A Systematic Review on Pedagogical Trends and Assessment Practices during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Teachers’ and Students’ Perspectives

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a wide range of eﬀects on education at all levels worldwide. After an unexpected, emergency and forced move from face-to-face to online platform for teaching-learning and assessment, teachers and learners were left scrambling to adjust and adapt. Concerning the importance of the above matters, this systematic review paper would investigate diﬀerent aspects of online pedagogical trends and online assessment practice from the teachers’ and students’ perspectives during the COVID-19 pandemic in the existing literature conducted from March 2020 to April 2021. For this purpose, 45 studies of 33.864 research studies were collected from the database of ScienceDirect, Scopus, and Web of Science and analyzed herewith. For inclusion and exclusion of studies, the guidelines of the PRISMA model were followed. The results show that there are 18 diﬀerent advantages of online learning, 28 challenges of online learning, 15 diﬀerent purposes of shifting to online learning, and 14 diﬀerent platforms used for online learning under diﬀerent aspects of online pedagogical trends. For online assessment practice, 5 diﬀerent types of assessment and 15 challenges of implementing online assessment are found. The study’s ramiﬁcations for online teaching and learning and assessment are examined. There are also suggestions for future research.


Introduction
COVID-19, a contagious virus, spread worldwide, wreaking havoc on all aspects of human life. ough it began as a health catastrophe, it has had a significant impact on other areas such as policy, economy, business, communication, tourism, and education. One of the most important effects of the pandemic is on education. According to United Nations (2020), the COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on education on a scale never seen before. By the middle of 2020, the pandemic would have impacted 94% of students globally. is equates to 1.58 billion children and youth in 200 nations, ranging from preprimary to higher education. When the pandemic spread around the world at the beginning of 2020, state governments suspended face-to-face campus-based teaching and learning activities in schools, colleges, and universities to curve its spread and save human lives. However, to keep educational activities ongoing, many educational institutions began to deploy technology to promote distance education, remote learning, and online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, following the government's decision.
While online teaching is commonly known and practised, emergency remote teaching (ERT) is relatively new in many parts of the world. Online teaching is initially planned and prepared to be provided virtually. By contrast, emergency remote teaching is a quick interim transition of instructional delivery to an online delivery mode due to a major disaster. ERT entails the full use of remote teaching tools to offer curriculum or educational resources that would otherwise be delivered physically or as hybrid or blended courses [1]. When educational institutions started ERT, in many cases, neither the teachers nor the students had been prepared for remote teaching with institutionally supported technologies. However, several institutions have made it mandatory for teachers to offer online sessions using opensource online educational platforms such as WhatsApp, YouTube, Skype, and Facebook [2].
Increasingly over the last one and half years, numerous papers have been published highlighting the changes in education as a consequence of the spread of the pandemic. Most of the articles have focused on pedagogy [3][4][5], the well-being of the learners/teachers [6], challenges [2,[7][8][9], and so on. For instance, Joshi, Vinay, and Bhaskar [2] used the interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to identify the challenges experienced by teachers during online teaching and evaluation in various home environmental settings in India. Teachers confront four types of obstacles during online teaching and assessment, according to the research. Significant difficulties included a lack of basic facilities, external distraction, and family disruption. Personal issues among teachers included a lack of passion and technical understanding. Aliyyah et al. [10] investigated primary school teachers' perspectives of online learning in a program created in Indonesia during the COVID-19 pandemic. Data were gathered from 67 primary school teachers via surveys and semi-structured interviews.
e findings revealed four primary themes: teaching tactics, difficulties, support, and teacher motivation. Using a qualitative methodology, Shamir-Inbal and Blau [11] looked into teacher experience leading emergency remote teaching (ERT) in K-12 to better understand the pedagogical, technological, and organizational obstacles and benefits of computer-augmented digital learning settings. Teachers used a variety of pedagogical remote learning tactics, according to the findings. e study emphasizes the importance of turning a curse into a blessing by regularly adding remote technology-enhanced learning and online activities into the school agenda. Ghasem and Ghannam [12] evaluated the impact of distance learning on chemical engineering students' educational performance at United Arab Emirates University during the pandemic period based on a survey and observations. Overall, the students who took part in the study had no major technical difficulties in completing all of the online exercises. During the online sessions, the majority of the students who participated experienced difficulty concentrating.
Nevertheless, there are few review studies found in existing literature during COVID-19 on the aspects of teaching and assessment through online practices. Kumar et al. [13] presented a review study discussing the various aspects of modern technology used to fight against the COVID-19 crisis at different scales, including medical image processing, disease tracking, prediction outcomes, computational biology, and medicines. Carrillo and Flores [14] provided a review of the literature on online teaching and learning practices in teacher education. Regmi and Jones [15] identified positive and negative factors that affect e-learning in health sciences education (el-HSE) in the medical literature. Again, Gamage et al. [16] reviewed the security of digital assessments, as well as the issues related to academic integrity. us, there is an explicit knowledge gap to investigate different issues of pedagogical trends, e.g., reasons for shifting online teaching, online teaching platforms, advantages, challenges, and online assessment practices during the COVID-19 pandemic.
For this purpose, studies that addressed the educational issues related to either country-specific or subject-specific or particular education level-specific empirical studies from teachers' or students' perspectives during the COVID-19 pandemic were under consideration of this study. Against this backdrop, reviewing empirical research articles systematically, the purpose of this study was to explore the following two research questions: (1) What are the aspects of pedagogical trends in emergency remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic? (2) What assessment practices are inculcated in emergency remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic? e above two research questions have been explored from teachers' and students' perspectives based on a systematic literature review.

