By Digital Assessments SIG<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sumayyah Islam and Laurence Horstman presented on the \u2018e-Exams\u2019 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\u2019s \u2018Digiexam\u2019 exams platform. Despite successes using Digiexam as a \u2018digital answer booklet\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"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: Transforming Digital Examinations: A Collaborative Approach at Heriot-Watt University This presentation […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13140,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1709,1944,1241,1409,1399,1589],"tags":[1258,1415,725,774,1975,2148,1043],"class_list":["post-13227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-assessment","category-digital-assessment-sig","category-digital-literacy","category-events","category-online-assessment","category-webinar","tag-altc-2","tag-events-2","tag-altc","tag-community","tag-digital-assessment","tag-digital-assessment-sig","tag-webinar"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/altc.alt.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1112\/2025\/05\/assessm.png?fit=734%2C550&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":12849,"url":"https:\/\/altc.alt.ac.uk\/blog\/2025\/02\/digital-education-sig-call-for-speakers-creating-digital-assessments-planning-conceptualising-and-supporting\/","url_meta":{"origin":13227,"position":0},"title":"Digital Assessment SIG Call for Speakers – Creating Digital Assessments: planning, conceptualising and supporting","author":"ALT","date":"13 February 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"The Digital Assessment SIG is calling for speakers for its next webinar titled \u201cCreating Digital Assessments: planning, conceptualising and supporting\u201d, which will be held online on 25 March 2025 from 10:00 AM until 11:30 AM GMT.\u00a0 We are particularly looking for speakers who are able share: Examples of how they\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Digital Assessment SIG"","block_context":{"text":"Digital Assessment SIG","link":"https:\/\/altc.alt.ac.uk\/blog\/category\/digital-assessment-sig\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"decorative image","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/altc.alt.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1112\/2025\/02\/Copy-of-Blog-Cover-700-%C3%97-216px.png?fit=700%2C216&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/altc.alt.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1112\/2025\/02\/Copy-of-Blog-Cover-700-%C3%97-216px.png?fit=700%2C216&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/altc.alt.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1112\/2025\/02\/Copy-of-Blog-Cover-700-%C3%97-216px.png?fit=700%2C216&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/altc.alt.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/1112\/2025\/02\/Copy-of-Blog-Cover-700-%C3%97-216px.png?fit=700%2C216&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":13502,"url":"https:\/\/altc.alt.ac.uk\/blog\/2026\/01\/training-staff-to-use-digital-assessment-tools-webinar\/","url_meta":{"origin":13227,"position":1},"title":"Training staff to use Digital Assessment tools Webinar","author":"ALT","date":"7 January 2026","format":false,"excerpt":"Our first webinar of this Academic year \u201cTraining Staff to use Digital Assessments\u201d was completed in November, you can review the whole webinar on the\u00a0ALT youtube channel. 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