The six-pack of online assessment

This article is meant as a brief presentation about experiences and work-in-progress projects. There is rather few scientific research on this topic, but in the last two years we have had exceptionally much practical experience.

The pandemic also prompts us to reflect about our approach to evaluation. In the last years, as a responsible for learning, development and quality assurance in a university of the arts, I supported many teachers in their shift towards online assessment. With the pandemic situation, the full shift towards digital and online education showed us even unexpected opportunities to tackle assessment differently and better than before. Just as we discovered in this exceptional situation several new opportunities in the approach to educational learning activities, there are tremendous perks for the evaluation process too! We can state that we have an empirical based conclusion that assessing online, supported with appropriate software tools, results in a strong leverage to all forms of assessment.

With this knowledge and experience, it would be a real pity to return to old school assessment and examination, at the end of this semester, with paper and pen, all the students together in a room with surveillance… 

To put the stress on the benefits and real leverage of our shift to digital and online assessment, in this practice-based paper I describe six opportunities as the six-pack of online assessment.

These are the 6 advantages which will make your assessment definitively stronger:

1. Organizing the evaluation for your courses through a digital learning platform, for e.g. Blackboard, is legally stronger, certainly for submitting (exam) assignments.
2. Assessment is better facilitated (grade center) and at the same time potentially more objectified: eg. view per question, eg. delegation of assessment but also the built-in opportunity to work with rubrics / indicators.
3. The exam pool offers opportunities for more coherence, objectivity and validity.
4. It is remarkable how technical knowledge and actions can also be evaluated in written online exams.
5. You can get final reports that make your exams even stronger for the future.
6. A digital peer assessment tool facilitates and objectifies the assessment of attitudes.

1. Legal strengths

With online evaluation we have enormous opportunities to make evaluation legally stronger, ranging from the deadline for submitting assignments online to a general better time management for the student.

1.1 Assessing online makes deadlines as clear as water. 

Digital assignment: submitting assignments online, very important for exam papers. The deadline is clear because turning in the assignment after the deadline is impossible. The students receive a confirmation automatically, the teacher has an overview and all the information, documents and even attachments are safely stored online within the course environment.

Written digital open book exam: built-in timer and clear warnings about deadline,100% equal closing time for all participants.

Written digital closed book exam: possible with proctoring tools but also on-campus under surveillance. Both situations keep their legal strengths as there are many built-in control systems, starting from personal login to dashboard monitoring of all the online activity of the student while making the exam. 

1.2 The learning environment is a transparent information center.

Both giving the instructions for an assignment (teacher point of view) as well as submitting the assignment (student point of view) without using e-mail is a much safer process. 

All the information remains stored online together, which is another blessing in case of juridical despite. Clear information online is independent of time and place and guaranties a legal embedment in the online course.

2. Assess facilitation

2.1 Benefits for the teacher

Learning management systems such as blackboard provide a grade center which really facilitates the approach, the overview and the processing of evaluation. Also, in the view per task/student/exam, the facilitation, offered structure and possibilities of annotation are undeniable strong points if we compare with the correction of assignments and exams in the traditional manual way without using a learning platform. The teacher can write annotations in the answers, a general feedback to the student and a comment/memo to keep personal. Even video feedback is often built in the learning environment (new in Blackboard too). To top it, we have the new dimension of co-creation and shared responsibility: co-teachers or assistants can work together in the same environment and consult the latest version and annotations of colleagues at any time. 

2.2 Benefits for the student

For the student-point-of-view, we also can distinguish various positive aspects in the assessment facilitation. Assessment is no longer limited within the walls of a classroom but can be both performed anytime, anywhere with the aid of computer, phone or tablet. Research has also proven that most students are interested in going through an online assessment rather than a paper-and-pencil one. Moreover, the students are also delighted when they get their results and feedback automatically immediately after the test.

The classroom is not always designed to facilitate learning in a comfortable way, nor for exams. There may be great obstacles to be met during an examination process, such as hard chairs, harsh light, and students being sited too close to one another. The noisy environment of the classroom takes the focus away, distracting students who are never able to concentrate on their task as their creativity and their flow are often interrupted. Taking exams in a comfortable environment is a nice leverage. (1)

People with special needs can also experience the benefit of taking tests and being assessed online. Useful methods have been developed; for example, students can simply touch the screen for the answer instead of writing it. Speech to text is also another great option and a great solution to people facing difficulties in essay writing. (1)

It has been documented that students experience stress and anxiety while waiting for exam results. With online exams, except for certain tests like essays, students can know their test results immediately resulting in less anxiety and pressure which affects their learning capability in the long run. (3)

3. Opportunities for more coherence, objectivity and validity

Question management in a pool offers a better construction of your questions and this is something that you can even gradually develop better within the online exam environment.

