Electronic marking (e-marking1) of student work is now well established within UK education, especially for GCSE and A-level assessment, and in parts of The Open University (OU), the UK’s leading distance-learning university. However, e-marking presents particular challenges for practitioners in symbolically rich curriculum areas (of which mathematics and statistics are prime examples). This is especially true when the marker provides extensive feedback, as with the OU’s correspondence tuition open-learning methodology, with its emphasis on individualized, tailored feedback. Despite great advances in mathematical typesetting over the past 40 years, the input of mathematical equations for most users is slow and laborious compared to text.
As part of continuous assessment, the OU Mathematics and Statistics Department handles 45,000 tutor-marked assignments (TMAs) annually. Most of these assignments are still sent by post, from student to tutor to university (where a proportion is selected for ‘monitoring’, the OU quality assurance mechanism) and then back to the student. The method is well tried, but slow and expensive. For some years the OU has embraced electronic submission (e-submission) in other curriculum areas, enabling students to upload their TMAs to a central server, from which markers download the assignments2 and then upload the marked TMAs (with the marks recorded in separate files). The University’s electronic tutor-marked assignment (eTMA) system successfully handles many thousands of TMAs annually.
There have been several experiments in electronic marking with digital ink technology at the OU [1,2] and elsewhere [3,4] including a trial of electronic marking in mathematics, covering a wide range of OU mathematics and statistics courses from Level 1 up to Level 8 [5]. Building on this previous work, it was decided to pilot e-marking in the Mathematics MSc programme. The MSc programme was chosen because of its size (only 2,200 TMAs per annum) and the mathematical sophistication of the students taking the courses. The pilot took place from February to September 2009 covering a single presentation of the Mathematics MSc courses…
Electronic marking (e-marking1) of student work is now well established within UK education, especially for GCSE and A-level assessment, and in parts of The Open University (OU), the UK’s leading distance-learning university. However, e-marking presents particular challenges for practitioners in symbolically rich curriculum areas (of which mathematics and statistics are prime examples). This is especially true when the marker provides extensive feedback, as with the OU’s correspondence tuition open-learning methodology, with its emphasis on individualized, tailored feedback. Despite great advances in mathematical typesetting over the past 40 years, the input of mathematical equations for most users is slow and laborious compared to text.
As part of continuous assessment, the OU Mathematics and Statistics Department handles 45,000 tutor-marked assignments (TMAs) annually. Most of these assignments are still sent by post, from student to tutor to university (where a proportion is selected for ‘monitoring’, the OU quality assurance mechanism) and then back to the student. The method is well tried, but slow and expensive. For some years the OU has embraced electronic submission (e-submission) in other curriculum areas, enabling students to upload their TMAs to a central server, from which markers download the assignments2 and then upload the marked TMAs (with the marks recorded in separate files). The University’s electronic tutor-marked assignment (eTMA) system successfully handles many thousands of TMAs annually.
There have been several experiments in electronic marking with digital ink technology at the OU [1,2] and elsewhere [3,4] including a trial of electronic marking in mathematics, covering a wide range of OU mathematics and statistics courses from Level 1 up to Level 8 [5]. Building on this previous work, it was decided to pilot e-marking in the Mathematics MSc programme. The MSc programme was chosen because of its size (only 2,200 TMAs per annum) and the mathematical sophistication of the students taking the courses. The pilot took place from February to September 2009 covering a single presentation of the Mathematics MSc courses…
assessment, e-marking, electronic marking, marking, feedback, TMA, tutor marked assignment, Open University, digital ink, distance learning, OU, Open University, PDF Annotator, MSOR Connections Feb 2010 Vol 10 No 1
