In discussions, the leaders discovered that the Open University has been reviewing programme assessment in one of its large faculties. There were also interesting ways of levering change and creating greater flexibility through QA procedures, for example disentangling credit from assessment.
Programme teams explored procedural issues related to changing assessment regimes, opportunities for incremental changes, and the potential for more profound shifts in pedagogy and assessment. These changes are being discussed at departmental level, weighing evidence from TESTA about the balance of formative to summative assessment, reductions in variety of assessment, and ways to incorporate more social and dialogic feedback to students.
The University of New South Wales is one of the Group of Eight Research Intensive universities in Australia. There are some 44,000 students at UNSW, and about 7,000 in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. TESTA will be used in this faculty.
This year's Change Academy programme, based on the 'explore, challenge, apply' change model features TESTA as one strand to address programme-wide features of asssessment in an evidence-informed way. Up to ten institutions represented by teams of up to five people are eligible to participate in the change academy strand. A Call for Submissions will come out in the next few weeks on the HEA website. In the meantime, there is more information on this link: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/change/ Higher_Education_Change_Programmes_2011-2012.pdf
