BlendKit 2014 Reading Reaction: Chapter 3

What struck me the most in this week’s reading are the questions “What expectations do you have for online assessments? How do these expectations compare to those you have for face-to-face assessments? Are you harboring any biases?”* As someone new to blended learning, I had not even considered that I could have biases against assessing the online participation in a blended learning course, but it makes sense. We gravitate towards the familiar or what makes us feel comfortable most of the time, so we may be more inclined to give f2f assessment more weight. If more weight were given to activities in the face-to-face environment, it would also lessen the impact of online cheating.

Because our university is concentrating efforts on the flipped classroom, I may be leaning toward that model, but it seems as though having informal assessments online as part of mastering basic information could be balanced with later, formal assessments both online and in class that really measure “students’ transfer of learning to new contexts. If learning is not transferred from the place of learning to practical application, there can be no positive return on investment of the time needed to create, implement, and evaluation instruction.” If students have ample practice applying the information in different contexts with feedback on their performance through informal means, it would seem that formal assessments for the same type of work could be done online and face-to-face and could be complex problems sets that would make cheating difficult. Although the reading states that multiple choice questions can be implemented to test higher-level thinking, I wonder if creating something that is simple to grade confines the possibilities of what we could see a given student produce. Isn’t that part of the disappointment from MOOCs—it doesn’t really encourage deep learning if assessment is only multiple choice questions and numbers of blog entries?

I wonder if anyone with more experience in blended learning and creating assessment tools could provide some guidance on what approaches and strategies have worked for fair assessment of student work in their experiences (although I will check the suggested resources from the reading). Sometimes it helps to have someone talk through the decision-making process and their own experiences. In comparison with the first two readings, I feel as though this one left me with many more questions and loose threads.

*Portions of the following section are adapted from “Design of Blended Learning in K-12” in Blended Learning in K-12 under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike3.0 Unported license. Portions of the following section labeled as the property of the Commonwealth of Learning are used in compliance with the Commonwealth of Learning’s legal notice and may not be re-mixed apart from compliance with their repackaging guidelines.