 Okay, thank you very much. My name is Adele Healy. I'm from Dundalk Institute of Technology and this afternoon we're going to be talking to you with an update on the team project. Technology Enhance Assessment Methods in Science and Health Practical Settings. So just to let you know this project is made up of colleagues from Dundalk Institute of Technology, IT Carlo, IT Sligo and AIT and we have here a mixture of colleagues from the project and the team here represented today is made up of the heads of school of science, people from the heads of teaching and learning and also academics that are actively involved in the project. So we have a number of stakeholders who are represented here today and the way we're going to present this this afternoon is we're all actually going to present different parts of the project. So really just at a high level what is the project about? Well I suppose we're trying to answer two questions. First of all we know that in health and science programs the practical element is really really important. So the first question is how can we realign practical classes to reduce over assessment and develop essential knowledge skills and competences both all of which are very important for graduates in these type of programs and the second one is how can we use digital technologies to promote assessment for learning in practical settings? We have a number of stakeholders involved in the project as I've mentioned it's being led out by the heads of school of science in the foreign institute technology. We have engagement from the learning and teaching units. We have academics involved, student partners, staff from the library and IT departments and also we have close collaborations with industry and employer partners and that makes up the wider team project group. We can broadly divide our project into three phases. The first phase really which you would have heard about in our June presentation was a baseline review seeing what are the best practice assessment approaches out there in science and health disciplines. This was informed by a literature review stakeholder input from the students and also input from the staff. Phase two then which we are in the process of undergoing and you'd hear a little bit more about that now this today is about piloting and evaluating technology enhanced assessment practices across all the four partner colleges so that we can start to look at the impact of these technologies and the last phase which we've actually been involved in part with over the last few months of the project will be primarily about disseminating further the outputs of the project and sharing the very valuable resources that have and we know will continue to emerge from the project. So we have done a lot since June 2016 and my colleagues are going to speak in more detail about what we have done. We've carried out a project networking workshop, we have carried out a literature review, we're preparing publications on that, the project website is nearing completion which I'll show you now. We've carried out an analysis of the data from science student feedback surveys of which we got almost 700 responses and we have submitted the findings of those abstracts to two conferences. We've also completed our consultation with industry and we've identified priority themes of which we're going to continue in the project and again we'll talk about that in a few minutes. So in terms of the pilot studies the logistics are underway for those. We've ordered the equipment, we have recruited additional academics to be involved in the studies, we've put in place training plans and at the moment we're getting ethical approval for the evaluation of these studies. Our project is really involving science programs and also nursing and health programs. So the science programs are in the active evaluation stage now. The nursing programs they have decided to focus on one particular aspect which is pre-clinical skills preparations. They're preparing those videos this semester and they will actually do their evaluations next semester. There's our project website. I'm not going to go into that in the interest of time but you can see from the top there that this project website team shp.ie will have information on the assessment technologies that we're piloting. It'll show outputs from the projects and we hope it'll be a very useful resource for sharing the learning from the project. We've also set up a comment page within the website which will allow other external partners or potential partners who might be interested in making contact with the project to do so through that. So I'm going to hand over now to Don Fowler from at Loan IT to speak about the project workshop. Thank you. Good afternoon. As we mentioned in the June presentation we held a project workshop in Athlone on the 13th of June last year. So at that project workshop we had a group of academics from the various institutions involved in the project as well as some other interested parties and as well as students. We were really happy to have the services of Dr. Michael Ciri from the University of Edinburgh who's done a lot of work in the area of practical assessment in laboratories. He gave a keynote speech on learning in the 21st century laboratory. There were also a number of presentations from academics from the four institutions on their own experiences within the learning environment in the laboratories and these presentations then were followed by breakout sessions and discussions. So we had 50 lecturers attend the workshop, 17 students and the four partner institutes of technology were there as well as a representative from the Dublin Institute of Technology. We had a session of what we called team stories from the front line where active academics gave an overview of their experience with technologies. So for example there was one called is the pen mightier than the mouse online grading with rubrics on Moodle adapting the electronic laboratory notebook for reporting science. So these were all very well received by the attendees and all told it was a very successful day and it sort of marked the start of the active part of the project. So I'm going to hand you over to Roland now to continue with the next part. Thanks Dan. So what I wanted to talk to you about was the pilots that have come from the information that we had discussed as a group collectively with students and staff at this workshop. We wanted to be as informed as we could so we engage with the literature, our student partners on the project, we had our student survey results that Adele mentioned 651 students had completed information on the technologies and practicals. We engaged with employers and also the staff and what was great about that workshop was it was collective, it was between the students and the staff working together that we got a lot of our feedback and we analyzed all this and came up with four priority teams that we wanted to use for our pilots and those teams focus on pre-practical videos, videos as assessment, quizzes, electronic lab notebooks or e-portfolios and then we had digital feedback or specifically rubrics. So just to show you the scale of what we've built so far there are 59 pilots taking place this semester across the four partners that are going to involve 50 academic staff and a total of 1,481 students are going to engage with these technologies that we want to pilot. So these are spread across the four institutes we've discussed as partners of the team and we have academic leads as part of our team here on the stage that are in each institute so there's a structure there to help roll out these pilots, there's a contact from the