The adoption of blended learning in many educational settings has occasioned the evolution of assessment to suit the need of the online learners since the kind of assessment designed for face-to-face learners would not just port to fit the online learning environment.

In today’s online learning environment, currently available technologies provide a lot of opportunities ranging from enhancing the speed of assessment (reduction in the time consumed by learners’ assessment), to the scale of assessment (thousands of students can be accessed in a very short time), and to the ease of assessment.

As a result of today’s technologies, an assessment that could hitherto take days to weeks to conduct can now be conducted in minutes to hours. Also before the advent of assessment technologies, assessing a large number of learners used to take a longer time than is currently obtainable using available technologies. Because of the scale achievable through technology and because of the speed of assessment, it has become easy for assessment to be conducted in greater frequencies thus bringing about the incorporation of formative assessment into the evaluation process of learners. Formative assessment by its nature has in turn afforded learners the benefit of having feedback early enough in such a way that further improves the learning process (Baleni, 2015). Underscoring the positive impact the feedback conferred by formative assessment can have on learners, Belani (2015) dubbed formative assessment as “assessment for learning” as against formative assessment tagged “assessment of learning”

Given the affordances of modern technologies, I opine that the reason why there hasn’t been much adoption and incorporation of new technologies by educators, trainers, instructors, and designers into the assessment practices is simply because of the following reasons:

• The learning curve involved in the use of technology by the instructors and learners; and
• The various device requirements on the part of the learners to use modern technologies for assessment.

However, developing online assessments comes with its challenges. Moore (2015) identified the challenges as the following:

• Cheating is easier to do (and harder to detect) online.
• Online courses need more student-to-student interactions “built in” than face-to-face courses.
• Online students need more student-to-instructor interaction than their face-to-face counterparts.
• Online students need more planned structure—that is, more help in staying on time and on task—than their face-to-face counterparts.
• Performance assessments (such as presentations and demonstrations) can be more challenging to administer online.
• Students expect more visually rich and interactive materials delivered via a screen than they do from an in-class experience.
• Because an online course typically takes more time to teach than the same course taught face-to-face, containing instructor workload with regard to administering online assessments is important.

An additional resource I got related to the concept of online formative assessment is the work by Vonderwell and Boboc (2013) in which the author underscored the need for faculty to understand the pedagogical characteristics of online learning before “calibrating assessments” to suit those characteristics. In another resource, Mondal and Mondal (2021) indicated that the feedback generated by online formative assessment can help improve the summative assessment performance of the learner should poor performers in the formative assessment take timely measures to improve themselves.

References

Baleni, Z. G. (2015). Online formative assessment in higher education: Its pros and cons: EJEL. Electronic Journal of E-Learning, 13(4), 228-236. https://www.proquest.com/trade-journals/online-formative-assessment-higher-education-pros/docview/1697674562/se-2

Mondal, H., & Mondal, S. (2021). Online formative assessment coupled with synchronous online learning: Insight from an Indian medical college. Indian Journal of Medical Sciences, 73(2), 192–196. https://doi.org/10.25259/IJMS_269_2020

Moore, E. A. (2021, August). Seven Assessment Challenges of Moving Your Course Online (and a Dozen+ Solutions). Online Teaching Strategies. Retrieved July 10, 2022, from https://s35691.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Assessing-Online-Learning-Strategies-Challenges-and-Opportunities.pdf

Vonderwell, S., & Boboc, M. (2013). Promoting Formative Assessment in Online Teaching and Learning. TechTrends: Linking Research & Practice to Improve Learning, 57(4), 22–27. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-013-0673-x