The Requirements

Assessments needed to be available to students on mobile phones, as they wouldn't necessarily have access to PCs in the workplace, and the administrative overhead of paper-based assessment made it problematic.

Additionally, many students didn't have good mobile phone signals in their workplaces-some were radiologists, working in lead liked rooms, for example-and so they needed to be able to sync to pick up assessments when they had a signal, and resync again when the assessments were complete in order to send their answers back to a central server.

The Challenge

To create a service platform allowing tutors to send assessments and supporting materials to the mobile devices of Health and Social Care students on work-based practice. The ALPS partners are the Health and Social Care faculties of Leeds, Bradford, Huddersfield, Leeds Metropolitan and York St John Universities, as well as the NHS Yorkshire and the Humber. The other bodies involved are T-Mobile, ecommnet and MyKnowledgeMap.

The five universities involved in the ALPS project were using different VLEs, but they all required access to the same template assessment package. ALPS asked MyKnowledgeMap to provide a tool which would allow the tutors to create and package the assessments for delivery to the devices.

The Solution

The service platform created for the ALPS project, based on our ReallyManaging Assessment system, allowed tutors to send assessments and supporting materials to mobile devices which the students used while on work-based practice. Tutors across all five institutions could create tailor-made assessments using a wide range of question types including multiple choice, fill in the gaps, and free text questions.

The assessments could then be uploaded to a secure application on students phones, and packaged with supporting materials such as additional instructions or extra reading. The students could then complete the assessments whilst at work and submit their answers for marking and feedback.

The ALPS project won the gold award at the industry "Oscars", the IMS Global Learning Impact Awards in 2011. It also won the Innovation Award in the Tertiary, FE & HE category at the 2009 Handheld Learning Awards and the Techworld Mobility Project of the Year 2008.