Posted by:
Tad Chapman, Director of Vocational Education at risr/
Like far too many of us, I spend the average working day staring at my numerous computer screens- which, for a man whose various previous jobs have included being a personal trainer, a thatcher and a bin man, can be tough to reconcile!
So I always enjoy this time of year in the world of apprenticeships and skills, where opportunities to get away from my desk, attend conferences and speak to actual, real-life people, face-to-face, come thick and fast. This week it has been the Apprenticeships & Training Conference in Liverpool- arguably the sector’s largest gathering- but last week risr/ were excited to be the headline sponsors of the Apprenticeships Conference in Birmingham.
At the latter, I was privileged to deliver a workshop to attendees on the evolution and innovation of performance assessments- including practical observations and oral assessments such as professional discussions. These assessment types- so common within vocational education, but also increasingly valued in academic programmes- are an extremely valid mode of determining competence, however their operational delivery now often lags behind that of written assessments. And as a result, the need for the kind of supercharging, technologically-speaking, that standardised testing experienced throughout the 2010’s and post-Covid, is becoming pressing.
The current proposed reforms to apprenticeship assessment don’t seem to be hitting the mark in terms of genuinely addressing one of the biggest bugbears for which the system has faced criticism; capacity. (I mean, speaking to colleagues over these last couple of weeks, they don’t appear to be hitting the mark for various reasons, though that’s a whole additional blog post…!). But technology and human-in-the-loop Generative AI has genuine potential, now and in the immediate future, to help assessment organisations deliver more efficient and effective performance assessments and help drive confidence and satisfaction from key stakeholders, including government and regulators.
If you’d like to hear more- or weren’t able to join me in Birmingham- I delivered a webinar along similar lines just a few months prior. You can view the 30-minute session here- Walk This Way: A Path to Digital Performance Assessments.
In both the webinar and last week’s session, I posed a question to attendees-
“What is your organisation doing to evolve and innovate its performance assessments?”
If you’ve not already asked yourself that, there’s no time like the present to prepare for the future.
Right, I’d better get back in front of those computer screens, lest I get withdrawal symptoms!
