Meaningful Assessments in MOOCs
This guest post is by Joshua Francisco, Course Support Specialist for Open Education at the Center for Teaching and Learning.
Trivia might be a fun game night activity, but trivia questions quickly feel like mere busy work when learners encounter them in assessments. At worst, quizzing with trivia questions diverts attention from a lesson's main concepts, skills, and learning objectives. Our goal in this article is to guide you away from trivia questions and towards creating meaningful assessments that focus on your learning objectives and extend the learning experience beyond the didactic content in your massive open online course (MOOC).
Assessments as Extended Learning Opportunities
The following are three ways to frame your assessment for extended learning:
- Reinforce: Use assessments to reinforce key concepts and critical takeaways. Avoid trivial details. Ask yourself, “What key concepts or practice do I want to reinforce from the lesson/unit/course?”
- Practice: Use assessments to have your learners practice important skills that they will use beyond the course. Ask yourself, “In what way can we apply what we have learned from the lesson/unit/course?”
- Metacognition: Use assessments to demonstrate to your learners both what they have learned and mastered and what they need to revisit and improve. Provide feedback for answers to questions and activities.
Writing Assessment Items
Figure 1. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- Identify which of your learning objectives you are addressing in the assessment. If you haven’t yet written your learning objectives, you should complete that step before writing assessment items. Refer to our blog on writing learning objectives for more details. Learning objectives are statements of what learners will “achieve by the end of the lesson, module, or course” (Lamm, 2023). These statements are best identified and organized with the Bloom’s Taxonomy (Figure 1).
- Align assessment items with learning objectives. Refer to the Bloom’s Taxonomy to determine ways your learners can demonstrate the skills and knowledge outlined in your learning objectives. These assessment items may be in the form of multiple choice or short answer, to name the most common types.
Examples
In the examples, the bolded words are the specific skills, and the underlined words are the verbs that can be mapped to the taxonomy.
Example A: Learners will be able to differentiate between qualitative and quantitative research.
- Differentiation is in the Analyze category from Bloom’s Taxonomy (Figure 1), so you could ask your learners to analyze a few different abstracts and have them indicate which ones use each type of research.
Example B: By the end of this module, learners will be able to assess environmental factors that impact public health, identify potential hazards , and propose strategies to mitigate risks.
- For “assess” you can draw from the Understand category and ask learners to explain (or choose from a list of explanations for multiple choice questions) why certain factors impact public health. Additionally, you can draw from the Evaluate category and ask learners to choose (from a given list) which environmental factors are applicable.
- “Identify” is in the Remember category. You can have learners recall case-study practice from the course content that exercises the skills described by the learning objective.
- “Propose” is in the Apply category. You can have learners choose from a list of proposed strategies that appropriately address a new and different public health context.
Remember that MOOC assessments are either self-graded or auto-graded by the platform. Design your assessments with those constraints in mind. With multiple choice questions, include feedback for right and wrong answers to clarify misconceptions and nudge learners toward the correct answers. With open response questions, provide a comprehensive model response that your learners can compare with their own.
Conclusion
By designing assessments as extended learning opportunities to reinforce and practice key knowledge and skills and as a metacognitive tool to provide learners insight on their mastery progress, you can turn your assessments into meaningful work for your learners. Furthermore, by aligning your assessment items to your learning objectives and utilizing Bloom’s Taxonomy, you can focus your assessments on the goals of your course.
Now that we can make meaningful assessments for our learners, Trivia night anyone?
References
Lamm, M. (2023). Know Where You Are Going! Simple Steps to Writing SMART Learning Objectives. Center for Teaching and Learning, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University. https://ctl.jhsph.edu/blog/posts/SMART-learning-objectives/