Hi everyone,

I’d like to introduce myself as the CEL theme leader for enhancing assessment and feedback. My name is Shelley Thompson, and I’m a senior lecturer and Head of Education and Professional Practice for
Politics programmes in the Faculty of Media and Communication’s Corporate and Marketing Communications Department. I’m so excited to be working with colleagues across the university on thinking about, reflecting on, and innovating assessment and feedback practices in your disciplines, programmes, departments, and faculties. I join Anne Quinney, who has been working in this theme for the last two years, but will be turning her attention to policy and procedure.

Assessment and feedback is such an important part of learning and teaching for students and staff. For students, the experiences of assessment and feedback are not always positive, and, based on NSS data, is an area of lower student satisfaction for many universities across the country. For staff, assessment and feedback can be a joy and a challenge at all stages from setting the assessment to supporting students as they engage with it to marking and feeding back. For both students and staff, it can be an emotional process and at times a significant portion of their workload.

With all that in mind, CEL has made assessment and feedback a significant focus of activity for this year and we’re branding 2017-18 the Year of Assessment and Feedback. In addition to having two CEL theme leaders for assessment and feedback, we will be working closely with Faculties on events and activities to support students and staff in these important areas.

I’m here to facilitate that at the individual, unit, programme, department and Faculty level. My goal as a CEL theme leader is to help you improve student and staff experiences of assessment and feedback, whatever that means for you and your students. I’m here to help.

Some of the things we have planned, include:

• Supporting faculties with celebrating good practice in assessment and feedback through assessment fiestas,
• Facilitating workshops that help departments and programmes adapt principles of assessment and feedback to their own disciplines to support good practice and consistency,
• Collating and curating resources around assessment and feedback through the CEL blog and forming an assessment and feedback toolkit, which will include highlighting the great work on programmes in all our disciplines, and
• Drop-in sessions where we can discuss your priorities around assessment and feedback in your academic practice.

The long and the short of it is, I’m here to help you with assessment and feedback on your units and programmes. I can’t promise I’ll have all the answers, but I’d love to work with you as we explore good practice in assessment and feedback.

So, get in touch with me at shelleyt@bournemouth.ac.uk.