Assessing Online Collaboration: What You Need To Know

Assessing Online Collaboration: What You Need To Know

Assessing Online Collaboration: What You Need To Know

What You Need To Know About Assessing Online Collaboration   

The goal of collaborative learning activities is to provide students with learning opportunities where learners are able to interact while sharing and processing new information. Assessing individual learning and achieving full online participation can be difficult without the appropriate assessment tool. Assessing online collaboration can be challenging and require the instructor to create assessment tools that evaluate individual student learning and group participation. Additionally, communicating evaluation results with online learners can be just as challenging as creating the assessment tool.

Formative And Summative Assessments

Assessing is the process of identifying specific and measurable goals, collecting evidence of student learning, and implementing changes to future instruction for the purposes of improving student achievement. Assessing student learning in the online environment can be in the form of formative or summative assessments. Formative assessments are ongoing and can occur at several points throughout a course. The objective of formative assessments is to monitor student learning, which will provide the instructor ongoing feedback that can be used to improve teaching and instruction. More specifically, formative assessments help learners identify personal strengths and weaknesses and help to create future learning goals. Additionally, formative assessments are generally low stakes assessments, having low or no point values. Some formative examples include: Student self-reflections, self-assessments, discussion rubrics, collaborative assessments, peer-to-peer feedback, and student working portfolios.

The objective of summative assessments is to assess student learning at the end of a course by comparing it against a previously set standard or benchmark. Information from summative assessments can be used to focus and realign overall course objectives and assignments for future course offerings. Summative assessments are often high stakes, having a high point value. Examples of summative assessments might include: Midterm exams, final projects, extended writings, or a final portfolio. However, using only summative assessment types ignores many of the basic guiding principles of collaborative online student assessments.

6 Key Assessment Characteristics

Assessing collaborative group activities require the instructor to understand basic principles of online student assessment. Morgan and O’Reilly discuss six key qualities of collaborative assessments, which include: Explicitly stated performance expectations, authentic tasks, a facilitative structured assessment, timely assessments, and an awareness of the learning context. The multitude of variables linked with assessing collaborative activities is a challenge for online instructors as they develop collaborative activities. The first step in determining the assessment tool is to identify the goals and objectives of the collaborative activity. The difficulty is found in matching the activity to the appropriate assessment tool. The following assessment tips provide a guide for online instructors as they develop collaborative group activities and assessments:

  1. Identify the learning outcomes.
    Assessments should be products of the activity and student learning.
  2. State explicitly the activity expectations.
    Learners must know the activity objectives and performance expectations before beginning.
  3. Use rubrics.
    Explicit evaluation criteria with assigned values based on levels of participation and content should always accompany an online collaborative activity.
  4. Provide timely assessment feedback.
    Value learner work and effort from the very beginning.
  5. Use a reflective process.
    Learning occurs at a deeper level when students are able to reflect on their own learning knowledge and experiences.
  6. Allow learners to develop portfolios.
    Serves as evidence of individual and group work.

Ways To Assess Online Collaboration 

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