In today’s fast-moving world, remote working has become increasingly popular. Most companies view it as a productivity boost for their employees, allowing them to work from the comfort of their own homes. Similarly, most educational institutions have also pursued remote working, providing educators with access to online learning management systems that help them manage learning remotely.
However, remote learning has its own set of challenges, unlike online working in a corporate setting. An institute’s stakeholders play an important role in making remote learning effective. First, they have to deal with their own faculty, ensuring they have an optimal internet connection and fewer distortions to work fluently. Secondly, they must coordinate with parents to create a smooth digital experience for the students.
Remote Assessment Challenges and their Solutions
This article talks about various challenges faced by school management while remotely evaluating students and provides practical solutions. Below are some of the most common challenges for remote assessments:
01 Technical Issues & Connectivity Gaps
Challenge
Schools that operate remotely count heavily on learning management systems and their standards. Without the right technical support, educational institutions struggle to keep the workflow effortless for their faculty. Moreover, the connectivity gap brings in further complications, causing major disruptions in the learning and assessing process.
Solution
Educational institutes should prefer learning management systems that offer smooth compatibility and mobile-friendly designs to ensure accessibility for all users. Plus, their preferred LMS platform should also deliver 24/7 technical support to keep the institute free from hurdles. To overcome the issues of connectivity, schools should provide offline materials as well to tackle the issues of unreliable internet connectivity.
02 Data Privacy
Challenge
Remote assessments can pose security challenges. Digital assessment platforms are stuffed with datasets containing student information, which can be compromised. Valuable information like student names, addresses, and results is at risk while conducting assessments online. Vulnerable datasets are at risk of identity theft, and schools must take necessary actions before any potential loss.
Solution
Stakeholders of educational institutes must comply with existing cybersecurity standards to protect breach of data. They should look for best practices in the market and deploy them for perfect data control and threat prevention. Moreover, enlightening tutors with sufficient knowledge about data breaches and how to stay vigilant.
03 Maintaining Student Engagement
Challenge
Keeping the students engaged during remote lectures or assessments is a tough ask. Traditional MCQ-based assessments rarely spark engagement among the learners, while most of the times, they remain disengaged and less participative. Thus, turning those passive learners into active ones is not easy, as it requires detailed assessment planning.
Solution
Keeping the students motivated and engaged during assessments is not an easy task at school. It’s an even bigger challenge when we talk about high-quality remote assessments. However, with tools like Assessifed, teachers can create interactive quiz types that students actually like. With game-like activities and media-rich quizzes, students don’t get distracted even while performing the assessment from the comfort of their homes.
04 Reduced Academic Integrity
Challenge
It’s not easy to create fair results in remote assessments. Given the amount of information available on the internet and advanced generative AI tools, students can solve their digital assessments in no time! Even with the accessibility of webcam monitoring, a tutor cannot oversee a class with a higher student strength.
Solution
Students not maintaining academic integrity is one of the major concerns of online assessments. Institutes have come up with novel ways of monitoring the students with the help of multiple tools. Assessified is a single tool that helps tutors create cheat-proof assessments by integrating features like blockage on copy-pasting, restrictions on tab-switching, and complete activity monitoring.
Final Thoughts
Remote assessments often struggle with disengaged learners and inconsistent evaluation. As learning moves beyond physical classrooms, schools must rethink how they assess student understanding and not just depend upon testing rote learning skills.
