Checking for student understanding in online courses

Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash

Having made the transition to asynchronous remote teaching, I don't see myself going back, at least not for the technical writing course I'm responsible for right now. It just seems to be a better medium for the material. Students are performing better using this format than they were when I taught the course face-to-face. Also, all of the writing faculty in our department are teaching overload sections right now to keep up with demand and remote teaching is the only way I can manage the extra load.

I've come a long way in a short time in this transition, but there are still a lot of things I did when teaching face-to-face that I haven't figured out how to implement online. For instance, in the classroom, discussion activities gave me many opportunities to check for students' understanding of the day's lessons. It's not that I centered my discussions on checking for student understanding. In fact, most of my discussion activities were designed to give students opportunities to wrestle with difficult material and to practice foundational skills. Assessing their understanding of the material was simply a byproduct, something that just naturally fell out of class debriefings about the activities.

In asynchronous learning environments, by contrast, everything is more compartmentalized. Yes, in principle, I could analyze my online discussion activities using qualitative methods to assess students' understanding. However, that would be incredibly time-consuming. It would also be imprecise, and it wouldn't prompt students to independently reflect on their understanding. In short, it ain't happening!

It occurs to me, then, that a better approach would be to implement short quizzes or surveys into each of my learning modules. Most weeks, I include a relatively short video to explain important material. Sometimes, what students need to learn is better covered using PowerPoint slides. Either way, though, I think it would be beneficial to follow those lessons with something to check their understanding, something that would prompt them to reflect more consciously on what they've just learned.

This will take a while to implement, and I'm certain my initial attempts will be a bit clumsy. Nevertheless, I've already been taking some steps in that direction this semester. For instance, one issue students struggle with is properly using citation styles. This semester, I decided to give students an ungraded quiz immediately following my lesson on citations. It covered the most common mistakes that students typically make, and, while it wasn't graded, they did have to get 100% on it before they could move on to the next learning module. I'm just starting to grade the first assignment that requires citations so it's a bit early to tell if it made a difference. My sense, though, is that they are doing better with this challenging skill.

Similarly, after releasing their grades for their first writing assignment, I created a survey, asking students to share what advice they would give future students working on the same project. My plan is to do this for each of their remaining assignments. Next semester, I'll compile their advice and provide it in some form to students in future semesters. 

I need to expand on these nascent efforts. Over time, I'd like to provide debriefing quizzes or surveys for every lesson. Yes, this will immediately give me important feedback that I can use to improve my teaching. More importantly, though, it will return an element of self-reflection for students that has gone missing in my online courses. I hope this approach will help them internalize lessons. It will take some trial and error, of course, but I don't think it will take too long before I get the knack for it.