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Use this article to explore assessments for personal communications including support for assessing these activities, how to use them in an online course, examples, and links to more research on the topic.

Table of Contents

Exploring Personal Communication Assessments

What Are They?

This type of assessment can include discussion board questions, oral examinations (via live synchronous tools), dialogue journals, learning logs, etc.

Why Use Them?

One benefit of using personal communication assessments is that they can help you provide opportunities for the three types of interaction that we mentioned in Module 01:

  • Student-content interaction

  • Student-student interaction

  • Student-instructor interaction

As assessment tools, personal communication assessments can be effective for measuring student learning at all levels of cognitive skills from Bloom’s taxonomy - remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating, depending on how you set up the assessments.

Best Ways to Use Them?

Generally, personal communication assessments work best as formative measures to see how students are learning and provide feedback as they go. However, you can use personal communication assessments for summative assessments; for instance, you might require students to post their final projects to a discussion forum and critique each other’s work as part of their grade.

To explore several common types of these assessments in more detail, view the page below titled Designing Personal Communication Assessments. The page covers the following tools:

  • Discussion Forums

  • Web Conferencing

  • Blogs/Journals

Example of Personal Communication Assessments

Here is a blog example that an instructor can use as a formative assessment to get students thinking about the goals for the course:

Please choose one topic/issue/question that interests you most in the scope of World War II. In your posting, briefly include:

  • Why you are interested in this topic/issue/question

  • Any questions you’d like to explore

  • How you would approach the exploration of this topic/issue/question

  • How the instructor, this class, and your classmates can help you in the discovering process

Designing Personal Communication Assessments

Performance assessments can include, but are not limited to, the following types of assessments:

  • Discussion forums

  • Web conferencing

  • Blogs/journals

Below, we present information on each of these three areas to help you determine whether they might work well for what you are trying to assess.

Discussion Forums

Although online discussions can vary in style, type, and frequency in use, according to Smith (2002), all effective online discussions share the following characteristics:  

  • Support course/assignment learning objectives

  • Generate interest

  • Present questions to facilitate thought, not just the facts

  • Can be applied to everyday life or professional goals

  • Provide clear, explicit instructions

  • Receive points and/or are graded

  • Reflect a percentage of the course grade that is appropriate, feasible, and significant

  • Provide a rubric or other evaluation tool that details the evaluation process

  • Require students to reply to other participants

  • Include effective facilitation

Discussions need not be restricted to the posting of a prompt that all students answer and then reply to each other. Additional ways to use discussions include case studies, debates, and the sharing of presentations for peer review (as we are doing in this seminar), to name a few.

Students typically require incentives to participate in an online discussion. For example, many online instructors make participation in discussions an integral part of students' grades. For fully online courses, it is not unusual to see participation in online discussion compromise 20-40% of the students' total grade.

If you plan to evaluate your students' participation in online discussions, you will want to clearly articulate your participation expectations in the course syllabus, perhaps through a scored grading guide called a  rubric. We will explore rubrics and discussions as learning activities later.

OPTIONAL: If you wish, choose one or more of these resources to explore further:

Web Conferencing

One concern we often hear from new online instructors is the absence of their students’ faces and body language. The asynchronous nature of online learning - meaning that students are accessing the content and participating in learning activities and assessments at varying times - can also take some adjustment.

Enter the use of web-based “software” programs to help bridge the personal gap. They go by a variety of names, including video conferencing, web conferencing, live lecture capture, webcasts, and more. Dozens of programs are available, such as Adobe Connect, GoToMeeting, Panopto, Tegrity, and WebEx. At Boise State, Zoom and Google Hangouts are available. If you have ever participated in a webinar, you have likely used one of these programs. Most of them provide an opportunity to do the following:

  • Use a webcam to see people in real-time (synchronously)

  • Use a headset or microphone to hear one another

  • Share files such as Microsoft Word documents or PowerPoint slides

  • Show video

  • Visit websites at the same time

  • Use a whiteboard

  • Take a poll

  • Record a session

Uses for web conferencing as an assessment tool include project presentations, oral quizzes, role-playing activities, virtual labs, demonstrations, and synchronous discussions (perhaps even with a guest speaker).

OPTIONAL: If you wish, read any of the following to learn more:

 - A blog post by Mary Beth Hertz

Blogs/Journals

A blog, short for “Web log,” is a website where an individual can post his/her thoughts, with dated entries that appear with the most recent post first. The tone is informal, much like an online journal. Readers of the blog can make comments on the post, and the original author may write replies to those comments.

Uses for blogs and journals as assessment tools include low-stakes journaling and internship logs.

OPTIONAL: If you wish, explore any of these resources to learn more about blogs:

References

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