Multidisciplinary E-Assessment Project Aims to Transform Teaching and Learning

BY: .

Despite coming from different Schools and Colleges, Discipline of Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) Lecturer, Dr Upasana Singh and IsiZulu Lecturer Mrs Roshni Gokool’s drive to innovate assessment practices has led to an interdisciplinary research project bringing together Information Systems and Technology (IST&T) and isiZulu, through a common assessment method.

The pair recently implemented electronic assessments adopting the Moodle Quizzes tool in isiZulu to 57 first year Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery degrees (MBChB) students. Following this adoption, they are currently busy with data collection on student perceptions of this e-assessment, with hopes of writing a journal article based on this experience.  This project implemented formative e-assessment for the first time in this language module at UKZN.

‘Informal feedback from the students indicated that this was an interesting approach, and that they enjoyed it and prefer it over the traditional pen and paper based tests,’ said Singh.

Being a maiden implementation, the road to successful implementation was not a smooth one, but with perseverance and dedication, both Singh and Gokool managed to overcome the many challenges they faced, with adopting this new technology. There certainly is room for improvement,  in the future and ‘Going forward, we are exploring options to implement ‘non-standard’ question types – like graphics, audio and video clip based questions, as the students registered for this module are based at Medical School. This will help to contextualise the questions to the learning environment of these students,’ said  Gokool.

The idea for this joint project came about when Gokool read the UKZN Ndaba article in 2013 about the successful pilot testing and implementation of Riddel -- an indigenous electronic assessment system, which upon implementation, dramatically reduced the marking burden of lecturers. She thereafter approached Singh to find out more about the opportunities available from e-assessment to language modules.  
The duo then decided to embark on this joint project at the beginning of this year, with the support of UKZN’s Information & Communication Services (ICS). To familiarise the students with this novel approach to assessment, Gokool introduced short formative e-assessments during the first semester, with the Moodle Quizzes tool. Then they took it a step further in the second semester through the implementation of the summative e-assessment.

Gokool said that choosing the isiZulu module was the most obvious choice as it is a compulsory module for all first year MBCHB students.

‘Unlike the general Basic isiZulu compulsory module offered at UKZN, this is a year-long and vocation-specific module, designed to incorporate the specific isiZulu communicative needs of the medical students. UKZN's Language Policy and Plan framework also specify the implementation of vocation-specific teaching of African languages,’ she said.

To expand the reach of e-assessment, Singh and a team from IS&T, in partnership with ICS, went on successfully to implement e-assessment with a larger group, 256 students,  first year IST students, across  two campuses, a few days ago. They are looking to expand the project by not only limiting e-assessment it to class tests and self-assessments, but adopting it for examinations also, in the future.

Thandiwe Jumo