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University of Tennessee

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Newsletter: Spring 2004

Making the Most of Online Assessment

by: Darren Hughes

The most popular debate concerning online assessment—that is, how do we prevent our students from cheating?—has, in recent years, given ground to one more vital and, ultimately, more productive: How do we integrate online assessment, in its many and varied guises, into an effective and pedagogically-sound curriculum? How, in other words, do we use the tools at our disposal to best promote the stuff of learning: knowledge recall, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation?

Continuing improvements to Online@UT, in combination with increased bandwidth, storage capacity, and computer literacy among students and faculty, have provided us with a wealth of online assessment options. Few of us use them to their full potential, however. Below is a general introduction to a few of these tools, accompanied by practical and proven strategies for implementation.

Online Quizzes
Online@UT’s most popular assessment feature is its quiz tool, and for good reason. Automated grading, instant feedback, and a user-friendly interface eliminate much (but not all) of the grunt work typically associated with creating and grading those multiple-choice, short-answer, and true/false quizzes with which we measure knowledge recall and comprehension.
Students like online quizzes, too, but for different and, occasionally, less honorable reasons. You should assume that your students are taking your quizzes with their books open and in the company of their classmates. Use this knowledge to your advantage—set a time limit on each quiz, randomize the ordering of your questions, draw questions from a large test bank, and, perhaps most importantly, provide good feedback to reinforce important learning goals.

Digital Drop Box and Assignment Tool
If you’ve ever asked students to submit electronic documents to you via email, then you’ve probably had that experience of opening your mail to find forty messages waiting, each using different naming conventions, and each downloading (slowly) onto your hard drive. Managing files can quickly become a burden. The Digital Drop Box is a depository of sorts on the Blackboard server into which your students can spill their documents, thus keeping them off of your computer. One nice perk of the Digital Drop Box is that each document is time-stamped and dated.

Blackboard 6.0 also introduces the Assignment Tool, a new feature that, like the Digital Drop Box, facilitates the transfer of electronic documents but with improved functionality. Most importantly, the Assignment Tool is fully integrated into the electronic gradebook. When you create an Assignment, the gradebook automatically generates a new entry into which you can enter point or letter grades.

Discussion Boards and the Virtual Classroom
Along with email, Online@UT also facilitates student-teacher and student-student communication via its synchronous and asynchronous tools. The discussion board, in particular, can be a site of genuine learning where students are expected to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate course content. Such critical discussion, however, does not happen by accident. It is your responsibility to establish clear standards for participation (even stating them in your syllabus) and to steer the discussion in a productive direction by asking quality questions.

Additional recommendations that are applicable to the Discussion Board and the Virtual Classroom:

  • Determine specific grading criteria. How often will students be expected to participate? What constitutes a “good” post? How will online communication factor into the student’s final grade?
  • Model best practices. Your posts should exemplify exactly what you expect from your students.
  • Provide specific feedback. Students are motivated by your response. Short, generic responses like “Good job” and “I agree” will likely be interpreted as a lack of interest on your part.


Group Work
Finally, Online@UT allows you to break students into smaller groups. As in the traditional classroom, online groups provide students with an opportunity to collaborate on projects and to participate in closed discussions. Group members can share information with one another through email, through the Student Pages within Blackboard, and through a members-only Discussion Board and Virtual Classroom. Again, you are responsible for providing specific grading criteria.
Suggested activities:

  • Ask group members to peer review their formal writing assignments by attaching electronic documents to a discussion thread.
  • At the beginning of each unit, assign a research topic to a group, who will then be expected to work together to synthesize and evaluate the material before presenting it to the class as a whole.
  • Give your groups a case study and assign specific roles to each member. Rotate roles throughout the semester so that each student will gain the full breadth of practical experience.