Methodology
e methodology of this study is based on the guidelines of the PRISMA model [17,18] for conducting a systematic literature review.
e guidelines consist of a method of literature review of available research studies found on the online pedagogical trends and assessment practices during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Study Searching and Inclusion Process.
e searching and inclusion process of this study is based on the guidelines of the PRISMA model [18]. For selecting studies on the online pedagogical trends and assessment practices during the COVID-19 pandemic, the researchers have gone through the renowned global databases such as Web of Science, Scopus, and ScienceDirect from March 2020 to April 2021.
e key search words were assessment and COVID-19, teaching and COVID-19, online leaning and COVID-19, and education and COVID-19. 33.864 research studies were identified in total in the databases mentioned above. e majority of them were discovered on Science-Direct (11,210), followed by Scopus (10.310) and Web of Science (9528). Following a careful evaluation of the study types, their titles and abstracts, and the possibility of duplication, 127 papers were retained for full-text analysis, of  Figure 1 presents the analysis process of this study in response to each research question. Selected studies were 45 in total in alignment with the objectives of this study. ese 45 studies were put into Zotero, the reference management software for making online database and studying part by part by the researchers. After screening through the Zotero database, all the selected studies (N � 45) were exported from Zotero as ris.file to import into NVivo. NVivo 12 version, the qualitative data analysis software, was used to build themes in response to the researcher questions. After securing themes as per research questions, the researchers exported the list of themes with the number of nodes (n) as an excel sheet. is excel sheet was imported into SPSS 25, the quantitative data analysis software for descriptive analysis. On the basis of the 50th quartile point, the results of this study were presented.
To present the findings, at first, under each major theme, we converted the individual observation number of each subtheme into a percentage compared with both total sample article numbers, N � 45, and total observation numbers of that respective major theme (n). en, the 50th quartiles for each major theme have been calculated again based on both N � 45 and n. We found that, in both cases, the 50th quartiles divide the subthemes into the higher and lower parts similarly. us, finally, based on the 50th quartiles, for each major theme, we categorized our findings of subthemes into the higher group (above 50th quartile)-factors that have been identified and discussed most frequently, and the lower group (from the 50th quartile to below)-factors that have been identified and discussed less frequently. Table 1 presents the summary of the reviewed studies (n � 45). e results show that all the studies deal on two issues, e.g., pedagogical trends and assessment practice through online teaching platform during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Results
Of 45 studies, the majority of the studies were conducted through the quantitative research design (n � 21). e qualitative research design was employed in 15 studies (n � 15), and rest of 9 studies were conducted through the mixed-methods research design. e majority of the studies used survey questionnaire. ese studies dealt with teachers (n � 14), students (n � 21), teacher-students (n � 7), teachersstudents-educators (n � 1), teachers-parents (n � 1), and teachers-students-administrators (n � 1).

