Abstract:

The increasing importance of online education has resulted in attempts to make these teaching/learning means more reliable, valid and feasible in order to avoid the criticisms that are often directed that any e-learning course, above all its assessment process within teaching and learning contexts.

Given the potential of online education to higher education, our question is whether, and in what ways, different types of assessments might have an impact on the view faculty and learners have of the assessment methods used in the Virtual University of Fernando Pessoa University (UFP-UV) in Porto, Portugal, in relation to their reliability, feasibility and validity.

In this paper we will revisit some of the approaches involved in any assessment process, with particular emphasis on online assessment. The case study carried out sought to investigate the extent to which faculty and learners consider the assessment used in the curricular unit of the e-learning course to be feasible, valid and reliable. These impressions were gauged in two different questionnaires (one for the teachers and another for the learners) in which respondents assigned graded qualitative responses to certain statements, and, in the observation section of the questionnaire, they could provide qualitative comments on the question, thus allowing both a quantitative and a qualitative analysis of the data.

The results demonstrate that the virtual classroom is, for both groups in this case study, the mechanism that shows the most reliability whether the virtual classroom acts as a ‘real’ classroom in which both parties are 'face-to-face' via audiovisual means or only the audio means of the virtual classroom is used to question the learner orally.

Keywords:

Online assessment, e-learning, reliability.