Designing activities for online assessment

Computer-based assessment

• a series of questions which the student can answer to assess their learning at a formative stage.– Quizzes, multiple choice questions, complete the sentence,

matching words. • Advantages.

– easy to set up, and – can be repeated by students to test their knowledge.– usually really liked by students as they’re effective for

developing rote learning,– are easily gamified ie leaderboards or unlock badges, and that

can be rewarding for many students.

Computer-based assessment

• Disadvantages– for many subjects you can only test very basic learning,

memorising facts and so on – For some subjects you can set up higher level tests, such

as finding out information to test information literacy skills, or to undertake complex maths or engineering calculations for example.

– Coding is also very effectively assessed automatically, the computer runs the code to see if it works.

– On the whole though, if you want to assess learning, it needs a human to do it.

Making an artefact

• Can be seen as fun or lightweight depending on student (McDonald and Twining, 2002; 6505)

• Can be collaborative or solo• Online – wikis, annotated bibliography, blog• Offline – making a video, podcast, physical

object• Engaging but time- and resource-consuming

Assessing artefacts

• Biggest issue – are you assessing content or form?

• If accompanied by presentation, assessing artefact, presentation or both?

• Are you going to include peer assessment?– WebPA, PeerMark , PeerWise, iPeer and SparkPlus.– Common element - students hate them– needs to be carefully introduced and its role

explained

Assessing online discussions

• Can just measure the number of posts (automatically)

• Better to mark based on content (e.g. Grice’s Cooperative Principles Rating Scale – Swan, Shen and Hiltz, 2013)

• Laborious to go through all the posts and comments

Assessing online discussions

• Options: write an essay based on the discussions– Familiar ground for student, teacher and exam board

• Create a patchwork text aka portfolio, hypertext– links to original posts and comments, with

surrounding narrative– Builds on the functionalities of the technology, and

builds more closely on work of student

Nominal Group Activity

How do you use (and value) technology in your teaching practice currently? 25 mins1. Write down three instances of how you might

choose to assess online activities, or assess online2. Share these with the group, explain technologies or

activities that others aren’t familiar with3. As a group sort each of these into the three you

think you would be most likely to implement

Feed back to whole room

In groups select three discussion points you want to raise. This could be:• A technology you want to know more about• An issue you have with supporting assessment

with technology.• How to use a particular technology to support

formative assessment.

References

• MacDonald and Twining (2002) “Assessing activity-based learning for a networked course” British Journal of Educational Technology Vol 33 No 5 2002

• Swan, Shen and Hiltz (2013) Assessment and Collaboration in Online Learning, http://www.wiredinstructor.us/pluginfile.php/1587/mod_forum/attachment/1770/Assessment%20and%20Collaborative%20Learning%20-%20assessment-and-collaboration.pdf