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Online Assessment and Grading Content
Issues surrounding assessment and grading for the online courses provided some
of the most valuable lessons coming from the CLASS™ Project.
-
Specify Your Target Audience
The designers discovered that some problems were unique to the circumstances
of developing courses both for the distance learning conditions of the Independent
Study High School (ISHS) and the more closely monitored environments in learning
centers.
Early feedback from the ISHS teachers indicates that there also are differences
between the students who chose the online courses and those who preferred the
print-based courses. Several students in the online courses indicated that they
liked the interaction and feedback. They enjoyed using the computer to access
additional information. On the other hand, students who preferred the print-based
courses pointed to a greater sense of true independent learning without having
to deal with potential technical problems.
With this in mind, online course developers should make sure that there are teachers
who are willing and able to handle the additional workload involved with online
courses. If the students feel that interaction and feedback are the major advantages
of these courses, developers certainly should not sacrifice these elements in
order to limit the amount of time required of teachers to monitor the students'
learning.
- Create a Mixture of Types of Assessments
The print-based courses rely heavily on objective, computer-graded evaluations.
There is no current data to suggest that there was a marked difference between
the success rates of students taking the print courses and those taking the online
courses that contained more subjective assessments. Most national and state standards,
however, set guidelines for advancing critical thinking and decision-making abilities,
and objective evaluations--especially the multiple choice and matching types
that are most common in Internet courses--are not conducive to improving these
skills. Consequently, course developers should evaluate students with a combination
of objective, computer-graded and subjective, teacher-graded assessments in order
to reduce the teacher load, while enhancing critical thinking.
- Establish How the Grades are to be Weighted and Entered on the Grade
Report
Whenever possible course developers should determine if the teachers
who are going to be responsible for the course want the grades' weight
incorporated into
the development process. Course developers should inform educators that
they have two basic options:
- If the weight of the grades is set at the
time of course development,
each student's grades for computer-graded assessments will be entered
on that student's grade
report automatically. The teacher, however, must enter the scores
for teacher-graded assessments. The computer will keep a running total
of the student's
grades
so that the student will be able to track his/her progress at any time
by checking the grade report.
- If the weight of the grades is left to the
individual teachers, the teachers will be responsible for entering
all of the grades and the value
of each of those grades, regardless of the type of assessment. If the grades
and
values are entered
properly, the computer still can be programmed to allow the students
to track their grades as they progress through the course
Part of knowing the target audience involves determining whether the courses
are going to be used in a school that needs to incorporate students' grades
into a pre-existing grading system or a school where the students' grades can
be entered independently. Course developers need to be aware that if they design
each student's grades to be entered into a grade report automatically, teachers
may have to adapt that grade report for their particular school's grade reporting
system--again adding unnecessarily to the amount of time teachers have to spend
on the course.
Copyright 2004 - University of Nebraska Board of Regents - All Rights Reserved
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