Unpack assessment
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Dr Elsie Hooi discusses her approaches to online assessment and feedback, © RMIT University
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Dr Jason Downs spells-out his assessment requirements, © RMIT University
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This section focusses on assessment tasks and feedback because they are often sticking points for many learners (and facilitators) especially in online environments. The points we’d like to make relate to the importance of clarity of assessment tasks and the tools and techniques for feedback.
While assessment tasks need to be clearly explained in the course guide, you must:
- reinforce what you expect
- explain how to engage with the task
- create and refer to a rubric, and
- stress due dates.
Strategies
You can use a range of technologies to unpack the task for learners:
- Have a voiceover PowerPoint that explains assessment requirements and breaks down the assessment task
- Post an annotated example (good or bad) of an assessment task and explain its features
- Post a video explaining common errors made in completing the assessment – feedforward to lower the likelihood of learners making the same mistakes
- Use desktop capture software to show someone working through the task – underline important words, highlight terms that need defining, go over the rubric or referencing requirements.
Whether you are encouraging learner-learner interaction in non-assessed group activities or you have set team assessment for pairs or groups of three or more, a range of tools can help your learners communicate, collaborate and keep track of who is doing what and when. Some of these include the group tools in Canvas (chat, discussions, file transfer) and the Google product suite (Google docs, Google hangouts). There are many, many more free applications, too.
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Learning Lab – The Learning Lab provides online resources to support academic study
Teach the task – A useful strategy to increase students’ understanding of the requirements of assessment is to ‘teach the task’
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