 introduction. And again, thank you to all of you who have joined us here today for today's session. Myself and my colleagues Ruthenie Viola and Fiona Reardon will be here to talk to you a little bit about our experiences of student partnership and assessment with a particular focus on using technology to support such approaches. I'm just going to pop the link to our slides in the chat. So if you want to follow along yourself or you want to take a look at the slides afterwards, please do. Both Fiona and Ruth and myself have a great interest in this area. It kind of intersects with our interests in assessment and our interests in student engagement and student partnership as well. We've a lot of interesting things planned for you for the next 60 minutes or so, and we'll be doing some interactivity with polls as well. So we do hope you get involved and please do pop questions and comments in the chat as well and we'll address those towards the end. So what we have lined up for you today is just to kind of set the scene, give you a little bit of background to ourselves and to the national landscape around student partnership in Ireland. Then we're going to talk about our project, our SAPIA project, Students as Partners in Assessment, talk about our pilots Fran and how technology supported them. And we're going to share our findings with you and then where we're going next with our project and we very much welcome your insights and your opinions and your perspectives throughout the presentation. So without any further ado, I'm going to hand over to my colleague Fiona now to tell you a little bit about ourselves here at DCU. Sorry, thank you Rob. That's great. So just to say we are a young, hopefully dynamic university, we like to think we are anyway. We're situated primarily in North Dublin City, so we're across four campuses based in Glass and Evans, beside the airport in Drumconder, also beside the airport. So four campuses across, across three campuses across those areas. We have circa 18,000 students and 2,000 staff and we have five faculties you can see listed there. So Rob and I work in the Teaching Enhancement Unit in DCU and this is essentially the University Centre for Teaching and Learning and our remit is to support academic staff to develop teaching excellence and that's all things teaching, learning and assessment. We also engage with kind of SOTA, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, with academic staff and within our team and we're putting more emphasis on that over recent years because impact has become such a core part of the work we're doing and also our academic staff are really keen to get published in this space so that's really good to see and we support the institution's Learning Technology Ecosystem. Thanks Rob. Thanks very much Fiona. We're going to throw over to you folks now so we're interested in hearing from you and we're going to use the polling tool Vvox just to get some opinions and perspectives from you. Hopefully Vvox is a tool you may have encountered before, it's certainly one we use in DCU. It's part of our Learning Technology Ecosystem. I'm just going to pop a link in the chat if you want to click on that link and that'll bring you to our Vvox session for today's webinar and throughout the webinar we're going to kind of run a few polls with you so you might want to click on that link and leave it open. So I'll give you all a moment just to open that and I'm going to share my Vvox screen with you now. Great, so you should be seeing the Vvox screen on my screen now at the moment and I can see quite a few of you have joined already so what I might do is just open up our first question. So this is an open-ended text question and it's just very simply when you hear the terms student involvement, student engagement, student partnership, student co-creation, what springs to mind? I mean these are terms that I think we hear bandied around all the time and people may have different definitions of them or different perspectives on them and I know I suppose my understanding of this whole area has evolved due to the work that we've been undertaking. I suppose it continues to evolve like any other concept but we're really interested in hearing from you folks. What do you think of when you hear these terms? And again this is an open-ended question so you don't have to give us a paragraph of an explanation, one or two keywords would be fine or indeed if nothing springs to mind or if you're totally new to these terms let us know that as well, let us know that you know this is very new for you. So I'd say about half of us have responded now, I'll just give you another few seconds on that and we might close it off now maybe in the next five seconds for three, two, one. So let me close that off now, apologies if you didn't get in on time but let's just pull up the results on screen and see what you folks are all saying. Listening to students, hugely important, core to everything, core to you know not just partnership, core to teaching and learning I think is listening to our students. Involving students in design evaluation, yeah, exit creativity, peer assessment, excellent, I think that's going to be a theme that comes up throughout this webinar. Enthusiasm, increasing motivation, opportunity to improve inclusion, very good, yeah. Student having an active role in development, democratic energizing, but difficult, very, very important, very good insight, their empowerment, user-generated content. Oh and I like this one, what level of partnership are students being merely consulted or is there an active partnership and I think again in a lot of the literature they distinguish between you know where students are maybe simply engaging you know versus partnership which is kind of more active or more in depth. So excellent, some great opinions from you all there, thanks so much. I'm going to jump back to our slides now but please do keep the VVox open because as I said we'll have a few more questions for you later on in the session but for now I think I'm going to pass over to Ruth who's going to give you just a little bit of a background of the kind of landscape around student partnership in Ireland so over to you Ruth. Thanks so much Rob and thank you everyone for having us here today, delighted to be having this conversation and I suppose we thought it would be useful to frame even our own research within the national landscape in Ireland because you can't have a conversation in Ireland in regards to student engagement and student partnership without discussing the national student engagement program it has become synonymous with student engagement in our context and the national student engagement program was launched in 2016 I think it was so it's in its seventh year of development presently and it's really essentially provided a bedrock for championing a culture of student engagement and partnership across the higher education sector. It provides training