Teachers’ Assessment Challenges in Online Education

Abstract

Online education has created new opportunities to teach and learn; nevertheless, since teaching and assessment go hand in hand, educators face unexplored challenges when they assess students in virtual settings. The study's objective was to identify the assessment challenges that higher education teachers experienced in the virtual modality and how those are related to their demographic variables. This descriptive study used an exploratory in-depth interview with six teachers (i.e., three women and three men) to create the categories and questions that were later included in the survey. A total of 21 participants were selected through systematic sampling. According to the findings, teachers' age influenced the challenges they experienced. The respondents were divided into three groups: young, middleaged, and aged. Although the educators agree and disagree to different degrees according to their age group, they pointed out some challenges that jeopardized students’ assessment reliability, validity, and washback principles. Among the challenges reported are the following: a) higher academic dishonesty due to the lack of knowledge of control protocols; b) low attendance and participation rates due to the lack of direct interaction or digital resources; c) poor feedback due to the malfunctioning and lack of technological devices, platforms, tools, and Internet connection; and d) external factors like students' health and learning environment.