How Do I Assess Students Online?

This article provides tips and resources for assessing students the online learning space, as well as academic integrity strategies.

Table of Contents

Start Here: How to Assess Online Learning

Begin with How to Assess Online Learning for ideas about alternatives to tests to find:

A review of four assessment options
Examples of assessments for a variety of formats, including video recordings, portfolios and The UnEssay

Review How to Create Transparent Assignments to create purpose and transparency in assignments.

For an in-depth article, see Academic Integrity Strategy. Also review the following:

Visit Boise State’s Academic Integrity for Faculty website
Incorporate the Academic Integrity Workshop into your beginning-of-the-semester assignments
Use Alternatives to tests
- Alternatives to Traditional Exams and Papers from Indiana University Bloomington
- Give students choice, where appropriate from the Eberly Center at Carnegie Mellon
- Bloom’s Taxonomy from Vanderbilt Center for Teaching
  - Move students up in Bloom’s Taxonomy, where possible, to focus on demonstrating critical thinking skills
- Try something different! See the table below.

Instead of this	Do this
Mid-term exam	Short quizzes with each module drawing random questions from large test pools
Final exam	Final project demonstrating course learning objectives
Proctored test	Open-book test with random questions to be completed in 45 minutes
End-of-course research paper	Research paper completed in stages with assignments relating to topic selection, library research and citation skills, annotated bibliography, draft of sections with peer evaluation, video presentation highlighting results and lessons learned, final submission

About Universal Design for Learning by CAST, the Center for Applied Special Technology
RubiStar - create rubrics
The Unessay by Daniel Paul O’Donnell
The Unessay by Emily Suzanne Clark
The UnEssay by Marc Kissel
The UnEssay: Making Room for Creativity in the Composition Classroom by Patrick Sullivan

Adobe Scan mobile app is free and on Android and iOS; this was mentioned as a tool to get a PDF of worksheets used during an exam to demonstrate work.
FasterScan is an iPhone/iPad app that is a faster way to scan documents (even if they are curled), with your iPhone. It produces a sharp image using image enhancement technology. You instantly scan multi-pages document and send out when there is no scanner nearby.
Adding a Quiz to a Video: This article guides you through the steps of adding a quiz in your own video session.