Week 5: assessing learning
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Assessment
Welcome back! Congratulations on getting this far. By now you should be comfortable with the online environment, more familiar with the other participants on this course, especially those you've worked with in a small group, and you might be either exhilarated or getting pretty tired at the relentless pace of the communication!
This week we look at principles and practice of assessment. Assessment is central to the student experience. It's the linchpin of the design of any course and especially of online courses. It's the key to student engagement. So, this is a really important topic. It's also a highly complex one. You might say that designing good assessment is a creative art. So there's a lot to discuss.
To start with we ask you to review key concepts and current issues in assessment. There are a couple of short videos to watch that should help you to do this relatively efficiently. Check that you have a grasp of the important concepts. The activities this week focus on online assessment and feedback in particular, or to put it another way, we look at how the principles of assessment apply to the practice of online learning and teaching.
You can read the video transcript here.
Activities
We take a pragmatic, experiential approach to looking at online assessment. We ask you to consider your experience of aspects of this course and to think through how one would design assessment relating to those aspects. The specific aspects we're going to look at are designing group work assessment and student engagement.
- Task 1: Assessing the small group presentations (no more than 90 minutes) (badge activity). Take another look at some of the small group presentations done in week 3. Prepare a proposal for an effective means of assessing this task. What criteria should be used? Who should be involved in the marking and feedback process? How should they be involved? What kind(s) of feedback processes would be most appropriate? Post your suggestion as the start of a new thread in this topic, adding your name to the subject header. Take a look at some other suggestions and offer your feedback to colleagues on them. And check back on your own contribution from time to time to respond to feedback on it.
- Task 2: Assessing online contributions (no more than 1 hour). This week, our plenary discussion focuses on the assessment of students' online contributions. Specifically we ask you: If your participation in this course were to be assessed, how should it be? In deciding how you will contribute to this plenary activity, you might like to consider some of the following questions:
- What assessment criteria would you use?
- Would you look for quality or quantity of postings? Both? Neither? Why?
- How would you assess contributions to a collaborative online task?
- What differences do you find between assessment of online work and more traditional assessment of students' work?
Aim to post your response early in the week, to give others time to read, digest and respond to it.
Readings
Key reading: Centre for the Study of Higher Education (2002). Assessing group work. (If you read one thing this week it should be this one)- Week 5 readings
- Assessment and feedback bibliography (PDF)
