Matching final assessment to employability: developing a digital viva as an end of programme assessment

While traditionally the viva voce examination had a central role in student assessment it fell out of favour as higher education expanded. This paper describes the development of a digital video viva examination to promote a more authentic and lower stakes method of assessment for students in their final under-graduate module. The paper presents a case study using a module from pre-registration nursing but the approach could be useful for other practice based and vocational disciplines in the health sciences, social work and business management and law. The paper describes the challenges of developing a truly authentic assessment when faced with academic requirements of the programme. The problems of video assessment include broadband speeds and file sharing are discussed. The authors were able to develop a lower stakes assessment with students on average recording and re-recording their viva submission 3.41 times and rehearsing it 3.67 times.