COVID-19 has presented universities worldwide with many challenges. Locally, social distancing protocols, together with limits placed upon gatherings within closed spaces, has forced the cancellation of invigilated face-to-face examinations at Southern Cross University (SCU). To address this situation for two first-year quantitative units within pathway programs at SCU, online examinations were prepared and deployed as online tests within Blackboard at short notice in place of usual face-to-face examinations. Students were encouraged to use the mathematical editor function within Blackboard and the equation editor function within Microsoft Word when developing and inserting answers into spaces provided for each question.
Being mindful of the additional cognitive load associated with the use of these tools (Prisacari & Danielson, 2017; Cramp et al., 2019), students were prepared for these examinations by the provision of an instruction video, practical examination papers and additional hardcopy advice beforehand. Students were also given four hours to complete their examinations instead of the usual two hours. Completion time data from Blackboard and student performance data as defined by student's final grades for the examinations concerned suggest this additional time was adequate to cater for most students. Use of mathematical functions by students enhanced the visual structure and readability of student responses, thus making the marking process easier as markers were not confronted with legibility and interpretation issues typically associated with hand-written exams (Frankl & Bitter, 2012).
The replacement of traditional paper-based assessments with e-assessments foreshadowed a decade ago (Ripley, 2009) is likely to accelerate further post COVID-19. As such, care and due diligence are required for the design of future online assessments tasks of this nature to ensure that they are rigorous, secure and scalable (Allan, 2020), have sufficient depth and authenticity (Villarroel et al., 2019), and with measures and features put in place to address potential academic integrity concerns (Souza & Siegfeldt, 2017).