Posted: Thursday 31st August 2017
Author: Claudia Cox
...and what a week it was! Although there were far fewer WISEflow examination candidates for our August reassessments, co-ordinating the exams was not without its challenges. With the help and support of the SALTs and the Examinations Team, we pulled through and received 39 online submissions - a very modest figure compared to May.
The highlight of the week has to have been the Master's examination which took place on Friday morning - several students were apprehensive about being disadvantaged by slow typing speeds. After the 3 hour exam ended, we approached these students and informed them that even the slowest typist among them had written at least 2,500 words. Although it was perhaps an unconventional use of WISEflow's data analytics, the students were incredibly pleased and proud of themselves and seeing their confidence visibly bolstered was a tremendous opportunity for us. We touched on the idea of correlation between word counts and performance in a previous post, and while there is a definite threshold where less content equates to poorer grades - by and large, we are firm proponents of the idea that quality supersedes quantity.
Now our attentions are fully focused on on the weighty task of implenting WISEflow throughout the rest of the College of Engineering, Design and Physical Sciences. As such, the Digital Examinations Project Team is busy preparing and scheduling training sessions, developing a Blackboard Learn resource for staff (much like the one released for students before the May exams), and unleashing our inner Spielberg by scripting and creating some video tutorials too. In addition to the staff manual, which is now being spread far and wide, we're also creating some short and snappy posters and single page handouts for users to refer to when performing common actions within WISEflow. We've also set up an email inbox as a single point of contact for users to email the team for assistance or any questions not answered in our existing literature. Prior to this users would just email individual members of the project team, but it's essential to have centralised support in place for the project's expansion.