online schoolapp
Assessment of student activities is an integral part of school education. Tracking the students’ progress helps in measuring the quality of education and identifying students’ strengths/weaknesses and improving the learning process. Assessment can also serve the purpose of offering certificates and grades that measure the degree of learning.
The Covid 19 pandemic and its related disruptions have badly affected the classroom learning process for students in India. Educational institutions have undertaken a sudden shift to online education to prevent the spread of the pandemic. The unpredictable changes happening in the educational sector have led to many challenges, particularly in conducting online assessments.
When school education underwent a sudden digital transformation, the assessment methods also became online. Even though there are certain challenges, online assessments provide numerous advantages over traditional classroom evaluations. The school community can easily tackle the difficulties and implement effective online assessment strategies with a bit of effort.
Let’s now explore the benefits, challenges and solutions to overcome the difficulties in conducting online assessments.
In online assessments, educators use a wide variety of flexible dynamic tools to evaluate, measure, and document students’ learning progress. With the help of such tools, the educators can get an overall impression of the student’s performance.
Here are some key benefits to consider:
Assessment reports and feedback: Online assessments bring quick and instant updates on student results in reports, notifications and other similar options. This helps the teachers on how the students are doing and the areas for improvement. For example, the results can be obtained in less time in an online test. So the teacher will be able to instantly identify which questions all students got wrong and which question concepts to be taught again to the entire class.
Easy test preparation automatic evaluation: Teachers usually spend about 1-hour preparing and setting question papers in traditional school assessments. They also have the additional burden of carrying the question papers to different classes, distributing them to the students and correcting the answer sheet of each student (which alone can take up to 3 hrs for an average of 30 students). The boon of online assessment tools is that they offer automatic assessment for various modes of evaluation such as multiple-choice questions, fill in the blanks, true or false and even for some short descriptive answers. The assessment solutions also help in the easy preparation of all categories of questions. Thus, with the help of such tools, teachers can reduce their time and effort by 80%.
Automated test tools: Online assessment tools better collate crowdsourced question bundles. Working online makes it easier to prepare questions by selecting appropriate questions from such reusable and vast collections. It is easier for a teacher to mark and issue results. Some assessment systems also provide options to create automatic and randomized papers. These facilities offer huge flexibility for the teachers in preparing questions and save their time for the same. The storage efficiency in computer-based assessment is a great benefit that helps create large repositories of questions answers, which makes it easy for students to revise, practice and learn.
Personalization of assessments: The evolution of technology made it possible to conduct personalized assessments based on each student’s learning ability and current proficiencies. Teachers can prioritize and develop different questions such as
multiple-choice, drop-down, free text, checkboxes, descriptive, and even image/audio/video answer questions. With such tools, the tutors can also analyze whether their students are visual, verbal or auditory learners. Various online assessment tools offer additional options for conducting formative and summative assessments. Pre-assessments (before teaching a new subject or course), quick short assessment at the end of a lecture, and automatic collation of data enable the teacher to measure the effectiveness of a class.
Reporting and analytics: Online school assessment tools provide detailed reports analytics on students’ learning styles and proficiencies. While conducting exams, teachers can easily analyze the types of questions where students go wrong. Apart from normal evaluation methods like exams and quizzes, the online assessment system offers extra features such as behavior analysis, performance tracking monitoring, importing exporting data, and real-time reporting of assessment results student performance. Such advanced tools help in analyzing student behaviors, their learning patterns and their interactions with course content learning activities. With the reporting and analytics feature, online instructors can be responsive and adjust their teaching style accordingly.
