Intensive exchange of experience
The community appears to have an impressive wealth of experience in e-assessment. The "show and tell" sessions provided an overview of the existing, tried-and tested tools, methods and scenarios, while practical experiences at Swiss universities were presented in the "semi-plenaries". Jacqueline Gasser-Beck, Executive Director IRP-HSG at the University of St.Gallen, gave a fascinating talk under the heading "Legal framework for e-assessments – why security issues, personal data protection and copyrights matter".
The "debate and open questions" sessions centred on possible scenarios for the near future at Swiss universities.
The numerous talks made it clear how much e-assessment is intertwined with other e-learning issues, some of the key terms being Moodle, BYOD, flipped classroom, e-portfolio, authentication, team-based learning, mobile learning, infrastructure components and certification. There was also some lively discussion of experiences using the Safe Exam Browser (see box).
Keynote speakers from Germany and Australia
Participants took a great deal of inspiration from the two keynote speakers. Jürgen Handke, professor at The Philipp University of Marburg's Institute of English and American Studies, spoke on the topic of "eEducation in the 21st century: new approaches towards learning, teaching and assessment". He explained that experiments are already under way using robots to assist with exams. "Assessing for quality decision making" was the topic of the following day's talk by Geoffrey Crisp, professor and Pro-Vice Chancellor (Education) at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Both talks are available on SWITCHtube.
