As you may know, Education Futures has been leading the Special Assessment Uplift project to deliver a new application system for Special Assessment provisions. We are excited to advise that the technical build workstream is nearing completion and we expect to be able to roll out the new application form to students and the data dashboards for staff in T3. You can check out a sneak peak of these below – we will be sharing more information soon as final testing is completed and the form moves into production.

The powerhouse behind the new system is a custom integration that has been developed between Callista and Courseloop, enabling student enrolment data to be cross-referenced with assessment data. This will deliver huge benefits to student experience, to staff workload and data access – take a look below to see how the integration serves both the student application form and staff dashboards.

Application form

Students will be able to apply for special assessment provisions via a single unified application form in AskUNE, replacing the previous PDF forms. They will now have all their unit enrolment and assessment data pre-populated, and will be able to add multiple assessments and multiple units to the same application. This means that when students need support, a single quick and easy application has the ability to cover all their assessments.

The integration behind the new form also eliminates a huge amount of manual data entry, saving hundreds of hours of staff time (we anticipate over a year we will save almost 1000 hours in the Exams & eAssessment team alone…!) and significantly improving turnaround time for students, who should receive responses in much quicker timeframes. It will also offer significant improvements in data accuracy, security and privacy.

Dashboards

The project team has also developed data dashboards in PowerBI that will allow staff to access real-time data around Special Assessment provisions, including volume, trends, outcomes and more at both unit and aggregate levels. These dashboards will be available to staff for a range of purposes such as Board of Examiners, discipline convenor monitoring, governance reporting and so on, and enable easy access to a much richer range of data to support effective decision-making and data-informed practice.

Atrium

The project team is currently working on integrating the Special Assessment dashboard into Atrium – when this is implemented, it will enable Unit Coordinators to access Special Assessment data alongside their other data sets and provide real-time oversight of applications and insight into student support needs.