Welcome to the August – October Hot Topic: ‘Transformative Assessment and Feedback’ Learning and Teaching Conference
On Tuesday 17th June, the University of Edinburgh hosted their 7th Annual Learning and Teaching Conference: ‘Transformative Assessment and Feedback’ at the Nucleus building, King’s Buildings Campus. After a pause in 2024, the Conference was very much welcomed back by the 340 in-person delegates as a collegial opportunity to share learning and teaching practice and network with colleagues for a whole day away from the desk.
The day was opened by a welcome from Professor Colm Harmon, Vice-Principal (Students), followed by the launch of the University’s Learning and Teaching Strategy by Professor Tina Harrison, Deputy Vice Principal Students (Enhancement).
We were honoured to be joined by our Keynote Presenter Professor Tansy Jessop Pro Vice-Chancellor for Education and Students, University of Bristol, who delivered an inspiring and warm-hearted talk on “Student agency and engagement in assessment in a time of AI”. You can watch the video of her talk below [please note – two videos played in the Keynote talk do not have sound due to a recording error. They can be viewed here: first video on podcast assessments for students, and second video on two-stage exams]:
The day consisted of 71 submissions presented in three breakout sessions over six parallel streams. These included: 32 ten-minute presentations; seven 30-minute panels; ten 20-minute demonstrations and 21 posters.
A further 170 delegates joined online, watching on sessions a Microsoft Teams live-stream in the Larch and Oak rooms. Delegates could view posters and exhibitors during coffee breaks, and online delegates could view the posters on a Miro board on the Teams site.
The day closed with a student panel, hosted by Lucy Evans and Tina Harrison: “Students’ experiences of innovative assessment in practice”. You can watch the video of this below:
Following this, delegates headed out into the June sun on the balcony for a drinks reception and continued networking.
Conference feedback and evaluation outcomes
The Conference feedback and evaluation was very positive, with 99% (104 responses) of delegates rating the day as ‘excellent’ or ‘very good’. As with every version of the L&T Conference, the Learning and Teaching Conference Organising Team experimented with new formats and organisational techniques. The Conference lasted only one day; previous years have seen an in-person days followed by online day(s), and the majority of the feedback indicated this was the preferred length. Hybrid still remains the desired format for the Conferences but the ability to resource this effectively remains one of the pressures for the Conference team. 79% indicated that the Conference should last one day in the future, but an on-going challenge for the organising team remains in balancing offering a smaller number of sessions for the delegates to choose from with accepting as many submissions as possible to provide colleagues with opportunities to present their work.
Instead of using an external company to stream the Conference, the organising team trialled Microsoft Teams as both a live-streaming and recording platform, as well as a repository for all the Conference information (abstracts, schedule, floorplans, and Conference ethos, etc). Feedback showed resounding support to use Teams again in the future, but with some useful suggestions on how to improve the experience. The Team also used EventBrite for the first time to register delegates, and this proved a success, again with a few tweaks needed to the process for next year.
One challenge with attending conferences is to maintain the conversations and engagement with the presentations and discussions raised on the day. In this Teaching Matters series, we have invited Conference presenters to share their presentations and posters through a blog post as another platform for their work. We are delighted to publish posts on the following (plus many more):
- Using rubrics and work samples to clarify assessment expectations, by Brodie Runciman and Gary Standinger;
- Translation Software: A help or a hindrance?, by David August;
- A two-stage exam meets co-creation, by Patricia Castro Sánchez;
- Transforming assessment with Noteable and nbgrader, by James Stix;
Conference recordings and presentation slides will be released very shortly on our new SharePoint site and all delegates will be notified.
Jenny Scoles
Dr Jenny Scoles is the Chief Editor of Teaching Matters. She is an Academic Developer (Learning and Teaching Enhancement), and a Senior Fellow HEA, in the Institute for Academic Development, and provides pedagogical support for University course and programme design. She leads the University’s Learning & Teaching Conference, Board of Studies Network, and her research interests include student-staff co-creation, climate pedagogy, interdisciplinary learning & teaching, professional learning and sociomaterial methodologies.
