Background

During the preparation of my CMALT portfolio, I attended some webinars organised by the Association of Learning Technologists (ALT) and I enjoyed the collaborative atmosphere of these events. As soon as I heard about the formation of a new Special Interest Group in Digital Assessment (SIG DA) in September 2024, I expressed an interest. With the support of my managers Karen Howie and Mark Findlay, I was glad to be selected.

Over three years ago, I changed job from a frontline Learning Technologist to a backend, ‘control room’, TEL Service Manager. A Learning Technologist by trade, my passion was to use various technologies to enhance students’ and teachers’ experience and to help them achieve learning goals; but as a TEL Service Manager, my role is to ensure smooth running of the centrally supported digital tools and to mitigate impact of issues and incidents. On this role, I struggle with software vendors when they could not develop features or provide solutions my users need. Although managers share the same frustration to some degrees (see this blog article by Karen – an Appeal to HE Suppliers), there is little progress we can make as a client. I often wish we could connect with other universities more and to tackle the challenges together. The ALT SIG DA provides a perfect opportunity for that!

The SIG Officers’ Activities

Joining the SIG DA as an officer, my hope is to meet like-minded people, to learn from their best practices, to share the challenges we face so that we could influence future development of digital assessment pedagogy, technology and policy together. I have certainly not been disappointed in the first year! 

The co-chairs Alison Gibson, Gemma Westwood and Helen Greetham (all from University of Birmingham), and colleague officers, Sulanie Peramunagama (Brunel University of London), Nurun Nahar (University of Bolton) and Lisa Bradley (Queen’s University Belfast), etc., helped me feel welcome and supported as soon as we first met. We are from different roles in different universities, from senior leader, academics, to Learning Technologists and IT professional, however, the same struggle and passion helped us to click with each other instantly. I am impressed how plans and decisions were made collectively and quickly and our ideas were implemented and webinars organized,  all like clockwork!

Figure. ALT SIG DA Officers’ Activities Clockwork

Highlight of the Webinars

Not only did the JISC ALT SIG DA mailing list subscriptions increase daily, the first webinar in GenAI and Digital Assessment on 21st January 2025, was a great hit and there were 91 attendees on the day! Alison, Nurun and Lisa shared their individual journeys embracing the breaking through of Generative AI in the past year, from rapid policy making in HE to adaptive teaching and learning practices. We shared the recording and reflections in this blog article shortly afterwards and glad to see the YouTube recording views increase quickly. 

When I shared the information with my colleagues in University of Edinburgh, I received many positive feedback, which helped growing my confidence. I shared the future events’ more widely on Linkedin and in the internal Learning Technology Community Teams. I am so encouraged to see my current and previous colleagues joining the following webinars and sharing their experiences! I learnt so much from their innovative ground-breaking work in different aspects of digital assessment. To highlight a few: 

• Creating Digital Assessments Webinar — Planning, Conceptualising and Supporting, 25^th March 2025 (Blog article and YouTube video recording). I am particular inspired by Dr Seda Battilliani’s talk, Designing Inclusive Digital Assessments with Scenario-Based Learning, in which she demonstrated how she used University of Edinburgh’s own GenAI tool ELM (see also ELM) to generate AI experts persona for students to interact with! What a creative idea! 
• Managing Digital Assessments Webinar, 24^th July 2025 (Blog article and YouTube video recording). I find Denny Roberts and Lisa Scott’s presentation on Transforming Digital Examinations in Heriot- Watt University very encouraging – their team managed to accomplish a daunting task by adopting a collaborative approach and keep all stakeholders onboard. They emphasized that “the creation of Virtual Exam Centre (VEC), an international interdisciplinary group comprising over 43 members from diverse departments played a key role to create a cohesive and efficient support system for digital examinations“.

After a short break for summer and the busy beginning of the term, we regrouped on 18th November for a webinar on Training Staff to Use Digital Assessment Tools (Pre-event blog article, post-event blog article, and YouTube video recording). One common challenge colleagues shared here is the demand for training up thousands of users when scaling up of a new technology can often fall on the shoulders of a small central technical support team. I strongly echo Yihua Huang and Natasha Nakariakova’s innovative approach to foster Culture Transformation in Digital Assessment at the University of Warwick – they made it by “embedding digital assessment literacy and confidence within local academics, administrators, and technical teams while balancing central policy with departmental flexibility”, and provided live support on Microsoft Teams during exam period.

In addition, we also shared two blog articles to reflect our collected first year experience,

• Digital Assessment SIG: Review of the Year, from Co-Chairs’ Perspective, and,
• Digital Assessment SIG: Reflections from our Officers

What’s next?

Encouraged by the experience, I would continue to volunteer as an officer for another year. I would also recommend colleagues who are interested in Digital Assessment to join us and share in the coming webinars.

The SIG DA just announced that the first webinar for 2026 will be held on 28^th January 2026. The Webinar will focus on Digital Exams and Paper Script Scanning. Please register to attend here. There is still time to submit the call for speakers form (before 12^th January 2026) if you have a story to tell.

Besides, I shall continue to serve the user community with what I have learnt in my University and beyond, to drive innovative and creative digital assessment design, to foster an open and collaborative culture transformation in user support, and to engage with vendors in their future product and feature development. 

Wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year for 2026!

Dr Miki Y Sun

First Year as an Officer for ALT Special Interest Group in Digital Assessment / Digital Learning Applications and Media by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0

Share