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Top1. Introduction
Distance Education (DE) courses have been offered for decades. Nowadays, online classes span from primary to university education, and the internet has an essential role in the expansion of DE. Despite the emerging variety of evaluation tools for DE, some assessment practices still require the students to be in-person, contrasting with the remoteness proposed by DE. Moreover, many assessment instruments - like oral or written tests - fail to encourage independent study and reinforce communication barriers between the teacher and their classes.
Hoffmann (1992) argued that performance assessment methods should promote teachers' permanent monitoring of student learning through consistent interaction with students. These interactions could be performed using questioning as a form of continuous evaluation. Students' responses would derive more questions to arouse and maintain their curiosity about the study object. Therefore, the evaluation should not consist of a single-stage validation of temporary content assimilation, that merely scores students as proficient or not in specific contents. Thus, tests are not efficient to diagnose the real existing academic difficulties of students (Luckesi, 2011).
During the recent COVID-19 pandemic, DE became a new reality in educational programs that originally were not developed or designed as such, and schools had to deal with different challenges such as the impossibility of in-person contact between students and teachers. Under these circumstances, there was a need to study solutions that could be employed for monitoring student's learning, as well as methods where the teacher can efficiently evaluate the students from a distance accordingly.
Thus, this study introduces a project based learning assessment strategy in DE based on an agile project management methodology (Beck et al., 2001) in order to understand its contributions and limitations for the distance monitoring and assessment of higher education students' performance. It is based on EduScrum (Wijnands & Stolze, 2019), an education-oriented adaptation of the Scrum framework, whose main pillars are Transparency, Inspection and Adaptation.
Transparency addresses the common objective to be achieved, as students and teachers work together to define the main goal for the learning experience. During the inspection, teachers and students must evaluate the artifacts produced by the entire group. The inspection occurs along with the process known as Adaptation, that is responsible for finding ways to correct the problems that happen during each sprint.
As scrum enables complex problem solving, with focus on delivering products with the best possible quality (Schwaber, 2017), this study presents promising results in project-based assessment of learning, providing effective ways to involve students with learning content, due to the use of realistic projects, based on questions, tasks or problems, and encouraging collaboration to build solutions.
Top2. Materials And Methods
The research followed a qualitative design, using an observational procedure for data collection, underpinned by phenomenology. We tested the agile project management methodology through an experiment in an online higher education Biology DE class.
The phenomenological approach employed in this study entails the researcher in constant contact with the participating students, as well as having access to the tools used by them in the production of content and in the exchange of messages, in order to capture the general aspects of collaboration and interaction between them. Thus, the tools used for data collection were Zoom, WhatsApp, Google Meet and Trello.