to students, it's recently started providing training and capacity building for staff and it's really I suppose this ethos is empowering students to be active participants in their higher education experience and to support staff to empower that process as well so we have you know this wonderful support guiding this work essentially and we're very grateful to have it. Last year was an exciting year for the program specifically because it launched a new framework called steps to partnership which aims to I suppose outline a framework for how we can continue to drive a culture of student engagement and partnership and we also have a number of other initiatives happening across the country the Munster Technological University I feel it's a project we continuously come back to reference because they have a really fantastic centre for promoting student engagement and there's a link on the slide there to go explore some of their recent projects as well which I would encourage you to do because we do I suppose get a lot of inspiration from that space and I think it's important to note that we're on a journey all of us are on a journey but I think we can see a lot of tangible impact of how student engagement has moved along a journey from something that we talk about to something that we are genuinely doing in a lot of contexts even taking an example of something like academic integrity in Ireland at the moment we have a wonderful program called the National Academic Integrity Network which is basically a series of working streams being led at a national level to improve conversations and initiatives around promoting academic integrity and there is an entire I suppose segment of student partners involved in that project very much driving the agenda and I think it's just a lovely example of how partnership really has developed across the last number of years but if we move to the next slide we might hone in a little bit on a couple of elements of the steps to partnership framework specifically so you can see on this slide there are four segments in in this framework we have drivers of student engagement principles of student engagement domains of student engagement and enablers of student engagement so for looking at driver specifically we can see that students as partners is a key driver of change for student engagement which is relevant to this project in terms of domains we're working specifically within the teaching learning and assessment domain which is where we're focusing today as well in terms of principles I think all principles in these contexts they're always going to overlap a little bit but we are focusing specifically on students as co-creatures and specifically in the context of co-creating assessments in today's presentation and enablers of student engagement you know specifically in this context as well I think we're focusing on capacity building and also innovations because we need to continuously be thinking about how we can enhance and develop our practice to support this domain so that's a little bit of a background context for the national landscape for this project and I'll hand back over to Rob. Thanks a million Ruth that's that's wonderful and again I popped the link to the to the n-step program in the chat for anyone that's interested in in in exploring that website they've got great great resources and you can explore the the framework as well that Ruth mentioned there and it's a wonderful wonderful resource and as Ruth said it's growing all our practices growing and evolving over time and I suppose the national leadership that n-step show is great for that we're going from the national now to the local and what we've been doing in in our own university in DCU I'm going to hand over now to my colleague Fiona who's going to tell you take you through the background of our SAPIA project so over to you Fiona. Thanks very much and so just to say that this really came grew out of the project we've been working on the Erasmus Plus project we've been working on for a number of years called integrity and as part of this project we developed resources to support staff design assessments that promote academic integrity and we developed a suite of I'm going to just copy put them in the chat a suite of principles to promote academic integrity in assessment design and these principles are kind of we encourage our academics in DCU to use them as a sort of a checklist if you like when they're designing assessment and you can see in that link there that one of the core categories there's three categories in there and one is the sort of the institutional level so it's that kind of promoting high standards expecting high standards building capacity around enhanced academic integrity and then the third the second category is the actual designing of assessment to promote academic integrity and the third category is student ownership and these principles grew out of a piece of work we were conducting a literature scoping literature review and then we worked at workshop these principles both nationally and internationally nationally with their own colleagues in teaching and learning and internationally as a result of our work on the Erasmus Plus project so they took about a year I supposed to develop to this point and then Rob had a particular interest in the student ownership element and some internal funding became available and Rob submitted a proposal around how we could use and or how we could embrace students or encourage students to become partners in assessment as a way to promote academic integrity so we moved from that then to conducting a scoping review which Ruth will talk to you about in a minute that most of our work in the teaching enhancement begins with a kind of a literature scoping review so we can position our work in that regard and that scoping review allowed us to develop a resource which I'll go through with you in a moment and that resource really was aimed at sort of demystifying students as partners because I think we now realize it actually isn't a complicated or complex concept it's something very real and very natural to many of us but many academics didn't realize this and so the resource allowed them to see oh yes I'm doing some of that already but I'd like to do it in a little bit more advanced way or structured way so we'll talk you through the resource and as a result we did we workshop the resource to sort of see can we get some interest in terms of people to pilot the different ideas in the resource so we had eight lecturers who agreed to join our pilot in the first year which is 2020-2021 and across 11 modules a range of different types of partnerships across different disciplines we did provide support particularly around the technology that you could use to kind of leverage student partnership and we're currently still in that dissemination piece so you have the literature review there pop the link into the chat box in a moment and we're sharing some