Tips For Assessing Learning Online

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SUMMARY

• The purpose of summative assessments is to determine if students have achieved the desired level of proficiency in a given learning objective or e-learning course. Summative assessments provide an overall understanding of student progress, while formative assessments identify areas that need improvement.
• There are four types of summative assessments in e-learning: written reports, presentations, objective-based tests, and portfolio assessments.
• Written reports provide a detailed and semantic way to assess students in an e-learning course and also make it easier to assess higher-order thinking skills, with less likelihood of cheating. Google Docs is a great tool to use for this type of assessment. In Google Docs, teachers can see all changes, leave comments, and provide direct feedback to students. Google Docs also has features like suggested view, editing mode, sharing options, and a revision history. These make it easy for teachers to grade assignments and provide feedback to students.
• Presentations are interactive ways to engage students and assess their understanding of a subject through discussion forums and creative presentations. PowerPoint is a well-known tool, but Prezi is another option that is more interactive and engaging. With Prezi, you can create lessons or let students showcase their knowledge in a fun and interactive way. Prezi includes templates, videos, and other features that make it easy to use and enhance presentations.
• Summative assessment through written reports or essays is a great way to assess students semantically in an e-learning course. It is easier to assess higher order thinking skills and less prone to cheating compared to objective-based testing. Google Docs is a useful tool for teachers to use when assessing students through written reports or essays. The tool allows for tracking changes, making comments, giving direct feedback, and sharing with others.
• Objective-based tests are a type of assessment in which multiple choice, matching or completion items are used. These tests can be customized in a learning management system, including design, deployment, feedback options, and timing. Objective based tests can also be password protected and show the grade immediately or after review by the instructor. However, these tests are easier to cheat on and therefore should be used with caution. Canvas is an example of a learning management system that makes it easy to create and set up objective based tests.
• Portfolio-based assessments provide a comprehensive view of the student's progress throughout the course. They are often used to evaluate the student's understanding of key concepts and skills learned in the course. Portfolios can be designed to include a variety of materials, including essays, research papers, presentations, and projects.
• When integrating summative assessments into your online course, it's important to follow certain tips to make the experience effective and secure for students. Firstly, provide a clear grading rubric in advance so students know what to expect. Secondly, use a diverse range of assessments to cater to different learning needs. Thirdly, increase security by setting deployment features, time limits and using parallel forms with randomized question presentation. Fourthly, promote honesty with open-book tests and items that require higher-order thinking skills. By implementing these tips, you can create a comprehensive and effective online summative assessment process for your students.
• In conclusion, online learning provides teachers with a great opportunity to assess their students' learning through the use of summative assessments. The use of technology and elearning platforms make it easier to design and implement these assessments, while also allowing for quick and efficient feedback to students. It is important to remember to be clear in stating expectations for honesty and to have consequences in place for breaking assessment policies. By following these strategies, teachers can ensure that their students are able to effectively demonstrate their understanding of the learning objectives and achieve their full potential in an online learning environment. 

INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Hello everyone. This is Crystal Harper from E teach online. 

Today's topic is on how to assess your students online, specifically on how to use summative assessments with students online. And as I'm discussing these types of assessments, I will also show you some tools on how to implement these assessments. So just a brief overview. The purpose of assessments is to determine whether or not your students have actually achieved the desired level of proficiency of the given learning objectives and either a module or at the end of your elearning course and itself. So summative assessments provide students with how well they are doing in contrast to formative assessments which identifies specific areas that are needing to be improved during the course. 

So in this training, you will learn about four different types of summative assessments and elearning as well as three tips on how to effectively integrate them into an online course. And as I said, I will also go over some great tools you can use when applying these different types of assessments with your students online. 

The first type of summative assessment we all know about it's written reports honestly written reports or essays is one of the best ways to assess your students semantically in an elearning course, receiving detailed written responses from your students online is much more often easier to replicate when compared to designing objective based testing, which we'll talk a little bit more about. It's also much easier to assess your students' higher order thinking skills. In addition, it's a lot more difficult for your students to cheat when they're writing a report. There are plenty of programs out there that can easily determine whether the words that the student has written are actually their own words. Now I'm gonna go and show you a few quick things about Google Docs. That's really cool. When you're assessing students with written reports or essays, Google Docs is a great tool to use. So I'm just gonna go ahead and show you some cool tips that you might not know about Google Docs. Okay, so here we are in Google Docs. This is actually a document that I created with a group of students and a course that I was taking and I pulled this one out because it's actually something that four of us all participated in. So first of all up here you can go to all save changes. And you can see every time anyone did anything in the document, you can go back and restore and actually look back and see who did what suggestions. This is just a really cool way to review progress or if you need to go back and bring a document back to where it was. So that's pretty cool. And also, right now I'm in editing mode. So it's directly editing. If I'm not sure about editing something, I can make a comment. And if one of the other girls came in to review my comment, they could actually even reply. So that's pretty cool. And you can resolve it when it's done. Also, you can select a suggested view. So this is great for teachers when grading assignments, especially like an essay or written report, a teacher can say no, that's not right. The student gets direct feedback from the document immediately so that's just one of my favorite things about Google Docs. And also the sharing you can share to edit share to make comments or share to view I always think it's easier to just copy the link and share it but you can also send it to email addresses and names. So yeah, that's just a couple little tips that I really liked about Google Docs. And it's great for teachers to use when assessing their students through essays or, or written reports. 

