The Ohio State University ASC Office of Distance Education

Activities and Assessments

Activities and Assessments

 

Discussion

Enabling students to learn with and from each other by talking or exchanging text directly is an extremely powerful tool for learning. Fortunately, there are many tools available to enable these kinds of interactions.

Quizzing

The value of online quizzing is sometimes underestimated, but it is possible to design learning activities that go well beyond simple objective memory testing.

High-Stakes Tests

Technically, quizzes and tests are the same thing online, regardless of the point values or percent of the final grade involved; thus, all the tools above can be used for high-stakes tests as well as low-stakes quizzes. What we are describing here are tools that can be used for especially important assessments when it is most important to reinforce academic integrity even at the cost of additional effort and the risk of worsening student anxiety.

Analysis and Lab Activities

There are multiple tools designed to provide guidance for students while they complete a complex set or sequence of steps.

"Papers"

The word "papers" is in quotation marks here both because there is no paper on the internet and because, as a result, the number of kinds of thing a student might submit to demonstrate their learning is a very large number.

Presentations

Public speaking and other demonstrative and performative skills play an important role in learning and can provide very valuable information about the status of students' learning. Online contexts provide a wider range of possibilities than the relatively straightforward situation of in-class presentations, so it is especially helpful to distinguish between a) the tools used to create the presentation media and b) the channel(s) whereby students share their presentation with you and their classmates.

Portfolios

Asking students to produce compilations of work completed at multiple different times, either as an ongoing and unfolding project or as a retrospective way to re-examine and re-use earlier work, is a very powerful learning opportunity, and the durability of files created and submitted via online tools makes this kind of work easier than in traditional settings.