Projects

Learners often find assessment hard because of the “hidden curriculum”, because they are trying to guess what their tutor is looking for, and to provide that within an increasingly complex set of resource constraints, many of which come from outside the immediate educational context. This is implicit in the ‘conduit’ frame of communication that is implicit in most of our learning environments and assessments.

Open Mentor is a learning support tool for tutors in further and higher education, which assists them through analysing and then providing reflective comments on their assessment and feedback of student assignments and coursework.

Many organizations are using email discussion groups to bring their staff together, allowing them to share problems and expertise throughout their organisation. Unfortunately, email software is limited in helping people find relevant messages: search is usually limited to keywords, and even this search is hampered by email conventions such as quoting messages in replies.

Meet-O-Matic is a simple to use meeting planning tool. Unlike other tools, which expect you to keep an electronic diary, Meet-O-Matic integrates with the web and with email so that you don’t need to run any new software to plan meetings. The standard version of Meet-O-Matic is complete, and is available at http://www.meetomatic.com/. Feel free to use it, and tell us what you think about it.

We've started work on Assessment Island, a 3D interactive game environment for exploring some of the deeper conceptual issues in the field of assessment. The idea is a simple one: you can wander around in an imaginary island, based on a drawing first developed in Chris McKillop's PhD thesis. Within the environment, you will meet characters representing some of the concepts in learning and assessment.