E-Assessment: an E-Business Enabler in Higher Education

Abstract

In the context of higher education, e-business can be viewed as the series of interconnected processes initiated with student application for entry and completed upon graduation. While e-learning is an integral component of this process, the assessment component remains primarily manual. This leads to an educational paradox whereby students are encouraged to e-learn, on one hand, while they are imposed in old-fashioned assessment practices, on the other. It also establishes a business paradox whereby universities strive to maximize their financial incomes through research funding but still do not exploit ICTs to minimize their costs in the pillar of assessment. As ICT skills span the requirements of university students horizontally and across departments, developing an e-Assessment System for ICT skills could address both paradoxes. This paper presents an e-Assessment system implemented within a nursing university department setting with 79 participants in Cyprus. Findings of a quasi-experimental design that validated the system’s effectiveness indicate that performance of students who used the system were significantly different than those students who followed a traditional learning process.