RQ1: Pedagogical Trends.
In response to research question 1, of 45 articles, for the pedagogical trends, the findings explored 40% of discussions on the advantages (n � 18), 62.22% on the challenges faced (n � 28), 33.33% on the purposes of shifting (n � 15), and 31.11% on the platforms used (n � 14) for online teaching-learning ( Table 2).

Qualitative
Interview Teachers [20] Investigating difficulties that EFL teachers face to implement online teaching during a coronavirus pandemic, particularly in Iran.

Mixedmethods
Survey and interview Teachers [1] Investigating how teacher educators and student teachers dealt with the unprecedented circumstances.
Qualitative Reflections Teacher-educatorsstudent [21] Investigating teachers' experiences during the early COVID-19 lockdown. Quantitative Survey Students [22] To demonstrate digital disruption at UK institutions, as well as the consequences and benefits of emergency online migration during COVID-19.

Quantitative
Survey Teachers [23] To look at the problems and issues that EFL students encounter as a result of restricted resources. Quantitative Survey Students [24] Investigating teachers' preparation, curriculum equipment, and teacher-students with the socialemotional competencies for dealing with such situations.
Qualitative Interview Teachers-students [25] To measure and elaborate pre-COVID-19 pandemic literature notions of faculty online preparation.
Mixedmethods Survey, focus group Teachers [26] To investigate how pedagogies changed as learning communities moved to new online spaces after the practicum was removed.
Qualitative Online survey Teachers [27] Investigating the impact of COVID-19 : sharing stories, sharing practice. Qualitative Presentation and chat box thread Teachers [28] is article offers professional perspective on this online learning-related PCK, with the objective of assisting nonexpert university teachers (i.e., those with minimal expertise with online learning) in navigating through these difficult times.

Qualitative
Interview Teachers 4 Education Research International To examine how early career teachers maintained social contact with students while also mastering core teaching challenges.
Quantitative Survey questionnaire Teachers [30] To examine the experiences of students in Zoom meeting rooms, mercury education platforms, and online assessment systems used by lecturers.
Quantitative Survey questionnaire Students [31] Investigating the impact of e-evaluation on job motivation among teachers during the movement control order (MCO) in COVID-19, as well as the influence of stress as a mediating factor.
Quantitative Online survey Teachers [32] To investigate the elements that influence students' preference for remote examinations, course assessment/ evaluation techniques, and factors.

Quantitative
Online survey Teachers-students [33] To give a genuine and relevant manner to share the understanding of the need of including employability skills into assessment practice.

Qualitative
Anecdotal evidence Teachers-students [34] To see how the coronavirus disease (COVID- 19) pandemic affected university students during the movement control order (MCO) and recovery movement control order (RMCO).

Quantitative
Survey Students [35] To create a theoretical model that highlights the factors that influenced the adoption of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Quantitative
Online survey Teachers [36] Investigating how health science students felt about elearning and how satisfied they were with it during the COVID-19 lockdown.
Quantitative Online survey Students [37] To examine students' learning experiences and attitudes during the pandemic. Qualitative Interviews Students [38] To highlight stakeholder views from the academic and student communities, ending in a mock examination to measure infrastructure, and student population readiness during the implementation of remote examination.
Quantitative Survey Teachers-students [30] To investigate the elements that influence students' happiness with online learning during the COVID- 19 epidemic.

Quantitative
Survey Students [39] To reveal the essential characteristics that influence students' adoption of e-learning during the COVID-19 era.
Quantitative Survey questionnaire Students [40] To learn about student instructors' perspectives on the online academic assistance e-tools that were implemented during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Mixedmethods
Online survey Students [41] To examine the challenges that teachers experience when teaching and assessing online in various home environments in India.

Qualitative
Interviews Teachers [42] To gain a better understanding of the important issues, approaches, and lessons learned by higher educational institutions (HEIs) in the context of COVID-19.
Mixedmethods Survey Students [43] To investigate difficulties with online learning among Malaysian university students during the epidemic.
Mixedmethods Online interview Students [44] To outline objectives for post-COVID-19 planning in order to achieve a better balance of distance and face-toface learning.