of our findings with you today and things like this and writing up a paper as well so we're in the second iteration or full year of this project if you like so it's sort of becoming mainstream at this point so perhaps back to you let's maybe talk a little bit about the literature review thanks Fiona so as you can see set out on the screen here we I suppose initially developed the literature review context using the PICO method so we were looking specifically at educators assessing in higher education our intervention was students as partners or as co-creators in assessment we wanted to specifically explore the evidence in the literature on students as partners or as co-creators in assessment and our outcome ultimately was to support educators to facilitate and empower students to become partners in the assessment process and our focus really was to develop a literature review that will be quite practical and tangible in nature so that an educator could take the literature review see the evidence but also then see how they could apply it in practice so that really was the driving force behind even our presentation of the literature review itself and again in terms of context we've spoken a little bit about this is the national landscape but it was overall written in the context of the pieces that are around here in terms of quality assurance my background is academic quality insurance and within the European higher education area it is one of the principles set out in in core quality guidelines that we need to empower students to be active participants in their learning process and this is one way of doing that the national forum for teaching and learning in higher education in Ireland I have not said that right that was a metaphor that I should have I should have written in full on screen but essentially our national body for enhancing higher education in Ireland has done a lot of work around assessment as of and for learning so again it's building on conversations that were already happening in the sector we've spoken about the national student engagement program Fiona has referenced the academic integrity work and then there's also been a lot of dynamic engagement around universal design for learning over the last number of years in Ireland as well particularly in relation to a massive online open course that's been run over the last couple of years with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of practitioners and engaging in in this process so it it did feel like a time we time to be engaging in this piece of work but if we move on to the next slide what we ultimately ended up doing was examining I think 200 articles that came out of our initial literature research and we ended up narrowing down those 200 pieces of work identified down to 14 core pieces of work that informed our literature review and as we went through those pieces of work we really found that the the emerging examples really fitted quite well into these three specific categories which were self-assessment collaborative grading and assessment activities and criteria so self-imperial assessment naturally being the students working on using their own autonomy to apply assessment principles to their own work and the work of their peers collaborative grading meaning we move beyond the lecture as the sole assessor of a piece of work to involve other stakeholders which may include people in the workplace who are contributing to a student's assessment and educational process but also students themselves and empowering students to be part of their own assessment processes and then assessment activities and criteria is really a part of literature review focusing on students as co-creators of assessment activities themselves and I suppose what's interesting as kind of an underlying underlying point under all of these categories is that they promote assessment literacy for students and not only students but in many instances we're shown to be improving assessment literacy for staff and educators as well which I think is a really lovely byproduct to remember that everyone is a winner in this process by empowering students we're empowering ourselves as educators as well so that's really a whistle-stop tour of the literature review process and I hand back over to Robin Fiona you'll be seeing a little bit more detail about what those teams look like in practice thanks a million Ruth actually before we hand over to Fiona we do just have another question to throw out to you folks and again Ruth kind of covered off the main themes that arose there from from the literature review things like peer assessment co-creation of tasks and criteria collaboration etc and we're really interested in hearing from you if you've been experiencing or thinking of any of those kinds of practices yourself so if you return to your Vvox screen hopefully you should still have an open somewhere on your device and if not I'm just going to pop the link back into the chat there on Vvox you'll see a new question a new open-ended text question for you to answer and that question is just very simply what initiatives around kind of assessment and feedback and or student partnership are you aware of maybe currently happening in your own context or or you might have heard from some other context is there anything you're interested in in our first poll someone mentioned peer assessment I'm wondering is anyone interested in in peer assessment or indeed are you practicing any of these kinds of approaches and certainly you know for us in DCU when we started out in this journey last year it was quite new to us and as Fiona said we wanted to demystify things but in that process of demystifying we actually found that a lot of these practices are things that a lot of our educators are doing already but they may not be calling it partnership or they may not recognize that it's it's partnership so I would be really interested in hearing from you and have you got a similar experience and so again just just just take a moment and again if you're totally new to this space maybe you're not aware of any partnership assessment partnership approaches being utilized in your context or neighbouring context so you know let us know that or maybe you are maybe you are involved in peer assessment or collaborative grading or co-creation with students and it would be great to let us know that I can see almost half of us have have responded now so I'll give just another few seconds or so and as well while Ruth was speaking there you might have seen I also popped a link in the in the chat to the to the literature review if you want to take a look at the full the full literature review and I will say of course all of these links are are available in our in our slide deck as well so you don't you don't need to keep track of all the links in the chat it's probably quite a lot in there already and what I might do then is I might just close off this poll in in the next few seconds so