ASSESSMENT IN DE

Assessment for Distance Education
Today’s class is about assessment in DE. It was informative to know how instructors conduct assessment and the challenges they face. It thought me also about the misconducts that are possible on DE education and how it can be dealt with.

The Role of Assessment
Recent research has recast the role of assessment in education. In addition to “auditing” student performance, assessment is expected to improve student understanding through the use of “authentic” tasks and relevant, ongoing feedback. This challenges instructors of both traditional and distance learning alike to supplement their fixed-choice exams and essays with more complex assignments such as performance tasks and portfolios. (See below.) Luckily, advances in computer technology are beginning to catch up with these challenges.

The Problem
While most of the challenges in teaching distance learning (DL) courses are identical to those of the traditional classroom, DL instructors and administrators face additional problems: Unless groups of DL students are meeting at regional learning centers, most of them are spread out geographically, physically separated from the instructor and each other. This makes both teacher-student interaction and student-student cooperative learning (and the assessment of these activities) more difficult. Class sizes for DL courses are generally larger than those for traditional classes, from 10 or 15 students to 100 or more. These larger numbers can make assessment an administrative nightmare.

http://cvc3.coastline.edu/Telelearning2001Web/AssessingStudents.htm

Assessment tools
http://www.adelaide.edu.au/clpd/online/assessonline/