8 Assessments & Grades

Guiding Questions

The following questions are meant to guide the design and sequencing of your assessments within your course.

  • How do your assessments align with your course learning goals?
  • Given the need to reduce course content when shifting online, what aspects of the course are most critical for students to learn and how will you assess these core learning goals?
  • What opportunities will you provide throughout the course for students to assess and show their learning? How will you weight these various assessment methods/opportunities (i.e. participation, performance, formative, summative; see the CTLT Online Teaching Program’s Planning for Online Assessment page for additional information and details about formative and summative assessment)?
  • What opportunities exist for students to collaborate on assessments in groups/teams?
  • What resources and tools exist to help with the grading of assessments within your course?

Designing Online Assessment

The following sections provide a few suggestions and examples of how you might assess student learning in your course.

  • When reviewing and revising your course material for the online environment, ensure that your course learning goals align with your assessments.
  • It is suggested to spread out your assessments across the term rather than having a heavily weighted midterm and/or final exam. You may want to increase the weight of your quizzes, assignments, homework and student participation/contributions (i.e. discussion board, piazza) and minimize the weighting to high stakes assessments (i.e. midterms, final exams).
  • Have frequent opportunities for students to assess their learning will help keep students engaged in the course and on top of the course material. You’ll need to consider whether to assign a grade to these opportunities. Some examples include:
    • One-minute papers: At the end of a synchronous session (in real time), ask students to reflect on what they understood and what they still have questions about. These could be submitted within the chat box within Zoom, as an assignment within Canvas, the Canvas Discussions or Piazza.
    • Clicker quizzes: Given polling in Zoom is not connected to students IDs, some instructors are asking students to complete Clicker quizzes (1-5 questions) after a synchronous/asynchronous lecture to assess student learning and to map the outcomes to student IDs and the Canvas Gradebook.
    • Homework/assignments: Instructors are including weekly homework/assignments to keep students on top of the material. You could build the material within the Canvas assignments or WeBWorK, which is often used in courses relying heavily on mathematical notation. We also have some suggestions if you want students to submit Handwritten Responses.
  • Provide clear timelines, expectations, and grading rubrics for your course assessments.  Describe to students how the various assessments are linked to the course learning goals, how they are designed to support student learning, and what criteria is used for grading.
  • Refer to the Skylight LT Canvas FAQ page for links to guides on setting up and managing online assignments, Canvas Gradebook, groups, peer review, quizzes, and SpeedGrader.

Different Types of Online Assessment

Reimagining Assessments

The UBC Provost Working Group on teaching large classes created the Reimagining Assessments resource on how particular assessments could be used in an online environment. It provides a description of the opportunities, challenges, and online considerations for a number of assessment types.

Peer Assessment

Peer assessment engages students in the assessment process and can enrich their interactions with their peers and course work. If you plan to assess peer assessment, it is important to effectively inform students of overall process and to train them in giving and receiving feedback. Depending on your context, you could use the Peer Review functionality in Canvas or tools such as ComPAIR or PeerWise. You can learn more about various tools and approaches in this CTLT Online Teaching Program section, Involving students in the assessment process.

In this interview, James Charbonneau (PHAS), describes how he engaged students in authentic scientific problems using peer assessment with ComPAIR, a learning technology developed at UBC.

Participation

Science faculty are using participation in a few different ways to help keep students engaged in the course material and to build community among the instructor, TAs, and students. The way in which participation is assessed varies from course to course and is dependent on the goals of the instructor. Most instructors however, emphasize that there needs to be clear objectives and guidelines for why students are being asked to participate and how they will be assessed.

  • Within a large online first year physics course, an instructor assessed student participation on Piazza. This low stakes assessment involved students making three contributions to the Piazza discussion forum each week. Students could post a question, reply to a peer, or read/like a particular post. The instructor chose not to assess the content of the posts, but instead, rewarded whether students participated or not. This course had a high level of engagement and significantly more traffic and conversations in comparison to Piazza forums in face to face courses.
  • Alternatively in a smaller course, an instructor could assess the quality of students’ contributions to a discussion forum. An instructor could post a prompt within the discussion forum and ask students to write a response and to respond to two of their peers by a particular deadline.  A select number of these posts and responses (to give flexibility to students) would be graded by a TA using a rubric that assessed the quality of students’ original posts and their responses to their peers.

Papers and/or Group Projects

Distance education courses will often include term-long scaffolded papers and/or group projects with check-ins and assignments due along the course of the term. This is a way to keep students on track with their learning and an opportunity for them to revise their work and to receive feedback on their learning. We also have some suggestions if you want students to submit Handwritten Responses.

Rubrics

Rubrics are a useful tool that provide students with a set of criteria that they will be assessed on in group projects, writing assignments, participation, and other forms of assessment. Further details about designing rubrics can be found on the CTLT Online Teaching Program Rubrics page.

Two-stage exams

Resources for Exams

The Skylight team has created and curated a number of resources related to designing and facilitating online exams, offering ideas and steps for replacing a traditional, in-person, paper-based exam with an alternative that students can undertake remotely.

You will need to consider student access to specific electronic equipment. Some students will have limited internet access, some will not have webcams, and/or some will not have access to printers or cameras. If you are thinking of asking students to do things that require a webcam, printer, scanner, and/or camera, communicate with them as early as possible to determine what’s possible and make alternate plans to accommodate.
With those in mind, the primary recommendations fall into two categories:

Resources for other key issues to consider beyond the format:

 

License

Skylight Guide to Teaching Online Copyright © by The Skylight Team. All Rights Reserved.

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