How to Facilitate Assessment in Your Online Course | Jeff Fox, Northern Kentucky University

We interviewed Northern Kentucky University lecturer and course designer, Jeff Fox, about bringing assessment into your online communication course.

How would you recommend a new faculty member get started?

“Assessment for many communication courses comes in the form of speeches, exams, and in some cases application assignments (e.g. papers or analyses). As a faculty member, decide what key components exist for the course and what is needed to measure effectiveness – e.g. a Likert scale for various categories when assessing speeches; or certain questions from a test bank that measure learning related to a specific learning outcome. Select what works best for your needs and will give you the most robust results.”

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

"Assessment should have value. Sometimes it is not always what is easiest to grade, but what best reflects progress from a student. Use a variety of types of assessments to gauge student learning – e.g. a mix of multiple-choice, short answer, and application-based scenarios."

What specific Connect tools would you recommend using?

“I recommend the test/question bank as a great tool in McGraw Hill Connect® for assessment. Each set of questions can be filtered by learning topic, objective related to the chapter, Bloom’s Taxonomy, and so forth. The plethora of question types and options in the test/question bank provide ample opportunities to assess students learning in different ways.”

How do you use GoReact as an assessment online?

“For speeches, video capture powered by GoReact allows a one-stop location for instructor and peer/self-review of speeches–and the rubrics can be customized to the assessment needs of the instructor/department.”