Week 5 video transcript
It’s a short week this week, but a really important one. Assessment is critical to the student experience. Good course design relies on good assessment design.
Because it’s a short week we’re going to try to pare down the readings and the activities a little bit from usual. A lot of the readings are about assessment in general, rather than the specifics of assessing online. That’s because it’s so important to get the fundamentals right.
Rather than giving you huge swathes of reading there are a couple of short videos covering general concepts in assessment and current issues in assessment that you can watch. Check that you’ve got a grasp of the key ideas.
There is also a bibliography on assessment and feedback so that you can follow up on specific topics of interest if you like.
Because we’ve been doing group work in this course we’re going to focus on group work assessment. Specifically, assessing group products and peer assessment. Because of this the one reading you really should do this week is about assessing group work. And of course we’re giving you some other relevant readings on the topic as well. The literature review by Graham Gibbs on assessing group work is also highly recommended.
The main task to do this week, Task one, is, as you would expect, related to this reading. Thinking about the group presentations you produced in week three, we ask you to think through and present an approach to assessing such products.
Present and discuss your ideas in the discussion forum provided for the purpose. What would be the criteria you would use to assess these products and how (and why) would you involve peers in the assessment process?
The other task, Task two, is a plenary forum discussion that asks you to think about some differences between assessments in traditional, face-to-face courses and online courses. Some of the readings we’ve given to you deal with this question.
The initial prompt question is quite specific: if your participation in this course was to be assessed, how should it be? But this is really a way of asking, how do we ensure that assessment in online courses is well aligned? In particular, how do we ensure that the learning methods we use in online courses are aligned with and valued by the assessment regime we use?
Some assessment practices lend themselves much more naturally to online courses than more traditional face-to-face courses. For example, the virtual learning environments that we use to deliver online courses make it very easy to offer regular, formative, computer-aided assessment. There is good evidence that this sort of formative assessment can have a significant impact on student performance.
Since it is very likely that we’re using electronic submission of assignments in our online courses then it’s a little bit more natural to also take advantage of opportunities to provide electronic feedback to students.
But I’m sure you will discover as you work your way through this week’s activities that there are number of other important things to think about in designing assessments in online courses.
Since we’re probably relying a lot on technology to carry out assessment processes in online courses, we need to think through carefully whether our students have the necessary skills to do our assessments. It’s easy to assume they are skilled users of technology when some of them may well not be.
Peer-review is an example of this. Students don’t automatically know how to do peer review; they need teaching, support and experience.
There is quite a lot of thinking that needs doing around the issue of fairness in the assessment design and its processes.
And don’t forget to think through tracking and monitoring in electronic learning environments. Are you planning to use tracking tools? Does it make sense to use them, or would that just create an unnecessary additional burden on your time? Have you told students whether and how you use them?
So, many ideas to think about. I hope you enjoy this week’s activities. I look forward to seeing you online.