Web design and development by Front, a strategy, design and technology studio in Belfast, Northern Ireland

Figure 1: Presenting some of our ideas

Ofqual in Northern Ireland supports learning providers in the development of e-assessment through the use of online testing (e-testing) and online portfolios of work (e-portfolios) within their learning environment.  Support, information and guidance has been made available through a dedicated website http://www.efutures.org. 

Ofqual have just engaged the Front team in a research & development project to to review Efutures and explore its potential as a resource to support e-assessment developments across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to examine how the information they provide can meet the needs of a wider audience. It’s an exciting challenge!

The Challenge

The key issues on the Ofqual project are:

• Ofqual’s research has shown that whilst there is increasing e-assessment activity, there is a lack of strategic guidance.
• There is a need to examine how the current site (http://www.efutures.org) can be developed to take into account 4-country regulators as well as general and vocational qualifications.
• There is a desire to build a single source of practical guidance on developing and implementing e-assessment in the learning environment.

The project has 2 broad aims:

1. Create an online resource: Create an informative, engaging e-assessment “toolkit” based on the materials available and experiences of the Ofqual team.
2. Efutures Website: Carry out research to guide the development of the Efutures website.

Progress so Far

The really exciting part of this project is being able to tackle the website from 2 different angles: filling the immediate gap for information with the toolkit (initially this will be a prototype, just advising a particular segment of users) and then shaping the overarching direction for the Efutures site.

Getting off to a Great Start: Understanding the Audience, Understanding Context

At the start of a project it is important to understand both the needs of the clients and those of the actual users. Often they are completely different, and this guides our approach. 

We have carried out interviews with the Ofqual team to understand and document their own thoughts, needs – then interviewed a cross-section of users and interested parties to do the same. The results have been incredibly rich and informative. Where we couldn’t meet with people in person, we’ve carried out phone interviews or asked them to fill in an online survey. All of this material and insight will help us make the online toolkit directly relevant to users, and will guide how Ofqual take their Efutures site forward into the future. 

We’ve also spent a great deal of time reading and decoding existing content; reference guides and policy documents; we found that there was a lot of institutional language that didn’t really resonate (or feature in our conversations) with real users. This has been really useful – we’re starting to get a sense of how the language of the online resources should be constructed so that it’s deeply relevant. Great insight gained.

Next Steps

Toolkit: With the client on-board with the broad approach we will be able to start fleshing out the requirements, developing personas and scenarios, generating a more detailed IA and set of wireframes.

Efutures: With all the interviews now complete and the online survey responses still trickling in, we are looking forward to compiling the data.

We are also starting the expert review of the existing site and a competitive analysis of sites with a similar purpose.