As I get further and further into my Moodle project, I see the online course that I am developing becoming more of a tool that I would use to supplement a face-to-face class in order to create a blended learning environment, rather than it becoming a stand-alone online course. As an educator who has only had experience teaching in face-to-face settings, I am struggling with a few aspects of creating effective online assessments.

As a classroom teacher and a former Learning Assistance teacher, I absolutely understand the value of quality assessment practices. Even excellent assessment practices without consistent and detailed feedback however, will not significantly benefit the students. Feedback is a critical ingredient in successful assessment, student motivation and growth. As Anderson posits in Chapter 14: Teaching in an Online Learning Context, ‘[w]e know from research on assessment that timely and detailed feedback provided throughout, and as near in time as possible to the performance of the assessed behaviour, is the most effective in providing motivation, shaping behaviour, and developing mental constructs’ (Anderson, 2008, p. 352). The influence of assessment as discussed by Gibbs and Simpson (2005) in their article ‘Conditions Under Which Assessment Supports Students’ Learning’ serves to further clarify just how important the role of assessment is in student growth and achievement as their findings indicate that ‘what influenced students most was not the teaching but the assessment’ (2005, p. 4)

Challenges Creating the LMS Quiz
The greatest challenge for me throughout the process of creating the LMS quiz had nothing to do with the Moodle platform and everything to do with the structure of the quiz. If I were to administer a quiz such as this in my own classroom, I would use it as a tool for formative assessment. The quiz that I created in Moodle was entirely content based and required very little synthesis or deep thinking on the part of the students. There are two main reasons for my assessment choices; 1.) this quiz would be used to conclude the first content module (the digestive system) and 2.) the students would be required to have a good understanding of the structure and function of the digestive system in order to be able to make further learning connections later on in the unit to explain the way in which all of the body systems are interconnected. As I have selected a Science unit of study for this LMS assignment, there is a need to teach the students a fair bit of background knowledge and although they could simply look the information up online when they need to access it, the students will be able to get a much broader and deeper understanding of the network of body systems if they have a basic understanding of the function and thus the interdependencies of the various body systems. If I choose to use this Moodle course as a means through which to create a blended learning environment for the students in my physical classroom, I would use the results from this quiz to gain an understanding of who has a basic mastery of the digestive system and who does not in order to target those weaker learners for remedial purposes.

I initially had established my open testing time for the quiz as a two day window of opportunity for the students to complete the assessment, but upon further reflection I adjusted the day of the quiz to be on the Monday after the digestive system module is set to be completed with a time frame of only 6 hours (the confines of the school day) to complete the test in. The main reason for this decision is that if I was going to use the data gathered from this assessment to gain a better understanding of the students’ knowledge, I would want to be able to ensure that the assessment results were an accurate reflection of student ability. As I was designing my LMS quiz, I was hit by the realization that if a student was to complete a quiz such as this at home on their own computer, what would stop them from opening up an additional tab on their browser and googling the answers to each of the questions as they progressed through the test? I know that it is possible to set an individual time limit for each question in some learning management systems, but from what I can tell about Moodle, I believe that the only limit that can be set is in reference to the duration of the entire test, including a submission grace period. Being that my course is designed for grade five students, I do not feel that a time limit would be appropriate even if one was available for individual questions in Moodle, as some of the students in my class would undoubtedly require more time than others to read the question, process the information, formulate an answer and take action to answer it as required on the screen. I would not want to increase student anxiety by having a timer counting down as they scramble to get an answer entered for each question. This would compromise the validity of the assessment as I am looking for the students’ level of understanding, not the students’ ability to answer questions quickly. By having the students complete the online assessment in the classroom setting, they can be monitored throughout the testing time to ensure that they are using only their own knowledge and not accessing information via the internet to complete the quiz. I am not sure how teachers who are delivering courses in a completely online setting are able to create and administer assessments with their students while maintaining a high level of validity. I would constantly be questioning the integrity of my assessment data for content based evaluations.

When I initially began to create a bank of possible test questions for my LMS quiz, I had created a number of open ended questions that required a deeper understanding of the course content, but when I actually went into Moodle to begin creating the assessment itself, I found that the templates for the various quiz question formats were not quite what I had expected. For example, I needed to alter the questions that I had created for the short answer style component, so that they would be answerable in a few words instead of in 3-5 sentences, as I had originally planned. I was able to create two essay style questions though that would require the students to make some deeper connections with the module concepts.

In Science in my own classroom, my summative assessments generally take the shape of a project rather than a test. Gibbs and Simpson report that students ‘tend to gain higher marks from coursework assignments than they do from examinations (2005, p. 6) and they also note that students ‘consider coursework to be fairer than exams [and] to measure a greater range of abilities than exams’ (2005, p. 7). If you were to look ahead at my long term assessment plans for this online unit of study, you would find that not only is the final piece of assessment for the unit a project based one, it is also of a collaborative nature. Because of my own personal experience combined with the information that I have learned through this MET course and other courses that I have already taken, I feel strongly that I can obtain a more accurate look at just how well a student has understood a unit of study from a culminating assignment rather than through a final examination. Formative assessments such as my LMS quiz play an important role in helping students progress through a course successfully by giving them feedback in regard to their level of understanding along the way, but in my own personal opinion quality assignment based assessment should form the bulk of the students’ final grade in the course.

As the students complete the quiz, they will receive both instant feedback during the test and then deferred feedback at the conclusion of the test based on their overall results on the auto-assessed portion of the quiz. I consciously did not program in corrective feedback for the multiple choice questions on the quiz as since I plan to use the quiz results for formative assessment purposes, I did not want the students to receive any extra information that would aid them in answering questions that appeared later on in the quiz. Had this not been the case, I would have taken advantage of the opportunity to program in specific feedback as to why the incorrect choices were not the best answer. After the quiz has been completed and the two essay questions have been graded manually, I would then use the internal email system within Moodle to send the quiz results to each individual student. This feedback following the completion of the quiz will need to be both thorough and specific to the individual student. It also needs to be completed and delivered to the students in a timely manner. Studies have shown ‘consistent positive effects that feedback has on learning compared to other aspects of teaching’ (Gibbs & Simpson, 2005, p. 9). Through an assessment such as this LMS quiz, the students will receive feedback in two formats; they will receive a numerical mark (a total number of correctly answered questions and an accompanying percentage), and they will also receive an anecdotal comment in regard to their overall performance in the quiz and more specifically about their essay question responses. Even though this quiz may appear to be quite a minor task in the scope and sequence of the course, it can be a very powerful learning tool and motivator if well designed and used for thoughtful feedback.

References:
Anderson, T. (2008b). Teaching in an online learning context. In Anderson, T. & Elloumi, F. Theory and practice of online learning. Athabasca University. Retrieved from http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/14_Anderson_2008-Theory_and_Practice_of_Online_Learning.pdf

Gibbs, G., & Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 3-31. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf