Key Issues: Assessment
This section of the Key Issues contains answers questions related to assessment in blended or online learning, such as how to combat plagiarism, how to proctor online tests and examinations, and how to use Learning Management Systems for formative assessment.
- What formal assessments are being used in blended or fully-online courses?
- How can I incentivise students' online participation?
- How can I check for plagiarism and the originality of student writing?
- How can I reconcile/adjust attendance or DP requirements in an online teaching environment?
- How can I give students feedback online?
- How do I discourage students from cheating on online tests or assessments?
- In what ways can I use technology to facilitate formative assessment?
If you don't find the information you're looking for in these questions, please check the other sections of the Key Issues (Getting started, Creating resources, Teaching online) or email CILT at cilt@uct.ac.za and we'll do our best to add it to the guide.
1. What formal assessments are being used in blended or fully-online courses?
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Last year what we did is we actually got some of our junior staff in the College to travel to Bisho in the Eastern Cape, and to Durban and to Pretoria, to invigilate. It’s a travel risk, it’s a travel cost, and so forth. So, this year, we still don't have a solution from UCT. UCT said they’re addressing it, so I’ve actually asked students to give me an indication of where they’re located, and I can’t discriminate against students because they’re not located in South Africa. I’ve got one student in Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania that applied and he meets the entrance requirements, And I can’t now say ‘I can’t accept you because you’re living in Dar Es Salaam’, I did mention to him that this programme is very much for the South African public sector, but if he wants to enrol for it he should be given that opportunity. Now how should I do the assessment? The only default at this stage that I can go to is a proctor. And then is that allowed within UCT, you know. So I hope that UCT … will be accommodating in this regard.
- A/Prof Ilse Lubbe, College of Accounting
(Or you can listen to the audio below)
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Navigate to Vula help and search for ‘tests and quizzes’ or ‘assignments’. These can be set as tests or exams in a UCT labs or remotely online. Before setting up an online exam please first contact the UCT Examinations Office well before the exam with information on how this will be conducted. Please notify Vula help at least a week in advance of scheduling exams through Vula.
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Summative assessment are intended as a measure of what has been learnt after a cycle of learning, such as:
- Tests and assignments
- Examinations in controlled conditions
- Examinations not requiring invigilation
- Practical examinations
Formal examinations remained a feature of the assessment profile of most courses. However, the very term “examination” is undergoing some stretching with exams taking a variety of forms and accruing varying levels of weight as a result. Read more...
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Blog
- Campus Technology - Evidence of Learning Online: Assessment Beyond The Paper
Documents and templates
Video
- Alan Cliff - Assessment as social practice
(slides available here: https://vula.uct.ac.za/x/tJDV3w)
Readings
- SAIDE (CHE). (2014). Assessment in distance education in a digital era. IN SAIDE, (2014), Distance higher education programmes. Pretoria: South African Institute for Distance Education. Retrieved from https://open.saide.ngo/repository/opensaide/CHE_-_Distance_Higher_Education.pdf
2. How can I incentivise students' online participation?
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In this video, Stefan Britz from the Department of Statistical Sciences discusses the general lessons learned during the running of the STA1000 course, including how the teaching staff used incentivisation to promote student participation.
In this video, Aditi Hunma and Janet Small discuss how students responded to the changes in their learning materials from standard lecture-based experiences to a more blended approach incorporating more multimedia resources.
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The following tools can bring dynamism to your online classes:
- Mentimeter - Create live polls displaying results from questions or challenges
- Socrative - Getting live responses or feedback in the classroom
- Kahoot - Gaming through quizzes
- Padlet - sharing visuals
The Vula team has also created a document to help users with the Statistics tool in Vula.
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Online forums can be a space for productive discussions outside lectures and tutorials. Students have more time to compose thoughts and participation is not limited by time. It can still be challenging to get students to participate. The topics for discussion and how the forms are facilitated are important factors. One strategy for encouraging participation is to award minor marks for participation. Read more...
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Blog
Readings
- Ghosh, A. & Kleinberg, J. (2013). Incentivizing participation in online forums for education. [Pre-print]. Retrieved from https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/ec13-edu-forums.pdf
3. How can I check for plagiarism and the originality of student writing?
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One of the things that comes up in the assessment context is the whole issue of cheating, of verification of who's doing the work, and to what extent is that our job, to police it, to put huge effort into making sure that does or doesn't happen... and what are the policies around plagiarism, or working together, working in pairs or groups, and that sort of thing.
