University of Reading – The EMA Programme

In response, a new 3 year EMA Programme was created to run from 2017 until 2020 to deliver this vision and address existing challenges.

To successfully deliver, the team worked very closely with each school within the University to understand their different requirements and collaboratively map complex assessment journey processes-who does what, when and how-as assessments are submitted. The Team then worked
intensively with two ‘early adopter’ schools to introduce online marking in September 2017 and then across almost all other schools in September 2018.

Feedback was very positive. A survey of 419 students showed that 94% of responders were broadly in favour of the University’s move towards online assessment and 89% said that they were more satisfied with their experience of submitting assignments and receiving feedback online than if the process was done using paper.

We supported this with an extensive communications plan involving 26 different types of contact to really meaningfully engage with staff and students involved to make sure that we weren’t just ‘imposing a solution’ and could ensure ‘business as usual’ after Programme closure.

At the same time we completed a really complex piece of work to enable thousands of individual summative assessment marks to be recorded in our student records system for the first time, almost eliminating the use of numerous spreadsheets by administrators. Since we made this information available in January 2018, there have been 71,877 student views of this information and 49,415 staff views.

This work has enabled us to develop a new, sector-leading Student Progress Dashboard (see below) which uses the detailed information now in our student records system to show students and staff how much summative assessment students have completed, what their progress looks like in a series of
graphics and how this attainment compares to the goals that students can (optionally) set for themselves.