Abstract:

The coronavirus disease, COVID-19, spread across the world at the end of 2019. Many strategies have been taken by World Health Organization (WHO) to decline the spread of the COVID-19, including hygiene, self-isolation, social distancing, and quarantine. The organization decided to shut down all the educational institutions by early 2020. Hence the traditional classroom learning has completely changed to online learning. Distance learning (DL) has never been implemented on such a vast scale and hence would face many challenges and require special tools and techniques for a successful application. Online exams have become an integral part of the DL. How to ensure the integrity of students during online exams is the central question that emerges. Many online assessments (proctored, formative, and summative) tools are available like Respondus Monitor, Proctorio, Safe exam browser, online forms (Microsoft/Google), Socrative, Mentimeter, and Poll everywhere. Each institution should consider the students' difficulties and concerns before implementing the online proctoring tools. Moreover, privacy and security are also important.

In this study, we aimed to evaluate college students' and professors' perspectives of the assessment tools used for online exams. The learning approach can be the synchronous, asynchronous, or blended way. We will prepare a set of questionnaires for the students and professors of colleges based in Kuwait. We will analyze how this online proctoring impacts the students' academic performance and their attitude towards the assessment, based on the data. Their satisfaction and concerns while using these tools will also be measured. Also, we will analyze best practices for educators to utilize these assessment tools to grade their students.

Keywords:

Distance learning, e-learning, Online learning, COVID-19, online proctoring, assessment tool.