Computer Aided Feedback and Assessment System (CAFAS)

The CAFAS Project has been funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council. CAFAS stands for Computer Aided Feedback and Assessment System. Its main aims are to assist academics in providing timely, high quality feedback and assessment results to students in tertiary education institutions and to thereby improve learning outcomes. It has been designed to mimic commonly used paper-based feedback forms and to cater to a wide range of disciplinary assessment requirements.

CAFAS uses weighted assessment criteria to break down an assessment task into specific aspects that are pertinent to the assessment task (assignment). There are two methods by which feedback and assessment can be provided for each assessment criterion via a Slider or Rubric. Feedback comments can be typed in and saved so that they can be quickly re-entered, thus creating a database of comments. Comments can also be created ahead of time by a team of assessors for quick entry while "marking". Or, more likely, a combination of these two approaches can be adopted.

CAFAS enables academics to design a feedback form which includes information about Grade Descriptors, Graduate Attributes and overall class performance. The aim of this is to improve the students understanding of the assessment scheme and what is expected of them.

In terms of administrative features for academics, CAFAS has "mark book" functionality to automatically tally marks from various assignments and calculate an overall mark for the course/subject/unit. This information can be exported in CSV format which can be opened in Excel.

CAFAS is an online system, therefore a broadband internet connection is required to use CAFAS.

Students access their feedback form via their university email account, thus overcoming many problems that distribution of feedback/assessment results causes for both students and staff.

Initially CAFAS will be offered as a web-based system and will be hosted by the University of South Australia. Your data will only be available to you, the colleagues that you nominate, and your students. The licensing scheme (Creative Commons Non-commercial ShareAlike 2.5 Australia Licence) enables all universities to use CAFAS free of charge and to install and develop CAFAS for their local IT requirements in the event that the institution decides that the system hosted by UniSA is not suitable.

The basic process is:

1. Login using your usual university username and password.
2. Configure CAFAS to your institution’s specific requirements and terminology and specify colleagues in your assessment team i.e. the people who will be helping you with assessment/feedback.
3. Design a feedback form. Define the assessment criteria and their weightings. Decide between the Slider and Rubric feedback mechanisms or use a combination.
4. Initial Publication of the blank feedback form to students. Ideally you should publish the blank feedback form at the beginning of the assignment – so students can understand how they will be assessed. CAFAS will produce an HTML file of the feedback form which can be incorporated into course/unit/subject material.
5. Use the feedback form. This stage is conducted by the whole assessment team - collaborating online.
6. Review & moderate feedback forms. This stage is conducted by the course/subject/unit coordinator.
7. Final Publication of the completed feedback forms to students is achieved via an automatically generated email message.  

Support for this project website has been provided by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council Ltd, an initiative of the Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations.

The views expressed in the project do not necessarily reflect the views of the Australian Learning and Teaching Council. 

This project is led by Mr. Martin Freney from the School of Architecture and Design at the University of South Australia with funding from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council. Dr. Denise Wood from the School of Communication is a team member. 

Unless otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Australia Licence.