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How to Facilitate Assessment in Your Online Course | Rhonna Krouse, College of Western Idaho

We interviewed College of Western Idaho Associate Professor, Rhonna Krouse, about bringing assessment into your online course.

How would you recommend a new faculty member get started?

“Meaningful assessment is done through careful planning. A great place for a new faculty to begin when developing online content is to decide how they want their learning outcomes assessed. McGraw Hill Connect® has a multitude of resources that allow for alignment of learning outcomes to the textbook selected as well as Bloom’s Taxonomy. If you are unsure, the best place to start is the test bank.”

What are some of the standards you need to keep in mind?

“It important to understand what needs your course is designed to meet. Do you have accreditation standards that need to be met or program goals? I always think of this as “knowing the players.” Most of our courses in Health Professions have a lot of players. Once you know what the course needs to achieve you can develop a plan of action. The plan needs to be specific and be created in a way that supports the learning outcomes for your course. Most of the content in Connect is aligned and can be selected by the chapter learning objectives. This can be extremely useful for creating assignments and assessments that cover exactly what you need.”

What specific Connect tools would you recommend using?

“Connect offers lots of tools for great assessment. I like utilizing the text bank and the section questions. Typically, these are designed for assessment purposes and allow me to hone in on exactly what I want to ask. I also love that these assessments can be shared between faculty, so everyone is assessing the course in the same way.”

What is something you want instructors using assessments in Connect to know?

“The great thing about working with content that is tagged to learning outcomes and Bloom’s Taxonomy is you can create assessments that can look at the breadth and depth of learning for students. This empowers the faculty to create activities that challenge students to achieve a higher level of understanding of your content. When I first began utilizing Connect, my overall class GPA increased, and I began to have more fun deep diving into content that I could not as easily do before.”