The Power of Assessments and Collaborations in eLearning

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SUMMARY

In the realm of online education, the importance of active participation and collaboration among students is widely acknowledged. Despite this recognition, traditional instructor-centered examinations often dominate the assessment landscape, sidelining the potential of collaborative learning. This discrepancy stems from the need for a radical rethinking of assessment methodologies, a challenge addressed in a comprehensive training program.

The training aims to equip educators with effective solutions for assessing and fostering collaboration in e-learning environments. It recognizes the diverse goals of online collaboration, ranging from knowledge base construction to peer mentoring, and the inherent difficulty in devising a one-size-fits-all assessment approach. The key to successful collaborative learning lies in valuing collaboration and tailoring assessments to specific learning objectives.

One approach to encouraging collaboration is through the development of grading rubrics that assess specific discussion behaviors. Rubrics offer a more detailed characterization of student behaviors, emphasizing individual accountability and positive interdependence. For instance, a grading rubric for promoting successful argumentation might evaluate clear statements of position, identification of agreement or disagreement, logical arguments, and more.

To further incentivize collaboration, rubrics can be designed to reward specific collaborative behaviors within discussion responses. This could involve crediting responses that cite and extend or refute previous postings, fostering a culture of meaningful engagement. Additionally, collaborative learning can be assessed through the outcome or product of discussions, such as group projects or case analyses.

The importance of small-group collaborative learning is emphasized, with research highlighting its positive impact on achievement, stress levels, student satisfaction, and appreciation for diversity. However, the success of collaborative online learning hinges on careful structuring, as online environments pose unique challenges like member disengagement and asynchronous communication.

Incorporating both content learning and collaborative skills into small group activities is essential, and educators must articulate clear goals for individuals and groups alike. Assessments should encompass both processes and products, and portfolio assessments prove valuable in capturing the evolution of students' collaborative experiences over time.

Furthermore, establishing a sense of community among online student groups before collaborative work begins is crucial. Icebreaker activities and orientation modules can facilitate this, providing a foundation for effective collaboration.

To ensure a fair and meaningful assessment of collaboration, Likert-type scales with explicit rubrics are recommended, evaluating both group dynamics and individual contributions. Peer assessments, where students are responsible for evaluating their peers, can also contribute to a more comprehensive evaluation.

INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

TRANSCRIPT

Hello, and welcome to the eLearning and Instructional Design for Beginners podcast, where new and aspiring instructional designers start, grow, and advance their careers in instructional design and online learning development. I'm your host, Crystal Harper. I'm a former school teacher who transitioned to instructional design, all while working full time as a single mom.

Would you like to become a successful instructional designer without the burden of earning another degree? Well, then let's get started. Many theoretical and empirical analyses emphasize the importance of active participation and collaboration among students in promoting the effectiveness of online learning.

However, in most online courses, traditional instructor centered examination remains the primary means for assessing student performance and collaborative learning is undervalued and also marginalized. In a large part, this is because the assessment of collaboration requires a radical rethinking of assessment methodologies.

In this training, you will learn effective solutions for assessing as well as strategies on how to encourage collaboration in an e learning course. There are a variety of kinds of goals for online collaboration, and it is also difficult to address the assessment of collaboration generally. Some examples of the diversity of focus among collaborative activities and online environments are the collaborative construction of knowledge bases, the collaborative investigation of scientific phenomenon, group engagement in game like learning tasks or simulations, peer review and evaluation of learning products, online peer mentoring, collaborative analysis of case studies, and collaborative discussion groups.

Even within these various groupings, one sort of assessment will not be appropriate because learning goals vary from implementation to implementation. For example, there's a difference between structured and emergent collaborative schemes. In the latter sorts of collaboration activities, assessment must also emerge.

What is consistent across the varieties of online collaboration is that collaborative learning will be more successful when it is valued, and that any such assessment should begin with a very specific understanding of the desired learning. For example, In some collaboration activities, learning to collaborate is seen as an important part of what is to be learned.

