Abstract
Assessment can be seen as the engine that drives student course activity, online or off. It is particularly important in encouraging and shaping collaborative activity online. This paper discusses three sorts of online collaborative activity—collaborative discussion, small group collaboration, and collaborative exams. In each of these areas, it provides both theoretical grounding and practical advice for assessing, and so encouraging, collaboration in online courses.
Highlights
The theme of this paper is the importance of assessment to learning; that what is assessed is what is valued, and if you value collaboration as an instructor, you need to find ways to motivate students and to assess collaborative activity
In most online courses, traditional instructor-centered examination remains the primary means for assessing student performance, and collaborative learning is undervalued and so marginalized
A collaborative exam is an online exam in which small groups of 3–5 students create questions; other individual students answer these questions; the small group grades the answers to the questions they created, using a set of detailed rubrics for grading; and the instructor reviews the suggested grading and rationale and assigns the final grade
Summary
The theme of this paper is the importance of assessment to learning; that what is assessed is what is valued, and if you value collaboration as an instructor, you need to find ways to motivate students and to assess collaborative activity. The paper begins with an overview of the changing nature of assessment in education and addresses assessing online collaboration—why it is important and why it is difficult It explores in greater depth two common and quite different kinds of online collaboration, collaborative online discussion, and collaborative small group projects. Findings from a recent dissertation which introduced and measured the effectiveness of innovative collaborative examination procedures are summarized. In each or these areas we lay out the issues, theoretical and practical involved in assessing online collaboration, as well as give examples of how to assess (and so encourage) individual and group work for differing sorts of activities
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