Module Assessment
Assessment of this module will take three different forms. These assessments will include student achievement, effectiveness of online delivery, as well as student perceptions of the module.
Student Achievement
Formative Assessment:
The teacher will monitor the learning tasks as they are being completed in small groups. Each learning task will be assigned five points, and will be graded according to completeness, content, and whether students appear to meet the learning objectives for that particular task.
Summative Assessment:
The blog post in Learning Task 5 will serve as the summative assessment for this particular module, and will be graded according to the following rubric:
This is an original rubric, but inspiration for the criteria was taken from Appendix A of Suwantarathip and Wichadee (2014).
Student achievement will also be assessed with a final exam at the end of the course, which will contain a section that specifically assesses note-taking. To get an idea of how this may look, please click the PDF link below:
(Cinnamon, 2018)
Note that this assessment is a work in progress and I initially created it as an assignment for another course. In an actual classroom situation, it would be edited and tailored to fit the specific course context.
Effectiveness of Online Delivery
In order to directly assess the effectiveness of the online delivery of this module, a formal study involving a control and experimental group will likely need to place, with the control group receiving exclusively offline instruction, while the experimental group partakes in online instruction. Students will then need to be assessed to see if online instruction has any measurable effect on their grades, or if these effects are negligible or non-existent. Given that this is a module designed for a hypothetical classroom situation, there is not any possible way to conduct this study at this time, but this remains a possibility for the future. Prior research has indicated that online learning modules and task-based learning positively affects student achievement and also generally leads to more participation and eagerness to collaborate with classmates (Ambrose & Palpanathan, 2017; Chiu, Wu & Cheng, 2013; Suwantarathip & Wichadee, 2014; Yang & Yin, 2015). With this in mind, I anticipate that my module may be similarly effective.
Another easier-to-incorporate element of assessment is student surveys. Upon completion of this unit, students will be given a survey to fill out regarding their overall views of the learning tasks contained in this unit. Did students think that these tasks were effective learning tools? Did students "get more" out of this module than they would if it were delivered offline? Hungerford-Kresser, Wiggins and Amaro-Jiménez (2011) used student surveys in order to assess the incorporation of blogging in a classroom, and while they found that students had an unfavourable view of these blogging tasks, students also had a lot of feedback to offer that was helpful. This feedback resulted in the authors being able to provide suggestions to more effectively incorporate blogging into the classroom. Thus, relying on student feedback may not necessarily lead to a more effective course, but it can help a teacher evaluate and make changes to learning tasks where necessary.
