Assessment Tools

Assessment

In an Online Learning

Environment

Tobias Blaskovits

61325981

ETEC 565

Dr. John Egan

June 27, 2009

Introduction

In the academic world, success is measured in terms of grades. As a result, assessment has always played an important motivating factor in student learning. Frequent assignments or tests can distribute student effort across the course, while infrequent assignments may result in intensive studying for a week or two immediately prior to the assignment deadline (Gibbs and Simpson, 2005). However, frequent assignments produces an increased workload for teachers, already stressed with demands on their time. The goal of designing assessment regimes is to generate engagement with the learning tasks without generating piles of marking (Gibbs and Simpson, 2005). While this goal may more difficult to manage in a regular classroom, the online learning environment provides many different opportunities for instructors to assess more without increasing their workload.

The online learning environment also has the ability to provide timely constructive feedback. Constructing useful feedback is essential to the learning process. Students must receive feedback promptly before moving on to new content, in order for the feedback to be useful. This can be extremely hard for teachers who are often overwhelmed with other time commitments. The ability of LMS assessment tools to provide instantaneous feedback is one of the true benefits of online learning environment.

Since the intent of my Moodle site is to supplement my regular classroom environment, I have chosen to use formative assessment tools that support learning and provide feedback. Feedback is used to correct errors and misconceptions, guide students through explanations and generate more learning by suggesting further specific study tasks, to encourage students to continue studying (Gibbs and Simpson, 2005). I will continue to provide summative assessment in the form of formal tests in my classes. My hope is that the use of online assessment will allow me to assess less in my regular classroom environment.

Lessons in Moodle

In my LMS practice course, I chose to construct some lessons using the built-in Moodle lesson tool. As part of each lesson, one can use formative assessment to gage the students learning of the course material. This assessment tool allows for many different question formats to accompany the lessons, and each lesson can be attempted once or multiple times. I believe this tool has a lot of potential, as it allows users to receive immediate feedback regarding their comprehension. In addition, the feedback can be designed to provide guidance and solutions for students to further support their learning. Studies show that students can cope without much, or even any, face-to-face teaching, but they cannot cope without regular feedback on assignments (Gibbs and Simpson, 2005).

Another benefit of this type of assessment is for the teacher. Online courses such as this, have the ability to provide self-marking assessment, which requires very little of the instructor’s time, once the course is constructed. I chose to design this so that students may have multiple attempts at each lesson, but their grade will be an average of all attempts on the assignment.

There are some potential issues with this type of assessment, as with any online course. How can one be assured who is completing the assignment? Ass a result, I would not place a lot of value on the marks generated by this type of assessment. I would primarily use this to support students learning, possibly including the score on this assessment as part of an overall participation mark.

Quizzes and Tests

Another form of assessment I chose to use in my LMS practice course is the built-in quiz generation tool. I chose this type of assessment tool as more of a summative form of assessment to use at the midpoint or end of a unit. This assessment tool is similar to the integrate lesson questions in that it allows for many different question formats to be created. Quizzes can be made using multiple-choice, matching, true or false, short answer, and or essay format questions. I plan on offering this feature, in my face-to-face classes, as an alternative to written quizzes in my classroom. I view the purpose of a quiz to assess the progress of a student during a unit. Quizzes are really preparation, to see if students know the material well enough to succeed on the summative unit test. This self-graded assessment tool also provides the benefit of instantaneous feedback.

The major drawback to this type of assessment tool is the initial construction. The constructing of your own questions can be tedious and labour intensive. This process can be improved by importing pre-made test bank questions. However, Moodle does not support all forms of test bank questions. This still leaves users the time consuming operation of cutting and pasting questions into the quiz generator. Also time consuming, is the construction of detailed and descriptive feedback.

As previously mentioned, an issue with online assessment is the monitoring of cheating. With this type of online quiz it is impossible to know who is sitting on the computer at the other end completing the quiz. If all that is needed is a username and password to login into the course, anyone could be completing it. Although I would still use the grade book within Moodle to keep track of a student’s progress, I would not weight this assessment heavily in the overall grade, as I still plan to use in class written exams.

Online student survey

I have also included a student survey in my Moodle site at the end of the course. This type of assessment is meant to provide teacher feedback as to how students perceive the course. Moodle offers a couple different options for conducting these types of “plug-in” surveys. I have chosen to use the Constructivist On-Line Learning Environment Survey (COLLES), which is designed to monitor the extent to which your course utilizes the interactive capacity of the internet for engaging students in dynamic learning practices. I believe this is a useful assessment tool as it allows students to provide feedback on areas of the course that they feel needs work. This type of feedback is invaluable to instructors, so that they can create an effective online learning environment for subsequent users.

Conclusion

The most powerful single influence that makes a difference in student achievement is feedback. Students need frequent opportunities to perform and receive suggestions for improvement (Gibbs and Simpson, 2005). Grades without such feedback can damage a student’s “self-efficacy” or sense of competence (Gibbs and Simpson, 2005). This self-efficacy is closely related to effort and persistence. If we want students to stay motivated through out a course, we need to assess learning frequently and provide proper guidance in the form of feedback. Ultimately this should be the goal of assessment in order to support and encourage learning. Quite often this is overlooked within the values of the education system. Fortunately, the online learning environment provides some potential solutions to this concern.

References

Gibbs, G. and Simpson, C. (2005).  “Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning.” Learning and Teaching in Higher Education Accessed online 26 June 2009 http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf