How to Facilitate Assessment in Your Online Course | Del Wakley, Milwaukee Area Technical College

We interviewed Milwaukee Area Technical College Instructor, Del Wakley, about bringing assessment into your online course.

How would you recommend a new faculty member get started?

"To facilitate assessment in your online course, I suggest reviewing the chapter test banks and the filtering capabilities. Depending on your assessment goals, you may want to create pools of filtered questions based on Bloom's Level, Learning Objectives, or Topics.

Additionally, I suggest assigning SmartBook® (SB) for each chapter. Within each assigned SB assignment, you'll find an assignment reporting dashboard that identifies challenging concepts for the class overall and for individual students. You can use this information to drive lectures, create assessments, and/or work with at-risk students.

Finally, I don't think any chapter is complete without an Application-Based Activity that provides immediate student feedback when a student completes the assignment."

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

“It's important that learners have opportunities to review their performance and are able to assess their own learning throughout your course. All of the self-scoring McGraw Hill Connect® digital assets allow you to provide different levels of feedback: total scores, detailed feedback, detailed feedback with solutions, etc. Additionally, all Application-Based Activities (ABAs) provide feedback at the conclusion of the assignment.”

What specific Connect tools would you recommend using?

“I'd recommend SmartBook, an assortment of other assignable exercises such as marketing analytics exercises or video cases, and one of the many Application-Based Activities for reasons noted above.”

What is your favorite Connect Report to use?

“My favorite Connect report is the SmartBook Assignment reporting dashboard. The report allows me to view time spent, metacognitive awareness, and challenging concepts. The report displays these results graphically and allows you to look at overall class performance, as well as individual student performance. I've found the reports helpful in working with at-risk students. Additionally, I review the concepts students have found challenging and use them to create an end-of-semester Challenging Concepts Assessment.”