The Lebanese University LU – The Languages Bureau of the LU- The Center of Research and Studies at the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences In collaboration with Cambridge Assessment English CAE Organise an online conference .
Digital Assessments and their impact on Learner’s achievements
Why is this conference important?
Due to the ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), there has been a coercive transition from traditional education at all levels into remote pedagogy. A huge number of academic institutions have made a big leap forward into this world in such a short span of time. The whole Arab world, including Lebanon, has experimented with online learning methodologies. Nevertheless, they have encountered real hurdles when they started with creating strategies of remote assessment, which represented a number of challenges such as the possibility of its implementation, its efficiency and reliability in testing students’ linguistic and analytical skills. Added to that are the problems of administering such exams while at the same time maintaining a certain level of reliability under difficult economic conditions, poor connectivity and power cut, among others.
Since tests in the discipline of Linguistics, Literature, and Human Sciences are essay-based tests made up of open-ended questions to a large extent, since the competencies and skills that should be tested are varied and manifold, since answers and their degree of precision require a wide range of skills that are not available in e-testing programs, and since the number of students per class is very high, i.e. 100 students in certain cases, academic institutions and faculty are in great need of this conference as it presents successful and promising experiences in this context, and introduces teachers in higher education to the most recent educational tools that are available to meet the emerging needs and that highly contribute to finding solutions to an educational crisis with negative repercussions on humanitarian as well as economic levels.
Conference importance and objectives:
This conference is a platform for educators to discuss the status quo of online assessment, its tools, problems, and ways to avoid them. It aims at:
– introducing academicians in higher education to the most important tools and programs that are deemed to be useful in the process of conducting online assessment.
– identifying the best assessment methods to be recommended for use at universities as a solution to the problem mentioned above and especially to the negative implications of the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic. This has resulted in an urgent need for e-learning at all stages of education.
Conference themes:
- Remote teaching pedagogy and online assessment as an alternative to paper-based assessment.
- Online assessment programs: proctoring processes and examinees’ credibility.
- Remote assessment tools: General usability and reliability of assessment.
- Assessment cases and trials: opportunities and challenges
Conference time: 22 October 2020
Conference platform : Webinar Jam
Conference coordinators:
Dr. Maha Jarjour, Dr. Hiba Chendeb and Dr. Ghassan Mourad (Lebanese University) and Dr. Hisham AL Saghbini (CAE).
The abstract should be of 200-250 words in range, it can be written either in Arabic and English. The submission deadline is 30 Sept 2020 .
Along with the abstract, authors are kindly requested to send their biography to the following email addresses:
Maha.jarjour@ul.edu.lb
Hiba.chendeb@ul.edu.lb
Ghassan.mourad@ul.edu.lb
Alsaghbini.h@cambridgeenglish.org
Participants’ research will be published in a special issue of the e-journal for university studies in Literature and Human Sciences – USH
