 Thank you colleagues. Okay, so our project title, as I've already heard, is Technology Enhance Assessment Methods Team in Science and Health Practical Settings. As you'll have seen from the introductions, we are made up of four institutes of technology and four schools of, I suppose, science and health. How we started working on this project together, I suppose, is through the interactions that our four schools have through a forum known as the Head of Schools of Science. We're very conscious that this project is a discipline-led project, and for this reason we have four schools all from the same discipline, and particularly important, it's being led by the four heads of schools or the four senior managers in those four institutes of technology. So that, I suppose, was the initial driver for the project. In addition, there's been a very good track record of our institutes working together in teaching and learning projects. As far back as 2010, Carlo IT and Dundalk IT were involved in a project around learner assessment, and currently Dundalk IT and Atlone IT with two university partners are involved in two projects funded in last year's teaching and learning enhancement call. This is the project team. The majority of the team are here today, as you've seen. Our colleagues who are not able to be here today are being well represented by their colleagues from the different institutes. Our team is made up of the heads of school in the four institutes, also represented us from the teaching and learning units, and also a number of lecturers who are involved in the delivery of science and health education in the four colleges. So we feel that we have a number of very key partners involved in the project team already at this stage. So what's the project actually about? Well, in science and health disciplines, key to student employability is their practical skills. In nearly all science and health disciplines, practical skills are a key outcome for our graduates. And in fact, the Institute of Technology in particular plays a major factor on practical skills for their graduates, and it's a fact that's often comment on by industry when they employ our graduates. So I suppose what we want to try and do is enhance what we think we're already doing very well in this sector by using the collaboration that we've established through this project. So we want to really look at the practical element and how practicals are delivered and assessed in the science and health disciplines. So we can bring it down to two key questions. First of all, how can we use practical assessment to facilitate student learning and skill development? And then secondly, how can we enhance the design of practical assessment in order to shift the emphasis to an assessment for learning approach? So essentially we want to develop a framework to apply the principles of good assessment and feedback to practical learning and do this by a dialogue with all the relevant stakeholders. Why are we doing this? Well, the literature has suggested that there are some concerns with over-assessment in the science and health disciplines, that there is a reliance on using conventional kind of recipe protocol following techniques when you're delivering in the science and health disciplines. Although we recognize that it's very much an active learning environment when you're in a practical session, so the question is, is assessment actively assessed? And is there an over-assessment? Are we looking enough at skills development and synthesis? For example, my colleague Ronan Brie from Dendork IT in his publication 2014 looked at this whole area of over-assessment and looked at putting in place a very simple incremental marking system where he showed that he evaluated this study and showed that it really improved the student experience within the laboratory situation. Assessment is key to the student's learning process. It's very important in terms of providing the student with the relevant skills that are relevant for industry and also for enhancing their actual learning experience in the science and health disciplines. So if you want to change the way you do assessment, I suppose there are a number of frameworks that you can look at. And I suppose at a high level the framework we're going to follow in this project is that laid out in the JASIC framework. Basically we'll identify, first of all, what good practice is. Then we will engage with all the relevant stakeholders to see what do they actually need. Then we will have an appreciative inquiry phase where we will look at change in a very positive way. We look at the baseline situation, we put in changes, we evaluate it and we'll continue trying to refine it and evaluate it as we go through the project. And what's key to this is the change management strategy. How do we actually embed this change into our four colleges? So when you are involved in I suppose science and health practicals, there are kind of three components to it. The first part is the design of the practical. The second part is how you actually carry it out, how you actually have the practical session. And the final part is an assessment. And it's those three practices that we're going to look at in this project. And we intend as one of the components of this project to use digital technologies that we're already using in the four colleges to enhance what we're doing in terms of how we design practicals, in terms of how we actually carry them out and how we actually assess them. So for example, in terms of the practical sessions, using interactive lab manuals, electronic lab notebooks in designing and looking at problem-based learning and the assessment using things like online quizzes, self-assessment, peer-assisted learning. So these are a number of the practices that we will use in order to, I suppose, enhance the experience for our students within the four colleges. So there are a number of key stakeholders in this project. And I think the key word here is the student-academic partnership. And I suppose we want to have an ongoing feedback dialogue between all of these partners. Today I suppose we have representatives from the management side, the head of schools, who will be the big drivers of the change around the four schools. We also have representatives from teaching and learning units who play key role in staff development that might be required as the project develops. And we will have support from, obviously, from our lecturers who are going to be delivering these different types of assessment practices who are going to be piloting them and evaluating them. But key to this is going to be the student voice. The student is going to be involved from the very beginning of the project and as it goes through because we think that the student is key here in terms of their learning experience. Industry will also play a key part because we want to be sure that our students have the skills that they need in order to gain employment