The Remote Assessment Procedure: The Major Focus at Monash University

Cliff Ashford, Director, Academic and Data Technology Services

This has been a while that the world is moving toward remote learning models, and the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the process. Though the mass move to online teaching didn’t work perfectly, many experts believe its future potential. Remote learning has been overstated for months on students, teachers, and districts that are proven as a complex method. It is challenging when many schools, colleges, and universities attempt to replace the traditional one-size-fits-all classroom experience with remote learning. But it’s incredibly difficult for educators to buck 100 years of practice mid-crisis as institutions attempt to provide structure and routine for students.

General experience on technology playing a major role in educational sector:

Over the past 20 years, technology has been present in the educational sector, but recently, new things in technology such as video and collaboration have been become very important in the education due to the lockdown side effect of COVID-19. We have many students at Monash who are remote, and a third of those are international students such as Malaysia or China. So they are not only remote but also based on different time zones. Over this period, we could not continue delivering education with out technology, and we opted for 100 percent online methods. Hence, we relied on a lot of video conferencing, video capturing using to such as Microsoft team, also on collaboration in stimulating workshops and other sorts of environment. So it's been one of our fundamental abilities to continue operating over the past two and a half years.

Challenges faced by the teachers:

So, assessment is important in such situations where a variety of things is present. So learning analytics is key anyway. It was present before and more prominent even nowadays as our central learning management system is much more heavily used for remote education than previous times when students were taught in person. That system provides us with a lot of back-end information about the time and content students are accessing, as well as the video content on other platforms. So we can measure much more degree of accuracy what exactly has to be in the educational process. In relation to that, the good use of these tools is, we all have these tools available but we can either use them well or badly. The great fact about academics is, we had to learn to teach in an entirely new fashion. This is very different incomparison to the process of teaching in a classroom and teaching something over a video or learning a group of activities or using the zoom meet platform. Well, it’s been the academic skills and the sort of underlying facilities that we always had on the platform and taken advantage of those who are ready to try and understand what was happening on the ground.

Challenges faced by the students and further needed rectifications:

So, this is in the basic challenges clearly, to complete the network that students get access to our environment easily. So if one of our students is trying to access learning facilities over broadband in a home environment, it can be challenging to other students at home taking over to the pandemic. Also, we have one-third of the student body who are overseas, so they were coming into our systems from thousands of miles away. One of the places is China, but different time zones caused some similar issues. From our point of view, we take advantage of some of the cloud technologies so that we could put new networks or essentially buy time for more new networks and to some remote parts of the world. Therefore, we could have a direct connection to central china, for example.

“ The COVID-19 pandemic interestingly awarded the techniques that we had developed to ensure high standards when all education was remote . ”

Additionally, another platform we use is the Cloud, the web service. They can take our systems and replicate them to a more convenient loophole; whether the US has a center or by scattering the world, we can choose to replicate ourselves to those locations. That has made a big difference, like everybody had a minimum level of access to our systems. The more challenging thing is that we needed to be told face to face whether we needed specialist equipment or we needed to be in work-like environment. So it’s like, choosing medicine while you will have to go to a hospital ward. We could create a room for students to participate even when they are in their own home.

Advice to the educators:

There are two things that would help the educators, at least. One is liberating multimedia content across a distance to somebody is a skill that needs to be learned, and spending enough time to make a polished and professional video, some engagements on the Zoom conference. Therefore, they will engage where they did not feel like a part of the same experience before, and these are not known to everybody, also they had to learn the side effects in order to learn further. However, we have to learn from ways such as just using a simple fly presentation, simple document, or creating pdfs. Spotting best education and educator is a sort of creativity to the tools they have, and they have learned how to combine the tools into a richer experience for our students. Suppose having a situation where we would typically show a video to the students to analyze some other video or the students create their own video and respond to the first video and explain why they dealt with the latter in a certain manner. So this is about combining different technologies together to do something more creative. The other thing we are related is in getting the students to participate by critiquing each other's creations that the students begin to understand the subject and reasons of critiquing other people's work. Hence,  collaboration and creative use of the tools are vitally important.

The future of remote learning that Monash delivers:

Well, we knew this would be difficult at Monash, and we did not throw our assessment on this at all. So, Monash went away with a way to provide a robust remote assessment solution being at the first stage. So, students could not get just right open their cases, that they were all still giving formal exams and also being invigilated formally only. Because of that, we could fully trust their knowledge and be sure that there has not been any decline in the educational value of the period at Monash. This is very important to us because we feel our reputation and of the students when they are looking for work is key that we could not reduce our standards. That was harder to do on these students and harder for our academics and support stuffs that we at least maintain to the same level that we had before. The COVID-19 pandemic interestingly awarded the techniques that we had developed to ensure high standards when all education was remote. We are continuing to use the techniques along with quality issues even though our students will be back on campus from next year because we find them so useful in measuring for students.  

A missed point from the speaker's end:

I think you have covered a lot of it; I think everybody says that this drove creativity and adoption that we had a lot of these technologies beforehand, but the academic community is very conservative and slow in adopting new technologies. It's been very good that because of the crisis they had to adopt technology, all sorts of different types, everybody had to learn new things. In the educational sector, this was not widespread beforehand, but its present creativity in delivering their education causes the use of a broader set of tools to work with respect for the value of the technology.  

Microsoft

Learning Management