Instructors’ Views on Online Assessment

instructors pointed out that nothing was clear about whether the assessment could be done online or face-to-face in the beginning of that time since it was emergency online teaching.

As explained in the methodology section in detail, after the announcement indicating that the lessons in Spring 2020 would not be face-to-face at all, the department decided to assign project homework involving various skills instead of face-to-face exams and continued to apply other assessment components like online assessment, vocabulary tasks and book reports with slight changes. The simplified proficiency exam was held distantly at the end of summer term by proctoring the students on Zoom. Concerning all kind of online assessment, there was a

consensus among all of the instructors that projects were one of the things that could be applied at that time, but plagiarism was a major problem during all this process in both projects and homework assignments. Thus, the instructors were asked how they could prevent plagiarism in online education and what can be done for a fair online assessment. Table 15 shows the opinions of the instructors concerning this issue. On the top, there is monitoring issue mentioned by 7 instructors. To them, proctoring via some platforms like Zoom is a must in online exams and it should be carried out meticulously as exemplified to a great extent in the excerpt given for this code. Half of the instructors touched on the importance of plagiarism checking tools which are available online. 3 instructors argued that having a system that controls everything that students do online may prevent cheating. Asking questions which require interpretation and do not have specific answers may be another solution against cheating for 3 instructors. Finally, giving a limited time during the examinations and increasing internal motivation rather than the external one are mentioned by 2 instructors. Apart from these, all of the instructors were of the opinion that more technological development is needed as can be seen in the following quotation.

“In any case, the student is in his or her own room and even if they are using a mobile phone to show their environment, you can't be 100% sure which does not even happen in face-to-face exams. There should be some technological improvements on this issue. There could be better programs, detecting students’ each behavior. It is related to the quality of the data technology.” (Ins1)

Table 15

Instructors’ opinions for a fair online assessment

Codes N Sample Excerpts

Monitoring/proctoring students carefully 7 Sometimes we don't really care about how they put the computers exactly. For example, sometimes they can hide the keyboard and this is the keyboard we actually have to be careful about because they can pretend like they are writing.

With the Bluetooth, they can do everything on the computer screen without you seeing them. As long as you do not watch the keyboard, they can cheat whenever they want. We sometimes check the voices by turning on and off the microphones, but some of the microphones do not change the positions, they can be off forever because of the technical issues. We have no idea whether that person is alone, whether someone is dictating the answers right behind the camera. Maybe one option is to say them to show us the whole room.

Maybe having less number of students in a Zoom meeting can be another option,

instead of 30, maybe we can have 10 and you can watch every movement more carefully. I am just being idealistic. (Ins8) Checking plagiarism through programs 5 I am very strict about it and for me, using

online plagiarism tools are very helpful for us to detect if they do it or not. (Ins4) Having a controlled system 3 They can log in a webpage in specific

times and they cannot copy and paste anything. While working on that thing, their screen might be recorded. I know that that is against some privacy, but that's the only way to guarantee to prevent that.

Also, they cannot use anything while on that website, they cannot close the windows or they cannot switch between the pages. It will be in a very controlled way. (Ins2)

More questions without specific answers 3 We can give them some tasks in which they cannot find any straight answer on the internet. So, we need to write more open-ended questions, but open open-ended doesn't mean more difficult. It is more reliable and more possible that the students write the answers on their own. (Ins6)

Giving a limited time 2 We can give them a limited time, so they won't have time to go and look on the internet. (Ins7)

Increasing internal motivation 2 I think it's more about internal motivation.

If the students do some tasks for grades, external motivation, there is no guarantee

that they're really learning or it's really assessing their skills; but if they really want to improve themselves, if they have the internal motivation, if they just want to learn about their mistakes and correct their mistakes, it will work better. Maybe we should find new ways to increase internal motivation amongst teens. (Ins9)

4.2.6. Instructors’ Suggestions for Further Online ELT Lessons: The instructors were