1. Rounding up - assessment;
ending a course
Joanne Sintes
Fernando López
Jorge Bascón

2. Top Tips
For Asynchronous
Online Assessment
“Assessment as a process requires that online learning
activities facilitate self-assessment,
peer-assessment, self-regulatory mechanisms, and learner autonomy.”
(*Vonderwell s, Xin L, and Alderman K (2007)
Asynchronous Discussions and Assessment in Online Learning)

3. Build a community.
The creation of a learning community promotes
peer learning and scaffolding through access to other
student’s thoughts and viewpoints.

4. Set clear criteria and objectives
Favour ‘assessment for learning’ so, students fully understand
their learning and the goals they are aiming for through
feedback.
Avoid simplifying assessment with a simple pass or fail, or
even percentages or similar.
Establish whether your assessment is going to be formative or
summative and be transparent about this with your learners

5. Make it clear to students from the
outset whether participation is
required/graded or not, and how it
affects their total mark/grade.
Ensure that each learner
understands the level of participation
that is expected of them.
Bear in mind the issue of poor writing skills as a factor in
assessing a student’s contributions, i.e. in L1 speakers. Be
clear on the objective of the assessment and make it clear to
students the level that will be expected or not.

6. Consider a global impression mark
for contributions, plus marks for
specific skills/categories. Relevance
to the topic (staying 'on
message'), creativity e.g. moving the
discussion forward/ introducing new
angles/ideas/finding
solutions, responsiveness to/support
for peers, etc.
Careful when creating your own criteria: it's very time-consuming and
there are bound to be very good ones already available.

7. Consider quality of
participation

8. Be clear about what you Encourage your learners to
expect from students. post contributions that follow
Give examples of posts that that model.
show some reflection and Provide ‘meta cognitive guides’
bring a valid contribution to during the discussion and
the conversation. provide feedback afterwards.
Having a structured discussion
increases effectiveness.
Avoid the use of non-threaded
discussions: they limit student’s
responses and encourage
Check the quality of your redundant responses whereas
questions to avoid redundant threaded ones result in a more in-
responses. Carefully use depth and diverse responses and
open and closed questions help develop more interactions.
according to your aim.

9. Provide variety of
topic, forum and
assessment.

10. Set up different task types/types of participation for assessment:
* students answer questions,
* respond to peers' comments and posts,
* submit questions for discussion,
* design discussion tasks for their peers,
* summarize threads
Structure tasks in such a way that
students respond to each other and
not to the instructor/the criteria.
Encourage learners to use forums for
sharing and testing out ideas about
learning and not only to use the
assessed forums.
Archive discussions so that both tutors
and learners can refer to them later on
if need be.

11. Consider Learning skills
Use opportunities for peer and self-assessment as a tool to encourage
reflection and learner autonomy.
Use formative assessment (assessing what they have produced) as a guide
for self and peer reflection, in order for them to better assess their own
understanding of the content they are learning.
Remember student’s learning is based on a group of different factors.
Consider assessment the main tool to facilitate student learning; a way to
assess student work in progress.
Only use summative assessment to gage your learner’s progress. Provide
opportunity for reflection on how they got to the correct answer.
Online discussions can help activate reflective learning and self
assessment, e.g., when writing a post the learner things carefully about
what they are going to say knowing the group will be reading it.

12. Top Tips
For Synchronous Online
Assessment
“One of the most marvelous
things about
online technology is the
fact that all discussions
are recorded and documented”.
(Ideas for Effective Online Instruction. George Drops. April 2003)

13. Presence and absence:
Physical versus virtual presence.
Students may appear to be logged on but are not participating.
Researching topic? Thinking?
Overview synchronous online assessment
Coding the data:
Dealing with ambiguity:
Turns, Speech
acts, strategies to
Statements could be consider a
summarize opinions
question, or a doubt, how you deal with
counter-arguments. How information
moves through development of a
conversation

14. Group sizes:
Social strategies: Larger groups or small ones is a
influence when participation is
Group development when insecure assessed.
about a particular topic
Tutor/Facilitator
May influence process, may interpret based on belief rather than
evidence.

15. Research about before
any assessment begins
Participation:
Getting a group of learners together -
particularly a large group - presents too
many challenges
Roles:
A variety of roles will occur and it would
seem that occupying any of the roles
should be assessed the same.
Exploratory talk:
In terms of creativity adding new ideas, perspectives and/or information
The students come up with suggestions or solutions

16. Deep learning:
How information obtained is being processed and added to
existing schema. Difficult to determine or assess this directly via a
synchronous chat in anything but the most subjective way
Community:
How responsive and supportive is a
student to his/her peers?
Does a student contribute to the social
cohesion of the group?

17. Can develop
argumentation
skills.
Benefits of Enables students to
participate more
synchronous equally (than F2F).
assessment
Provides students with a
sense of community.
Can be less teacher
dominated (than F2F
discussions).
Can provide rhythm for distance
learning program.

18. Difficulties of synchronous assessment
Students may feel intimidated by speed
and language.
Heavy cognitive load for tutor.
Overlapping threads and turns out of
sequence can make conversation
difficult to follow.

19. Literature in this field of online synchronous assessment considers
that it should be based on the student, not tutor. And
then, constructivism is established as the main protagonist in this
design framework covering student/course design/facilitator in an
abstract view:

20. Activities to round up
and finish a course.

21. E-closure is probably one of the most
strange steps of an online course because
do you have just to say bye? do you send a
final mark and feedback and then close the
course down?
After having so much emotional and professional contact with
the rest of participants the end is as important as the beginning
of an online course. We need to give all the students, as in a f2f
course, the chance to say goodbye to everybody and to share
everything that has been learnt.

22. Act 1: Parting Gifts.
You have the chance, as a participant or a
tutor, to offer a farewell to the rest of your group.
A gift can be almost anything such as a joke, a
poem, a piece of music by the participant, a
home-made video, a useful website...

23. Act 2: The Most Important Thing I've learned
This activity asks the students to point out the ONE
most important thing that they have learned during the course.
Participants need to choose just one although it is very difficult after
having learnt so many new things. Here, again, we are not just
concentrating on one thing such as an activity, a free voice
application or a new programme they have learnt, participants can
make comments on their emotions when sharing knowledge and
time with some new people. It is better to create this activity with an
online notice board or poster tool such as Golgster or Wallwisher. It
keeps all contributions short and easier to read at once.
www.wallwisher.com An
www.glogster.com A very online notice board maker
interactive way to make that allows people to
your own poster and share express their feelings and
it with your friends. thoughts.

24. Joanne, Fernando and Jorge
February 2012