Shifting From Onsite to Online Summative Assessment at the University of South Africa

Background

Many scholars have posited that the sudden outbreak of Covid-19 disrupted the education system globally (Aborode et al., 2020; Davids, 2021; Dhawan, 2020; García-Peñalvo et al., 2021; Klein et al., 2021). South Africa was no exception. The government announced the national lockdown on 26 March 2020 that affected summative assessment in higher education because students could not attend physical venues to write examinations. Before Covid-19, universities had relied largely on onsite tuition and were unprepared for the transition to an online pedagogy (Crawford et al., 2020; Iglesias-Pradas, 2021; Ramírez-Hurtado et al., 2021). The lockdown created pedagogical challenges for African tertiary institutions because they generally used a traditional onsite delivery model (Gurajena et al., 2021) and needed to accelerate the use of digital learning (Klein et al., 2021).

As for Unisa, two approaches to summative assessment had been outlined in the assessment procedures manual before the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, namely, venue-based assessments and non-venue-based online assessments (Unisa, 2013). Despite being an ODL institution, Unisa was, nevertheless, mostly dependent on venue-based (onsite) summative assessment until the outbreak of Covid-19. Venue-based summative assessments were written at designated venues in almost all the provinces of South Africa and students were invigilated, while non-venue-based assessments were administered online without any proctoring. Quality assurance was done through Anderson and Krathwohl-Bloom’s taxonomy revised (Wilson, 2016). Unisa, thus, used a blended approach. The outbreak of Covid-19 was a wake-up call for Unisa to transition rapidly from onsite to online summative assessment for all the modules’ examinations.