MOOC
Assessment
The topic of student assessment
is one that has been near and dear to my heart for several years now, both as a
classroom teacher and in my current position as the assessment coordinator for
the College of Education. Through my professional experiences, I have
grown to appreciate the significance of well-designed and valid assessment, and
the great skill that is needed to design them.
Sadly, far too often teachers utilize poorly designed assessment
instruments that provide little insight into actual student growth. I will be the first to admit that during my
time as a classroom teacher, I was far too often guilty of using a variety of meaningless
and invalid assessment techniques; such as multiple choice tests. But the
reality is that most teachers have to deal with extremely large class sizes and
a variety of external pressures demanding validation of student achievement, which
too often forces teachers into gathering inauthentic assessment. When you consider the exponentially larger
class sizes of MOOC courses, the challenges of time and space and the ambiguity
of MOOC course credit, the issue of assessment within the MOOC environment
appears to be an unsettled enigma, with the lingering challenging of determining
how to authentically assess student performance within the MOOC environment.
To me, the biggest question
regarding assessment within the MOOC environment is how to authentically assess
student performance while maintaining a feasible work load for the instructor(s). Unfortunately, there is no one best assessment
method for all courses. The nature of
the course plays a large role in determining how to best conduct
assessment. The MOOC that I am creating
for AHE 602 lends itself well to experiential learning strategies and hands on
student activities. The activities that
I have in mind for this class rely more on application, and cannot be
adequately measured through an exam. As
such, the auto-graded multiple choice test that is commonly used in MOOCs is
not a great option for me. Neither are the proctored exams that Parry describes. I think that peer assessment is going to be a
more valid option for my MOOC. I enjoyed reading Davidson’s article on crowd
source grading. Her concept seemed like
a well-timed solution for my enigma. I
plan to have the student’s actively participate in peer assessment throughout
the course. As of this moment, I am not
sure if I need to designing a document outlining peer assessment groups, or to
allow that to form naturally
Like all courses,
traditional or online, instructors must consider how to maintain academic
integrity within the course. Young raised
several valid concerns regarding plagiarism and the potential for academic
dishonesty within the MOOC environment.
The MOOC frontier is so new that most of the instructor efforts still revolve
designing the MOOC courses. It seems
little has been done to ensure that students abide by academic conduct
policies. I openly admit that I have no
solution to offer. That is why that I am
glad that my MOOC is a not for credit course.
If a student decides to cheat, they are really just cheating themselves
out of learning experiences.
References
Davidson, C. N.
(2009). How to crowdsource grading. Retrieved from http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/how-crowdsource-grading
Parry, M.
(2012). Edx offers proctored exams for open online courses. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/edx-offers-proctored-exams-for-open-online-course/39656
Young, J.
(2012). Plagiarism in coursera. http://chronicle.com/article/Dozens-of-Plagiarism-Incidents/133697/
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