Authentic assessment at scale: The Infrastructure for Lane 2

As institutions increasingly look to a two lane approach to assessment, ensuring that you have the right infrastructure to deliver open assessment is critical to giving faculty the right tools to create authentic, scaffolded tasks that enable students to reflect on the learning process rather than purely on delivering a final artefact that may or may not be the point of the task. Inspera provides an integrated suite of capabilities that work seamlessly to allow you to deliver open digital assessments that empower students and faculty to focus on the learning process, without increasing faculty workload.

Two lanes

Generative AI has increased the speed and necessity of assessment redesign. With the two lane approach gaining in popularity as a framework to addressing a wicked problem, institutions need a modern digital infrastructure that supports their pedagogical approach to teaching, learning and assessment’, in the way they want to, fitting to the framework. Inspera’s flexible capabilities easily support both lanes, opening up possibilities for academic staff that may not have otherwise been considered. To find out more on how we support lane 1 / secure assessments, please click here. To find out more on how we support lane 2 assessments, please keep reading here.

Lane 1 assessments are secure, supervised and act to exactly what an individual student has learned. Operating mainly at strategic points across a program, these tasks focus strictly on the assessment of learning to ensure that students have met learning outcomes before they progress or graduate. Because they take place in a highly controlled, supervised environment, they allow institutions to form assured judgements of student ability. Generative AI is typically restricted or completely prohibited in Lane 1 to protect academic integrity, though it may be allowed under strict supervision if a specific professional skill requires it, such as during an interactive oral exam or a timed, in-class test.

Lane 2 assessments are open, unsecured tasks designed to help students develop deep disciplinary knowledge and practical skills through the process of completing their coursework. Operating mostly at the individual unit level, these assessments focus on assessment for and as learning, focusing on process as much as product. Instead of restricting technology, these assessments scaffold the responsible use of external tool and resources, including generative AI, to help students brainstorm ideas, structure arguments, and reflect on their learning.

Supporting authentic assessment

We know that a well delivered open or lane 2 assessment isn’t simply a case of handing students a question or task, and asking them to hand something in a few weeks later. There is a need to support complex coursework, and evaluate the learning process through authentic projects that require students to critically engage with external resources.

Managing this at scale requires the right infrastructure. While an LMS is the right technology to support learning, an assessment platform goes beyond being a passive file repository, providing an environment optimised for assessment. Structured work spaces for the student dovetail with grading workflows for feedback and marking and flow into assessment data, useful to all.

The potential combining of an open assessment with a secure assessment to both provide a creative space but also have assurance, points towards a single assessment platform covering both for a seamless student experience and institutional efficiency.

Architectured for open assessment

Inspera provides the architecture to deliver and provide feedback on process and product. Moving beyond a simple space to upload a document, by blending question types, resources and creating a logical pathway for students to follow, institutions can create a rich open environment for students to demonstrate their best work.

Alignment between lanes: combining open and secure tasks

Operationalising a two-lane assessment strategy can introduce an unintended consequence of technical and administrative fragmentation. When institutions treat Lane 1 (secure, invigilated) and Lane 2 (open, scaffolded) as separate operational silos, deploying disparate technologies, the LMS/VLE for one and an assessment platform for the other, it creates a hard barrier that prevents a pedagogical link between the two lanes. Beyond the diverging student experience, it creates a training and resourcing issue for institutions. For a two lane model to be robust, there must be a simple method of faculty and educators blending the two. For example, a student might generate a policy document in lane 2 using all the resources available to them in an open environment and then subsequently defend their methodology, critique their choices and extend their work within a secure lane 1 environment. When these two components live in different platforms, linking them is an administrative and technical burden, leading to a disjointed experience.

Inspera eliminates this friction by unifying the entire assessment spectrum within a single platform. Because Inspera Assessment handles both open and secure, institutions can design a single, cohesive assessment ecosystem that spans both lanes. For educators this allows them to combine tasks and provide feedback across lanes with ease, for administrators it removes the overhead of cross-platform data synchronisation and for CIOs it reduces the resource required to maintain integrations.

Grouping tasks to assess process not just the product

Through use of our assessment path capability, tasks can be grouped together and feedback provided overall. This structure allows you to assess process and thinking to reward the learning trajectory, not just the final polished product. Assessment paths can be set up so that tasks run in serial or parallel, scaffolded as you see fit. In serial, you could require students to demonstrate their current progress at specific intervals or a number of times of their choosing. In parallel, you can construct specific spaces for different task types. 

Emailing documents back and forth between student and educator is not sustainable, desirable or efficient. Uploading disparate documents that standalone neither helps bring them together to demonstrate process, nor is an effective way of providing feedback. Institutions need to be able to create nuanced workflows that aid students and faculty to have dialogue and provide the opportunities for feedback to be directly applied to the next stage of the process, and easily returned to at any point.

Qualitative feedback

Inspera’s dedicated marking workspace allows for a variety of rubrics (qualitative only, various methods of quantitative and qualitative), comments and criteria. Coming soon, our new classification AI feedback tool that doesn’t use generative AI, but improves efficiency by reusing human generated comments across a cohort. This new tool will enable faculty to provide in the moment, quality feedback that is based on their own comments as the tool learns from and mimics the academic, rather than generating its own feedback.

Continuous and process driven assessment requires feedback that matches the cadence of the student. A dedicated space makes this easy to use for educators and administrators, which in turn enhances the student experience and interaction with their feedback. Feedback on the process is far more memorable than feedback on the task itself and Inspera provides the technology to deliver meaningful feedback at the point(s) in the process when it has the most impact.

Scale your open assessments

Give faculty the tools to evaluate the learning process, not just the final product. Speak with our team to see how Inspera unifies your open and secure assessments within a single system.