apologies if if you don't have time to get it in but I'll just close it off now in three two one so let's have a look now at the results on screen video assessment and feedback peer assessment to compliment lecture assessment really really good that came up I think Ruth quite a bit in the in the literature we found you know a lecturer complimenting peer assessment grades very good yeah more peer assessment formative assessment co-creation peer assessment coming up this is really interesting because as we'll see now when we get into our into our pilots that we ran peer assessment ended up being very popular approach excellent yeah yeah so students in later years coming up with questions for their juniors outsourcing the creation of questions I really like that more self-impaired review student involvement in quality assurance so I like that idea in VLE design yeah I'm sure Ruth that's probably tickling your fancy as well giving your background in quality assurance speaking my language there for sure lovely co-curricular co-co-co-design a curricular online assessment lovely excellent some really really interesting areas are involved in or areas that you are you're currently practicing and that's great to see and you know again as as Fiona articulated you know a lot of these things aren't actually terribly you know new and and and and you know unknown there there are things that we probably have been doing for for quite some time so thanks a million for that you can leave Vvox open because I think we'll have some more questions for you a little later but let me just jump back to our presentation and I think Fiona we're going to hand over to you now to talk a little bit about our guiding resource and then we'll move on to the pilots as well okay so this is what the resource looks like and we allowed the literature review to inform this resource and then as I said we we workshopped it with our own academic staff but prior to that I didn't mention this earlier we had some focus groups with students so we wanted to see what their thoughts were on it as well and and we also invited the instead of project manager to contribute so we put a lot of effort into trying to ensure that it was a workable piece a workable resource and something as we said already that we're trying to support our academics and our students to call out and make explicit where that they're where they are currently partnering with academic staff and where there's been the potential for more partnership and so you'll see here on the on the first on this slide on the first the the front side of the flyer the partnership possibilities and really the partnership possibilities are designed around developing a shared assessment literacy between academic staff and students and we're suggesting that we bring that conversation into the tutorial in the classroom as often as we can using marking criteria assignment briefs exemplars so have loads of conversations in class and to develop that literacy and loads of opportunities for students to give us feedback on our assessment but then in terms of specific examples of how you could partner and we divided into into you can see in the the bottom end here low-level partnership and high-level partnership and we try to differentiate between summative and formative and sometimes they both overlapped and this isn't an exact science it's just a stimulating discussion and get you get ideas going but you can see if you as an academic are new to partnering students you might like to like to go to low-level partnership or if students are first-year and kind of novice higher education learners a low-level partnership to build up their skill set and their literacy so things like allowing them to negotiate the brief negotiate the assessment submission date I mean students should always I think be encouraged to personalize the brief to their own examples it makes it more valuable to them and more authentic for them and then if you wanted to kind of think of maybe slightly and they would be all at the sort of summative level but they're low risk if you like or low level and then a formative level you could start and bringing in sort of peer assessment again you could do this a first or second year so it's a formative piece of work it's not influencing the summative piece and self-assessment they're really good skills to develop in our students at that point and then as we move through the higher level into the higher level partnership you're looking to co-design or co-create the assessment brief the marking criteria and you're asking them to assess each other and their peers on work and progress a peer assessment as part of the summative work and maybe students could design elements that they want specific feedback from experts on and if we move over to it onto the next slide to the flip side of the flyer in terms of if you like the previous slide talked about possibilities this is how can you kind of enhance that partnership or perfect that partnership and we're suggesting and again this is to our literature review and conversations with academic staff we're suggesting that we as academics need to be open to change be a little bit more flexible and build in the or build the student capacity through those conversations in the classroom seek their input and feedback and involve them and develop that shared literacy through discussion of exemplars model answers rubrics and then to remind our students so I would give them advice remind them to be actively involved and to empower themselves and to take ownership encourage them to engage in discussion with lecturers and peers around their assessment so that they can develop that shared understanding of what's required and they do need some support on receiving and acting on the feedback that they get from the academics and their and their colleagues but when we met with students and asked them what they wanted in this partnership space they said we want loads of opportunity for dialogue we want to be able to discuss our assessment with our colleagues and with their academic in multiple different ways and they did talk about some of the concerns being about large class sizes reducing this opportunity and sometimes novice lecturers are a little bit uncomfortable doing it but they want that dialogue so they can have strong direction and so in addition to the dialogue they think marking criteria should be available to everything and we fully agree formative feedback needs to be included in every summative piece self and peer assessment really helpful and exemplars really good they were very concerned about fairness across assessment and they wanted to have this kind of conversation and understanding of what is good across all of the students in a particular cohort but indeed across modules and a particular stage and then they wanted more agency more choice they were very clear about the point that and somebody put it in the chat earlier that they are experts in their