The Covid-19 pandemic has enhanced the role of technology in a variety of fields, including education. In the last year, digital learning has risen by leaps and bounds. Online exams, like eLearning, should be a practical solution in today’s world. The evaluation of student performance is an important element of any learning process.
Given the shifting landscape, authorities must modify the criteria of old ‘assessment’ processes to adapt to a new digital mode of assessments.
“Nothing that we do to, or for, our students is more important than our assessment of their work and the feedback we give them on it. The results of our assessment influence our students for the rest of their lives and careers — fine if we get it right, but unthinkable if we get it wrong.”
Assessment is at the heart of the learning process: it shapes students’ comprehension of the subject and determines their capacity to grow. At the same time, assessment and feedback are an important component of practitioners’ workloads, and they continue to be a source of concern for many institutions due to growing numbers, fewer funds, and higher learner expectations.
What contribution can technology make to ensuring that assessment and feedback processes are agile, streamlined, and capable of promoting high-quality learning?
Benefits of Digital Assessments:
The assessment should recognize that outcomes such as the educational attainment of students have multiple intervening variables and extraneous influences.
1. Cost-effective
There is no paper involved with digital assessments. As a result, there is no need to spend money on stationery. It also means a cleaner environment. Consider how much time you’ll have to spend collecting paper assessments from students, keeping them stored, distributing the checked assessments, and so on. Online records do not necessitate the purchase of storage space for the evaluations. All the data is stored on a server.
2. Interactive
There are various interactive modes of online evaluations. You can ask learners to choose one or more of the correct answers in multiple-choice questions. You can create interactivities that are click-and-reveal or drag-and-drop. To assess student comprehension, consider employing gamified scenarios. Your learners will be more engaged if the assessments are interactive.
3. Immediate feedback supports the formative assessment method
When it comes to feedback, the timing is crucial. Feedback is most helpful when given shortly after or as near to the completion of work as feasible, according to research. Educators may quickly see which topics are difficult to understand when data is easily available and elegantly presented, and they can alter their focus on the topic or the person as needed. This is the premise underpinning formative assessment, which has been shown to improve learning far more than traditional summative examinations.
4. Technology easily accommodates students with disabilities
People with impairments can use online examinations as an alternative to traditional assessments. Students with motor skills issues, for example, can just touch the screen for the answer instead of writing it down. For essays, for example, voice to text is a possible alternative. The options are limitless.
5. Fewer errors
There is a risk of mistakes while manually evaluating paper assessments. With online evaluations, you can nearly completely eliminate it. A pre-programmed algorithm is used to score and record the questions. There is very little possibility of making a mistake. With a single click of a button, you may get aggregated reports at any time.
Additionally: Technology can make possible the assessment of skills and processes that were previously difficult to measure, including the dynamic processes involved in learning. Technology can also add a personal quality to feedback, even in large-group contexts, and, through efficiencies gained from asynchronous communication and automated marking, can enable practitioners to make more productive use of their time.
Digital assessments are in and are here to say. The sooner you adopt it in your learning strategy the faster you will reap results.
Online assessments also require a different approach. There are numerous challenges to conducting online examinations at scale, including limitations on the types of questions that can be asked in an online environment, handling network and power disruptions, and preventing unethical practices.
Quiklrn supports various types of assessments for faculty to evaluate and get insights into student performance.
- Create a question bank aligned to course outcome objectives.
- Create a unique test for each student with randomized questions
- Create online or offline tests
- Gather insights into student performance
- Conduct surprise quizzes, internal tests, descriptive exams, and high value proctored evaluations.
To know more, visit our website and request for a detailed discussion — https://home.quiklrn.com/
-Saloni Jindal