Qualitative
Mapping focus group Teachers [45] To compare hurdles and constraints to producing excellent distant learning and the usage of electronic tests during the coronavirus epidemic, with the goal of attaining success in the distance educational system (COVID-19).

Mixedmethod
Online survey-open questionnaire Teachers-students Education Research International 5 To investigate Internet platforms that were used in teaching and learning throughout the COVID-19 pandemic's lockdown phase.
Mixedmethods Survey Students [47] To find an answer to the question of how can we make the learning process as easy as possible for everyone involved? How can we assess the relevance of knowledge and skills acquired at a distance?
Quantitative Practical work, lectures, projects Students [48] To see whether universities are employing the appropriate assessment methods during pandemics and other times of crises.
Qualitative Online discussion Students [49] To investigate the use of Chegg, a website that offers "homework help" and other academic services to students during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Quantitative Subject-level menu on Chegg Students [50] To investigate India's "exam emergency" through an entertaining discussion of the importance, division, and disagreement surrounding the resumption of all annual admission examinations that had been postponed owing to a statewide lockdown owing to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Qualitative
Interviews Students [51] To investigate how open educational resource (OER) materials help teachers and students during the COVID-19 time.
Quantitative Survey Teachers-students [52] To give a case study describing the use of an automated student-centered assessment tool to transition the assessment method of a programming course in higher education to a totally online format during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mixedmethods
Students' interactions and survey Students [53] To observe how the COVID-19 outbreak and its attendant quarantine influenced university students' perceptions of online learning in Jordan.

Quantitative
Online survey Students [54] To learn about undergraduate students' reactions to emergency online learning during the first two weeks of COVID-19 mandated shift to online learning.

Qualitative
Texts Students [55] To provide examples from Australian teachers of how high-stake examinations influence their implementation of senior secondary history curriculum.

Qualitative
Interview Teachers [56] To create the periodontal senior case clinical challenge (PSCCC), which would provide fourth-year students with an alternative to senior case presentations and serve as a formative evaluation in which student opinions would be collected and analyzed.

Quantitative
Survey Students [57] To investigate students' experiences with remote examination delivery and compared test performance in remote vs invigilated campus-based forms of equivalent assessments over two academic years.

Quantitative
Online survey Students [58] To provide light on the effects of COVID-19 on the teaching and learning processes at Sri Lanka's southeastern university, as well as the obstacles the university had in maintaining its online educational system throughout the conference.       Table 7 presents the 50th quartile values of the major theme, namely purposes of shifting to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.

RQ2: Online Assessment.
In response to research question 2, for the assessment practices, 11.11% of the discussions were found on the assessment types (n � 5) and 33.33% on the challenges faced (n � 15) ( Table 11).

Major eme 1: Types of Assessment in Online
Learning. Table 12 presents the 50th quartile values of the major theme, namely types of assessment in online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the first major theme, "Types of Assessment in Online learning," a total of five subthemes (n � 5) have been identified where the 50th quartile � 0.022 (Table 13). Among these five assessment types, remote online delivery (4%) and time-limited remote examinations (4%) belong to the upper group. On the other hand, automated student-centered assessment (2%), interim presentation (2%), and video assessment (2%) belong to the lower group.

Major eme 2: Challenges of Assessment in Online
Learning. Table 14 presents the 50th quartile values of the major theme, namely challenges of assessment in online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Discussion
e themes related to the different aspects of pedagogical trends and assessments during pandemic were categorized into the upper and lower groups.
ose who had high frequency within these studies fell into the upper group, and those who had low frequency were put into the lower group.

