Sen Gupta Tarun, Wong Eugene, Doshi Deepak, Hays Richard
James Cook University and The Australian College of Rural & Remote Medicine.
The Australian College of Rural & Remote Medicine.
MedEdPublish (2016). 2021 Jun 4;10:155. doi: 10.15694/mep.2021.000155.1. eCollection 2021.
This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought many challenges to medical education, necessitating a rapid transition to digital delivery. The widespread move to online exams has introduced novel risks, including the risk of catastrophic IT failure. These are not 'black swan' events - something so unexpected and devastating that we could not anticipate them and prepare accordingly. The phrase 'black elephants', a cross between a black swan and 'the elephant in the room' has been coined to describe these events. Moving to high-stakes online examinations introduces another element that needs to be considered and managed: the 'stability' of the assessment format used. This dimension incorporates notions of 'platform reliability' and 'internal risk management' and can be caused by both unplanned events eg IT failures, and planned events like security breaches Developing approaches to mitigate this new risk suggests another dimension to the well-known assessment 'utility equation': stability of the platform used. This paper explores the concept of stability from the perspectives of educational institutions and candidates and offers some approaches to achieving stability. The delivery of assessment in the digital age, requires the 'utility equation' to be recalibrated and establishment of a new "sweet spot" for each assessment program.
本文已迁移。该文章被标记为推荐文章。新冠疫情给医学教育带来了诸多挑战，这使得医学教育有必要迅速转向数字化教学。广泛采用在线考试带来了新的风险，包括灾难性信息技术故障的风险。这些并非“黑天鹅”事件——即那些极其意外且具有毁灭性、以至于我们无法预料并做好相应准备的事件。“黑象”这一说法应运而生，它是“黑天鹅”和“房间里的大象”（指明显存在却被忽视的问题）的结合，用于描述此类事件。转向高风险的在线考试引入了另一个需要考虑和管理的因素：所使用评估形式的“稳定性”。这一维度包含“平台可靠性”和“内部风险管理”的概念，可能由意外事件（如信息技术故障）和计划事件（如安全漏洞）引发。开发减轻这种新风险的方法为著名的评估“效用方程”提出了另一个维度：所使用平台的稳定性。本文从教育机构和考生的角度探讨了稳定性的概念，并提供了一些实现稳定性的方法。在数字时代进行评估，需要重新校准“效用方程”，并为每个评估项目确立一个新的“最佳平衡点”。
