COVID-19 Exam Software Survey – 2020

Abstract

With the advent of COVID-19 and ensuing social distancing measures, universities in the Australasian higher education sector found themselves not being able to run their traditional face to face examinations (in the majority of cases). This required all institutions to look for alternative methods and processes to run these important. In many cases institutions pivoted quickly and implemented a range of online proctoring tools, while others changed the forms of assessment that were required, replacing their traditional exams with other forms of online assessment.

To try and understand how universities in the Australasian sector dealt with this and to further distil some of the lessons learned from pivoting quickly to implement their solutions, The Australasian Council on Open Distance and eLearning (ACODE), in collaboration with the Council of Australasian University Directors of Information Technology (CAUDIT) ran a survey designed to provide all institutions with a sector-wide perspective on this.

The survey contained questions asking which solution/s the institutions implemented and how successfully they implemented them (see Appendix B, page 9). They were asked to reflect on some lessons learned from the implementation, share some of the service and technical issues they encountered, and to indicate whether they would continue with the solution they chose, or consider other options in the future.

Every public University in Australia and New Zealand responded to the survey, along with one institution from Fiji and one University College (both ACODE Members institutions). In total this was 47 Institutions.