Assessing Collaborative Efforts
In this module, you watched two video programs in which George Siemens discussed strategies for assessing collaborative learning communities in the online environment, and for creating and maintaining successful online learning communities. Both instructors and learners must take responsibility for achieving this goal. Occasionally, you may run across a student who does not like to work in groups or collaborate with peers. He or she may even request to work on a project alone rather than in a cooperative group.
As an instructor, there are several issues to consider:
- How should participation in a collaborative learning community be assessed? How do the varying levels of skill and knowledge students bring to a course affect the instructor's "fair and equitable assessment" of learning?
- If a student does not want to network or collaborate in a learning community for an online course, what should the other members of the learning community do? What role should the instructor play? What impact would this have on his or her assessment plan?
Reflect on these questions in your blog. Reference your readings and video programs from this module, along with another blog post dealing with the topic of assessing collaborative learning. Be sure to link to all of the resources you cite in your blog.
MD3Disc: Online Format Assessment
ReplyDeleteThe difficulty with online college courses is that the level of competency cannot be lowered. An individual with lower skills will need to take remediation courses prior to taking the college courses. Instructors teaching at the higher education (bachelor, masters and doctorate) have a right to expect their students to have the skills necessary to accomplish the courses. It becomes the responsibility of the intake/registration staff to ensure that testing and writing samples are submitted prior to scheduling any courses. If there is a question as to the skill level of the student, the instructor must communicate with the student and their counselor to provide the student with the necessary support needed them to be successful. Although, this may seem harsh, without upholding the academic level the university aspires towards, the university’s reputation will suffer when employers hire individuals lacking the skills they should have acquired while obtaining their degree.
Palloff and Pratt (2003) provide seven different modes of collaborative assessment:
1) Design learner-centered assessments that include self-reflection
2) Design and include grading rubrics to assess contribution to the discussions as for assignments, projects, and collaboration itself.
3) Include collaborative assessments through publicly posting papers along with comments from student to student.
4) Encourage students to develop skills in providing feedback by providing guidelines to good feedback and by modeling what is expected.
5) Use assessment techniques that fit the context and align with learning objectives.
6) Design assessment that are clear, easy to understand, and likely to work in the online environment.
7) Ask for and incorporate student input into how assessment should be conducted (p. 101- 102).
Online education is a choice. During orientation, the college/university must make it excessively clear that collaboration is mandatory part of online courses for some universities. There are universities, such as Western Governors University, that require very little online collaboration. For students not participating, an investigation into why the student is not able to collaborate with the others is needed; their peers can help with this issue. Instructors can pose questions to help the students gain a higher sense of safety, responsibility, and competency by communicating with the student, modeling an acceptable level of collaboration, and/or use subtle questions and leading suggestions in the discussions. Assessment needs to be made clear up front. Providing the rubric of expectations for discussions and collaboration is mandatory for success (Swan, 2004).
Reference
Palloff, R. M., & Pratt, K. (2005). Collaborating online: Learning together in community. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Palloff, R. M., & Pratt, K. (2007). Building online learning communities: Effective strategies for the virtual classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Swan, K. (2004). Relationships between interactions and learning in online environments. The Sloan Consortium.
Great post.
ReplyDeleteDo you think that when a different school does not require online collaboration it effects the rigor and quality of the program?
No, I actually believe that the individual that selects an online school at the same time selects the type of interaction they want to engage in. If the student wants this collaborative environment, they will enroll in that college. The push towards forcing people to be collaborative can backfire. For some people collaboration is extremely difficult. Not everyone is meant to be at the center of collaborative efforts, some are solo workers and we need all types of individuals to make the whole system work. Like in education, there is such a high focus on reading and writing that we often times lose the talents of those that are artist by nature. They may not write or read well, but their innate talents exceed far and above those who read and write.
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