Doha: Education has witnessed a substantial change due to COVID 19 Pandemic. The Community College of Qatar immediately responded to the unanticipated health circumstances by shifting from face-to-face classroom learning to online learning. This shift was a great success as it was preceded by a five-day intensive teacher-training programme on online learning educational applications, platforms, and resources.
The English Language Center – ELC, as an integral department at the Community College of Qatar, has benefited from all these online training programmes. To trigger the online students’ academic integrity, which is an inevitable consequence of this system, and to adhere to the government’s health rules of applying the social distance regulations, a new strategy in assessing students’ achievement online was implemented called the On-Campus Comprehensive Computer-Based Assessment, (CCCBA).
To understand the project, Dr. Sabah Salman Sabbah, Ph.D. Assistant Professor English Language Center at CCQ interviewed the ELC Chairperson, Masroor Hassan, and the academic coordinators, Kevin Anderson and Mastoor Alkaboody.
Masroor Hassan, ELC Chairperson at CCQ
From an administrative point of view, Hassan said, “There was great support from CCQ President, Dr. Mohammed Al Naimi, and CCQ Vice President, Dr. Khalid Al Abdulqader, to implement the on-campus digital exams project suggested by the ELC managers. The ELC proceeded with the project despite the great number of ELC Level 1, 2, 3, and 4 students.
The ELC Chairperson disclosed that the strong belief in our students’ abilities, the technical support and the logistic facilities provided by the college’s IT department, the college’s security and services staff have greatly helped in making the On-Campus Computer-Based Assessment a success within the COVID-19 state health regulations.
To compromise between the great number of female and male students (400 Term 1, 596 Term 2), the few computer sets (48 computer sets), and the obligation of keeping social distance among students, the CCCBA plan was taken to increase the number of exam sessions and limit the number of students in each computer lab. Each lab accommodated 12 students. Thus, the exam day started at 8:00 am and ended at 9:00 pm.
“The crucial goal of CCCBA was to adhere to high educational standards while applying the government’s COVID-19 health regulations by keeping the students safe and socially-distanced. For the first time in our department’s history, students use their mobiles to scan a barcode created for attendance purposes,” Alkaboody said.
“This system made it easier to know the exact time the student was on campus, which would have helped in contact tracing in case one of the students tested positive with COVID 19 afterward,” Alkaboody added.
Meanwhile, Prof. Anderson emphasised that CCCBA had been a continuous process. He noted that the process included “many ad-hoc decisions as we were dealing with a novel situation. We had no choice but to give some final test on Blackboard.”
According to Prof. Anderson, the starting point was to create pools of different types of questions for all language skills and all levels. These pools were used to prepare all levels of final exams. Describing the process of conducting the on-campus computer-based final exams, Prof. Anderson emphasized that such a large-scale computer assessment was a significant risk. Still, collaboration and cooperation resulted in a group achievement worthy of pride.
Discussing the department’s challenges in conducting CCCBA, Alkaboody asserted that the primary concern in the planning stage was ensuring that the students had a safe environment and everyone adheres to the social distancing rules.
However, coordinators the most critical challenge was IT issues. To prevent technical problems during the exams, the IT staff created a new Windows profile that had only Chrome and Notepad pinned to the taskbar so that students would not get confused with many files or folders. Besides, an IT staff was available for support during the exams.
