The Statistics and Data Analytics Education group at the University of Glasgow hosted a workshop on Assessment Strategies for the Mathematical Sciences in the Digital Era on Thursday 23 June 2022.
The workshop was organised as part of the IMA & RSS Mathematical Sciences Teaching and Learning Workshop Series. Despite receiving funding to host the workshop over 2 years ago our plans were curtailed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, so it was a pleasure to finally be able to host this workshop with the option of in-person attendance. Unfortunately, our bad luck continued with a national rail strike on the day of the workshop which hampered some attendee’s ability to join in person, however we were delighted to have 24 in-person attendees and a further 54 joining us online. It was great to see many of our colleagues from across University of Glasgow and attendees from other Scottish institutions but a special mention to those who managed to navigate public transport and join us from further afield with attendees from Lancaster, Liverpool and Bristol to name a few.
We kicked off proceedings with an overview of our online distance learning programmes in Data Analytics and some discussion around the development of accessible notes introduced into our courses this year which were developed by ODL full stack web developer, David McArthur. We would be happy to provide an example of these for anyone interested, please just get in touch.
The day also involved four varied and interesting keynote presentations including: scaling up assessment with peer review presented by Dr Jeremy Signer (University of Glasgow); assessing first year statistics students using e-tests presented by Dr Ian Weir (University of the West of England); using STACK e-assessment in course design presented by Dr George Kinnear (University of Edinburgh) and student peer review using Aropa presented by Dr Helen C. Purchase (University of Glasgow).
We also had a session with 5 lightning talks including topics such as: Are online quizzes like Wordle?; pre-recorded presentations as e-assessments in applied mathematics; issues surrounding individual programming tests on large modules; online electronic assessment in a large undergraduate statistics module and peer assessment via comparative judgement.
Our aim was to bring together researchers and practitioners from the mathematical sciences to discuss key issues about digital assessments and show/promote conditions in which deeper approaches to learning will flourish and the day definitely succeeded in this, with each talk being followed by lots of interesting discussion. It was also great to have the opportunity to continue these discussions during the coffee and lunch breaks. Despite this being the first experience of organising a hybrid event such as this for our group, we were pleased the day ran so smoothly and was well received by all participants. Many thanks to all of the wonderful speakers, attendees, and of course IMA and RSS for supporting the event.
Our sessions are available to watch on the new SDAEG YouTube channel and for those of you who are on Twitter, please follow us @UoGSDAEG to keep up to date with our future events. You can also contact the team at stats-sdaeg@glasgow.ac.uk.
