up standards in teaching, learning and assessment in one of the UK’s largest FE colleges. My key takeaway was the phrase Positive Nuisance, I like that concept. How can you be a nuisance to others but in a way that will positively affect our students.
The second session was about how good AI and using things like the WHO5 can be for supporting students with their mental health and allow us to safeguard our students. Professor Peter Francis, deputy vice-chancellor (academic), Birmingham City University, took us through how their project developed a ‘predictive analytic system’ that integrates data from across university sectors and generates a predicted likelihood score for students experiencing poor wellbeing in the following month.
Implementing a model of student consent for this system, approximately 70% of the student population consented and this predictive system has shown over 80% accuracy in identifying students at risk of poor mental wellbeing. Through this identification they were able to intervene proactively through tailored messages to students that highlight wellbeing services that are proportionate to their level of risk.
The final session before I braved the snow and the long train journey home was about why you should consider student-led learning for your future education.
The session focussed on four key areas to fuel activity and deepen learning for our students. These were:
Challenge
Curiosity
Control
Fantasy
This will help students to develop job-readiness and learn to take responsibility themselves.
Digifest 2023 was a fantastic conference, and I would recommend getting along next year if you can. Please get in touch if you would like to know more, and thank you for reading.
In the fifth sprint of the Assessment and Feedback Sprint Series a small team of students and colleagues, from across the university, worked collaboratively for three weeks to investigate and design resources that would help answer the question:
How do we articulate a meaningful programme experience that ensures a cohesive assessment journey for all our students?
The initial discovery phase of the sprint revealed that students often struggle to see the ‘big picture’ of their programme and how their assessments relate to and are informed by one another within a modularised system. Rather than understanding their assessments as a journey that is an integral part of their learning, students chiefly viewed them as standalone, disconnected instances that are ‘tacked on’ to the end of a module with the sole purpose being to assess. Rarely were assessments recognised by students as a part of their continued learning and development of skills.
With this in mind, we have created an assessment and feedback planner. The aim of which is to provide students with a resource where they can collate all of their assessment information, across a stage of their programme, so that this can be easily visualised and stored in a single place. More importantly, however, the planner’s primary function is to encourage students to consider the skills that their assessments are designed to develop. This allows students to critically reflect on how these skills are transferable across their modules and the stages of their degree, and how to carry their feedback forward, thereby building a clearer picture of their programme as a whole.
The assessment planner is operated through OneNote, a platform available to all students as part of their Microsoft package. The planner can be used to both type and handwrite information, as well as providing space to import or jot down any key notes. We have provided two links, one to a blank template, and one to a mock-up of a completed planner so you can visualise the planner in action. You can use the tabs to navigate through the planner and for more information we will be creating a ‘getting started’ video soon that offers a guide on using the planner. One of the key benefits of the planner is that it is fully editable so that students on any course can customise it to fit their specific programme’s needs and goals.
In the version we have created, we have decided to use a Stage One template, as student validation suggested that receiving the planner in stage one would be most useful to reinforce assessment reflection across all stages in a programme.
“This would have greatly helped me in Stage One”- Student, HaSS
The most important feature of the planner is the reflective output. We have included a “My Feedback” page for every module, a “Semester Reflection” to act as a bridge across semesters, and a “Thinking Back, Looking Forward” section to reflect on the stage as a whole and to feed forward into the next stage or into the post-degree future. All reflective sections offer students the opportunity to think critically on their assessment goals and knowledge, with questions such as “what assessment skills/knowledge have you developed since starting at Newcastle/since your previous years of study?” and “thinking back, how do you feel about the goals you set at the start of the year? (What progress have you made? Have your goals changed at all?)”. By having open-ended questions that require detailed answers, students can reflect on their educational assessment journey and feed this forward. A link is embedded into the last section of the planner to encourage students to create a new planner for the next year of study, if applicable.
We see the “My Assessment Planner” potentially being used as an active tool that students could work through with their Peer Mentor and discuss with their Personal Tutors. This is because when validating the planner with students it was suggested that they would find this most useful if they had the opportunity to review the completed planner with peers or staff.
