The National Forum, in partnership with Quality and Qualifications Ireland (QQI), has just announced a series of events scheduled throughout 2020 entitled ‘Work-based Assessment: Exploring Critical Issues and Sharing Solutions’. The purpose of this event series is to initiate a national conversation on work-based assessment and share experiences and approaches so that good practice responses can be identified, and challenges explored collaboratively. The series, including two webinars and one national symposium, will explore critical issues and potential solutions across a range of work-based learning contexts.
Recent developments in curriculum content across higher education institutions have seen an increase in the number of students availing of work-based learning, including internships, placements and apprenticeships, and this trend is set to continue. Work-based learning is key to the development of key graduate attributes and to the achievement of national policy objectives related to employability and student success. The assessment and feedback approaches that underpin work-based learning can sometimes be unfamiliar to academic staff, workplace mentors and students and the recent move to online/remote teaching and learning has also dramatically disrupted the context of work-based learning and assessment.
Through discussion and debate, the upcoming work-based assessment event series will facilitate the development of a national understanding of work-based assessment in different contexts, build a learning community to encourage collaboration and networking, and identify potential actions for the enhancement of practice and the development of enabling policies.
The provisional series schedule is as follows:
| Date | Event |
| 17 June, 2020
2-3pm |
Webinar
Work-based Assessment: Shared Challenges and Opportunities |
| 14 October, 2020
Time TBC |
Webinar
Work-based Assessment: Key Critical Issues – Going Deeper |
| 19 November 2020
Time TBC |
National Symposium
Work-Based Assessment: Practice and Policies – Actions for Sectoral Change (This national seminar will be shaped by conversations and input from the preceding webinars.) |
The first webinar, due to take place on 17 June, will be facilitated by Dr Terry Maguire, Director of the National Forum, Prof Geraldine O’Neill, 2016-18 National Assessment Lead and Mr Peter Cullen, Head of Research and Standards at QQI. Contributors will include Lorna O’Shea (Trinity College Dublin), Gillian Doherty (Accounting Technicians Ireland), Blake Hodkinson (CDETB) and John McCallig (UCD).
To register click here.
An online community space has been developed to facilitate discussion and share key resources between events.
This event series builds on the two-year enhancement theme of the National Forum, which ran from 2016 to 2018 with a stream focused specifically on work-based assessment, which resulted in a National Forum Insight dedicated to the topic, available here. QQI’s 2018 Green Paper on Assessment of Learners and Learning and associated consultation event also included a focus on work-based assessment, which will inform the event series.
For more information on this event series, see here.
