News & Updates

TESTA Summit

The University of Winchester, Higher Education Academy and SEDA are funding and hosting an international summit for universities in England, Scotland, Australia and India who are using TESTA, in London on 16 September.The TESTA Summit programme includes a keynote from Professor Sean Brawley at the University of New South Wales, case studies from Birmingham, Essex, UCL and Keele Universities, and global cafe discussions about using TESTA in different contexts, for periodic review, research and impact data, and developing more programmatic ways of working to transform the student experience.

TESTA at UCL

Dr Teresa McConlogue, Senior Teaching Fellow in the School of Life and Medical Sciences is leading the pilot on three programmes: MSc Reproductive Science and Women's Health; MSc in Audiological Sciences, and the BA Linguistics. The purpose of the TESTA pilot is to evaluate the benefits to student learning of rethinking programme assessment design, with potential added benefits to academic workloads. Dr Tansy Jessop, TESTA Project Leader, met with programme teams and gave a lunchtime talk to colleagues at UCL about TESTA last week, and held discussions with Vice Deans about assessment and feedback approaches. Professor Carmel McNaught, Visiting Professor from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Dr Rosalind Duhs, Senior Teaching Fellow from CALT, attended several of these meetings, adding further value to the process.

TESTA at UNSW

TESTA was rolled out in the faculty of FASS after Dr Sean Brawley, Associate Dean, invited TESTA Project Leader, Dr Tansy Jessop, to run a two day workshop with programme leaders in September 2011. TESTA has proved successful in spite of differences in degree structure and context. UNSW and the University of Birmingham, both members of the global research-intensive Universitas 21 group, have made widescale use of TESTA to enhance programme-level assessment and feedback processes.

TESTA at Birmingham

In the second phase TESTA will be rolled out to the remaining three colleges. Three researchers have been trained to use the TESTA methodology, and are being deployed across the colleges. The BALI project includes the idea of shadowing, supporting and mentoring, and has a student researcher dimension. Nottingham University educational developers are shadowing the process with a view to learning lessons and potentially implementing TESTA approaches at Nottingham.

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