International Journal of Social Science And Human Research ISSN(print): 2644-0679, ISSN(online): 2644-0695 Volume 05 Issue 08 August 2022 DOI: 10.47191/ijsshr/v5-i8-21, Impact factor- 5.871 Page No: 3500-3508 IJSSHR, Volume 05 Issue 08 August 2022 www.ijsshr.in Page 3500 Students’ Acceptance Level of Digital Newspaper Publication Performance Assessment Innovation Norhuda Salleh 1 , Wardatul Akman Din 2 , Romlah Romli 3 1 Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universiti Malaysia Sabah & Jalan UMS, 88400 Kota Kinabalu Sabah, Malaysia 2 Faculty of Psychology and Education, Universiti Malaysia Sabah & Jalan UMS, 88400 Kota Kinabalu Sabah, Malaysia 3 UUM College of Arts and Sciences School of Multimedia Technology and Communication & Universiti Utara Malaysia, Sintok, Kedah, Malaysia ABSTRACT: The alternative assessment was implemented in the Editing Course (AK20903) to analyze students’ group achievement in digital skills. This core course is compulsory for all second-year communication (UH6321001) students to prepare them with the skills of writing, analyzing, and copy editing. Students' digital skills are assessed through the publication of a digital newspaper that uses graphics applications provided by the university. However, this software can only be accessed within the campus area. The Covid-19 pandemic has changed the landscape of student locations where students are no longer within the coverage area where the software is accessible. To address this issue, the Canva application is being tried out. This study employs a quantitative approach with a sample of 124 respondents consisting of current students who are registered in the AK20903 (Editing) course. This study aims to analyze the acceptance level of the students of the introduced innovation. To collect the data a set of four parts questionnaire was used that included the demographic information, perception of user-friendly, perception of usability, and students’ satisfaction. The results showed that most of the respondents highly agreed that perception of usefu lness, perception of usability, and users’ satisfaction are the factors that influenced their acceptance of the innovation performan ce assessment of digital newspaper publications. The findings of the study indicate that students’ acceptance of the innovation performance assessment of digital newspaper publishing is influenced by the benefits and usability gained from the use of Canva. KEYWORDS: application; alternative assessment; digital skills; Canva; pandemic. I. INTRODUCTION Education is arguably the most critical element in building a nation. The responsibility of nation building essentially also lies in the hands of the teachers and lecturers as students spend quite a big chunk of their time at schools or academic institutions. Unavoidably, they communicate more with their teachers or lecturers. Classes with positive interaction will definitely create classroom environment that are more helpful to learning and meet students’ developmental, emotional and educational needs. In the process of teaching and learning, teaching refers to the participation of teachers in the process of instructing and imparting knowledge to students, whereas learning refers to the participation of students in the process of establishing knowledge (Smith, 2018). The role of a university lecturer is to cultivate, develop and enhance a student’s potential in learning. Another important component in the teaching and learning process is assessment. Assessment is important as it involves the collection of information with regards to students’ learning as well as lecturers’ teaching. This can be observed by how a lecturer spends most of thei r time designing and conducting assessment activities. Assessments can be used as a tool to collect information, such as pertaining to the lecturer’s evaluation on his/her teaching methods, and at the same time, it can also be used to make professional judgements on students’ performance in every teaching and learning process undertaken (Bashir et al., 1997; Tajularipin Sulaiman et al., 2020). Assessments in education are applied in various ways, especially in the teaching and learning process. In addition to this, assessments not only provide assistance to lecturers and students but also provide help to education administrators, education researchers and other education stakeholders to obtain useful information, so as to better decide whether to strengthen education strategies or to enhance education plans to improve education (Pellegrino, 2014). Aside from this, there are two forms of assessment, namely traditional assessment (multiple choice question, fill in the blanks question, true and false question) and alternative assessment (projects, open-ended question, journal writing). The first focuses more on scores, however the latter focuses more on the student’s performance in the process of learning (Tajularipin Sulaiman et al., 2019). On a global scale, the current generation needs to adapt to the challenges of the 21st century world. Therefore, Malaysia’s education system introduced Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) in the year 2013. In the Malaysian Education Blueprint (MEB