The COVID-19 pandemic presented many challenges within higher education, one of which was conducting assessments. This research reflects on the assessment practice in a second-year systems analysis and design (SAD) course at a South African (SA) university as it moved from face-to-face (F2F) pre-COVID to an online continuous assessment format during COVID-19.

SAD focuses on the knowledge and skills required to perform the early stages of a software development project. In these stages, one needs to understand and diagrammatically represent a business’ needs. Theoretical content includes determining the business problem and its requirements. Skills include learning to develop diagrams of business processes, use cases, data flow diagrams and class diagrams. Students need to learn, interpret and construct these from a prepared narrative.

Students find it relatively easy to understand such diagrams once they have learnt the necessary symbols, while they tend to underestimate the skill required to create a diagram from a narrative. This is one of the difficult aspects of the SAD module. Facing a move from F2F delivery to an exclusively online mode, this was anticipated to remain a challenge. Other challenges facing SA students were access to devices and the Internet. As noted globally, the pandemic highlighted the difficult circumstances faced by vulnerable students.

The aim of this research is to highlight the benefits, challenges, and lessons learnt when performing assessments in both modes and to curate the academics’ learning gained in this forced move online.

A case study research design approach was followed. All three authors were involved in the administration and teaching of the SAD module, which represents the case for this research. In 2020, 238 students were registered for this module. Autoethnographic data production was used for this study. The data collected was a recorded round table discussion amongst the authors, related course records, emails and WhatsApp messages.

Before COVID-19, all students wrote two common tests and a single three-hour final exam. In SA, a national lockdown was triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Lecturers were told to move all module delivery to the university’s online learning management system, Moodle, urgently. This movement online allowed the SAD academics to review the module delivery and assessment.

Pedagogical changes included setting assignments to allow students to work on extended business case study questions. Students were required to submit scanned, hand-written solutions to a Moodle assignment. Test questions were adjusted to accommodate for automated online marking, i.e. MCQs/closed-format quiz questions. Students were asked to draw analysis diagrams and then answer the questions based on their diagrams.

The results highlight the effort required to move from F2F assessment to an online assessment format. Firstly, the case study required students to think more critically when answering the assignment. Secondly, creating MCQs which assessed the student’s ability to draw, not merely interpret SAD diagrams, was challenging. Thirdly, the technological challenges and limitations of online assessment must be understood and addressed to ensure assessment integrity and fairness.

The use of assignment and test assessment approaches may not be feasible in all online classes. Practical and physical constraints may play a significant role in limiting the available academic choices.

Keywords: Assessment technology, Learning management systems, Software engineering, Online pedagogy, Emergency remote teaching, Higher education.