Tag Archives: two in one

Dever – Week 4 (Prompt 1) Assessment is My Friend and My Enemy

This course has exposed me to several new ideas and techniques of assessment for online teaching. Importantly, these techniques are not only for overall course assessment, but also periodic, in course assessment.

Since most of my instruction is to mature learners, the incorporation of heutagogical learning and assessment is both a refining of and a confirmation of what I need to pursue. However, for my thought process and what I have experienced the development of my assessment parameters and my process will have to be a hybrid of heutagogical learning and “traditional” learning. This is because the idea of “instantaneous” feedback is essential (since my learners are from several very different professions), yet I also have to provide base knowledge as, though business concepts are applicable in some form across industries, the concepts I teach have a singular basis. That is, the different industry and experience dictate heutagogical learning for interpretative exercises and instruction, but the base concepts do not lend themselves to heutagogical learning as they are both rote and the learner may not appreciate the technique or nuances they must learn to make the interpretative aspects of the course/learning possible.

I would consider my strengths in assessment the ability to see the course I teach as a dimensional entity. Meaning, I feel that the course is both a tool provider and an application. I try to ensure that the learners appreciate from the beginning of the course that there are short-term and long-term goals and celebrations – and that as a result it makes sense to the learners that the assessment and feedback amounts, types and techniques be unique to that section of the course. I try to explain and obtain understanding/appreciation of this from the learners by incorporating this idea explicitly in the course orientation and syllabus.

Hence, my assessment design for the first part of the course (base) will consist chiefly of quizzes, Qualtrics, and some Adobe Connect. For the more interpretive part of the course, assessment and therefore adjustment will be through Adobe Connect, minute papers, mind mapping, some polling, and VoiceThread demos and feedback.