Module 3: Learning Activity 2
Connecting Course Outcomes to Assessment
This week, you will brainstorm appropriate types of assessments for your online course/ module based on the course learning outcomes and competencies you set last week. You are encouraged to integrate multiple assessment strategies to gather appropriate evidence of learners’ achievement of course learning outcomes. Keep in mind to also integrate formative assessment opportunities to provide feedback on learner’s progress toward achieving course learning outcomes.
Do your planning for the area you identified in the poll that you want to develop as part of your own online course.
By developing assessments at the beginning of the online course design process, you can ensure that later efforts of designing instructional strategies focus on the type of learning needed to demonstrate the achievement of the intended learning outcomes of your course/ module. The purpose of assessment is two-fold. For one, they can provide learners an opportunity to demonstrate achievement of outcomes and second, they demonstrate progress toward the learning outcomes.
As you know from your own teaching practice, there are a range of different types of online assessments, namely
1. Authentic, performance-based
2. Self-assessments or reflective assessments
3. Portfolios
4. Collaborative and peer-assessments
5. Tests
Instructions
Recommended Steps to plan your assessment as referenced in Stavredes and Herder, (2014, p. 67):
- Brainstorm summative and formative assessment strategies for your course learning outcomes. While you think through your assessment options, keep coming back to your learning outcomes to make sure you are providing appropriate opportunities for learners to demonstrate their progress toward and achievement of the learning outcomes. Ask yourself the following questions to guide you in this step (as suggested by Wiggins and McTighe, 2005, p. 146):
- What evidence can show that students have achieved the desired results?
- What assessment tasks and other evidence will anchor your units and thus guide our instruction?
- What should you look for, to determine the extent of student understanding?
- Review your assessments and think about what you learned about your learning outcomes as you started designing them. Consider the following questions:
- Did you realize that the focus of your learning outcomes is different than what you initially thought?
- Did you find that there were competencies that needed more emphasis than you originally thought?
- You may also find that your initial outcomes were not accurate enough, so feel free to go back and make adjustments at this time before you move further into the design process.
Add your design PLAN for your course assessment.
Start by looking at the exemplar = the assessment description for FLO 2019 by accessing
The Goals Picture with Hotspots below, which you recognize as + icons that you can click on to get more information. You might recognize the picture from the Feedback when I told you how I formulated the course level goals for FLOd2019. In addition, you can now read up on the assessment types that are tied to the individual goals. Navigate the information by clicking on the orange plus icons in the picture.