own learning so why not draw on that expertise and they want to develop those life skills so that's the resource itself um I think oh yeah the next piece we'd like to share it's just a very short woman a clip we edited it out for presentation that one of our students gave and it's just so powerful when you hear it from the voice of a student Nyle Henry is the student's name how important that formative piece is and that dialogue which your lecturers is and he uses the sports analogy to make this point so can you play that Rob if you don't mind I want to compare them sort of assessment cycle to the cycle that you might use and in a professional sports setting that before a match like it like you see there there's all sort of processes that go into so that the team can perform to their best that they know exactly what we're getting into and exactly how they're going to um react to different situations that happen in a match and I think that then they go and play their match which is comparable to doing an assessment but then after what happens after is just as important as what happened before the assessment or the match that if you don't recover properly from your match you won't be able to train properly for your next match and similarly if you don't learn from your assessment you won't be able to implement that in subsequent assessments as well thanks Rob so you're going to take it from here Rob yeah I'll take it from here Fiona thanks very much and just just to echo I that student Nyle is so insightful and you know I think he was really getting out there going back to the resource that the importance the centrality of things like dialogue and direction in assessments so even if you are interested in trying a an approach like peer assessment or co-design of grading rubrics or something like that you know it's the dialogue and the direction and the openness are all foundational to to to to any kind of assessment partnership approach you want to you want to try and so after we did this initial work around literature reviewing and and and putting together some practical advice for our students and our academics we undertook in the last academic year we undertook our first iteration of piloting some of these approaches where we're currently now coming to the end of our second iteration in this current academic year so in the in our first in our first iteration we recruited about eight lectures across 11 modules who wanted to pilot a form of assessment partnership with their students it was mostly undergrad modules and you know arranged from kind of first to fourth years we supported them obviously in in in in partnering with their students and because last year was mostly online of course due to the pandemic a technology played a huge role and even even in our second year now currently of the project even though we are largely back on campus teaching technology is still playing a huge role in supporting partnership which we'll which we'll get into now in a moment and we have been obviously evaluating these these approaches and we have the findings from our first data set to share with you today and we're just currently closing off our data collection for our second iteration so for our first our first iteration these are the subjects that were involved and these are the different types of approaches that they used going back to the resource Fiona shared with you you know there's kind of like a nice continuum there from low level to high level and different approaches that can be taken but as Fiona said you know it's not a linear checklisting type of a framework it is to simulate conversation and what a lot of our modules did when they were piloting was that they they mixed and matched some of those suggested approaches from the resource and to suit their particular needs so you can see here on screen things like peer review peer assessment were quite popular and choice was quite popular and one of our one of our piloters used co-creation of quiz questions I think someone had popped that in in one of the vbox polls as well so you can see you know they were mixed again matching different kinds of approaches to suit their particular their particular needs and technology was crucial to supporting all of this really so if you look here from the from the framework you know a lot of low level partnership approaches were used and then peer assessment was also used to an extent and I suppose that's understandable you know for lecturers starting out in this area I think they wanted the safety of trying low level partnerships of things like negotiation, discussion, choice and etc and then some peer assessment not many went for the co-designing of briefs and the co-designing of marketing criteria because I you know that could be a bit a bit scary I think for for for a lecturer who's just starting to open up their practice and inviting students into partner but hopefully our goal over time is to is to try and kind of bed in some of the higher level forms of partnership so how specifically was technology used to support these pilots well if we take the low level partnership first and you can see these involve as Fiona outline things like negotiation choice in methods or topics and what a lot of our piloters did was when they were giving our their students choice in methods or topics and the VLE voting and questionnaire tools were used extensively for that so we're moving institution here in DCU the Moodle choice activity we was used and Moodle group choice activity was used to allow students to select particular topics that they wanted for their for their assessment or what particular method they would complete their their their assessment in be it you know text, video, audio etc and those tools are really really fundamental to allowing students that choice and that agency that they want that they're looking for when it comes to assessment but even a lot of our lecturers also chose you know a lot of this was done in a dialogic dialogic format as well so during class they were integrating opportunities to discuss assessment and to choose assessment within live sessions so things like zoom polls and in class voting and thumbs up etc via zoom were used quite a lot and Vvox as well of course as a voting tool was also used to allow students to choose and the benefit of that obviously was in some cases it was anonymous so the lecture was kind of just getting a sense of okay well what topics are our students interested in or what what what methods are they interested in etc but what was also good about that was that then when students did choose a particular method or a particular topic it allowed for differentiated progression so again as a Moodle institution we were using features like access restriction to allow students who had chosen a particular topic to get access to relevant material for that particular topic that they had chosen so they weren't overwhelmed with you know all of the material related to