Today’s assessment practices in higher education in Norway are a far cry from the digital advancements that are being developed and embraced in other areas of society. The digital “natives” who attend higher education institutions in Norway today study and learn with their laptops/mobiles but when they turn up for their long-awaited examination, they are required to reproduce their knowledge with pen and paper. Academics eagerly wait for the students’ papers to arrive by snail mail, and spend their time interpreting the illegible hand writing while administrators spend their days counting, copying, double-checking, packing, and sending examination papers from student to examiner. This talk looks at the projects that have been initiated at a national and a local level which focus on the transformation of the traditional paper-based assessment process in place today to an end-to-end digital process. By establishing a National Project for Digital Assessment in Higher Education and inviting all state owned universities to participate in a joint collaboration, the project’s goal is to share challenges and results and establish cooperation between the universities. The response to this invitation has been overwhelming, and 76 named resources representing 27 different higher education institutions are now participating in this national project. The technological perspective of the project has been a high priority from day one, and the project has taken a leading role in work related to the technological aspects of the digital assessment process. The presentation will focus particularly on these areas, and the perspective of succeeding in with a national project and joint collaboration in a broad scale.

• A joint collaboration including most Norwegian Universities
• The use of an innovative public procurement process – in collaboration with vendor market
• How digital solutions might influence new ways of learning and assessment
• Solving legal issues
• Establishing a national service platform for integration

Freddy Barstad (National Coordinator for Digital Assessment, eCampus – UNINETT AS) is an experienced manager and ICT-strategist, with 20 years of experience working with ICT in government, the public sector and as a consultant; he has spent the last 11 years in higher education.