Assessing students online is a major concern for many teachers. Generally, traditional tools may not work because of the ease in which students can cheat. However, there is a place for traditional assessment if they are used for feedback rather than for points. In this post, we will look at assessing students online

Before the assessment

When planning the assessment you want the students to do you need to first consider the objectives of the course/unit. In addition, you need to think about what kind of assessment are you trying to conduct. Is this going to be a formative or summative assessment? Will this be a product or process type of assessment? Finally, you also need to think about whether this will be a traditional or project-based assessment. Keep in mind that traditional assessment is often for formative purposes and projects are generally for summative purposes in an online context. What we have discussed so far deals primarily with curriculum questions that do not have much to do with technology yet.

Speaking of technology, you also need to consider what tools are available for you to use in the online setting to achieve your objectives. With enough creativity, almost anything can be done in any learning management system. For example, I once had my students do presentations online. Rather than watch them live (which is generally boring) I had the students record their presentations, upload them to YouTube, and past the link inside a forum on Moodle. By doing this, students did not have to watch every presentation but just the ones I assigned them. In addition, because the presentation was inside the forum I could assign a score and even provide feedback in the forum. This saved me a lot of time.

In a different situation, I had students do peer reviews of their papers through Moodle Every student was made a “student-teacher” in the assignment activity. Two or three students would then upload their paper to the “student-teacher” assignment activity and the “student-teacher” would provide feedback. I was able to see the feedback and could grade the teacher for their participation in providing feedback.

These are just two non-traditional ways of using your learning management tools. It really boils down to creativity and a desire to determine a way to get something done. Moodle in particular was built for all of these workarounds to support students.

During the assessment

Once the assessment is determined it is time to implement. At this point, clear communication is critical for student success. All directions and expectations must be written down and communicate for student success. If anything is left unspoken students may become confused and this could be a major problem.

There are at least two additional ways to alleviate anxiety students may face. One is to make sure you respond quickly to questions. The second is to provide some sort of an example of a finished product. Providing examples is especially important for project type assessment as students can you use this as a springboard for their own. This assumes that you have prepared a rubric for a project-based assessment.

Technology has a bad habit of failing. This means that you need a plan for the random disaster of internet access. If students are taking a quiz and the server crashes what will you do is a question you need to consider. If the students need to submit a project, how hard will the deadline be? For projects, my approach is to have a recommended deadline and a hard deadline. The recommended deadline might be 24 hours before the hard deadline. This means that students who have technology problems have 24 hours to find a connection to upload their projects. If students miss the hard deadline this is when the negotiating begins

After the Assessment

Now is the time to determine if the students have achieved the objectives of the course/unit. This is based on their actual performance of the assessment. For example, if students did well with a quiz, it indicates that it is time to move on. If they struggled then reteaching may be necessary. The reteaching can be done by sharing a message explaining the common mistakes that students made and or responding to individual quizzes when marking them. Quizzes should be mainly for formative purposes because it is hard to tell if the student was honest during the assessment

For a project-based assessment, the same principle applies. You can respond to mistakes individually and or share common misconceptions through the development of a message for the entire class. The message can be written or a short video. Off course, since projects have rubrics, you will be sure to make the completed rubric available to the students as well

Conclusion

Planning, communication, and execution are the main steps to keep in mind when assessing students online. Whatever creative or boring idea you have can be accomplished if you share your expectations with the students and provide tools for them to do it.