Streamlining digital assessment with Blackboard adjustments
Streamlining digital assessment With 30,000 students, 4 Bachelors Degree programmes and 146 Masters Degrees, the University of Groningen has a strong desire to streamline its examinations process with the aim of delivering over 80% of assessments in digital mode by 2020.
Beginning in the 2012-13 academic year, the University created a comprehensive, cross-departmental team to help realize the school’s plans. Key members of the team are: Education and assessment specialists, Digital learning environment experts, Developers, IT hardware, network and server staff, faculty schedulers and Blackboard support
In addition to defining the overall digital exam process and capabilities, the team went the extra mile to create bespoke facilities that could help students and examiners during the assessments.
The University of Groningen has seen numerous benefits of digital examinations, such as eliminating the need to “decipher” poor handwriting, being able to include multimedia as part of the test material (computers are equipped with a headphone socket. E-books can be used as additional resources) or implementing advanced options like adaptive release for additional questions. Also, digital exams reduce the amount of paper stored in archives and correcting the essay exams is easier. No more paperwork, no more distribution of exams among graders.
The use of digital assessments also helps reduce the teacher workload: multiple-choice questions are automatically graded while open questions can be graded through the VLE or on paper. And the results are stored in the Grade Centre of the exam course, ready for further processing.
