Sally Brown

Plenty of universities are wondering what are the most urgent things to do to build a sense of community among new student starting this autumn in the event of another covert surge. My Wonkhe post sets out briefly my thoughts about the five most important steps to take In case campuses have to shut rapidly to make sure freshers can make a good start. The link is here buff.ly/2Rej4vH

Today it’s pouring with rain, almost biblical in proportions, but it’s been sunshine in the study where I’ve really enjoyed running a webinar for the Hong Kong Education University together with some colleagues from the Hong Kong Baptist University, on the topic of post-covid-19 assessment. The slides are here: Hong-Kong-keynote-Aug-2020-w.pptx (2117 downloads)

It was really interesting to have questions about setting convincing and secure science and maths open book exams, and on assessing group work in remote conditions, and the most joyous element was a language teaching colleague, Dr Jain, who described having changed her assessment techniques to more authentic ones with the result that the students performed much better. She was worried this might be a problem but I congratulated her and said it wasn’t surprising that better assignments lead to better performance. I look forward to working with colleagues in Hong Kong again in the future, alongside my partner-in-assessment Kay Sambell.

Kay Sambell and I are delighted to see that the brilliant Katrina Swanton of Edinburgh Napier University has done a sketchnote of our latest 22 August article (in my post below this, but link again here:  Writing-better-assignments-in-the-post-Covid19-era.docx (4078 downloads) ). We admire her work so much that we asked if we could use it here!

Designing Better Assignments Post-Covid

Although I haven’t posted for 6 weeks, I’ve been pretty busy over the summer.

• Participating in the formal defence of her thesis by my dear friend Dr Hetty Grunefeld at Utrecht University. I should have been there in person in the ancient university hall and celebrating with her and other members of the PhD by Publication Group I’ve been convening for years, but it wasn’t to be so I did it from my study in an approximation of academic dress as requested  and was overjoyed to see her graduate;
• Running a three-day virtual writing residential for PebblePad clients on starting to get published on learning, teaching and assessment;
• Leading a workshop for Leeds Beckett senior staff aiming to achieve Principal Fellowship of the Higher education Academy;
• Mentoring half a dozen colleagues pro bono during lockdown to help them keep up momentum with their life and writing goals;
• Drafting a chapter on doing a PhD by Publication for a volume expected to be published in 2021;
• Completing and submitting my SEDA Senior Fellowship reflection, which is a condition of my ongoing status retention;
• Continuing to work with Kay Sambell on our suite of publications on managing assessment during Covid-19 and beyond. We are in particular working on ensuring that HE assessment in the future never reverts to the ghastliness of largely-ubiquitous, traditional unseen time-constrained exams, instead using more fit-for-purpose and authentic assessment approaches. We hope that one of these will be published by SEDA in the Autumn and another will be posted on this site and Kay’s very soon.
• We’ve also been working on a new post on ‘Writing better assignments in the post-Covid19 era: approaches to good task design’  Writing-better-assignments-in-the-post-Covid19-era.docx (4078 downloads) which I hope colleagues will find useful when moving away from traditional exams. While we’ve been writing it , I’ve been driven to rage and fury at the current UK totally-foreseeable problems our government has inflicted on our nation’s A-level students by applying a flawed algorithm to predicted results for students applying to universities right now, resulting in devastating injustice, reinforcing my strong reservations concerning exams!

Meanwhile Phil and I have been coping with domestic lockdown with plenty of home-based productive activities including lots of fruit harvesting (fabulous raspberries, redcurrants and cucumbers this year) and produce making, reading novels (Ali Smith’s Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer are what I’m reading at the moment), socially distanced interaction with our Newcastle grandchildren including garden yoga classes, much baking and socially-distanced outdoor catching up with friends.

In the Autumn I’m looking forward to more writing with Kay, continuing to work with NUI Galway on their academic promotions scheme, a couple of virtual keynotes (I’m getting better with Zoom but still struggling with Teams despite a broadband upgrade) and working with another university helping them enhance NSS scores, following successful outcomes from my collaborations at Solent University last year.

This is my seventieth year and I had planned to spend much of it traveling abroad, which obviously isn’t happening, but I’m still managing to have a busy, engaging and largely enjoyable time.

It’s hard to be productive in this lovely sunshine, but I’m doing my best! This week should have been the Solstice Conference at Edge Hill University, but of course this is happening virtually rather than live this year. You might like to catch up via their website on Wednesday with a narrated PowerPoint which Kay Sambell and I have created entitled ‘Building bridges to the future: assessment which promotes learning post coronavirus‘. The hashtag for the conference is #solstice2020, and the link from which our narrated PowerPoint can be downloaded is: https://figshare.edgehill.ac.uk/articles/Prof_Sally_Brown_and_Prof_Kay_Sambell/12408968/2

I have also decided to start a new occasional feature called Question of the week. This has come about because people are regularly writing to me with questions of a pedagogic nature, the answers to which may prove valuable to others. Let me know if you have a question or would like to add to my answers. My response to the first question, which is on online replacements for traditional lectures, can be downloaded here: Question-of-the-week-w.docx (561 downloads)

Additionally, Kay and I have produced a new paper called ‘The  changing landscape of assessment: some possible replacements for unseen time constrained face-to-face invigilated exams’ in which we argue that some of the alternatives that universities have put in place for the coronavirus  contingency should be made permanent, and that we should use this as an opportunity to make some radical and substantial reconfigurations to assessment in the future to make it more authentic. A particular feature is the comparison table where we explore the pros and cons of diverse assessments that can be done virtually. You will find our new post here: The-changing-landscape-I-June-w.docx (4674 downloads)

I hope all these will be useful to colleagues. They are all open educational resources so please feel free to share them, but if you do please acknowledge where they came from. We like to hear where our work is being useful!

These are strange days indeed when most of what we are doing that might be useful to anyone else is being done at home. Kay Sambell and I have been delighted that people have been using our recent work on alternatives to unseen, time-constrained invigorated exams, and tips for assessing effectively and authentically under coronavirus conditions. Of course we very much hope this thinking will have usability in the future as well as we think about different ways of assessing in optimum ways. You might be interested to note that we have had feedback that this work has been found useful across the UK, in the Netherlands, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and most recently Japan. For those of you who read Japanese, here is a link to our work on the Osaka University website. https://www.tlsc.osaka-u.ac.jp/project/onlinelecture/tips03.html
And the picture below shows me and Phil at our recent street party, suitably socially distanced.

Following on from my posting on 13th March, Kay Sambell and I have subsequently both been asked by colleagues for advice on how to move from having invigilated on-site exams to having students sit written assessments online from home, so we’ve put together a second informal guide as an open educational resource posted here: Kay-Sambell-Sally-Brown-Coronavirus-Contingency-Suggestions-for-replacing-on-site-exams-w.docx (4006 downloads)

Please feel free to circulate and use it. You are very welcome to customize it for your local contexts, but please acknowledge its origins if you do so (and it would be very interesting for us if you let us know how you have used it!)

Meanwhile, Phil and I are staying safe at home and working hard exercising, mentoring, gardening, spring cleaning and using or time constructively: the two photos show one result of my current obsession with sourdough in the form of a pizza and my newly alphabetized fiction shelves!

I hope you can, like us, enjoy any moments you can in these horrid times. Stay safe, keep well and don’t work too hard.