Chapter 8 – Covid-19 lockdowns: a catalyst for rethinking assessments in skill-b
Chapter 8 – Covid-19 lockdowns: a catalyst for rethinking assessments in skill-based nursing courses
Dr Zeenar Salim; Dr Anil Khamis; Shanaz Cassum; Zohra Kurji; and Professor Pammla Petrucka
Amid the Covid-19 mandated lockdowns, the Aga Khan University School of Nursing and Midwifery in Pakistan (SoNAM-PK) closed their physical campuses to adhere to public health requirements for social distancing. The students living on campus returned to their primary residences. Students, especially in remote areas of northern Pakistan, lacked dependable internet connections and travelled miles to reach a central hub where internet connections were made available for the students by the university through a partnership with Aga Khan Development Network schools. While male students could travel on their own, female students required a male escort or stayed home and missed the lessons – in alignment with cultural norms and restricted mobility (Cassum et al. 2024). A few students captured and shared videos to exhibit their struggles to access internet connections and technological devices to the faculty and the university at large through social media, including Facebook and WhatsApp. Faculty at the school quickly pivoted instruction from face-to-face to the online medium, often without sufficient preparation. Around 30% of the SoNAM-PK faculty had experienced teaching in a blended modality; however, assessing students online was new for everyone. Aligning with the book’s theme, only assessments of the practice-based courses are discussed.
Initially, SoNAM-PK faculty focused on equity in teaching online, given the reality that some students had access to the internet, while others did not. The design and implementation of assessments were afterthoughts as the semester progressed and the likelihood of returning to in-person assessment dissipated. Initially, the plan was to replace paper-based examinations with online ones administered with video camera-based proctoring to mitigate cheating and academic misconduct. However, given the inequitable access to the internet by faculty and students, it became apparent that such a surveilled approach would not be possible. The need to adapt the design and implementation of the assessments in line with students’ access (or lack of access) to the internet was apparent.
SoNAM-PK leadership conducted a needs assessment to understand how faculty could be best supported. Nearly 40% of faculty were apprehensive about switching to online assessment, while 26% of faculty expressed that they were ill-equipped to handle educational technology and to troubleshoot issues related to technology in assessments. The faculty’s primary concern was how to assess students’ learning of practical skills in nursing courses, such as bedside patient management, counselling, patient education, measuring blood pressure, and administering vaccines. They feared that the assessments’ authenticity, validity, and reliability of assessments would be chall