10th U6+ Consortium of African Universities International Conference

The fast growth of online learning environments in higher education has brought significant changes to teaching methods, student engagement, and most all, evaluation methods. Higher education institutions are facing different issues in evaluating students’ performance in digital contexts and are trying to find the balance between academic quality and equity and adaptability. This paper aims to offer a systematically review of six key challenge areas: the preservation of academic integrity in unsupervised assessments, the congruence of digital assessments with pedagogical models, surmounting technological constraints, cultivating faculty competence, concerns of equity and accessibility, and assessing higher-order skills online. Drawing on synthesis of empirical studies, institutional reports and theories of curriculum development including Biggs’ Constructive Alignment and Sterling’s Sustainable Curriculum model. This paper proposes Sustainable Online Assessment Architecture (SOAA), and makes recommendations for curriculum developers, policy makers and educational technologists. The study argues that the establishment of sustainable curriculums in digital contexts involves far-reaching conceptual rather than technological adaptations.