Designing Formative e-Assessments to Prepare Studentsfor the Summative Assessment in Massive Online Courses

Abstract

 Abstract—Massive Online Courses (MOC) usually contains learners of several thousands and they create new challenges in teaching and learning environments that must be addressed using ICT enabled interactive tools. Such courses represent a learning community rather than a group, with various types of learners with varying knowledge and skill levels. Learners' main objective is to obtain a certification by following learning activities and they could be hardly got individual attention from facilitators. However, the certification depends on the final summative assessment in the course. To obtain effective results, learning and assessment have to be carried out together but it could create unmanageable workload for facilitators. Hence, they need to use automated tools to assess the students and to provide effective feedback to prepare learners for final examination. Facilities available in a virtual learning management system could be used to design such formative assessments which will prepare learners to face the challenges of summative assessment. In this paper, we are presenting our experience of developing formative e-Assessments in Moodle based Virtual Learning Environment for an external online degree programme. The paper presents the challenges and practical issues together with our design of formative e-Assessments. This design approach helps to improve the learners' performance as well as to maintain the sustainability of Massive Online Courses.