“I would want this to be a resource facilitated in partnership with staff”- Student, HaSS
The overarching aim of the planner is to provide more cohesion across assessments to enable students to better understand the links between stages and their overall programme.
Try out the Assessment Planner
We have two versions of the assessment planner available for download. These are “packaged” versions of the workbook – simply download them and click to open them in OneNote.
an empty template for your to use and adjust for your needs
If you have any questions about the ‘My Assessment Planner’ please get in contact with Levi Croom (HaSS Faculty Student Experience Administrator) Levi.Croom@newcastle.ac.uk
See our earlier blog post to view the Sprint Showcase Recording and find out more about our second “Minimum Viable Product” – Programme Assessment Journey Map.
As part of our Assessment and Feedback Sprint Series. A small team of students and colleagues have been investigating the question:
How do we articulate a meaningful programme experience that ensures a cohesive assessment journey for all of our students?
Feedback (Stage Surveys, NSS etc.,) tells us that students and colleagues struggle to see assessments from a programme perspective and this disconnection can lead students to feel like assessment isn’t part of a wider programme and that their skills/feedback don’t link across modules and assessments.
Being able to visualise the assessment journey across a stage or programme is important because, as one colleague said,
“An assessment journey builds confidence in the education (and the education provider) and underscores the importance of each individual assessment towards an overarching goal. Articulation of assessment journeys allows for broader reflection and helps explain the skill development (rather than focussing on siloed, module specific content).”
An overview of some of the visuals we found from within Newcastle University and other HE Institutions are shown below. In summary, we found a range of approaches, often highlighting the ‘journey’ through the stage or programme, making it easier for students to reflect on progress.
What have we created?
Using these findings, we created some template visuals which were then validated by colleagues and students along with feedback incorporated from our first showcase.
We decided to create a variety of templates to reflect diverse practices/skillsets across programmes and areas. Some are more suitable for Semester-based programmes and others for block-taught programmes.
We started by looking at a standard linear stage one programme – V400 BA Archaeology. We initially had a large amount of text on the visual explaining each assessment and how it aligned to the wider programme learning objectives. However, it quickly began to look overwhelming.
We then started to explore using H5P as a way to keep the visual relatively simple but incorporate pop up boxes to make it more interactive and engaging. The version below has dummy text – click on the questionmarks to see how it would work.
We also considered how to visually represent a block-taught postgraduate programme and incorporated feedback from a Degree Programme Director (DPD) to represent larger-weighted modules with bigger circles. The DPD said this would be a useful tool for both staff and students including at recruitment and Induction events.
The intention is that these editable templates will be useful for both students and programme teams to visualise assessment across a programme or stage. The visual could be produced as part of a workshop reviewing programme level assessment or could be a standalone tool designed to be student-facing.
Find out more about our Sprint
We presented our Sprint adventures at the Sprint Showcase event on Friday 10 March, and you can watch the recording here:
To find out more about the Assessment and Feedback Sprint Programme contact Conny.Zelic@ncl.ac.uk in the Strategic Projects and Change Team.
Inspera Assessment (the university system for centrally supported digital exams) is supported by the Learning and Teaching Development Service with a range of training options open to all staff. We now have a new training session aimed at Professional Service colleagues due to run on March 9 from 3-4pm. You can sign up via Elements.
This session will introduce the digital exam platform Inspera, and how to support an Inspera digital exam.
Introduction to Inspera
Creating an account
Reviewing crated questions and question sets
Basic functionality including randomisation and question choice options
Allow listing and adding resources
Checking the student view
Entering or amending question marks
Inspera Scan sheets
Who should attend?
This webinar is suitable for any professional services colleague supporting an Inspera digital exam.
Inspera assessment is the University’s system for centrally supported digital exams. Inspera can be used for automatically marked exam questions, for manually marked question types including essays, or for exams with a combination of both.
New functionality has recently been launched that enables colleagues to do more with digital written exams.
Question choice for students
Candidate selected questions is used to give students taking your exam a choice of which questions to answer from a list.
For example in an exam where students need to answer 2 essay questions from a list of 6 questions, you can set this up so that a student can choose a maximum of 2 questions to answer.
