Shifting Assessment Online in the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case of an ICLHE Undergraduate Course in Medicine

ABSTRACT

In March 2020, Belgian universities moved all their courses online due to the COVID-19 outbreak that was sweeping across the globe. Higher education institutions had to take urgent measures to deal with this unprecedented crisis by providing rapid technological and pedagogical solutions for exclusively digital learning and teaching environments. This chapter focuses on third-year medical students' perceptions of the online assessment methods used in an ICL course on respiratory diseases at the Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy of the University of Mons. The authors wish to look into the challenges presented, the constraints imposed, and the impact that this sudden and unprepared shift to distance learning has had on content learning through the medium of English. More specifically, the analysis aims to explore the scope of this abrupt change in assessment methods in a course originally designed as a collaborative ICLHE experiment in formative learning. Drawing on the students' experiences and the teachers' observations and reflections, the following questions will be addressed To what extent has the COVID-19 pandemic, and its consequences on online assessment, affected student understanding of the learning outcomes?How have students perceived the final online assignment and what implications has this had on their language and content learning?How can content teachers and language practitioners better collaborate in on- and offline ICLHE environments?What are the lessons to be learnt and the solutions that can be envisaged to maintain the quality of formative assessment methods of EMI courses in digital settings? © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.