In others, it is merely a means to an end. In some collaborative activities, collaboration is focused on producing a group project. In other words, it is designed to improve the quality of individual work. Specific requirements for collaboration, including detailed assessment rubrics, focused on critical collaborative processes, The complexity of assessing both individual and group behaviors is a complex activity which involves both individual and group effort.

To encourage collaboration, both aspects must be assessed. Contend that the key to successful cooperative learning is maintaining both individual accountability, in which students are held responsible for their own learning, and positive interdependence in which students reach their goals, if and only if other students in the learning group also reach theirs.

The way to ensure individual accountability and positive interdependence is to assess both individual and group learning. A simple example of this kind of assessment using summative testing is to give each student a grade based on some combination of their test score and the average score for their group.

Another frequently used scheme is to give a common, assessment for a group project and have group members rate their peers contributions, which are then averaged for individual grades. Unfortunately, these kinds of grading protocols are not often seen in e learning courses, where the common approach is to assess either individual effort or group products.

An effective approach is to develop grading rubrics that assess specific discussion behaviors. While grading is the most common form of assessing students learning, Rubric scoring provides for a more finely detailed characterization of students behaviors than simply grading. Rubrics typically consist of a set of categories, features or aspects of student work that are of interest, or hierarchical levels of performance within each category.

Despite the effectiveness of rubrics in assessing students learning, developing an adequate rubric for a given course discussion requires time, and often multiple iterations, of revision. The first consideration in developing a discussion grading rubric is to establish the goal or goals of the discussion.

For example, some instructors want to use online discussions to help students learn argumentation techniques, whereas others might be more interested in students coming to a consensus on a topic. Clearly, different assessment rubrics would be needed to encourage each. Thus, the second step in developing a grading rubric is to identify characteristics of messages that would support the established goal.

For example, a discussion rubric aimed at encouraging successful argument might identify such things as clear statement of position, identification of points of agreement and disagreement, with previous postings, logical arguments, and so on as characteristics to be evaluated. The third and final step in rubric creation involves then taking each characteristic and specifying differing levels of performance for each and assigning scores for these.

Another way of going about creating a rubric for assessing discussion postings is to identify the goal of the discussion as knowledge construction. That is, view discussion as central to content learning. Thus, instructors should encourage student contributions to the discussion that were accurate, original, relevant, and that add to content learning.

Instead of creating a rubric that separately specifies differing performance levels for each of these characteristics, however, group them together and specify differing performance levels for that group. Another way to provoke collaboration is to develop rubrics that reward collaboration. Rubrics that reward collaboration must focus on discussion responses.

This might, for example, only credit responses that cite and either extend or refute previous postings. Another possibility is to assess postings based on the discussion threads they engender, making thread initiators responsible for sustaining collaborative discussions. Finally, an important means for assessing and encouraging collaborative discussion is to have some sort of outcome or product of discussion which is graded.

These kinds of options are again more applicable to small groups because it is difficult to collaborate on a project in a large group. Group members might be asked to collaborate on a discussion summary or to develop collaboratively a case analysis or a solution to a problem. Individuals within the group could then be graded on their individual contributions using rubrics as discussed above and on the group project.

Assessment of group products will be discussed further in the section which follows. Collaborative learning involves situations in which two or more participants interactively build a joint solution to a problem and distinguish collaborative activity from activities in the group. In which tasks are divided and solved independently by individual group members.

In collaborative learning, the common goals are educational and generally culminate in the creation of an educational product. Small group collaborative learning has been shown to result in higher achievement. Less stress and greater student satisfaction and greater appreciation for diversity. It is also suggested that it may be particularly important and well suited to the online environment as a way of incorporating the social aspects of learning into a virtual environment.

Indeed, there is research which suggests that collaborative learning may be very effective online. For example, research has found that students learn more in an online collaborative class than in a face to face classroom comparison, but that they also acquired greater experience in teamwork, communication, time management, and technology use.

On the other hand, some research also suggests collaborative online learning must be carefully managed to be successful when small group projects are employed. Careful structuring of small group collaborative work is particularly important for several reasons. The most obvious being it is much easier for group members to avoid participating.