the assessment because they had chosen a particular thing they were able to go down that pathway and they only need to focus on the material that was necessary so that they're getting good clear direction which again going back to our resources is one of the things they're they're looking for we use ePortfolio at DCU Mahare is our ePortfolio platform and ePortfolios are great obviously because they're very flexible students can showcase themselves and showcase their individuality in putting together a portfolio and you know the web-based nature of the portfolio is fantastic for allowing students to integrate different formats and different methods of assessment video audio and text all in one and in fact one of the one of the one of the modules that that's participating in the project this current year have really used ePortfolios to in a great extent you know students have had great choice in expressing themselves a very practical module around physical education they've had a great opportunity to get involved and to share video clips of themselves and reflections and so on so ePortfolios are wonderful I think when choice is involved and where negotiation has happened we've seen how discussion forums on the VLE can really structure that negotiation because when we were talking with our academics about you know oh well you know invite the students to contribute to criteria or contribute to you know discussing you know dates that they want to submit on you know the first question the first thing our lecturers said was how on earth can I have a conversation like that with you know the 60 students in my class and here's where the discussion forums on the VLE became really really useful for the lecture to actually just structure the negotiation or structure the discussion around different aspects of the assessment so they'd be kind of a particular thread on the discussion forum to discuss different aspects and it was kind of it was still open obviously and students were getting involved and they were posting and sharing their insights and their opinions but it was done in a much more managed way then so that the lecturer was able to sort of take their opinions and put it into the design of the assessment so tools like that are really really useful for our lecturers to manage the partnership process because I suppose depending on what approaches you are choosing there can be certain logistics to bear in mind. Looking now kind of moving towards the more middle form of partnership here we see things like self-assessment, peer assessment, receiving different layers of feedback etc and peer assessment has really become a really peer assessment and peer review has become a really big area of interest in DC at the moment it'd be interested actually in finding out from yourselves you can let us know in the chat is it the same in your own institutions is there a lot of peer review and peer assessment being practiced but it's certainly becoming a lot more focus on in DC now and again as a Moodle institution there's a great peer assessment tool called Moodle Workshop Activity which a lot of our staff are now embracing again it's a fantastic tool for managing different steps of peer assessment and of making it really easy for students to engage with each other and look at each other's work and offer feedback and so on and I know a lot of the other VLEs obviously I know Blackboard and Brightspace have peer assessment tools as well and they're really really well worth checking out. Sometimes a combination of tools can be used so in cases where there's peer assessment happening with the Moodle Workshop Activity some of our lecturers then ended up putting up a using questionnaire tool on the VLE to gain for students to kind of indicate on what particular aspects would they want feedback on their peer assessment and again as someone mentioned in the Vvox poll earlier on they were using peer assessment with a layer of lecturer feedback and that's what some of our piloters had had had done as well. Peer assessment of course doesn't have to be asynchronous using the VLE peer assessment review can be done live in classroom either on zoom or in a physical classroom and that happened in one of our pilots as well students where it was for senior undergraduate module students were offering each other feedback on draft literature reviews that they were doing and that was done very lively very energetically in a live class session and there's obviously a great dynamism from from from doing that so you know sometimes we tend to think when it comes to peer review peer assessment okay well we must use the VLE to do it but we have through through the SAPIA project seen it done very very effectively in an in an asynchronous manner and then lastly just moving up to the high level end of the framework where again we're talking about co-design and getting feedback etc as I mentioned before how discussion forums can be used for discussing with students around different aspects of submission etc that same approach can be used to co-designing rubrics or indeed collaborative documents can be used to to when you're co-designing marking criteria I know one of our lecturers who was piloting co-design of a rubric with her students she she chose not to go down the route of using a collaborative document she kept control of the the actual master document where she was creating the rubric but she used the discussion forum to kind of post out okay well you know on this criteria and I'm thinking about you know awarding you marks high marks for x and y and you know low marks for a a b and c and through the discussion forum the students were able to inform and kind of share with the with the lecture what they felt an excellent piece of work would look like and what a what a less than good piece of work would would look like but again there was I suppose in all of this there there's a management aspect from from the lecturer ultimately you know no matter what way you square student partnership there is still an asymmetrical power relationship and for obvious reasons a lecturer still has to retain control over over over grading and and quality assurance etc but that's not to say that students still can't be involved and and and inform the decision making but the the lecturer can use these tools and use technology effectively to manage that that process of collaboration and and and partnership and so again you know discussion forums are a fantastic way of facilitating facilitating that again in class time for live feedback for you know for students to to to seek areas that that are what that they want some detailed feedback on your v-box polling tools you know your your your zoom tools etc for an online class are all fantastic ways for students to indicate what they want from from the assessment and feedback process as well so you know I'm sure there are lots more tools that you can think of that will help with this type of of of these types of