Diana Laurillard: Assessment is one of those areas where technology could be most valuable and is probably most underexploited. The great thing about the interactive computer is that it can react to what you're doing as an individual. So in assessment terms, it gives you feedback on what you're doing which can be formative. It can also potentially check whether what you've put in is correct, so potentially it has a role in summative assessment as well. Informative assessment unfortunately and in fact in summative assessment as well, it's been used mainly for multiple choice questions because technology lends itself to that very easily. You can think up four possible answers to a question and easily programme a computer to check whether you've got the right one of those four. The problem is that with multiple choice questions, the learner is forced to consider wrong answers. We are putting into the student's head plausible wrong and they have to be plausible in order to invite them to answer that question wrongly. So you're forcing the student to think through could that be the right answer to the question? Which is the most appalling pedagogy I could think of actually. So I've always been very dubious about the role of multiple choice questions Ebrahim Mohamed: Online assessments allow me to track and understand the learning process in more detail. The type of questions I would normally set in e-Learning context are the type of discussions that have two sides or there's disagreement and there has to be some consensus. So in some sense you need to have a sort of argumentative situation. Online assessment in my view provides a much better environment for me to understand what students have actually learnt from my course and I do believe enhance the learning experience. Rhona Sharpe: I use online assessment because my courses are online, so it's not that the assessment is online particularly but the students that I have on my courses are based all over the world and if I want to offer them a certificate of participation for instance, then I need to have some way of checking that they've taken part in the course. So I don't choose online assessment over paper-based forms of assessment for instance. It's just that's the way the course happens to be. Kevin Burden: It depends what you mean by online assessments. If you mean tests, then the answer would be 'no'. But if it's taken in a broader sense, formative assessment for example, 'yes' we do. But not tests as such and what we try to encourage students to do is to express themselves more freely online and use tools such as Web 2 technologies, wikis, blogs - those types of tools which allow them to demonstrate what they understand. So quite typically they're asked to actually work collaboratively and demonstrate their understanding of a problem or an issue by creating something, and we would use for instance a wiki. Just recently done a project where students have created a wiki together to demonstrate how they understand a particular topic. I'm not so keen on tests, multiple choice questions, because in my particular subject I don't think it gives them the opportunity to demonstrate their breadth of understanding. But by using more open-ended techniques such as those I've described, students I think can really genuinely tackle an issue and demonstrate what they really know and understand. David Kennedy: I teach a number of modules and I set a range of online assessments specifically to engage students in different ways than they're traditionally used to for the traditional essay. One of the things that's attracted me to online assessments is the greater set of affordances and the ways in which I can encourage students to represent their knowledge. Take the traditional essay for example, students are used to doing those things and they can develop them pretty quickly, they learn patterns for creating these environments. But quite often the feedback for those essays only comes at the very end of a programme when they get summative assessment. There's very little opportunity for them to actually create some assessable items and then receive an iterative form of feedback, a set of formative evaluation and feedback that allows them to think more critically about what they've written and then go back and change things and improve their overall performance. Toggle1Online assessment: Students' experiences and opinions Anh Thao Tran: Online assessments are an advantage to us as students I think because it gives us a little bit of freedom as to when we can access, so particularly with our course, Bachelor of Oral Health and we have a lot of contact hours. So just whenever we wind down at the end of the day we can access anything we want online, particularly if there are tutorials and lectures online. It's just more of a laid back environment and a feeling, so it's a little bit less stressful for us. Xuyuan Li: Well for the online assessments, normally we have three different types of questionnaires. The first one is multiple choice and it's mainly used for the theoretic problems. And the second one is numerical questions that we have to use a calculator to do sums and sharing calculation for that. And the third one is like key points so we need to have the keys dot points to answer some of the questions. Anh Thao Tran: So the online tutorials gave us immediate feedback, so whenever we submit an answer, at the end they would tell us if it was right or wrong. The problem with that was we had some short answer questions where we'd have to type in our answers and if we didn't write down the right key words it could have been, you know, a synonym for that, if we didn't write down the one they wanted it'd be marked as wrong. So for the face-to-face sessions the next time we came in that would be sort of discussed and students would get feedback that way. Online assessments do give us a chance to show what we have learnt, mainly because they test us on the key issues when they're doing the online assessments. However there might be some little details that might confuse people or people might get misunderstandings about, so with the online assessments they might not be able to provide the level of detail that we might need to know, so with that respect, face-to-face sessions are still beneficial. Elizabeth Rebecca Peglidio: An online assessment that I love using's the wiki because I'm a country student, so I'm from the Aires Peninsular originally. So I had to work in a group with a person who lives here in Adelaide and I had to do it over the break and I wanted to go home because I hardly ever get to go home. So we developed a wiki and we wrote a report that we were supposed to write for general studies. Within a week we were back and forth to each other and got it done and he edited my work and I edited his to make sure that everything was as good as it could be, and then we submitted the hard copy when we had the first day back. So that worked really well because I couldn't have come in, I couldn't have flown all the way back to Adelaide because that's six hours away if I wanted to drive or forty five minutes by the plane and they're really expensive so it was just cost effective for me for one. And it helped me get a good mark and it was done in a really laid back and fantastic manner. Why is it important to assess the learning of students?Assessment pushes instruction by stressing the importance of critical thinking, reasoning, and reflection thus creating a quality learning environment. Many techniques may be used to assess student learning outcomes.
What is the purpose of assessing?The purpose of assessment is to gather relevant information about student performance or progress, or to determine student interests to make judgments about their learning process.
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