Assessment PoC announcement

The University of Birmingham is pleased to announce the successful completion of our Digital Assessment Proof of Concept project for the 23/24 academic year.

This project has run over the last twelve months, and involved the use of two assessment platforms at scale across the University of Birmingham, which involved 55 University modules, over 7,500 students and over 100 academics. We completed an extensive and robust evaluation of our staff and student experience of the University’s existing platforms, while also running a full and open tender process in which several providers were invited to bid on two separate requirements lists.

We are pleased to announce that we have chosen to award a licence to Graide following a successful bid at tender to meet our institutional requirements to address STEM staff marking workloads, improve consistency of feedback, and facilitate digitised marking of paper exams.

We have decided to meet our second set of requirements, which addressed challenges around offering scaffolded student support, using the University’s in-house functionality through our VLE (Canvas) and academic skills centre.

In the coming months, the assessment team will finalise the semester two data analysis and a final report will be available internally in August 2024.

We’d like to thank colleagues and partners who have engaged with this project via our webinars and conference presentations and those across the sector that have put in a bid during the tender process, and we look forward to keeping you updated with our ongoing digital assessment and feedback journey at the University of Birmingham.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the project lead, Alison Gibson and the Digital Assessment Team (assessment.digitaleducation@contacts.bham.ac.uk).