- A/Prof Leanne Scott, Department of Statistical Sciences
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Understandably, plagiarism is a serious concern for online assignments. The most widely used text matching tool at UCT is Turnitin, a web service that can match submitted texts to other texts stored on its database, from which it derives reports on the degree of similarity between two texts. It is integrated into Vula as part of the assignments function, which means it can optionally be activated to help spot potential instances of plagiarism in assignments. Turnitin refers to this as an originality check, as quotes and references may be flagged as matching other texts. Read more...
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Documents and templates
4. How do I reconcile/adjust attendance and DP requirements in an online learning environment?
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To learn more about how technology can be used to track user engagement with your online materials or course site, read the section on Tracking participation using Learning Analytics.
To read about how UCT lecturers have used incentivisation to encourage student participation, read the section of the Teaching Online Portfolio on Forum participation.
5. How can I give students feedback online?
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In the podcast below, Stefan Britz reflects on the best ways to give feedback to students who learn in a blended Statistics course (from 06:00):
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Feedback is as important online as it is in face-to-face courses, and possibly even more so, as it is one of the key ways students learn and feel like they are part of a learning community. When students are not seeing academics regularly in the class, getting timeous feedback on learning activities signals the lecturer is paying attention. For large classes, technology can enable you to set up some standard responses for faster marking, which would require only one or two more specific comments for an individual student. Read more...
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Blogs
- The Rapid e-Learning Blog - Tips to give effective feedback for online courses
- eLearning Industry - 9 Tips to give and receive eLearning feedback
- Inside HigherEd - How to provide meaningful feedback online
- CanvasLMS - Canvas enables teachers to give audio and video feedback to students
Readings
- Bonnel, W. (2008). Improving feedback to students in online courses. Nursing Education Perspectives, 29(5), 290-294. Retrieved from https://journals.lww.com/neponline/Fulltext/2008/09000/Improving_Feedback_to_Students_in_Online_Courses.14.aspx
- Bonnel, W. & Boehm, H. (2011). Improving feedback to students online: Teaching tips from experienced faculty. The Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing, 42(11), 503-509. Retrieved from https://www.healio.com/nursing/journals/jcen/2011-11-42-11/%7Bbb21028b-55f0-4fda-aae2-61047d3584e4%7D/improving-feedback-to-students-online-teaching-tips-from-experienced-faculty
- Bryant, J. & Bates, A. J. (2015). Creating a constructivist online instructional environment. TechTrends, 59(2), 17-22. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs11528-015-0834-1.pdf
- Leibold, N. & Schwaz, L. M. (2015). The art of giving online feedback. Journal of Effective Teaching, 15(1), 34-46. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1060438
6. How do I discourage students from cheating or online tests or assessments?
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Understandably, plagiarism is a serious concern in online assignments. The most widely used text matching tool at UCT is Turnitin, a web service that can match submitted texts to other texts stored on its database, from which it derives reports on the degree of similarity between two texts. It is integrated into Vula as part of the assignments function, which means it can optionally be activated to help spot potential instances of plagiarism in assignments. Turnitin refers to this as an originality check, as quotes and references may be flagged as matching other texts. Read more...
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Blogs
- Iddblog - "How do I know students aren't cheating?"
- North Illinois University - Tips to reduce the impact of cheating in online assessment
- Tony Bates - Infographic on cheating in online learning
7. In what ways can I use technology to facilitate formative assessment?
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And then obviously online assessment is big in Health Sciences. What we’ve seen in the last couple of years is that people … continue to do the same things in the same way. So to show the alternatives or possibilities when it comes to online assessment, and that it doesn’t just have to be summative. So a lot of them now are using it for formative as well, so which are the ways in which you can do that.
- Gregory Doyle, Department of Health Sciences Education
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The following tools can be used to create small formative assessment exercises for your online classes:
- Mentimeter - Create live polls displaying results from questions or challenges
- Socrative - Getting live responses or feedback in the classroom
- Kahoot - Gaming through quizzes
- Padlet - sharing visuals
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Formative assessment is intended to gather evidence of learning and happens during a course, such as in tutorial activities or a portfolio. Active assessment (assessment as learning) is a form of formative assessment intended on engage students in an assessment process, setting success criteria, using peer and self-assessing, using activities and feedback to clarify student learning and understanding. In many cases the same text or object for assessment, can be engaged with in various ways more or less suited to various purposes by considering the analytic tool that an educator makes use of to assess the student’s text or object. Read more...
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Blog
- Campus Technology - Evidence of learning online: Assessment beyond The paper