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Online Assessment
Uncharted Territory
3/1/2008
At Newbury College (MA), "metrics" are much more conceptual. Yes, educators assign scores to certain tests and assignments, but at least in certain psychology classes, Professor Charlie Virga is more interested in seeing that his first- and second-year undergraduate students can demonstrate the "construction of knowledge" from the beginning of a semester, to the end of it.
For Virga, this means careful scrutiny of online discussion posts. With the help of his school's Blackboard system, he archives every post and grades them periodically throughout the semester. Relevant posts that link to course material and provide elaboration or additional information receive the highest marks. Irrelevant posts, and posts that have no link to course material or personal experience, receive no score.
"In my book, it's all about critical thinking," he says of his rudimentary rubrics. "I don't have access to [my students'] thought processes online, but by looking at the discussion posts, I can try to identify the turning point where they started to see something that they couldn't see before."
Keeping Tabs
With a course management system such as Newbury's, archiving data on performance is a cinch. Such is the case with many other CMS platforms and online assessment tools, too. Collecting data on student performance in the virtual environment, however, is only half of the assessment effort; once professors have the data, the next key step becomes figuring out how to make sense of it.
One way to keep tabs on the degree to which students are interacting with online assessment technologies (and with peers via the tools) is to apply business intelligence. With the help of a virtual learning environment from L Point Solutions called Inetoo, professors can encourage student collaboration and communication online, and later log in to analyze how students interact with content and with each other.
Recommended Reading
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Enhanced Learning/ Assessment
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: High-Performance Computing
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Interactive, Remote Learning
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Mobile Learning
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Network Security
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Social Networking for Admissions
