Tools for Assessing Student Progress in

<Note: This section will need to be replaced/updated if you are not a Canvas user.>

Overview of Assessment Tools

The next few pages of this module will examine the various tools that are available to you in <Replace - Your LMS> for assessing student progress in your online course. After reading about each of these tools, we will have you apply your assessment strategy using one or more of these tools to build an assignment for your development course. First though, it is important to understand how assignments work in <Replace - Your LMS>.

3 blue circles used as content divider

How Assignments Work in <Replace - Your LMS>

At this point in the course, you should be thinking about how you want to assess student progress in your online course.  <Replace - Your LMS> allows you to build assignments to assess student progress.  In <Replace - Your LMS>, an assignment is technically defined as anything that is graded (e.g., participation, research paper, graded discussion, exam or quiz). While the term "assignment" is generically used to mean anything that is graded in <Replace - Your LMS>, there are three different tools you can use for creating them:

  • Assignments - Used to create three types of assignments:
    • Assignments that students submit online (e.g., Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, Media files, Web pages, Text, etc.)
    • Assignments that students in mixed-mode and web-enhanced courses submit in person (e.g., Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, etc.)
    • Assignments that do not require a submission (e.g., Participation and attendance)
  • Discussions - Used to create online discussion spaces that will be graded
  • Quizzes - Used to create multiple online quiz and exam types

 

Watch ThisAssignments Video

If you want to create any item that is graded, you can start with the Assignments tool. The following video provides a brief overview of the Assignment tool. 

3 blue circles used as content divider

Grading Assignments, Rubrics and SpeedGrader

Two features shared by all three of these tools are grading rubrics and SpeedGrader. We will take a more extensive look at grading assignments in Week 7, but for now we just want to introduce you to these two features.

The next three pages of this module provide more detail about each of the three tools presented above: assignments, discussions and quizzes. After exploring each of these tools, please complete the Build Your Assessment Activity.

Creative Commons License

TOPKit Sample Course was prepared by the University of Central Florida (UCF). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License Links to an external site..