I am excited to work with the Commonwealth of Learning to offer this MOOC for the second time. The course has reached over 4,500 learners from around the globe who are interested in initiating educational reform through improved assessment practice.
One of the ways I have worked to establish and maintain an instructional presence in this MOOC with over 2,000 learners is through daily announcements derived from discussions in the forums. This question was foundational.
Today’s question of the day is: How different is online assessment from traditional assessment?
There are 2 ways to answer this question – the long way or the short way. Here is the short way.
The answer depends on how we interpret “traditional assessment?” Traditional has become, for some, a bad word – meaning old and outdated. I interpret traditional in this question to mean at the same time (synchronous) and in the same place (location). Proctored exams and in-person presentations are two examples of “traditional” assessments where the students and instructor are in the same place at the same time. Internet-based communications technologies enable teaching and learning to transcend time and space limitations; people don’t need to lug their guts from one place to another for learning to occur.
But, you might rightly ask, what about research papers? Research papers are popular traditional assessments completed asynchronously and at a distance, when the instructor and the student were not in the same place at the same time. This is where it gets messy.
Here is the long answer:
Bates (2005) notes, “distance learning can exist without online learning and online learning is not necessarily distance learning (pp. 14-15).” Some distance learning formats still exist that do not employ the use of internet-based communications technologies. Bates (2017) captures the endemic definitional quagmire of online education by saying, “We are trying to describe a very dynamic and fast-changing phenomenon, and the terminology often struggles to keep up with the reality of what’s happening.” This observation took on new poignancy during the COVID-19 pandemic with the rise of phrases such as emergency remote instruction, bichronous, polysynchronous, and hyflex learning models.
Online education may include synchronous “face-to-face” technologies such as Blackboard Collaborate Ultra, Zoom, or Google Meet, asynchronous or multi-synchronous platforms such as the learning management system (LMS) and Google Docs, and/or participatory flow technologies such as Twitter, Facebook, and Padlet. The use of online education in this course denotes learning experiences where students and faculty use “a personal computer or other mobile device connected to the Worldwide Web using either a cable or wireless protocol,” and where faculty and students possess “the ability to make use of text-based, audio, and audio-visual communications that afford instructors the opportunity to create multifaceted and multidimensional instructional delivery systems” (Conrad & Openo, 2018, p. 8).
Because of these sophisticated instructional models, online assessments have an additional burden to be:
Intentional – Assessment is a major teaching and learning activity. How do online assessments provide evidence of learning outcomes?
Relevant – Online learners need to remain motivated and focused, and online assessments need to focus students' attention on the learning.
Creative – There are a plethora of tools available, and encouraging students to use these various tools can increase engagement.
Now, shouldn’t all assessments be intentional, relevant, and invite creativity? Yes. Because of the learning management system, aren’t all instructors teaching online to some extent now? Yes. So how different is online? Beyond the use of internet-based communications technologies, it's hard to say what’s unique about online assessment and what is just good teaching practice. But when online, instructors must pay closer attention to the affordances of technology and its limitations.