The role of virtual learning environments in assessment and feedback in STEM

This workshop will build on desk research being undertaken on students‘ and lecturers‘ perceptions of feedback represented in the literature, and practice at University of West London and Kingston University. To complement this a bench-marking exercise of the existing assessment tools in Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace Core, Aula and Turnitin is being undertaken. This exercise is focus on existing features, how assessment is supported and how students and staff access assessment information. From this, mock-ups have been designed comprising of 4 different scenarios of assessment and feedback experiences. In the workshop participants will first be given a lightning review of the desk research and bench-marking exercise, before participating in 'sandpits‘ where they will be able to critique and redesign these 4 scenarios based on their existing practices and perceptions 'Sandpits‘ are a type of creative design-thinking focus group where participants are stimulated by a narrative of a scenario around the use of a particular product, object or artefact and are subsequently encouraged to critique, discuss and re-design it (Frohlich, Lim and Ahmed, 2014; Casanova and Mitchell, 2017) The output of this work will be presented to VLE product design teams to influence the support of assessment and feedback in STEM subjects.