E-Learning Centre Trains University Lecturers on Item Writing

Lecturers at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology have been trained by the E-Learning Centre, on the creation of a bank of items (questions) to be mounted on the examination platform and be administered ahead of the mid-semester examination.

The mid-semester exams will be conducted online with the examination platform highly encrypted and protected.

The difference in the process of conducting online examination compared to in-person exams makes the item writing workshop a necessity.

Participating lecturers were taken through techniques to ensure the integrity of the questions. Director of the E-Learning Centre, Professor Eric Appau Asante is positive this will prevent copying and screen capturing by students. “We are here to firm up our decision to run examinations online.

In all humility you will not be allowed to work with your laptops. All the computers here are going to be used for that purpose. When you finish, we format all of them, and the items are temporarily kept into the item bank online and it’s physically locked. Only core people will have access to it. The integrity of what we are doing is highly secured,” he assured.

Facilitators took participants through the process of replication of questions.

This process ensures the core intent of the question is maintained; its integrity highly assured whiles a question is replicated within a short time.

Lecturers from the School of Nursing and Midwifery, KNUST, benefited from the item writing workshop. For over a decade, the school has been managing, setting examination questions and offering academic certificates for Ministry of Health nursing, midwifery and public health nursing programs. There are 76 schools across the country with over 10,000 students graduating each year.

This large number, requires the services of faculty members, support staff, and transport services to supervise the examinations. The school believes conducting online examination is one of the measures to do things better.

Professor Veronica Millicent Dzomeku says this will start with an online examination pretest with upgrade an program running in 9 schools in May 2024, before taking effect in the other schools. “We are hoping to pretest the online examination in these schools.

With the successes or lessons that we have, we will escalate it to the rest of the schools in June and July. We are also very hopeful that the virtual learning space will be set up soon so our students can explore that,” she said.

Participants were enlightened with the training and are looking forward to such trainings periodically.

Published:8th March, 2024 Source: KNUST E-Learning Centre