Creating Digital Assessments: planning, conceptualising and supporting
By the Digital Assessment SIG
A summary of the Digital Assessment SIG Webinar that was held online on 25 March 2025.
Dr. Seda Battiliani: Designing inclusive digital Assessments with Scenario-Based Learning
Dr Seda Battiliani from the University of Edinburgh presented about how they revamped a course which was expected to grow from 45 students to 400 students. The course initially had an essay based assessment but the growing number of students and the need for the course to promote collaboration, needed changes in the assessment methods. From an initial assessment idea that was to get students to interact with AI chat bots, they developed it to include particular AI personas that students needed to interact with, to come up with solution(s) to set problem tasks.
The personas were created in Storyline and designed by Seda using the Edinburgh Language Model (ELM). Seda explains how she came up with and improved on the prompts to create various specific and expert personas and how she used the constraints of the learning activities and the help of AI to hone them. She also notes how interacting with AI in the persona creation helped her, including, encouraging her to consider aspects she previously didn’t think about and also the speed in which she could test out various scenarios in a practical and reasonable pace.
She explains practical steps taken to develop a prototype for this assessment.
She concluded that she used AIs ability to help analyze large amounts of information, run tests, troubleshoot, and compare scenarios but stressed that the starting point for using AI in assessments should be grounded in pedagogical expertise.
Enabling Competency-based and Programmatic Assessment using Digital Platforms
Professor Samantha Pugh from Leeds university spoke of how they completely revamped their physics programme during an institution wide curriculum refinement. Her session describes how they successfully transformed their method of assessment as part of this initiative.
The previous assessment included low stakes coursework and high stakes exams. With these, students who appeared to be doing well throughout the year would do very poorly in the final exam. She pointed out also that students could still pass the course having serious gaps in their knowledge because of the set pass mark of 40%.
The new approach focuses on threshold-based assessment, which they called “vitals” (Verifiable Indicators of Threshold Abilities and Learning). They made it possible for each vital to be assessed multiple times throughout the course. This made it possible for students to achieve all vitals at least once to pass. Students who meet all vitals are guaranteed the set pass mark of 40%. Grading assessments at the end of the year allow for differentiation after the pass mark.
They implemented the quizzes using Mobius, an assessment platform that supports mathematical expressions and variable-based questions, creating a large number of question variants. They also used an in house-built vitals website to track student progress. Throughout the course, as the students take their quizzes in Mobius, the vitals website shows which vitals have been passed and provides a comprehensive overview for students as well as tutors.
Samantha touched on some of the challenges they had with the new method which were related to module size not being compatible with program-level design, also redefining how resitting this method of assessment works with the student record systems. But they were able to overcome these with clever workarounds and very supportive colleagues.
In conclusion she mentioned that the changes ensured that all students can meet all learning outcomes, it removed high stakes assessments and provided more opportunities for success. She said the technology enabled students to pace their learning and continue attempting assessments until they succeed.
Facilitating Student Choice in Assessment Task in Moodle with the School of Psychology
Ben Atkinson described how he worked with colleagues to introduce a new activity type to Moodle at the University of Nottingham called Group Choice. This activity facilitates student engagement in their choice of assessment topic. It was used in pilot form in the School of Psychology in Autumn 2024-25. In the pilot, some flexibility was already available with a range of questions which allowed students to align the assessment with their personal individual learning style.
However, the problem was how to deliver choice effectively inside Moodle whilst minimising manual intervention.
The solution developed not only addressed this problem through a streamlined combination of group choice and release conditions, but reduced the administrative burden on staff, and at the same time improved their ability to monitor extenuating circumstances.
An additional benefit of the process is that automated marking groups are created to aid academic colleagues in their marking and feedback for large cohorts in Moodle and Turnitin assignments.
Ben outlined how the activity has many versatile applications within teaching and learning, but essentially at its core, it provides the ability for students to enrol themselves into a group or groups which have previously been set up on the module.
Ben described how, through the combined use of group choice and release conditions, powerful automated processes were achieved, dramatically improving the student experience while at the same time reducing the administrative overhead for the teaching team.
Finally, he outlined how the method could be used in other contexts, for example by creating groups for sub-topics within the module, so that students could opt-in to a specific pathway. Moodle’s conditional release functionality combined with the Group Choice activity could be used to ensure that certain topics within a Moodle module are only visible to relevant groups. In this way, whole sections of content could be made available only to students who had opted-in to the relevant topic via the Group Choice activity, a level of personalisation that could benefit students without staff needing to manually intervene.