How Will You Assess Students In Online Learning?
Student assessment has reached new heights in the modern age. Though there’s something timeless in old-fashioned paper and pencil ways, new technologies are coming up every day to assist teachers with this task.
When you think about assessments on traditional learning, quizzes, essays, uninspired tests and assignments without any bearing and value in the real world immediately come to mind. With the onset of virtual learning, the learning environment is gradually adapting a global teaching strategy that not only focuses on what they are learning but also how they are learning.
What is the purpose of assessment?
As per the definition, the common motive behind assessment is to evaluate and enhance student learning, but there can be a difference in the purpose, depending on the type of assessment that has been used.
How Do You Evaluate Students Online?
Here are few types of approaches that can be used assess students in online learning!
• Online quizzes
• Essay questions
• Drag-and-drop activities
• Online interviews
• Dialogue simulations
• Online polls
• Game-type activities
• Peer evaluation and review
• Forum posts.
Let us get into the details of a few approaches!
1. Online Quizzes
Quizzes belong to the category of a traditional assessment tool. Moreover, when it is clubbed with technology, it turns into a great method to activate student learning. One utility of quizzes is that they are short and easily accessible and the order of questions and options can be shuffled, so each student’s quiz is unique.
How can I create an online quiz?
One can develop online quizzes easily through an eLearning authoring toolkit such as iSpring Suite. iSpring Suite comprises a quiz maker tool that can provide 14 question types. You just need to select the right templates to create a quiz for your students quickly.
2. Open-Ended/Essay Questions
Open-ended or essay-type questions are one of the most used methods for qualitative assessment. They push learners to explore their feelings, thoughts, and opinions, while assessing their overall understanding of a topic. This type of question creates critical thinking and is best suited for evaluating higher-level learning.
How can I create an open-ended assessment?
Open-ended assessments belong to the kind of questions available in iSpring Suite. Auto-scoring cannot be applied in online courses like in many questions types and so needs to be reviewed by teachers one by one.
3. Drag-And-Drop Activities
Drag-and-drops are the kind of assessment that display a learner’s capacity the information and knowledge to solve a practical problem. Images and text both can be used in a drag-and-drop activity, giving it a real-world feel that is both challenging and engaging.
It’s important to use this kind of assessment type when you would need learners to be able to use their knowledge in a real-life situation.
How can I create a drag-and-drop activity?
iSpring Suite provides a drag-and-drop template that allows you to move text boxes, images, and shapes to a specific place on the page. To begin the assessment, you need to put the images into a question template and then simply identify the drop target.
4. Online Interviews
You can integrate a video conference into your online teaching to bring a personal touch in learning. While carrying out short online interviews, students can display their expertise in music, language, nursing, and other courses, for example, where mastery of specific skills is an important requirement. At times, it is essential to conduct group interviews – for team project reports, for example.
Interviews can also include a tutoring component causing students to get instant feedback from teachers and make them more responsible about their studies.
How can I create an online interview?
You can conduct online interviews with the aid of digital conferencing tools like Zoom. To get the best results, make time to plan out your interview before it begins. Gather your questions from before and fix a time to conduct the meeting. Give your online learners a way to provide feedback or interact with the interviews.
5. Online Polls
A poll gives you he chance to get hold of the feedback regarding their learning experience directly from your audience. It can be used to measure anything from learning satisfaction (Kirkpatrick Level One feedback) to the reason a student made a particular choice during a lesson. Surveys that are conducted online are extremely engaging for learners because they give them the scope to give their opinions, make themselves heard, and are quick to complete.
How can I create an online poll question?
If you conduct webinars via web conferencing mediums, you can use built-in tools for conducting polls. You can also use some specialized online platforms like SurveyMonkey that can help you to create, send, and analyse surveys.
Thus, we can see that the method of assessment have come a long way and advanced on many different levels since online education is being considered as the most prominent form of learning. Online learning and Virtual Online Teaching has become one of most sought after methods in the field of education giving education a new direction!
