Abstract:

Covid-19 has changed educational practices dramatically. Many institutions started to present distance education to students from different grade levels. Universities, also, integrated distance education into their programs to provide the continuity of the education. Online assessment tools used for assessing the performance of students in distance education gained a big importance. Hence, the aim of this study was to understand the factors affecting the use of online assessment tools from the perspective of university students and instructors. The participants of the study were 25 students taking three different online courses in digital game design department in spring semester of 2019-2020 academic year. Additionally, three instructors who implemented online assessment tools in their distant courses were included in the study. Semi-structured interviews were used to get data from students and instructors. Content analysis was implemented to analyze the data. According to the results, 3 themes, namely, easy use, consistency between online content and assessment and technical issues were the main factors for university students. For the theme of easy use, most of the students indicated that online assessment tools, such as quizzes and exams should be easy to perform. They also stated the need of clear instructions appeared on the assessment tools. For the consistency between online content and assessment, the university students emphasized that the selected online assessment tool should match with its content. Additionally, a variety of online assessment tools, such as matching, ordering, filling the blanks, short answer etc. should be implemented for handling the whole content. For the last theme of technical issues, a majority of students mentioned about the need for eliminating errors. According to them, there should be no session errors, timer errors, login errors and submission errors especially for synchronous online assessments. Based on the results of semi-structured interviews with instructors, 2 themes, namely capability of online assessment and understanding students’ needs were appeared. For the theme of capability of online assessment, instructors need to be capable of using all online assessment related tasks, such as creating assignment, ordering questions, including timer…etc. For the theme of understanding students’ needs, the instructors indicated the importance of providing a variety of online assessment tools. According to them, a variety of online assessment tools is critical for students because of assessing the content deeply especially in university level. The results of this study can be helpful for instructors, academicians and several experts studying the online assessment. As a future study, comparative long-term research of analyzing the online assessment tools and procedures would be a good contribution to the field.

Keywords:

Online assessment, distance education, university students, online tools.