in the relevant sector. So the project group is very multidisciplinary and we feel that that really will enhance the overall project. And it's important that every single stakeholder has ownership. So how are we actually going to do it? Well, we're going to divide this project, I suppose, into three phases. The first phase is a baseline review of the practices amongst the four partner institutions. Obviously we'll establish the project, we'll set up the project governance and it'll have an advisory board which will consist of students from the four colleges and industry representatives identified with the four colleges. We'll carry out a literature review to look at international best practice in the field of assessment and science and health. We will also do an analysis of what is actually going on in the four colleges. We have a sense of what's going on already but we want to just kind of pin that down so we can potentially, I suppose, partner up similar like-minded academics within the four colleges. Essentially, we want to be sure that our enhancement that we're going to put into practice is very much grounded in evidence and this is really the first phase of the project that will hopefully ensure its success. The second phase, then, is after we've identified what we think are the practices we want to pilot and evaluate in our four colleges, we will then carry out a pilot and evaluation study in the four colleges. So what we could be talking about there is we might look at a particular assessment practice in microbiology that's happening in Dundalk, for example. We might then partner up that lecture with the lecturer at Lone and Sligo who might be doing something similar and together they'll work on a collaborative project to pilot this new assessment project and then evaluate it. And this is the way in which we think we'll be able to assess the impact on the ground with the frontline lecturers delivering the project and all the time looking for student feedback as the project goes on. So all the time as we're rolling out these pilots and evaluating the student who will be consulted and the lecturers who are actually carrying out the pilots will be consulted. In phase three, then, we will then look at disseminating and sharing the resources that we have obtained from these pilot studies by setting up a project website where we will share the assessment resources by dissemination through maybe organizing master classes in the four different partner institutes and inviting in the lecturers from across those colleges and then we will also organize a final workshop. And I think one of the main outcomes of this project we feel is that we will be establishing or enhancing an already established community of practice between lecturers who are working in the science and health disciplines between the four colleges. And we think that there is a huge potential to this to expand into our other partner institute technologies and indeed university partners within our different regional clusters. So what will we actually deliver? Well, at the end of year one, we hope that we will have our project governance established. We have our peer network of academics formally established. We will have a baseline report detailing practical assessment approaches across the four partners, a detailed literature review of best practices and pilot studies identified scope data, ethical approval and staff trained where required. At the end of the second year, then, we will have a number of these practical assessment approaches piloted and evaluated. We hope to generate some peer-reviewed publications between the partners. We have launched our websites. We have organized master classes and have a project workshop and look at ways of sustaining the peer support network. In terms of resourcing this project, it's a two-year project. We will put in some admin support to it. One of the key resources in this project is the academic lecturer buyout. Our academic lecturers have a very high teaching load and for them to be actively involved in additional research or projects like this for northern to give them, give it as much time as needed. It's important that we allow them to buy out their time. That's a major important factor of the costing of this project. We will need to purchase some digital technologies and we will bring a learning technology stand near the latter part of the project which will allow us, I suppose, to develop resources to put up on our website and to be able to have ways of which we can disseminate the information further. There will be obviously some travel costs and also staff development is very important there. We're very privileged in our institutions that a major priority is put on the staff development around teaching and learning. So we have a lot of experience in working together in developing CPD programs. So this will be an important part for getting buy-in from all of the academic staff in the four partners. In terms of, I suppose, our national impact, we feel that we're four institutes of technology that are quite geographically located amongst the country. We're four out of the 13 institutes of technology. We think that if this project, assuming this project moves forward, that it has the potential to allow interaction between all of the institute technologies and the relevant university partners in this discipline. Because it's really a way of taking assessment practices that we know are working very well, enhancing them, and then sharing the techniques with colleagues and allowing colleagues a network by which they can work together. Because we're going to involve industry at all stages of this, hopefully we'll produce graduates that will have skills that are really relevant to industry that will improve the employability of our graduates to Indigenous and local companies in the regions. I think it's important, I suppose, to state maybe as a concluding point that we think this project will succeed for a number of reasons. First of all, there is a very strong commitment and leadership from the senior management in the four institutes of technology who are going to be the drivers of change in these assessment practices. And that's, I suppose, evidence by the involvement in this project proposal. There's going to be a very strong ownership of staff and students in this, and they're going to be consulted at all stages of the project, as will industry partners. We think that what we're looking at here is an evidence-based enhancement of practices that we are doing already and that we want to put them into a mode that they can be shared with all colleagues and will overall improve the student-learner experience. And finally then, we think through our ongoing evaluation we have a chance to refine and improve what we're doing and we feel that it has a fantastic potential for capacity building in the health and science disciplines in Ireland and further afield. So, thank you very much.