Assessment Overview

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Last updated: Jul 24, 2023 by SAMA MOHAMED
5 min read

Assessment and feedback are at the heart of the student experience, shaping students’ understanding of the curriculum, and influencing student progress on the programme and career choices. The assessment also forms a significant part of the workload for academics and administrators and yet is an area that is often rated unsatisfactory by students. (JISC, 2010)

When setting assessment deadlines online, we recommend that deadlines are set between 9-5 Monday-Friday to ensure educational technology, technology, and course office support is available for students who experience problems with their online assessment. Review the Module Page Checklist: Assessment Information on Module Page for requirements around online assessment.

E-Assessment benefits

Using technology can bring many benefits to the assessment process and some of these are outlined below:

  • Greater variety and authenticity in the design of assessments

  • Improved learner engagement, for example through interactive formative assessments with adaptive feedback

  • Choice in the timing and location of assessments

  • Capture of wider skills and attributes not easily assessed by other means, for example through simulations, e-portfolios and interactive games

  • Efficient submission, marking, moderation and data storage processes

  • Consistent, accurate results with opportunities to combine human and computer marking

  • Immediate feedback

  • Increased opportunities for learners to act on  feedback, for example by reflection in e-portfolios

  • Innovative approaches based around the use of creative media and online peer and self-assessment

  • Accurate, timely and accessible evidence on the effectiveness of curriculum design and delivery

(JISC, 2010, p. 9)

Effective Assessment in a Digital Age

Options for Assessment in Moodle

Moodle offers many different styles of assessment, from quizzes to peer assessment to video assignments.

Quiz

The Quiz activity allows you to design and build quizzes consisting of a large variety of question types, including multiple-choice, true-false, and short answer questions. Questions are kept in the Question Bank and can be re-used in quizzes in different modules. Moodle Quiz can help to build students’ confidence by providing opportunities for them to consolidate their learning, and offering instant personalized feedback. Lecturers can also benefit from using quizzes to identify parts of the curriculum that students are struggling with and to gather feedback about the content covered in lectures. Moodle Quiz activity supports diagnostic and formative assessment as well as summative exams.

Assignment Guide

There are three separate assignment activities in Moodle – Turnitin, Moodle, and Video assignment. Assignment activities in Moodle enable students to submit their coursework as a file upload or online text and allows the Lecturer to assess, grade and provide feedback. Our Assignment Guide outlines the functionality of each activity to help you to select a tool that meets your requirements.

Peer Assessment Guide

Peer assessment is the assessment of students’ work by their peers against set assessment criteria. By assessing or evaluating each other’s work, students take up the role of appraisers and, over time, acquire the skills they need to make judgments on their own work. In general, there are two types of peer assessments:

 

  • Assessment of team contribution in group work – members of a group assess the performance of their peers in terms of their contribution to the group’s work.

  • Assessment of coursework undertaken by other students – students provide feedback/grades on their peers’ work.

In either case, self-assessment may be included as part of peer assessment. Self-assessment requires students to reflect on their own work and judge how well they have performed in relation to the assessment criteria. Developing reflective skills provides students with the ability to consider their own performance and to identify their strengths, weaknesses, and areas that require improvement. Students can then use this knowledge to influence their future work, whether on a program of study or in employment.

Moodle has two peer assessment activities and also the Database and Forum activity which can be used to support Peer Assessment. Our Peer Assessment Guide outlines the functionality of each activity to help you select a tool that meets your requirements

Forum

The Forum activity allows students and lecturers to exchange ideas by posting comments as part of a ‘thread’. The Forum can be used for formative and summative assessments that require students to communicate, collaborate, debate or critique.

Wiki

A wiki is a collaboratively designed webpage or series of webpages. Each time a person makes changes to a wiki page, their revision of the content becomes the current version, and an older version is stored. Edits can be reverted if necessary. Wikis can be used for formative and summative assessments that require students to collaborate and co-create content.

 

How to Set Up an Assessment?

Step 1 - Navigate to the module you would like to add an assessment to.

Step 2 - Click on “Turn editing on” in the top right of the page.

Step 3 - Scroll to any section where you’ll see “add activity or resource” click it to display the menu of activities.

 

Beneath each activity and resource you can press:

To save specific activities an resources for easier future browsing to the Starred tab

To read more about each activity.

Step 4 - Select the activity to display the contents page.

 

Step 5 - Fill in the details of the activity or resource.

Once you are done, click Save and return to course or Save and display.

 

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