RQ1: Pedagogical Trend.
In response to research question 1, there were four identified aspects of the pedagogical trends of online teaching during COVID-19 such as advantages of online learning, challenges of online learning, purposes of shifting to online learning, and platforms used for online learning.
Under the theme of advantages of online teaching, there were 18 different types of advantages found. e most frequent advantages were teachers'-students' positive experience, costsaving, flexible learning, time-saving, collaborative learning, conducive learning, effectiveness, good medium, and synchronous teaching methods. Teachers-students' positive experience was the most important advantage. On the other hand, academic support, freedom in learning, manageable, safety, self-directed learning, student-centeredness, synchronous and asynchronous, timely response from teachers, and ubiquitous learning were in the group of least frequent group.
From the perspectives of challenges of implementing online as a pedagogical trend, there were 28 different issues. Course integration with technology, Internet issues, lack of interaction, lack of technical infrastructure, lack of devices,      (ERT) transitions, facilitating conditions, hedonic motivation, moving with agility, and social influence were the prominent. On the other hand, effect expectancy, entering "disembodied spaces," facilitating leadership, multiple digital protocols, navigating larger groups, performance expectancy, price value, project team capability, regulator's support, and transferring to home working were dealt less in these studies. For using platforms for teaching online, there were 14 different types of tools were found. Among these 14 platforms, Zoom, learning management system, Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams, and WhatsApp were the frequently used platforms. e most used platform was Zoom, whereas, Chegg, Discussion Forum, email, Facebook, Google Hangouts, Learning Central, Teleconferencing Software, Telegram, and telephone were the least used platforms.

RQ-2: Assessment Practice.
In response to the assessment practice, 5 different types of online assessment were found. Among these, remote online delivery and timelimited remote examinations were used most, whereas automated student-centered assessment, interim presentation, and video assessment were used less frequently.
15 different types of challenges were found to conduct online assessment practice. Among these 15 challenges of assessment in online learning, lack of preparedness, lack of students' interest, challenging online assessment, facilitating cheat, importing marking system, lack of students' mental preparedness, dissatisfactory examination system, and limited time had high frequency. On the other hand, external distraction, family interference, Internet issue, item leakage, lack of government's preparedness, limited resources, and test anxiety had the least frequency. e findings of this study in response to research questions 1and 2 are different from the existing review studies. For example, Kumar et al. [13] presented a review study discussing the various aspects of modern technology used to fight against COVID-19 crisis at different scales, including medical image processing, disease tracking, prediction outcomes, computational biology, and medicines. Secondly, Carrillo and Flores [14] provided a review of the literature on online teaching and learning practices in teacher education. irdly, Regmi and Jones [15] identified the positive and negative factors that affect e-learning in    [16] reviewed the security of digital assessments, as well as the issues related to academic integrity.

Further Research and Limitations
is study has made shreds of evidence that some areas of research deserve further attention. First, more attention needs to be paid to practical strategies for equitable distance learning that should be considered during and beyond emergency remote teaching (see also [61]). Although this study has highlighted the issues related to online pedagogy that were likely to lead to teaching and learning impact, these were not the primary focus of the studies examined. Second, more attention needs to be directed towards the pedagogical underlying issues leading to universities to facilitate adoption, acceptance, and use of online teaching during a healthcare emergency leading to campus lockdowns or the imposition of restrictions on the physical movement of people [35]. Concentration should be on incorporating principles into the course that could be applied and/or modified to increase students' engagement and performance [20,62]. Moreover, developing state of Internet connectivity, adequate training, and workshop on the usage of e-learning should be emphasized to optimize the maximum benefits of e-learning [63].
In regard to assessment, the process used during the COVID-19 pandemic may remain in the post-pandemic context, so test developers need to pay attention to using technologically delivered assessments for delivering construct representative in the new era of technologydriven language assessments [64]. Further research needs to be carried out for evaluating automated studentcentered assessment tool for learners' evaluation in any context to minimize the absence of physical examinations [52,65]. Additional research can be carried out to investigate post-examination living experiences of learners to formulate an online assessment system for any context in the globe [50]. More focus needs to be placed on procedural support, resourcing and preparation in raising awareness and disseminating information on academic integrity policy, practices, expectations, disciplinary action, and developmental tools to mitigate academic misconduct for online assessment [21].
Moreover, this study has reviewed the literature on different issues, e.g., advantages, challenges, shifting rationale, online platforms of pedagogical trends, and assessment challenges and practices synthesized in the existing literature during the COVID-19 pandemic in the area of teaching and learning. However, due to a large number of studies under examination and the constraints in terms of word limitation, this study has focused on the most common themes or characteristics that have been determined to be the most relevant for this study and has left out several essential concerns, e.g., impacts of COVID-19 pandemic on learners' physical and mental health and academic performance. Further, a review study can highlight these issues to present a complete scenario of online pedagogy in education from the global perspectives.

Data Availability
No empirical data were used for this study. Only published articles were used for this study.

Conflicts of Interest
e authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.