Blended Assessments of Learning

In designing blended learning courses that has to be an ongoing evaluation of the success of the instruction. That is there must be Blended Assessments of Learning.  According to this week’s article Riley et al. (2014) suggest that faculty ask themselves: “How well does your course make connections between learning objectives, course activities, and selection of site tools to accomplish the assignments? How well do face-to-face and out of class time learning activities complement each other?” (p. 164).

In my opinion, the grading system that you use in the course is dependent upon the learners. The basic foundation would remain the same, but the items may vary. There is constant (formative) assessment during the course with the final (summative) assessment at the end of the course. However, the summative depends upon the formative. As educators if we consistently review the formative results we are able to determine how to design the summative assessments.

Regardless of assessments being online or face to face the objectives should be made clear to the students. The article shares that the learning standards must be addressed, but also there should be a real life application to better the students’ understanding of the material covered. Failure to do this will result in a waste of time by the instructor and the student.  Technology is useful in simplifying this task of transferring the learning strategy. That is, the technology should not drive the instruction. The instruction should drive the technology.

Despite the importance of real life application of knowledge and skills, perhaps the most common type of assessment is still the traditional multiple choice exam.  Placing such tests (or non-graded self-assessment versions) online is one of the most popular approaches to blended assessment of learning.

Online tests make for easy and quick grading by the instructor. However, security is a major concern. That is there is plenty of room for cheating on exams. Many times the technology is used by students to cheat. According to the article, tests taken exclusively in the classroom setting using paper and pencil, however, negate the affordances of technology. Faculty who evaluate their students’ performances by using a mixture of tests – some online, some offline – have experienced more fruitful outcomes. Caution must be practiced when using online tests in a blended course. In order to be sure the students are familiar with the operation of the technology, give a practice exam to allow the students to test the use of the technology.

The assessments may feature a variety of quiz formats. These may include online quizzes and projects. In my opinion my assessments would feature online quizzing tools which typically provide some affordance form of randomization of test items. With an assessment time limit. I would also require release conditions. This would ensure that certain guidelines are met before the student may proceed.

I think the format of the quizzes depends upon the content. Due to the fact my focus is technology integration; most of my quizzes would be project based. This will allow the students to apply the skills they have learned in real life applications.

With the LMS that is used, we have the option of requiring a lockdown browser. When an assessment is started, students are locked into it until they submit it for grading. This will allow the students not to access, print, copy, go to another URL, or access other applications.

As an additional approach to informal assessment, summative and formative evaluations can be conducted by collecting anonymous input from students during and after the course using either a survey tool within the LMS or one of the many free web-based survey tools. Formal and informal assessment will be administered using various forms of technology some of the resources to be used will include socrative, poll everywhere, and student clickers.

My goal to implementing formal and informal assessments of learning will include teacher questioning, teacher observations, peer assessments, self-assessments of students along with surveys/feedback following each unit/topic. These results will be used to evaluate student performance and plan future lessons and assessments. The formal assessments will include objective online tests.

Some assessment strategies allow students to get creative. It is important to make sure that students have access to, or ability to use the technologies required to complete the tasks. These technologies should be free, simple to use, and accessible to the students. Regardless of what products students provide to show their abilities, you need a way to evaluate their work. This evaluation tool might be rubrics.

One strategy from the article that I plan to implement is the one-sentence summary. The students answer seven questions separately: “Who? Does What? To Whom (or What)? When? Where? How? And Why?” Then they put those answers together into one sentence

Regardless of the methods or resources used, the success of the course and student depends on the assessment used and how the results from the assessments are used.