Abstract
One of the core values in education is the need to align assessments with content, skills, and knowledge in order to maintain validity and reliability. There is good research evidence to show that well designed assessment systems lead to improved student performance and ensure success of students. Electronic assessment, which is regarded as the flip side of the e-learning coin, is acclaimed by some stakeholders in UAE higher education institutions as a possible magic bullet or saviour for the evaluation of learning. Others argue that e-assessment might herald the death of assessments with high levels of reliability and validity. This qualitative study investigates teachers and students’ perceptions of e-assessment within a private higher education institution (HEI) in the UAE. Through the use of a questionnaire and interviews, perceptions of virtual learning environments, e-assessment methods on virtual platforms, and the process of giving feedback on performance on e-assessments are analysed. The participants offered unique insights into the conduct of e-assessment and most were concerned about the prospect of electronic feedback replacing verbal feedback and face-to-face interaction between the lecturers and students. Most participants indicated some benefits of e-assessments to the pedagogical processes in the university, but were reluctant to express wholehearted agreement with a transition to e-assessments as a sole @ method of summative evaluation. The study concludes by recommending ways of promoting the idea of e-assessment to lecturers and students including new codes of practice, training and assurances to both stakeholders that these new methods are an improvement on previous practice and that e-assessment can actually increase reliability and validity.
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Warner, R. (2017). The Future of E-assessments in the UAE: Students’ Perspectives. In: Al-Mahrooqi, R., Coombe, C., Al-Maamari, F., Thakur, V. (eds) Revisiting EFL Assessment. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32601-6_19
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