Assessment in Sustainable Remote Teaching and Learning Environments During Emergency Situations

Abstract

This paper explores how quality assessment is maintained in the COVID-19 protocols mandatory remote teaching and learning higher education environments. The argument being pursued is that, despite the pandemic, the e-assessment ensures the sustainability of quality thereof even in remote teaching and learning environments. We compare e-assessments in these environments to how conventional assessments happen in in-person contexts. In this comparison, we unearth several challenges afflicting the conventional in-person assessments. These range from ill-prepared lecturers sometimes, who do not take time to formulate meaningful assessment tasks, to students who demand special treatment just because they are physically present and are able to 'bully' lecturers. In the COVID-19 mandatory remote e-assessments teaching and learning environments, despite the attended challenges of costs to install the Learning Management System and train academics, there seem to be many more positive outcomes. These include lecturers' ability to ensure that all students enrolled in the module read the materials provided, spend enough time doing so, and engage meaningfully with the learning subject content. That feedback is provided almost immediately to ensure quality in remote teaching and learning environments. Design research principles that serve as the overarching theoretical framework for this paper are used to identify the challenges to e-assessments, the responses to these challenges, the contextual factors that make the responses effective, those that pose threats thereto and how they are resolved and circumvented.

13 - Creating Effective Postgraduate Learning Environments: An Analysis of an Intervention from Realist Social Theory

“…Informed by Archer's realist social theory as an approach to supervising postgraduate students' learning and as a way of generating research data and making sense of them, fifteen academics came together in 2011 sharing the same concern of improving MEd and PhD students' success rates (Mahlomaholo 2012a;2012b;. All academics had PhD qualifications in education, but their specializations were varied, ranging, for example, from mathematics, physical and natural sciences, economic and management sciences, psychology and sociology to history and languages, to name but a few.…”

“…This article uses Margaret Archer's (1995;1996) realist social theory, which is grounded in Roy Bhaskar's (Buch-Hansen 2005;Corson 1991;Mutch 2005) critical realist philosophy, to describe and generate an understanding of how a team of fifteen academics at the University of the Free State approaches the supervision of a cohort of twenty-eight PhD and twenty-two MEd students (Mahlomaholo 2012a;2012b;. This paper reflects on the reasons, factors, ideas, processes and activities that enabled some of those students to complete their studies.…”

Unblocking the System to Strengthen Implementation of Early Childhood Development Policies and Practice in South Africa

“…The aforementioned authors state that ECD stakeholders at national, provincial, and district education offices work in isolation, without a common vision or understanding of providing ECD services. The appalling situation of ECD in South Africa suggests that teachers, especially those responsible for young children between the ages of birth to five, do not have guidance to design and interpret learning programs (Mahlomaholo & Mahlomaholo, 2023;Shaik, 2022). To elaborate further, ECD services in South Africa are hindered by structural problems which include inadequate practitioners' training to acquire knowledge to care for children, funding and infrastructure, monitoring, and support of program implementation (Makhubele & Baloyi, 2018).…”

Creating Sustainable Posthuman Accounting Learning Environments: The Case for Green Accounting in South Africa

“…Among the 17 goals, we look at SDG 4 because it deals with quality education, a central idea in this paper. This goal is interested in ensuring inclusivity and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities (Mahlomaholo & Mahlomaholo, 2022;Muukkonen, 2022). It is one of the goals that ensure optimum achievement of the overarching goals geared towards producing a set of universal contexts that combat the urgent environmental, political, and economic challenges facing our world (Mahlomaholo et al, 2023).…”