How does it work for a student?
If candidate selected questions is used in an Inspera exam the student sees information above each question that shows how many questions to select in total, and how many they have already selected. To choose a question to answer they change the ‘Answering this question?’ drop down box to yes.
Screenshot showing student view of Inspera, with the option to choose whether to answer a question.
If a student starts answering a question without changing the ‘Answering this question?’ drop down box, Inspera automatically changes it to ‘Yes’.
When they have selected the maximum number of questions, the student cannot start answering any more questions. However, if they change their mind about which question(s) they want to answer, they can simply change the ‘Answering this question?’ drop down to no, and select a different question instead.
How does it work for a marker?
A marker only sees answers to the questions that a student has chosen to answer.
As students can only submit answers for the maximum number of questions they are allowed to choose, this means you can say goodbye to the dilemma of trying to work out which questions to mark when a student has misread the instructions and answered too many questions!
How can I use it in my exam?
The Candidate selected questions function is available when you are authoring a question set for an Inspera digital exam. Find out more in the Inspera guide for Candidate selected questions.
Rubrics for marking
You can now create a rubric to use for marking any manually marked question type in Inspera. Rubrics allow you to build the assessment criteria for an exam question into Inspera, and use them in your marking.
Choose whether you want to use a quantitative rubric to calculate the mark for a question, or a qualitative rubric as an evaluation and feedback tool, and then manually assign the mark.
How to introduce a rubric for your exam
When you are creating the exam question in Inspera, set up the rubric you want to use for marking that question. The Inspera guide to rubrics for question authors explains how to create a rubric and add it to your exam question.
If you’ve chosen to use one of the quantitative rubric types, as you complete it the student’s mark for the question will automatically be calculated. If you’ve chosen a qualitative rubric, once you’ve completed the rubric use it to evaluate the student’s answer and help you decide on their mark for the question.
You can choose to add feedback to the candidate in the box below the level of performance you’ve selected for each criterion (you can see an example of this in the image below).
Screenshot of the Grader view of a sample points-range rubric in Inspera
Want to learn more about using Inspera for digital exams?
Come along to a webinar to learn about creating exam questions or marking in Inspera.
Enroll onto the Inspera Guidance course in Canvas to learn about Inspera functionality at your own pace.
Find out about the process to prepare an Inspera digital exam, and how the Digital Assessment Service can help on the Inspera webpage.
Contact digital.exams@newcastle.ac.uk if you have questions or would like to discuss how you could use Inspera for a digital exam on your module.
** Deadline Extended to 4 March to Join a Working Group **
This online partnership event is an excellent opportunity for the region’s 5 universities (Durham, Newcastle, Northumbria, Sunderland, Teesside) to come together and share ideas. This year’s event will focus on Innovations in Learning. The keynote speaker for the conference is Prof Chris Headleand, NTF.
The conference/call for abstracts is open to colleagues and students from the 5 universities.
Get involved
1. Submit an abstract. The call for abstracts is now open, closing on 2 May 2023.
2. If you have a special interest in Student Retention or Doctoral Training join a working group by 4 March. These cross-university working groups will meet online in the lead up to the conference and present and host sessions on the day.
Are you interested in student co-creation but unsure of the benefits, how to get involved or where to start?
If so, you might be interested in reading my review of the recent AdvanceHE symposium on Student Co-creation, which includes highlights from the event, variations and benefits of student co-creation, scholarship and the student’s voice.
The day was packed with insightful, exciting and innovative talks from international colleagues and students across the HE Sector. There was such an exciting buzz in the air all day and you couldn’t help but admire the enthusiasm from students passionate about working with educators and developing agency in their own learning experiences.
Keynote Speaker: Catherine Bovill, University of Edinburgh
The day began with Catherine talking passionately about ‘The transformational potential of co-creation from a classroom perspective both in person and online. She spoke of the many variations of student co-creation, highlighting some of her own research and scholarship along the way. Catherine shared a Co-creation of learning & teaching typology (Bovill 2019) which identifies how you might initiate co-creation, within what context and whether those sorts of activities are staff-led, student-led or both – some included in the table below:
Paper available from A co-creation of learning and teaching typology: What kind of co-creation are you planning or doing? (Bovill 2019)
Interestingly, this research mainly focused on students co-creating when they are already part of a programme or module – with activities such as co-creating assessments, designing essay questions or working with students to co-design what might be taught in coming weeks.