of assessment approaches and that's what we actually now want to move over to you I've talked a bit there now about our different pilots that we've done in DCU and how technology was used and often in in in quite simple ways to facilitate those partnership approaches but we're really interested now in hearing from you so another v-box poll for you based on what we've just shared with you now do you have any other suggestions for for using technology to support assessment partnership I'll just pop the v-box link again there in the chat if any of you are still on v-box you can you can pop in a response to that question again just another open-ended question I'm going to share my v-box screen again so again so what other suggestions do you have for using technology to support student partnership activities and actually I'm just checking the time here now what I might actually do is I might just leave that poll open for you folks in the background and you can you can you can pop in your suggestions there so any suggestions around how can you use technology to support students co-creating some assessment tasks or criteria how can you support how can you use technology to support discussion and dialogue and direction around assessment and you can pop a few there but what I might do is that we do how I do want to get to our findings now as well so I might just jump back to our presentation for the moment and we'll come back to our v-box results in a few minutes so as I mentioned we've completed the data collection and data analysis for the first year of the project which I'll share with you now we're just concluding data collection for the second iteration at the moment and we'll be analyzing those findings over the next few weeks but just to quickly and again I won't spend too much detail on this because you do have the slides and you can you can look at these in more detail but just overall we conducted a survey with our student participants and our staff participants who were involved in the pilots and from our students you can see the blue and the orange on screen indicate strongly agree or agree towards certain statements so some of the ones that really kind of jumped out for us is that students really feel they performed well in their assessment because they were involved because there was that element of partnership to one extent or another students really feel like there was a positive effect on their actual outcome in the module which is great to see and we can see here students did feel involved and did feel engaged in the module because there was a student partnership approach being used and they also felt fairness in the assessment as well and going back to our resource fairness is one of the things that students want out of assessment so we were very very buoyed by those by those results because that's ultimately what we want to get at with partnership is greater involvement, greater fairness and ultimately better student outcomes so we're very happy to see that that seemed to have come true in our pilots and then just a couple of snapshots of really what what the student says so 77 degree that they felt involved or engaged and 64 felt they performed well and some really really interesting quotes here we were treated like adults like they really just liked the opportunity to just have honest open adult conversations with their lecturers about assessment and having the opportunity to get involved they liked that it was kind of you know pulled away from traditional learning and it was more interactive and they felt more involved than any other module that allowed them to enjoy it more and wanted to do better in it so just by changing the dynamic a bit shifting the dial can have just a huge impact on on students perspectives and attitudes a couple of themes came through though in the open-ended responses to the to the students so they enjoyed group work working together they enjoyed the process of peer review and feedback they enjoyed the variety and the because these partnership approaches were new to them they enjoyed how it engaged them it was kind of something different from the norm but you know as always there are things that can be improved and our practices can always be improved and it's through seeking feedback with students that we can improve our practices they did also say though that you know things like assessment practicalities really really need to be so clear for students you know when you know when you know what format I think is going to take what the deadline is going to be how this partnership is going to work and you know what the effect is going to be of those discussions even though our lecturers were really being very open and giving great direction as they felt you know there were still some aspects that students were a little bit unclear about when it came to assessment so it goes to show you I think that the strength of ongoing dialogue and and even though you you think you might be being very clear with students about expectations you're not always and really really is so important to be so explicit with students. We also as I said surveyed staff again and to see how staff felt about the the partnership approaches and they echoed if we see here I think the blue and the red in this case indicates agreement with the particular statement so again you know aligning with student opinion staff felt students performed better in the modules which is great to see and the staff felt that assessment was fair and equitable as a result as well. Interestingly there was again if you remember our sample for for this survey is quite small there were only eight lecturers involved but you can see one lecturer here disagreed with all of the statements and interestingly I suspect it's because I saw this in the in the open-ended results I think that lecturer chose a very high level form of partnership to use with first year undergraduate students and there was just a kind of a mismatch of expectations and experiences and ability I think she went kind of too high with the partnership too fast and it didn't really work out for her so it goes to kind of show you starting simple starting small you know being mindful of that this is a journey for both the staff and the students I think is a really pragmatic approach to take when it comes to student partnership you don't have to do all the the bells and whistle shiny form of partnership straight off the back keep it simple and build your capacity over time. Again there's some highlights from the staff survey they their experience has been great and they're going to do it more in the future but they need to think more carefully about the workload and the student's workload and that's really really important that you know innovations like student partnership are great and wonderful and there can be so many benefits but it does need to be balanced between well what more are you asking students to do as a result of this or what more are