The role of assessment in online learning

Assessment is one of the most important aspects of instructional design. However, in my opinion  teachers often fail to develop effective assessments. In my teacher education program I was taught that assessments were a critical part of instructional design but I was not taught how to use assessments to drive my pedagogical practices. Throughout my early career I struggled to find the best ways to assess student learning. I have used a variety of summative and formative assessments in my classroom, from sitting through multiple presentations on the same subject to grading the same weak responses using a poorly written rubric. Sometimes I even found my self questioning a students final grade because I believe I did not assess their learning correctly. One thing I do know is that if any teacher wants to accurately assess a students learning, then they first make sure the assessments aligns to the strategies used to learn the content. I learned this lesson the hard way. When I first began teaching I used constructivist learning strategies aligned to my schools social studies curriculum; while my summative assessments showed students were meeting their learning objectives my formative assessment did not always reveal the same results. As I reflected on these discrepancies I quickly realized my multiple choice and extended response assessments were not aligned to the constructivist strategies used in class and thus failed to truly assess what students learned.

Not only does my anecdote help to illustrate the importance of assessment, it also shows why assessment is key to a good online education. As noted in the presentation online learning is students centered and therefore uses a constructivist approach to learning. Therefore it is crucial that the designers of online learning courses have a good understanding of how to use summative and formative assessments. For an online course designer the right summative assessments can improve a students performance on a formative assessment. An effective formative assessment is necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of any online learning.

Based on the presentation, my experiences at RMCAD, and the brief research I have done it seems the best online assessments allow students to demonstrate learning by applying new skills and knowledge in real world or authentic scenarios. These types of assessments allow learners to synthesize skills and knowledge learned while applying them in a professional manner. In my opinion these types of assessments are the hallmark of a well designed online course. Without a well thought out assessment an online lesson is no different than an online newspaper, who knows if the user is walking away with any new knowledge. Assessment is an easy way to see if an online course is designed correctly.