From the research undertaken by Catherine, and other scholars she mentioned, there are clearly a lot of benefits of student co-creation for students and staff, some of which I’ve noted below:
Increased student engagement and motivation for learning
Increased meta-cognitive awareness, sense of identity and belonging
Enhancements in teaching and classroom experience
Enhanced academic performance
Transformation in assessment performance and less focus on grades and more on learning
Enhanced feelings of belonging, feeling valued
More culturally responsive and inclusive
Liberating for teachers
Increased confidence through relationship building and trust
For me that last point on relationship building and developing trust are the key ingredients to any form of curriculum co-creation, whether that’s student-staff co-creation or staff-staff co-creation, both require positive relationships but also build positive relationships – which then leads to all those other benefits above!
Bovill, C. (2020) Co-creating learning and teaching: towards relational teaching in higher education. St Albans: Critical Publishing.Bovill, C. (2019)
A co-creation of learning and teaching typology: what kind of co-creation are you planning or doing? International Journal for Students as Partners3 (2) 91-98: https://doi.org/10.15173/ijsap.v3i2.3953
Student Co-creation at Newcastle
As my role focuses on working with specific programme teams to redesign or design new curricula, I was interested in finding out how colleagues across the sector have engaged students in new programme design – a particular challenge when students aren’t already invested in the programme. I managed to catch Catherine during a coffee break to chat about this and was comforted that this isn’t just a challenge for us, it’s a sector-wide challenge. From our chat I’ve identified some approaches that we could use at Newcastle:
Organise staff, student and graduate panel discussions as part of the curriculum review process
Provide money incentives – involve students from the outset through schemes such as Jobs on Campus
Provide other incentives – if the budget doesn’t stretch to Jobs on Campus, would a Digital Badge incentivise students to get involved? There is robust meta-data behind these badges that employers recognise as authentic
What I realised from this symposium, and from being around all these enthusiastic students, is students are eager to get involved in shaping their own education. Student co-creation in any variation can have positive benefits not just for the students and educators but for the University as a whole.
Excitingly, we also had representation for Newcastle University at the AdvanceHE symposium. Helen Elliott, our Student Experience Manager and Meg Hardiman a second-year student in English Literature with Creative Writing, presented their work on ‘Why Can’t Module Choice be More like Netflix?’
Their work focused on finding out what information students need to make a confident choice during module selection. A student co-creation project that used Agile Methodologies.
Here at Newcastle, we have some great examples of student co-creation:
In LTDS we are working on developing support and guidance on student co-creation and would love to include some of your case studies, so if you have examples do get in touch ltds@ncl.ac.uk
Parallel sessions – what stood out!
There were of course many other motivating and interesting sessions at the Student Co-creation symposium. I was particularly inspired by the student co-creation examples from The University of Manchester, and the University of Dundee.
Dr Nicholas Weise (Senior Lecturer / Teaching & Learning Enhancement Lead –Department of Chemistry) shared their approach to co-creating the curriculum with Commuter students (a student group that has lower rates of progression and success than other student groups) so that they feel less isolated, feel seen and heard and are able to engage in more social and networking opportunities. Through a flipped teaching environment students were given the opportunity to co-design active learning sessions and have a voice in designing aspects of the curriculum, such as learning outcomes, lecture content, and formative and summative assessments. What really caught my attention was how they rewarded and recognised student contributions. The University of Manchester has set up a programme, the Leadership in Education Awards Programme (LEAP) for all students (UG, PGT and PGR) and is supporting students, involved in co-designing curriculum, to gain recognition as Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA).
