Equality project

Equality project

During this SIG session, we would like to demonstrate an application that has been developed to assist educational programmes in providing insight into and monitoring the quality of their assessment programmes. The application was developed at Utrecht University as part of the USO- funded project "Equality: a sustainable improvement in assessment quality."

For many educational programmes, enhancing and ensuring the quality of assessment is a challenge. There is often a lack of understanding regarding how learning outcomes are structured across the curriculum, how they are assessed, and how learning outcomes relate to the course learning objectives. Additionally, assessment quality procedures are frequently not embedded in a systematic way. As a result, there is a risk that inadequate action will be taken to improve the quality of assessments. To assist study programmes in this regard, Utrecht University has developed an application called -Equality- that aims to contribute to the long-term enhancement and assurance of assessment quality. The application was developed in collaboration with a variety of stakeholder groups (i.e., course examiners, members of examining committees, and programme directors) using a design-based research approach.

The result is an online application with various dashboards on the course and the programme level that are accessible to all stakeholders. At the course level, the dashboards include a PDCA cycle that guides the course examiner through the process of designing, administering, and evaluating the course assessment's quality using self-evaluation questions. The dashboards at the programme level depict the structure and organisation of the entire assessment programme. The dashboards enable longitudinal visualisation of the collected data (across multiple courses at programme level). In this way, the application can serve as a valuable tool for initiating a productive dialogue about how to improve assessment quality over time.

We would like to demonstrate the application Equality during this SIG session. While the application

does not currently incorporate learning analytics, we see opportunities and potential benefits in

doing so. As such, we would like to discuss with participants what data might be appropriate for

learning analytics techniques. And how incorporating learning analytics can help improve the

quality and efficiency of quality assurance procedures.