Assessment

The introduction to the assessment is posted here, or the assessment can be accessed directly here.

Designing meaningful assessment tools is one aspect of instructional design that I find very challenging – as I highlighted in my Flight Path – when designing materials for both face-to-face and online learning. For this assignment I chose to do a summative evaluation. However, because the context I am designing for does not grant grades or even require students to complete specific courses, students are doing the courses and any assessments out of personal interest. Jenkins (2004) wrote that receiving feedback is “a valuable part of the learning process and should be ongoing, frequent and comprehensive” (p. 68), so this will not be the only assessment included in the course. My plan is to include formative and summative assessment in each module. These will be structured so that, “Students can access the tests whenever they need and they are able to repeat them, obtaining feedback on all their attempts” (Jenkins, 2004, p. 76).

The Easy Part

The Moodle quiz functionality was quite straightforward when it came to setting up the questions, but ensuring the correct scoring and setting up any Gradebook features was more time consuming. Every system has its quirks, and getting familiar with a new system just requires an investment of time and patience! Plus, it’s good to have tips from colleagues to help address the big hurdles.

The Challenges

Fortunately for me – but unfortunately for Jose – I was not the only one to encounter the problem with Chrome removing the WYSIWYG editing tools in Moodle. Convinced that I had somehow modified my own permissions, I spent ages trying to ‘modify them back’. But getting access to the wider range of WYSIWYG tools doesn’t really affect the content. The technology is just a tool, so the challenge remained generating meaningful content to fill the Moodle question fields.

I will be the first to admit that when it comes to assessment I am old school. Perhaps my reliance on testing people’s recall of the content comes from my own educational experiences, or perhaps it’s because writing those kinds of questions is easy. OK, it’s not easy to write good multiple choice questions with clear structure and distracting distracters, but writing questions that really unearth people’s deeper thinking and ideas is hard. This is something I will continue to research and work on throughout the remainder of this course.

This was the first time I’d used the feedback options in Moodle. Chickering  and Gamson (1987) note that “assessment without timely feedback contributes little to learning.” To that end, I attempted to integrate feedback into my Moodle assessment whenever possible. It is unfortunate that it’s not possible to provide specific feedback in the matching questions. No doubt there is some technical reason for this, but I think this would add value to this type of question.

While it was challenging creating the assessment component prior to finalizing my course content, the advantage is that assessment will remain top-of-mind while I work on the course content.

References

Chickering, A.W. & Gamson, Z.F. (1987).  Seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education.  American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 39 (7), 3-7.

Gibbs, G., & Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1, 3-31.

Jenkins, M. (2004). Unfulfilled Promise: formative assessment using computer-aided assessment. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1, 67-80.