Question management consists in the labeling of question types, categories (for example linked to chapters of your course), subjects, levels of difficulty and keywords.

This whole range of parameters help you to develop a stronger exam / examination environment each year and brings the coherence, objectivity and validity to another level. The stronger you make the labeling / tags of each question within the pool, the more you enhance the coherence and validity of a single exam you create out of your pool. In a non-digital environment, it is hard to reach this level of refinement. Important in the objectivity during the correction work: the teacher can choose to check per question instead of per student. Also, a great advantage for more objectivity, is the possibility to hide the username of the student so you correct the work anonymously which brings the objectivity to a maximum level. 

Tests can be personalized and tailored to individual students. The level of difficulty of each question can be modulated depending on the learner’s previous responses, which leverages the coherence of the test. (2)

4. Technical knowledge and actions can also be evaluated in online written assessment

Is digital and online assessment only appropriate for theoretical courses? No, the possibilities for assessing technical competences is underestimated.

Just some examples to prove this point: 

• You give the students some statements and ask them to mark the right statement, covering a technical dilemma.
• You give them a scheme or drawing with statements and the question to mark the right statement that corresponds with the drawing of the scheme.
• Give a picture with indications and the question which indicator marks the right technical case that is shown in the picture.
• You can ask the student to indicate the requested technical part in a given picture or scheme.
• Ask for the right terminology for a part that you indicated with an arrow in the picture of a technical instrument.
• Ask the students to link different items in a picture to the right description and order (while working with letters and/or numbers to make the connections).

Fun and interactive simulations with the use of multimedia, such as videos or recordings in the examination itself, opens up the measurement of technical and complex competences. In the meanwhile, this approach helps students focus.. Multimedia is known to engage students in learning, and consequently in assessments. Visual and auditory learners are more focused on the test because of those stimuli rather than just long strings of words and sentences page after page, which strains the brain. (3)

5. You can get reports that make your exams even stronger for the future

Back-end data from LMSs, such as the number of log-ins, time on task, and number of discussion posts, can be linked to hard assessment data such as examinations or performance-based data to provide a fuller assessment of a learner’s effort and progress in an online course. (2)

Most online learning environments give the possibility to generate interesting reports after the assessment took place. Within Blackboard for example, it is just a click away in the column where you find the results in the grade center.

You get a lot of feedback from such a report! Feedback consists in a ranking of your questions and a division in reasonable, honest and good questions. Also a ranking in the level of difficulty: simple, average and difficult questions. The time the students needed to answer each question and the total exam. Based on this report, you get a lot of feedback to improve your pool of questions. The major - and easiest - adjustment will be the accurate determination of the timing of the exam. Maybe you thought they would work an hour on the questions but when you notice in the report that the average time was 35 minutes, next time you will adjust your timing to 40 minutes which is a fair and more accurate timing of your exam.

6. A digital peer assessment tool facilitates and objectifies the assessment of attitudes

Learning management systems also invested more in peer assessment tools. Blackboard for example, offers one tool for group-, peer- and self assessment. Using such a tool, attitudes can be appreciated, qualified and quantified in an objective way. If you try a peer assessment in a non-digital way, you get tons of paperwork and calculations ahead. That is the main reason why few teachers use peer assessment, which is a pity. During the pandemic, several teachers discovered for the first time the advantages of the build-in-tool. A good peer assessment tool facilitates the whole process, including the creation of criteria. Criteria you indicate to use for the student and/or for peers and/or for the teacher. Without a good tool, assessing those criteria is a far more delicate matter. 

Conclusion

Back to "normal" in 2021-2022? Please no... Let us embrace these opportunities and integrate them for a better education. The tail wags the dog, optimizing the evaluation creates a stronger learning environment.

> Relevant URLs or literature references

• Create tests in Blackboard Ultra
• Importance of Online Assessment in the E-learning Process 
• The Impact Of Online Assessment On The Educational Sector (1)
• 15 Benefits Of Computer-Based Testing (2)
• 7 Reasons Why You Should Conduct Assessments Online According To Students (3)