They can more easily disappear online and it is much harder to negotiate collaborative activities in the asynchronous environment because the give and take of negotiation is extended in time. Online students cannot just participate in group activities by showing up for class. Structuring of small group activities must begin as discussed in relation to the collaborative discussion.

with a careful identification of the learning goals and wishes to achieve through small group collaborations. Most educators agree that these must include both content learning and collaborative skills, process goals, as well as specific products and goals for both individuals and groups. Each goal should be clearly specified in assessment procedures developed to measure each one.

Ideally, such assessment procedures can be embedded in the small group activities themselves and intrinsic to them. Issues surrounding the development of these are discussed below. First, learning the course content must be an outcome of small group work or Y included. And so it is important to carefully consider what kinds of content can best be learned collaboratively.

Students learning to solve problems in a range of content areas can benefit from considering multiple approaches to solutions by working towards collaborative ones. Students learning research and writing techniques can similarly benefit from collaborative endeavors. Such activities can be assessed by assessing their products, but it often helps to break larger tasks into smaller pieces that are also assessed.

At the same time, learning to collaborate with others is an important skill in itself. Thus, it is important to consider what collaborative skills one considers most important and develop ways of assessing them. Other instructors consider functions within groups such as discussion leader, facilitator, reporter, observer, and participant as critical and so assign and rotate these roles among individual students and develop separate assessments for each.

It may even be possible to identify specific collaborative skills that are especially important to in particular domains. In any case, it is important to value collaborative skills to encourage students to learn to use them. In addition, most educators agree that it is critical, especially for students collaborating online, that a group identity, a sense of community, be established before serious collaborative group commences.

Thus, many recommend icebreaker activities that are fun and encourage self revelation, and which are assessed solely for participation. Another way to help student groups establish community is to explicitly initiate them to the process and etiquette of online collaboration. Many online courses and programs have required orientation modules that do this.

Second, it is important to assess both the processes and the products of collaboration. Researchers have found that online experience provides an opportunity for students to learn collaboratively, That is equal to that is provided to a face to face version of a group processes course. But the added opportunity to analyze and reflect on their own collaborative processes enhances student learning experiences.

One way to collect both processes and products is through portfolio assessment. Portfolios are student prepared collections of documents that evidence understanding of important concepts or mastery of key skills by requiring students to organize, synthesize, and communicate their achievements through the semester.

Several different types of portfolios can be used, but most are variations of students personalized collections of their work over the entire duration of the course. In the case of the assessment of collaborative group work, students might be asked to provide evidence of their contributions to group projects or reflections on the group process, as well as evidence of learning.

Portfolio assessments provide each student with the opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of course material, as well as their participation in collaborative processes, and, when used longitudinally, how their understandings change over time in response to other contributions. To help ensure both group interdependence and individual accountability.

And so to support collaboration, both group and individual assessments are essential. It is clearly not adequate to evaluate a collaborative project based assignment by merely rating the quality of the final product of the group. Rather, if other courses have the objective of developing students capacity to work as part of a team, then we need some means of assessing teamwork in a fair and meaningful way.

I recommend using Likert type scales with explicit rubrics to rate at least two dimensions of the group experience, the functioning of the group as a whole, and the performance of each individual member. Often these ratings are completed by group members with oversight from the instructor. Another option is to make the group assessment the sum of individual participants assessments on some measure of content learning.

This sort of assessment makes group participants responsible for the learning of all members of their group. In a similar vein, require all students to participate in a peer learning section of every module of the course, either giving or seeking assistance. Or you can assign a collaborative internet research paper with requirements in an assessment scheme that encourages both interdependence and individual responsibility in an interesting way.

First, students must propose a topic to the class including supporting internet resources. Finally, there are some who argue that the constructive nature of collaborative learning suggests that the experience might be enhanced by collaboratively designing assessments. For example, adding collaboratively developed small group activities enforced by the assessments of group members to an online course increases student satisfaction with and learning from collaborative small group projects.

This is what I call emergent collaboration in which small student groups collaboratively develop both the specific activities that they will use to solve a particular problem And the ways they will be assessed.