Abstract:

Introduction:
Research has highlighted that students felt they do not have the required IT skills to fully engage with their educational programs (Stephens et al., 2013). Additionally, other barriers were identified, such as student’s poor internet connection, and too much distraction for students during digital assessments (Dost et al., 2020; Dyrek et al., 2022). Students also point to the lack of equipment and access to it along with difficulties up-loading video recordings, accessing systems and time lags (Rosenkoetter et al., 2014). Currently, half of the European education systems are reforming their curricula related to digital competence, either to introduce digital competence into the curriculum, to update existing content or to strengthen specific areas of digital competence.
These challenges also occurred among our partner institutions during Covid-19 where learners and teachers were catapulted to teaching and learning online over night. The partners from 4 different countries decided to understand the problem using the Erasmus+ funded project title: Assessment in digital assessment in the field of healthcare education across four European health care educational institutions. The AHEAD project has 5 outputs. This presentation relates to the results of a survey from the first output to identify learners’ level of engagement, and their own perceived level of confidence and competence with digital assessments across the participating institutions.

Methodology:
The project team developed and pilot tested a survey using the Delphi method, which was then disseminated to the project participants during the ‘Co-Creation’ workshop. The questionnaire was divided into three sections. The first section was about demographics, the next sections were for students which contained 11 questions and the following section contained 13 questions for teachers. In addition, free-form answers were used through the google form to gain more information from the respondents. Surveys were sent to students and teachers through the 4 educational institutions. The aim was to collect at least 80-120 responses. The methods for the data collection and handling the interviews and the questionnaire were approved by the Dublin City University Research Ethics Committee.

Results:
The results indicate that most learners felt confident in using digital assessments. There were several barriers with the most common barrier being “Poor internet connection’, indicated by 67.4% (ISU) to 98.1% (DCU) of respondents. The respondents also paid attention to “Too much distraction during digital assessment for example from family members, pets, neighbours. The ‘Lack of technical support’ also turned out to be important.

Conclusion:
Research has shown that the learners frequently use digital assessment tools on Moodle platforms, as well as tools for tests and quizzes. The results of this survey indicate that digital assessment tools are used less frequently through the partner instituions. A big problem for learners is the lack of an internet connection that meets the learners’ expectations, or the lack of equipment enabling participation in the digital assessment. Another important problem is the lack of technical support reported by learners. Participants of the survey highly evaluate digital competencies.

Keywords:

Digital assessments, learners, health care and digital competences.