Personalising Online Assessments: A Systematic Literature Review

In the last few decades, the expansion of online learning and online assessment has attracted both negative and positive attention, some of which has celebrated the flexibility and individualised affordances of online learning contexts, while also lamenting the overuse of one-size-fits-all teaching approaches. Virtual learning contexts have been criticised for their lack of human presence and, while continual developments in learning technologies have supported advances in flexible education and remote learning, assessment and feedback processes have not always improved accordingly. This systematic literature review focuses on the assessment process from the design phase through to the post-feedback phase with particular emphasis on the way in which individual choices and personalised features of assessment can enhance student learning. Twenty-nine articles that met the inclusion criteria developed for this study were analysed. Results show that personalised online assessment is mostly researched using qualitative methods that focus on students. Furthermore, these results reveal that it is pivotal for the lecturer to focus on the process of personalising online assessments, acknowledging the significance of the assessment design. An additional outcome from this study was the clarification of the terms: humanised, personalised and individualised, previously used interchangeably.