Presentation delivered by Gordon McLeod, Learning Technologist, University of Glasgow as part of the SMUG (Scottish Moodle User Group) Meet event on the 7th of June, 2019.

1. Offline marking of practical
exams using OSCEMark
Gordon McLeod
Learning Technologist
School of Veterinary Medicine, University of Glasgow

2. What is an OSCE?
• An objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) is often used in health
sciences (nursing,dentistry, veterinary medicine). It is designed to test
competence in skills such as communication, clinical examination or
medical procedures
• Students run a gauntlet of 4-8 stations per day over several days, and have
5 minutes to perform each task then move to the next station to read
instructions on their next task
• Also typically, each station has 2-3 streams of students being examined
simultaneously, each stream having a different assessor
• Traditionally the performance of each student would be marked on a sheet
of paper, and the results collated electronically after the exam.

3. Here is a typical 1st year task – students later
in the course will do more challenging tasks

4. What does this have to do with Moodle?
• Forms are written on a Moodle Database activity
• They are then pulled down onto tablets using a json script and
displayed via the OSCEMark app
• The app stores the results of each form on a local database (and
writes to a backup on a memory card), then we batch upload the
results back to Moodle
• On Moodle, we can filter the results using the database search, or just
batch export everything from the multiple assessors in one step

5. Moodle Database Activity

6. Course Display Result Display

7. Old Process
• Exams written
• Exams printed
• Exams take place
• Papers collated
• Administrator transcribes results
• Analysis and pass mark determined
• Results available for Board of Examiners
New Process
• Exams written
• Exams entered into Moodle template
• Exam published to tablet (and a few printed)
• Exam takes place & results uploaded
• Analysis and pass mark determined
• Results available for Board of Examiners
Result of process change
• Admin work pre-loaded (1-2 days specialist effort required at start)
• Removal of risk of transcription errors and lost exam papers
• Feedback comments typed instead of handwritten - and marker can’t go ‘off reservation’
• Processing time for each exam reduced from 1 week to about 5 minutes