Managing Digital Assessments Webinar 

By Digital Assessments SIG

On the 20th of May we held our last webinar of this academic year. Thank you to our presenters for sharing your work. If you missed it and would like to watch any of our presenters you can access their individual recordings on youtube:

• Denny Roberts and Lisa Scott: Transforming digital Examinations. A Collaborative Approach at Heriot-Watt University
• Sumayyah Islam and Laurence Horstman: Enhancing MCQ Exam Experience at LSE
• Dr Lee Parkin: Using Automation to manage administration surrounding third year research projects
• Zhiqiong Chen and Yihua Huang: Transitioning Language Exams to Online Delivery in Higher Education 

Transforming Digital Examinations: A Collaborative Approach at Heriot-Watt University

This presentation The transition to digital examinations at Heriot-Watt University, particularly during the return to campus, and the significant challenges it presented. Denny and Lisa shared that to tackle these challenges the Virtual Exam Centre (VEC) was founded, an international interdisciplinary group comprising over 43 members from diverse departments, this dynamic team leveraged agile methodologies, iterative process development, reflective practices, and technologies to create a cohesive and efficient support system for digital examinations.
Their approach centres on fostering collaboration and communication among team members, ensuring that all stakeholders are aligned, informed and removing single points of failure. By adopting agile practices, the team has been able to respond swiftly to emerging issues and continuously improve processes. Iterative development has allowed for the refinement of strategies based on feedback and real-world experiences while reflective practices ensured that lessons learned from each examination cycle were applied to future iterations.
They shared how technology played a pivotal role in bringing together the geographically dispersed team and managing digital examinations. The team used various digital assessment platforms, such as Canvas Quizzes, Mobius, STACK, Gradescope, and Respondus LockDown Browser, to streamline the examination process, enhance academic integrity, and improve accessibility. Additionally, digital collaboration platforms helped to facilitate seamless communication and coordination among team members across global campuses, ensuring a unified approach.
This presentation detailed the journey of implementing digital examinations at Heriot-Watt University highlighting the challenges faced, the innovative strategies employed and the successes achieved. It will provide insights into the formation and operation of VEC, showcasing how interdisciplinary collaboration, agile methodologies and technology can drive positive change in educational support systems.

Piloting Digital MCQ Examinations at LSE

Sumayyah Islam and Laurence Horstman presented on the ‘e-Exams’ MCQ pilot which represents a step forward in the digital transformation of assessment at LSE. Their presentation shares insights from the pilot, which runs from July 2024 to May 2025, and discusses benefits and challenges of implementing MCQs within LSE’s ‘Digiexam’ exams platform. Despite successes using Digiexam as a ‘digital answer booklet’ to deliver essay-based exams, the potential for digitising MCQ exams using automatic marking was previously underexplored at LSE. The pilot sought to build on existing MCQ features, allowing students to view questions and answer alternatives directly on-screen.

Automated Mark Agreements for 3rd Year Research Projects

This webinar focused on how automation software such as Power Automate can be integrated with multiple processes to reduce administration burden, speed up the marking process, and how these processes can potentially be shared across other modules and faculties to ease marking and feedback surrounding digital assessments.

Transitioning Language Exams to Online Delivery in Higher Education

This presentation reviews the end-to-end transition of traditional paper-based language assessments to fully digital formats within a higher education language course. It focuses on administrative planning, implementation, and lessons learned, with an emphasis on improving efficiency, accessibility, and the student experience – while maintaining academic integrity. This presentation offers practical insights and forward-thinking strategies for institutions aiming to transition language or discipline-based assessments to online platforms. It highlights the importance of cross-team collaboration, phased implementation, and stable support structures to ensure a successful and sustainable digital transformation.