Teaching Tips

What Online Students Say About Assessment

Feedback. Feedback. Feedback

• Feedback needs to be timely: "Personal communication and prompt feedback on assignments are essential for any course to be a success."
• Feedback should include grades: "Feedback in the form of grades is essential, and it should come to students frequently!"
• Feedback needs to be helpful: "Instead of just marking answers wrong, she would also give a brief explanation as to what the correct answer was and why."
• Feedback needs to be personal: "I would personally like to see teachers send a one or two line email to students each week about their work-be it their writing or quality of comments."
• Good feedback is motivating: "Whether I posted an assignment at one o'clock AM or PM, I received grades, answers to questions, and responses to my work within twelve hours at the very most. This is extremely gratifying and motivating."
• Good feedback inspires more learning: "I would challenge him with a question and a half hour later be able to sign on to my computer and not only would the question be answered, but he would challenge me to a question."
• Feedback can come from classmates: "One of the things that helped me the most is the fact that I received feedback from all my classmates not only the teacher."

Clarity

• Students what to know up front what is required of them, what deadlines they must meet, and how they will be graded. "She set expectations right up front so there was no question about when something was due or what I was supposed to do next."
• Students want assignments to be clear, "The professors should write more extensive, detailed instructions when they give assignments simply because of the awkwardness of the online environment."
• Instructors should be willing to clarify assignments: "It should be easy to correct and rewrite instructions for the benefit of the students."

Assignments

• Students prefer a variety of smaller assignments, "Have smaller and more assignments on which to base the course grade. Only 3 assignments and a final exam aren't fair."
• Students want an acknowledgement that their assignment has been received.

Threaded Discussion

• Deadlines are important, "Professors must post deadlines for threaded discussion…Once a deadline is established the professor must follow it also i.e. if the deadlines for TD are weekly or biweekly, the professor must post grades after the deadline."
• Faculty need to be present in the threaded discussion, "He was always there in the threaded discussion."
• Students appreciate well thought-out discussion assignments, "I truly enjoyed the conference forum. We really have to think about our responses before we post them."

Testing

• Students find timed testing difficult, "Timed testing is very difficult. I would much prefer testing that is not timed."
• Students with disabilities who are accommodated on campus with more time for testing want the same accommodations in an online class.
• Students don't just want their grade, they want feedback: "I would have liked to have seen the correct answers to the questions I got wrong."
• Students want to be asked to think: "The grading structure and format is set up so that all he wants is you to regurgitate information from the text. There is no higher thinking involved."
• Testing for online classes should be online: "I feel that comprehension of the material can be assessed through the virtual classroom and do not see the need for a proctored exam."

Group Projects

• Many students find group projects difficult, "People don't follow through with their commitments and you're left hanging."
• Others enjoy them: "I didn't think I would like working in teams, but I enjoyed it very much."
• How group projects are graded may present difficulties for some students: "I thought it was unfair to ask students to complete a project with other students and get one grade for it. Other students were in a hurry to get it done and didn't want to do specifics."
• Coordination can be a problem for some students: "Teamwork was difficult to complete. Everybody had different schedules, and it was difficult to 'chat'."

Quotes come from the CTDLC's Spring 2001Online Student Evaluation Survey
Prepared by Diane J. Goldsmith, Ph.D
Director of Institutional Research, CTDLC