Digital assessment in higher education: Promoting universal usability through requirements specification and universal design quality (UD-Q) reviews

Abstract

Statistics show there is a clear relationship between higher education and employment in Norway, especially for people with disabilities. The use of digital assessment solutions is increasing in Norwegian higher education. The overall goal of this study is therefore to highlight the potential for improvement of current practices related to universal design, both for providers of digital assessment solutions and for higher education institutions. Based on a case study of practices in Norwegian higher education sector, this article reviews existing requirements for ensuring universal design in digital assessment solutions, prototypes an approach to evaluating universal design quality (UD-Q) of two major Norwegian digital assessment solutions and investigates the compliance between providers’ self-assessments from interviews and UD-Q evaluation scores. The article presents two contributions: (1) an improved set of requirements for universal usability when procuring digital assessments solutions and (2) UD-Q, a stepwise feature analysis-based expert inspection method for evaluating the UD-Q of digital assessment solutions.