you asking yourself to do as a result of this partnership approach and it is important to be to be cognizant of that. Again the staff attitudes towards SAPI you know again very very positive results here they want to continue with in the future it had a had a positive impact and they did feel it allowed them to shift some power towards students that is ultimately what the wider movement of student partnership is about is about shifting that dial of power back towards students so that they have some role in decision-making processes that affect them. Again you can take a look at that in more detail I might skip the last poll if that's okay because I'm just conscious of time and I do want to give the last few minutes over for Q&A and discussion but just where are we at now as I mentioned we're wrapping up the second year of the project and even though we're on campus technology is still playing a vital role some of the same approaches have been used this year peer review assessment quiz co-creation rubric co-creation e-portfolios choice of assessment and feedback etc our data collection is underway and we should have the next set of findings soon enough and where we want to go next with things is obviously we've been supporting staff and students to engage in some of these partnerships in in the sort of small pockets of innovation but we're wanting I suppose to explore wider dimensions of student partnership and assessment and kind of put together more practical guidance and examples for staff and hopefully you folks might have some some suggestions for us here we're also looking then at how can we partner students in in other aspects of assessment outside of the actual practicalities of doing an assessment things like assessment policy academic integrity policy and frameworks etc we're very interested in partnering with students in a meaningful way on those dimensions as well so that's where we are at thank you so much for taking the time to listen to us as I said the slides are available to you all to take a look at in your own time I'll actually just pop the link back in the chat for you so you have access to us you can take a look at that in more detail particularly the the findings if you didn't get a chance to interrogate them all as I was whistling through them well please do take a look up up the link in again into the chat and I think we'll just throw it open out to the next few minutes for you folks any any questions or any comments thank you very much thank you so much Rob and Fiona and Ruth for an excellent webinar that was really fascinating and a great approach to student partnerships if I think you've answered the question that was posted in the comments already it was about the evidence of the student perception but if anyone wants to ask a question now you can put up your hand we'll unmute you or you can stick it into the chat area if I may just in terms of Florian and I hope I pronounced your name correctly getting the students to code design during assessment policy review we're actively doing that around academic integrity framework designed for the university so we're working with students on that and our intention is to work more closely not our intention we would like to work we haven't a structured plan to do it but I think it'll be really useful to maybe see if we can get some funding and bring the student voice into the policy design element yeah Alistair do you want to we'll unmute you now Alistair just one second there you go or you can unmute yourself thanks Alistair do you want to ask a question yeah and thank you that was a really great presentation loads of brilliant ideas thank you and my question was asked in terms of the data and the outcomes I wondered because you mentioned one tutor who had gone almost too far too soon and had less suboptimal outcomes whether there was an approach that you saw working best whether some you mentioned the subjects that it worked that you covered whether some subjects you felt were better than others in your results I don't think so interestingly I don't think I'm sure Florian I don't speak to you Florian I'd say you'd agree with me I don't think subject matter actually interestingly affected the the type of partnership approach that was that was chosen you could see there was a very diverse range of subjects that took part in the first year of the project and they all kind of mixed a match to different different assessment approaches so we didn't really find that the subject matter or the discipline you know lent itself to to one or other greater form of assessment partnership approach because fundamentally what's underneath all of the assessment partnership approaches are things like dialogue and direction and fairness and so on which are applicable to every discipline really in the case of of that particular lecturer who had a suboptimal experience as you put it I think she went in for doing rubric co-designing with a bunch of first year undergraduate students and I think first year undergraduate students need so much help transitioning any way to become literate as being a university student and becoming assessment literate I think that was that was too much too fast and I would say that was in a particular discipline I can't remember but I would imagine if other people had done that in other disciplines they would have probably encountered the the same issue because it's just a bit too much of a reach I think for first year undergraduates to be to be doing that would you agree Fiona? Absolutely and and I think the ones that are most effective are the ones that call it out and embed it integrate the student partnership element and so I can't think of the lady's name but there was one lady in was it French and she had called out all of the partnership elements really clearly and it was a very well designed and scaffolded assessment where students were partnering throughout rather than sort of an ad hoc bolt-on piece so if it's called out and integrated with your assessment design strategy I think it works well no matter what discipline you're in. Great thank you and we are just at half past one so unless there's anything else anyone wants to add we might wrap it up Rob Fiona Ruth is there anything else you want to say? I don't think so just thank you all very much thanks for coming along today giving your time thanks for your engagement you have the links to the slides please do explore all the links and the various resources we gave you please keep an eye on our website for ongoing updates on this project and we'd love to hear from you if you're doing something similar there's opportunities for collaboration if there's any other way we can kind of cross fertilizer disseminate or advance the practice in this area we'd love to hear from you our contact details are on our slides so thank you very much and thank you obviously to to Al for giving us this opportunity here today. Thank you everyone enjoy the rest of your week.