Dr James Brooks (Senior Lecturer in Electrical Engineering and the Academic Lead for Pedagogy within Science and Engineering) at Manchester University talked about student involvement in co-designing a course from scratch with student partners. The extent of the involvement in the co-design had real positive impacts on the students, their experience and their grades. James’ students gave summaries of past material in the lectures, live constructive criticism of the lecture, and formal and informal peer feedback on assessments. They co-designed the marking criteria in the lectures, specified the grade descriptors in the lectures and created learning materials to evidence their learning – some really great examples of engaging students in their own learning experiences and assessments!
Dr Paul Campbell (Physics Division, University of Dundee) perhaps won the award for the most innovative and fun example of student co-creation (there wasn’t actually an award for that but he’d of won, I’m sure 😊). Inspired some time ago by The Apprentice, students on a Physic module are tasked with working in groups (typically of 5 or 6 students) to:
Develop a 4/5 minute YouTube video that ‘informs, educates and entertains’* on one aspect of this module.
Exercise represents 10% of the overall module score.
Hard deadline set at the last scheduled class slot of that 11 week academic term.
Marking scheme provided [including a peer assessment component].
Students then take complete creative control.
Students really got creative with these videos and had lots of fun, and the benefits were clear, including:
Improved Subject Attainment.
Enhanced Student Experience.
Enhanced employability (URL link to CV).
Cultivation of true team working and identification of distinct employment roles.
There are also a lot of benefits for educators:
Improved attainment.
Inexpensive in terms of facilitation of kit and time investment.
Fabulous recruitment tool.
Facilitates true insight to both academic and character traits that serve towards generating accurate job references with demonstrable excellence.
Also serves towards the development of rapport and enhanced confidence in the senior phase
Take look at one of the videos on Youtube and see what you think!
Thanks for taking the time and reading my blog post on student co-creation. Please get in touch if you are interested in chatting about student co-creation or in sharing your practice!
Michelle Barr, Learning Design & Curriculum Development Advisor (LTDS)
Inspera Assessment, the University’s system for centrally supported digital exams, launched for the 21/22 academic year. A key part of understanding how we better use digital exams is to consider ways to improve the student experience of taking a digital exam. Following the launch, the Learning and Teaching Development Service (LTDS) asked for student feedback from those who took a digital exam in 21/22.
142 students submitted their feedback.
Here are our findings:
65% of students were somewhat or very satisfied with their overall experience of taking their exam using Inspera.
Results of the Inspera Student Evaluation
How easy is Inspera to use?
81% of students found starting their Inspera exam somewhat or very easy.
80% of students found handing in/submitting their Inspera exam somewhat or very easy.
When asked to compare a written exam paper and an Inspera paper which included written questions where students could type their answers, 63% of students stated they found it somewhat or much better using Inspera.
Is Inspera better for Take Home or on Campus PC cluster exams?
85% of students were somewhat or very satisfied with their overall experience of using Inspera for their take home exam(s).
73% of students were somewhat or very satisfied with their overall experience of using Inspera for their PC Cluster exam(s).
Thoughts for the future
Inspera seems to be a hit with students overall; the experience of using it is largely positive, with Inspera Take Home papers gaining the highest satisfaction scores. PC Cluster Inspera exam satisfaction scores showed the majority of students were satisfied with their overall experience. Feedback clearly indicated many students felt re-editing written answers works well in Inspera (and is better than trying to edit paper based written exams).
The most common concern raised was around plagiarism. LTDS is keen to work with colleagues to alleviate student concerns and ensure that the provision is developed and supported going forward.
LTDS opened its provision for digital exams to all modules, and the number of planned digital exams for 22/23 has increased.
To better support students before their exam, the LTDS recommend students practise with Inspera. Our survey showed 60% of students tried at least one demo before their main exam; we’d like to get that figure up! Practice exams can help with learning to use the tool and they are accessible via Canvas.
The University Education Development Fund provides grants of up to £10,000 to support the development of new approaches to learning and teaching across Newcastle University.
Two strands of funding are available:
Up to £2,500 for projects focused within an individual academic unit through the Responsive strand.
Up to £10,000 for projects with collaboration across academic units through the Strategic strand.
Chaired by the PVC Education, the fund offers a fantastic opportunity to propose and deliver projects with real benefit to student education. Applications should further the aims and key themes of the Education Strategy.