Okay, so the next topic that I'm going to talk about is presentations. online presentations discuss specific topics in which students can often even share in a discussion forum. Presentations are just a great way to engage your students and assess them in more authentic ways. As opposed to just objective based testing. Students can really have fun with creating presentations while at the same time as learning the main point of a presentation is just to show expected mastery of a given subject and also determining whether they've mastered the actual learning objectives. Now everyone knows about PowerPoint, but I also want to show you about a really cool presentation tool that I love, which is called Prezi. Prezi is a lot more interactive than PowerPoint and you can use Prezi to create lessons for students but I think it's also a great tool for students to use when showing what they've actually learned as well. So let's go into Prezi real quick. Okay, so this is another thing that I created myself. I created it for an online sixth grade science class and it was on the laws of energy. So I tried to make it cool and titled The Secret Lives of energy. Yeah, it's just it's a little more fun. The students who start here give them a to-do list. There's just a lot more interactivity when using Prezi, and it's really not that hard to use at all. They give you templates. You can play videos, and I'm not going to go over all of it. But I just wanted to give you an idea of what you can do with Prezi. It's pretty cool. 

Alright, and the next type of assessment that I'm going to discuss is objective based tests which everyone knows about, but I'll go over it real quick. An objective based course consists of multiple choice matching or completion items. Usually in the learning management system, you can customize the design and the deployment of the test, as well as your feedback options. In addition, you can show one item tests at a time or the entire test. Also in the learning management system tests can be timed or even password protected. Another thing is that you can determine whether the student sees the grade immediately after finishing or after the instructor has completed a review after all the students have completed the tests. Another thing you might want to include in an objective based test online is rationales to provide for each of the answers, or even the item as a whole. But I do want to mention, however, that you should use objective based tests with caution online. It's obvious that it's much easier for students to cheat in a minute. I'm going to discuss some more ways that you can help prevent some of the common issues with objective based tests online. But I want to go into the learning management system Canvas really quickly and show you a few things of what I was talking about on how to set up objective based tests and that learning management system at least. So this is the sixth grade science class that I also had created the Prezi for that you saw a minute ago, but I just want to show you really quick you can go into quizzes. And this is a quiz that I created. There's the directions right there. I'll go to edit so you can see all the options for this. We would want to make it graded. And you can label it actually in Canvas there. There isn't a label for tests, you can only do quizzes, so if you're doing an objective based test, you could just select quizzes. You have the option to shuffle the answers time limit. As I was saying you can let their students either quiz responses and give them immediate feedback. You can allow a number of attempts and you can have the option to show one question at a time requiring an access code. But yeah, Canvas makes it really easy to create tests online. And so to other learning management systems. They seem to be making it much easier in more recent years on being capable of actually working the program. 

Alright, and the fourth topic that I wanted to talk about with assessing students online is portfolios. In a portfolio students are asked to place important assignments throughout the elearning course. into an organized format using a website. A portfolio is often usually assessed at the end or it can also be used for an entirely new project for students to determine a final grade on something. So that's it. Those are the four types of assessment that I recommend in an elearning course. 

The four types of assessment were written reports, presentations, objective based tests, and portfolios.

Now I'm going to go into some tips on how to use these assessments in your online course. 

• The first tip I suggest is to make a grading rubric available in advance. prior to giving your students their summative assessments. It's important to make sure that they know what it is to be covered and how it will be graded. So provide them with a grading rubric and criteria in advance. Ensure that they understand how each section of the assessment will be analyzed. This type of scoring system assists in closing the feedback loop between the teacher and the student. Most learning management systems include built in tools for creating assessment rubrics. 
• Number two, use a wide range of assessments. Every student has different learning needs. So you should provide them with a variety of types of materials and activities so that they can learn the content effectively. Some students might require more interactive assignments, while others might struggle with communication skills, which is an important skill in writing reports or essays. So when possible include a good mix of summative assessment types to cater to the variety of your learner preferences and styles. 
• Number three, measure security on an objective basis. This one's important. I mean, they're all important but this one's super important. So even when tests are not proctored, you can set deployment features to increase the security of the test. The first security measure is to hide the tests until the release date and make the test available to students who have a correct password. 
• Number three, it's a good idea to set time limits. So students only have a certain amount of time to answer the question. Typically one minute per multiple item is sufficient for students who have actually studied for a test 
• number four, to reduce the possibility of students getting answers from other students in the course. You can develop item sets, the sets should have items with similar content, but asked in a different manner or cover a slightly different aspect or concept. You can then make parallel forms of the same test. Most learning management systems have a built in tool that can select an item from a question to make the parallel forms. 
• Number five. In addition to having parallel forms, you can set the learning management system testing tool to randomize the presentation of the questions which I showed you in Canvas just a minute ago. When you use parallel tests, randomization, and time to items, students have much more difficulty consulting with one another about a test. 
• Number six. Another method to promote honesty with non-proctored tests is to create a test open book. Simply make it legal for your students to use the internet textbooks and notes. But state what is off limits such as discussing items with other students. You can use test items that require higher order thinking skills so the answers are not found on the page of a textbook or in students notes. 

These strategies are great at supporting students' synthesis of concepts, analysis of problems and development of solutions. Online courses offer technologies that make the design and reuse of assessment techniques much easier than in a traditional face to face class. Students can also receive immediate feedback on activities when automated scoring is used. So lastly, when designing assessments, remember to state clearly their expectations for honesty and the consequences of breaking policies. 

So in this training, you learned about four different types of summative assessments and elearning as well as three tips on how to integrate them in an online course. I know it's difficult starting out figuring out how to effectively assess students in elearning. I hope you now feel more confident about creating summative assessments for your students and the online learning environment.