In close collaboration with QM Academy, TELT, HSS, and selected FMD module teams, the Digital Education Studio led the Cadmus pilot project starting in June 2023 with encouraging interim results.
During the pandemic and over the last three years, increasing adoption of digital learning approaches has changed teaching and learning in Higher Education. Assessment, being core to the educational process, is no exception. This shift triggered innovative thinking around assessment and feedback. With the recent emergence of generative AI, Higher Education institutions face tremendous challenges with assessment. In an effort to address some of the challenges and opportunities of digital assessment, the Digital Education Studio led a pilot of ‘assessment for learning’ platform Cadmus, starting in June 2023.
To enhance the student and staff experience with digital assessment and feedback, and to mitigate potential academic integrity issues, the Dean for Digital Education Prof. Chie Adachi and the Digital Education Studio investigated a range digital assessment tools to complement the existing assessment portfolio.
There is an abundance of tools used for assessment and feedback in the market. The rubric for eLearning Tool Evaluation (EDUCAUSE) was used to assess the suitability of such digital assessment tools for piloting at QMUL. Cadmus stood out and scored highly on all criteria. The added evidence from previous work and successful pilots with other universities in Australia, the UK and the US, led to Cadmus being selected for pilot.
Cadmus is an ‘assessment for learning’ platform, which incorporates a range of assessment design templates to scaffold the assessment and feedback (both summative and formative) processes for teachers and students. It supports students to develop their academic writing , and gives teachers with a variety of learning analytics to help provide personalized academic support to individual students.
While there is a variety of assessment formats within FMD, this pilot project focuses on written assessment, which mostly resides within ‘assessed coursework’. Aside from exams, this is one of the most frequently used assessment formats in the Faculty. There has been an increase in the number of academic misconduct cases related to written assessment over the last couple of years, suggesting a need to redesign assessment practice to support academic integrity and reduce misconduct.
The project aimed to:
The project was led by the Digital Education Studio, in collaboration with QM Academy, TELT, module leads and learning technologists from each institute. The Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) was also involved in the pilot.
The pilot project began in June 2023, with kick-off meetings with selected piloting module leads where the focus was on assessment design for Semester 1. Based on an agreed evaluation framework, the project team evaluated the effectiveness of the pilot and tool in practice for Semester 1 and will continue to evaluate it in Semester 2 in August 2024. The interim results of the pilot project, outlined in the following section, are very encouraging.
In the academic year of 2023/24, 8 modules in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry and in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences took part in the pilot.
549 unique students and 21 educators/ professional staff used Cadmus as an assessment tool. 1,406 student submissions were made.
The overall response was positive. Academic teams found Cadmus useful and insightful:
Student quotes
“Using a checklist really helps with organizing the content and layout.”
"I love the fact that Cadmus automatically saves my work. It’s almost like following a recipe, which definitely alleviates a lot of stress.”
By Students at QMUL
Academics who have been using the Cadmus platform say it has:
Provided a good preventive strategy for giving indicators of possible academic integrity issues Enabled them to understand the learning journey of individual students by looking at analytics and step in where necessary to support students in both learning and assessment
If you would like to know more about this project, please contact Digital Education Studio by e-mail: digitaleducationstudio@qmul.ac.uk