Creating effective online assessment activities
A good online course will have assessment activities. Instructional Designers know that planning assessment activities begins at the beginning of the course development process. Good assessments are not an afterthought. They are a way to show your learner how they will retain the information they have learned by giving them the opportunity to put their new knowledge into practice. Furthermore, assessment activities are also a way for designers to measure whether the learning objectives of the course have been successfully achieved. When creating your assessments, consider the following suggestions.
Best practices for developing effective assessment activities
1. Simulate
The underlying goal of most training, especially compliance training, where I come from, is to change behavior. Essentially, if an employee does A and you want them to do B, you need to show them what actions to take to get to B. The safest learning environment is one of simulation. Mistakes are welcome and learning happens just in time.
In the world of eLearning, Virtual Reality is your best friend. If the phrase “Virtual Reality” makes you see a bucket of dollar signs flash before your eyes, fear not! Virtual Reality is expensive – there’s no way around it (pun intended) – but there are cheaper ways to simulate behavior. For example, you can create scenarios with your authoring software that provide a simulated atmosphere and combine it with conditional question-and-answer responses. The key to this method is to provide immediate feedback if a learner selects the wrong answer. That way, learners know how to correct their behavior on the fly. You can then give them the chance to “try again.”
2. Exercise
You know what they say: practice makes perfect! This is also true for online learning. It is crucial to give students multiple ways to practice the new behaviors they have learned. You should use a variety of methods to do this, such as matching activities, knowledge checks, drag-and-drop games, and click-to-reveal.
As an Instructional Designer, you need to be creative in designing how these assessments will work, but more importantly, how they relate back to the learning objectives. The learning objectives are the anchors for your course, and a good way to know if you’ve met them is by the success of your assessment activities. Each assessment activity should directly correlate to a learning objective. This means that, as mentioned above, if you want your learner to do B instead of A, you need to give them the opportunity in your course to actually do B. That way, they can mimic real-world behavior.
3. Strengthen
A great way to consolidate learning is through a final knowledge test or quiz. This will bring the entire course together and consolidate the work the learner has done so far through the assessment activities. Formative assessment activities are typically not graded because they are not meant to punish; they are meant to teach. Summative assessments, however, are typically graded; they are where the course content comes together. It is also the final way to measure the learning objectives.
A final assessment will be based on the formative assessment activities, course content, and learning objectives. Make sure to ask at least one question that highlights each of the course learning objectives so that your data represents the entire course content. Since users have practiced along the way and received immediate feedback, the outcome of the summative assessment should reflect this.
If your summative assessment scores are consistently poor or below average, this is an indication that you may need to go back to your course and make some adjustments. You don’t design your final quiz to “fail” your students or make it difficult for them to pass; you plan for the opposite. In fact, your final average scores are also a reflection of the effectiveness of the course you’ve designed. This valuable information helps Instructional Designers significantly. If your summative assessment is designed to maximize and reinforce learning, your students will demonstrate that their learning objectives have been met through their results.
Conclusion
Assessment activities are the hallmark of any good online course. Woven throughout the course in strategically placed places, learners can practice what they’ve learned in a safe environment while receiving constructive, real-time feedback. Remember, assessment activities aren’t punishable, so don’t try to trick your learners. If learning is a process, not a destination, then assessments are the signposts.