Online Assessment

After reading the article, Designing online assessment of student learning, written by Segrave. S. & Rice, M., I had now an in depth idea about how the online assessment work for students, how that can be developed, and why it is beneficial to students.

For online courses, particularly, blog, forum, google docs, and WebCT type of online gateway can be used as online assessment tools. I don’t support using just one of the above. All of the above tools have some sort of drawbacks, which can be overcome if multiple tools are used for online assessment. Google doc is an excellent way to share documents with group. I was playing with the links that Lorraine sent us for making free online tests (http://www.easytestmaker.com/default.aspx). I have created an IQ test and post that to google docs and decided to share it with the class.

Some of the drawback that I was talking about is as follows-

Blogging: You will find students posting artificial comments just for the sake of course work. Moreover, you don’t have a real time option in blog where you could post a document and that can be accessed and edited by different users at the same time (like google doc). For example, if teachers want to test their students, they cannot post questions that can be answered and submitted to teachers using blog, we need a different system.

WebCT: Although WebCT does not have such problem, testing students with exams is not the only way to assess. WebCT does not have the huge and open discussion facility like blogs and forums. Therefore, it is suitable to use for exam purpose only.

Forum: It is a little upgraded version of blog, I would say. As a member of the forum you can participate in any open discussion and post word documents, pictures, video as an attachment for other member to download. Moreover, embedding multimedia facility is also there. However, for test purposes or for shared documents, forum is still behind.

Google Doc: This is a recent creation of google, and I really like this tool. This is an excellent tool for online assessment. You can post your test paper and share it with a group. You also have an option to see who is editing what so that you can always be on the loop when you share a document through google doc.

Since assessment plays an important role in determining the quality of students’ learning, it is very important to have a solid, accurate, and fair assessment system. Therefore, I would suggest using all or some of the above tools to make the entire assessment process more productive and efficient.