E-assessment: how can we support tutors with their marking of electronically submitted assignments?

Abstract

One of the problems with tutor feedback to students is that a balanced combination of socio emotive and cognitive support is required from the teaching staff, and the feedback needs to be relevant to the assigned grade. Is it possible to capitalise on technology to build training systems for tutors in Higher Education, that will support them with their feedback to students, and which will encourage their students to become more reflective learners? One approach to this question was to build an electronic tool to support tutors in the feedback process. Our work has involved building an open-source mentoring tool for tutors, known as Open Mentor. This tool analyses and displays the different types of comments provided by the tutor as feedback to the student. It then provides reflective comments to the tutor about their use of feedback. Open Mentor was not designed for use at institutional level, but to give teaching staff a tool that can be used in training and also later as personal support that will enable individual tutors to track their use of feedback to students