Personal Communication Assessments

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:

• 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, depending on how you set up the assessments: remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating.

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 section 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 answers to the following:

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

• What questions would you like to explore?

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

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

Designing Personal Communication Assessments

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

• 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

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.

When planning to evaluate student participation in online discussions, clearly articulate the expectations. Consider outlining expectations in the syllabus, with the assignments, and/or by using a rubric.

Web Conferencing as an Assessment Tool

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).

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.

Additional Resources

• Interactivity in Online Learning

• Synchronous Discussions / Web Conferencing

• QM 5.2 Learning activities provide opportunities for interactions that support active learning

• QM 5.3 The instructor’s plan for regular interaction with learners in substantive ways during the course is clearly stated