team in each one. When I split the pilots out per team just to show you digital feedback rubrics, ELNs, portfolios, videos, quizzes you can see the scale. Now one thing to show you is with digital feedback you might think we're just having four projects as feedback but feedback for us is a very broad, we're taking a broad approach to what feedback is and all of these approaches engage with feedback, quizzes, portfolios, ELNs, rubrics and so on. So feedback is something that we're embracing in all of these different pilots but you can see the different types that people have gone to try and roll out. With regards to across the four partners how many programs are involved so just to show you the reach of the project there's going to be 45 programs which will take on a pilot of one of these technologies and give it a go this semester which will be evaluated. So that kind of gives you the maybe the local approach in our four colleges and I'm going to hand over to Jeremy who's going to give you an idea of the the national impact of what we're trying to do. Thanks Ronan, Jeremy Byrd, Head of Science at IT Sligo. So we defined six real areas in terms of national impact. First area is identifying and sharing best practice and not only do we intend to do that amongst ourselves but also we hope to utilize the Heads of Science Association through TIA, the Technological Higher Education Institutes Association. Cross-disciplinary capacity building through identification of priority themes. So these are the integrated science disciplines so it includes areas such as midwifery, nursing and health as well as other areas in pharmaceutical science and so on. Active student and staff engagement where we have ongoing recruitment we've currently got 45 programs included in this project across four ITs. Our peer network is very well established so we have different discipline areas and we hope to include those thematically for example in molecular biology. The project website is well in its way to being completed and launched and this embraces case studies, screen casts and so on. And presentation at national and international meetings we've presented at the EdTech conference last June, NUI Goreway. We are planning to present in April 2017 and we've submission into the ACERA conference in DCU this summer. I think there's something else to come up. So we have also publications. We have one from the EdTech conference in June 2016 from the TARC Malaysian Conference on Teaching and Learning in 2016. I think it's a book chapter included in that. We're looking at, we have a currently submission to the European Science Research Association conference at DCU in August 2017. Hopefully that will be accepted and at the University of Manchester, the Manchester Assessment in Higher Education meeting in June 2017. Dina. Good afternoon. I'm Dina Brazel from the Institute of Technology in Carlow. So I'm just going to, I'm just going to talk about how we have felt the project has gone to date. Now we will be formally evaluating the project by means of a student survey. We're going to carry out focus groups between staff and students. Also we'll be able to follow through various analytics on Moodle and Blackboard as to whether or not students are engaging in the way that we're hoping. On our website, as has been mentioned previously, we're going to have a comments page so people can say what they think of what our resources. So our own evaluation of what we've done to date is that the project is progressing on target. The engagement between the four partner colleges is ongoing and it's significant. We've had our our work our workshop in June but we've also been able to engage with other academics who've expressed an interest and they're now willing to take part in the pilots. The collaboration between the different institutes is very real and it's very ongoing because we've divided each of the themes between the colleges so we're able to speak to our colleagues in other colleges on particular themes and we're learning from practices that are ongoing at the moment and we really feel that we have the a good community of practice at this stage. There is a wide group of programs. They're basically science programs so there are commonalities but we're looking at them at different levels from level first year up to fourth year and we're looking at what we can learn from the nursing programs as well as the science programs and where we've been invited to take part in the national seminar series that will be held in NUIG and so we feel that this is a sustainable project because what we feel is that we have both a top-down we've got the support of our heads of school we wouldn't be able to do it without that and we also have bottom-up support because we have our student partners which were involved in many different stages of the project setting up the pilots and we have academics that are actually involved in these areas so it's very much an organic project and when we say dialogue and collaboration it actually is we are working very well together we're using technology we can't meet every month in person we're using Skype with all its its problems but we are coming together we're talking to each other we're learning from each other and we are building on our good practice so we're just just as an example what we have done and we think this is something that we will be working on further is that we all had to produce a short little video of what team was about and exactly how colleagues would would use videos so we had to come together produce these quick short videos and give them out to our colleagues and I think this is something that will we can work on make them better maybe but we're finding that we can work very very quickly and that there is good practice there and we felt that was very important to recognize the practice but we feel this is now a framework that people can continue and we feel this will continue when the project is over and yes so I will just finish here and pass on to Adele who gives you the final. So really I suppose just in terms of going forward you know we hope that we can we plan to embed these changes that we're going to put it in place and in their assessments into our programs and we'll use mechanisms such as curriculum development and programmatic review to do that and we've already mentioned about kind of dissemination and engagement that we have with the project. My last slide here is we thought we'd put up here some response to the international panel from the feedback we got in June and I just put on the left hand side here are some quotes from what was said to us. One was translate the review into action so we think with 59 pilot studies 50 academic staff and almost 1500 students there is real action on the ground going on within the project we were it was just that we would maintain the engagement of staff and students and we have done that by recruiting additional academics to go over and above what you see here today to the project and we have constant ongoing student engagement at every phase of the project and it was also suggest that we would create a suite of focused practical changes in assessment practice and we hope we have achieved that by focusing in on the priority themes which have already been outlined to you today. So I'd just like to finish by thanking the project team who are all represented here today from the foreign institute technologies and our colleagues who couldn't be here today due to other commitments also our external project advisor Dr Michael Ciri from the University of Edinburgh and last but by no mean least our student and industry advisory panels. Thank you very much.