Academic Assessment in the Context of Digitally Mediated Teaching and Learning. Benchmarks for a New Assessment Architecture

Universities are seen today as essential agents of societal development. They play a key role in preparing individuals for the challenges and opportunities generated by social, professional, and technological change. In this context, it is not only the knowledge promoted in universities that is constantly updated, but also the educational means used for teaching, learning, and assessment. An academic reality that requires a real paradigm shift with regard to the training process, including teaching evaluation, is the progressive digitisation of many educational activities. The potential of enriching the repertoire of academic assessment strategies with digital assessment tools and actions is undeniable and will be discussed at length in this chapter. The first two sections were intended to make the reader, the potential beneficiary of our material, aware of the need for changes, both in educational policies and in the concrete plan of the university institutions where the educational act is carried out. They are imposed by the rapid pace of digitisation that has impacted all professional environments. In a natural sequence, Sects. 6.3, 6.4 and 6.5 deal with the prerequisites for effective implementation of technologically supported assessment. Specifically, in these sections, we have addressed theoretical models that underpin all academic assessment systems, including digital assessment, teachers’ conceptions of assessment and digital technologies as a supporting element, and the principles that should govern the use of a digitised assessment system. Finally, the last two sections focus explicitly on digital technologies with the intention of highlighting, first generically and then through a concrete illustration (the expression of one’s own research), the advantages that these contextualised modes of assessment can prove in the context of university education.