As you move into the online environment, you have the opportunity to develop and create a multitude of assessments using new and innovative tools. Students will feel a strong sense of relevance to your course materials when you align your content objectives with your assessments. This section reviews two types of assessments, formal and informal, that can help shape how you assess your students online.
Multiple choice and short answer tests (or quizzes) are useful for assessing students' abilities to recognize and recall content. They are also fairly easy to grade; and when faced with a large class size, you can make the grading automatic depending on the question type. The following PDF documents will help guide you in creating quality multiple-choice questions:
Assessments that require a subjective analysis are often more difficult and time consuming to grade; however, this type of assessment is appropriate for gauging how well students are able to apply the concepts learned in class.
Also, in <Replace - Your LMS>, there are a variety of tools to facilitate these types of assessments. You will read more detailed information about the following tools in the Build Your Course Activities this week.
This type of assessment can be time-consuming for the student to complete (and often for the grader to grade) due to its complex, real-world applicability. However, such assessments are particularly well suited for assessing whether students have reached a deep understanding of core concepts and allow students the ability to personalize their learning.
Other examples and formats of authentic activities and assessments are provided below: <UCF resources are provided, but can be deleted or updated with institution resources>
Informal assessments are an integral part to any quality course. Faculty incorporate these types of assessments into their course to increase their presence in the online environment and to keep track of their students’ learning. Some sample strategies include:
Below are some strategies that you can use to facilitate effective feedback:
Rubrics promote the fair and consistent grading of complex subjective material. They also provide a guideline to students regarding performance requirements and are a useful tool to provide valuable feedback. In addition, the Grading Forms featured within <Replace - Your LMS> allow you to build rubrics for discussions and assignments.
Visit Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository to learn more about the strategy for using Rubrics in your online course.
Peer review provides another means for students to receive feedback and is based on a set of standards created by the instructor. Below are samples and strategies that can be used to incorporate peer review within your course:
If you would like more information related to assessments, check out the following references. Each contains a wealth of information that you will find helpful now and in the future.
TOPKit Sample Course was prepared by the University of Central Florida (UCF). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.