Uncharted Territory

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Online Assessment

Uncharted Territory

3/1/2008

By Matt Villano

For More Information

Don't miss these resources, generally hailed as 'must-reads.'

Understanding by Design, by Grant P.Wiggins and Jay McTighe (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2005).
Assessing Online Learning, edited by Patricia Comeaux (Anker Publishing, 2005).
Web-Based Learning: Theory, Research and Practice, edited by Harold F. O'Neil and Ray S. Perez (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006).
And head here for up-to-the-minute information on assessment and online assessment tools. Visit our magazine archives, and subscribe to our Web 2.0, SmartClassroom, and IT Trends eNewsletters).

This service, dubbed "performance intelligence," is something that founders Robert Brouwer and Ahmed Abdulwahab say is a higher education spin on the kind of business intelligence used by companies in industrial and manufacturing sectors. While this product is brand-spanking-new, Paul Kim, a professor at Stanford University (CA), is wasting no time deploying it; he's planning to pilot it in his Web-Based Technologies in Teaching and Learning class this spring.

"After the completion of this course, students will be able to describe how web-based communication, collaboration, and visualization technologies play a role in the behavioral, cognitive, constructivist, and social dimensions of learning," says Kim, who also serves as CTO of the university's School of Education.

Finally, at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (IN), educators have turned to the Learning Management Suite from Angel Learning to map various content items (such as assessments, drop boxes, and discussion forums) to institution-wide and coursespecific objectives and to generate reports based on student performance related to all items associated with a given standard or objective.

Claude Anderson, professor of computer science and software engineering, says the school recently has incorporated Subversion for storing and communicating all of its faculty-level course assessment documents, and for charting version control.

"We used a wiki-based system for a couple of years, but found it too cumbersome," says Anderson. He adds that with Subversion, Rose-Hulman has "greatly simplified the coordination between various faculty members teaching a course."

Dissuading Cheaters

In a brick-and-mortar classroom, it's easy for teachers to catch students peering down at a cheat-sheet or passing answers to a pal. In a virtual classroom, however- where in most cases educators have never seen students face-to-face and have no idea what kinds of technology setups students have in their homes-sniffing out cheaters is a much more difficult task.

This is a challenge Karen Swan knows all too well. As research professor for the Research Center for Educational Technology at Kent State University (OH), Swan works regularly with professors to devise ways to prevent cheating in the online world. Yet, the harder she tries, she admits, the harder she finds the task. Her solution: keeping students active with assessments before, during, and after every class.