Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic imposed in many countries, in the short term, the interruption of face-to-face teaching activities and, in the medium term, the existence of a ‘new normal’, in which teaching methods should be able to switch from face-to-face to remote overnight. However, this flexibility can pose a great difficulty, especially in the assessment of practical courses with a high student–teacher ratio, in which the assessment tools or methods used in face-to-face learning are not ready to be adopted within a fully online environment. This article presents a case study describing the transformation of the assessment method of a programming course in higher education to a fully online format during the COVID-19 pandemic, by means of an automated student-centered assessment tool. To evaluate the new assessment method, we studied students’ interactions with the tool, as well as students’ perceptions, which were measured with two different surveys: one for the programming assignments and one for the final exam. The results show that the students’ perceptions of the assessment tool were highly positive: if using the tool had been optional, the majority of them would have chosen to use it without a doubt, and they would like other courses to involve a tool like the one presented in this article. A discussion about the use of this tool in subsequent years in the same and related courses is also presented, analyzing the sustainability of this new assessment method.
Highlights
The global pandemic of COVID-19 led to the suspension of face-to-face teaching activities in many countries
This article presents a case study describing the transformation of the assessment method of a programming course in higher education to a fully online format during the COVID-19 pandemic by means of an automated student-centered assessment tool
The results of the student survey conducted after using autoCOREctor in the final exam of the course are shown in Table 2, including, for each question, the mean (M), median (MED), standard deviation (SD), and median absolute deviation (MAD), along with the number of answers (N)
Summary
The global pandemic of COVID-19 led to the suspension of face-to-face teaching activities in many countries. Overall, automated assessment systems have the potential to facilitate the transformation of programming assignments into an online format, especially in scenarios with a high student–teacher ratio, with the Sustainability 2020, 12, 7451 support of other tools within a course LMS, such as the forum, notifications, or direct messages among teachers and students. According to Struyven, Dochy and Janssens [20], students approach learning differently depending on their perceptions of the evaluation and assessment, varying among a deep approach (an active conceptual analysis that generally results in a deep level of understanding), a surface approach (an intention to complete the learning task with little personal engagement, often associated with routine and unreflective memorization), and a strategic or achieving approach (an intention to achieve the highest possible grades by using well-organized and conscientious study methods and effective time management). This article presents a case study describing the transformation of the assessment method of a programming course in higher education to a fully online format during the COVID-19 pandemic by means of an automated student-centered assessment tool.
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