We attended UNIwise’s usergroup meeting for WISEflow on Tuesday last week along with colleagues from the product team and have come out of it feeling supercharged with optimism and hope for the future! It was a great opportunity to connect with UNIwise and colleagues at other institutes in person and featured an insightful omnibus of presentations.
Roadmap and Future Developments: Exploring Key Themes
The day started off with an opening talk from UNIwise about some of the exciting developments they have planned for WISEflow. Note that these features have not been added to Sycamore (WISEflow’s development roadmap) and there is no confirmed schedule for their availability at the time of writing:
- Paper based exam support: with no need for QR codes or special paper/ scanning equipment, the aim is to offer a solution for handwritten exams which persist for a myriad of reasons (STEM needs, resource constraints, a short term response to AI, etc.) which allows users to retain the benefits of marking online.
- Device monitor AI detection: the device monitor is a module in WISEflow with a similar premise to facial recognition – it captures screenshots of a device while an exam is ongoing and can also produce a log of any applications that are running during the exam. The resulting report is available to staff to help maintain academic integrity.
BI Norwegian Business School had been exploring the potential to intergate AI into this feature and shared their findings at UNIwise’s partnership seminar back in April, and it seems that it’s being taken forward. The device monitor is not enabled on UCL’s license and isn’t widely used among UK institutes but this has the potential to allow us to run a wider variety of in-person assessments without the lockdown browser, giving students access to specialist applications such as Jupyter Notebook or RStudio. See UNIwise’s current article on the device monitor. - AI assistance tools for authors and assessors: WISEflow’s authoring tools for the creation of FLOWmulti exams and rubrics make use of APIs provided by Learnosity, which has also offered a variety of AI products for some time. Other platforms, such as FeedbackFruits – which is currently being evaluated via a small pilot within the Faculty of Mathematical & Physical Sciences at UCL, feature an AI-driven feedback coach for students. Although the use of AI is a controversial area, UNIwise emphasised that these would be introduced as supportive tools and the focus would always be on a human-led approach.
- FLOWmulti similarity report: where multiple choice exams in WISEflow feature essay components, these can be subject to similarity checking in the future! We’ll be very pleased to announce this feature when it becomes available.
- General authoring improvements: although detail was fairly minimal, this will include improved co-authoring, allowing users to collaborate more easily on creating exam papers and rubrics.
Exploring the New Marking Tool
Following the suite of future developments planned, we were brought back into the present day with an interactive session gathering user feedback on the new marking tool, which came out of beta in February and has been recommended more broadly for assessments delivered in WISEflow since May. Now that there is a rough timeline for the planned deprecation of the legacy marking tool, it’s more important than ever to capture some of the improvements and enhancements that markers would like to see (click on the image below to access full detail):
Innovating Assessment: Reflective Portfolios and Moodle Integration with WISEflow at the University of Portsmouth
A quick coffee break and then it was onto a great presentation by the University of Portsmouth on their Moodle integration with WISEflow and continuing success with innovative ePortfolios delivered via FLOWmulti assessments!
UNIwise announced their partnership with Canvas to support Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) back in August, along with plans to expand their support to other platforms such as Blackboard, Moodle and Brightspace but in the meantime colleagues at Portsmouth have developed a very simple but effective homebrewed solution which offers a straightforward and easily navigable experience for staff and students alike.
Portsmouth have also expanded their ePortfolios project from the series of small pilots they were conducting, rolling this out to approximately 3000 students in the 2023/24 academic year and 14,000 students this year. They’ve continue to receive overwhelmingly positive feedback from students:
WISEflow Any% Glitchless Speedrun
In the afternoon was an offering from UCL: Claudia took a playful approach to optimisation, highlighting future enhancements captured in Sycamore and practices that can be adopted right now to help users rocket through the administration and marking of assessments. In particular, some of the tips and tricks uncovered in marking include a DIY comment bank and a way for anybody to add feedback at a rate of over 100wpm – which very much deserves its own blog post.
Introducing UNIwise Originality: Enhancing Assessment Integrity
Capping off the day, it was back to UNIwise to speak about their own similarity checking product. Available as a standalone piece of software or able to be integrated with WISEflow, it’s been developed as a response to a market with decreasing variety and aims to make use of new technologies and models that are available.
See UNIwise’s article on Originality for further information.
Access slides provided from this usergroup meeting (UCL login required).