For this week's assignment, we met online and had a "soapbox" hangout. I enjoyed this types of hangout, as we each chose a topic and developed a short presentation on it to share with our colleagues. It was really nice to get an in depth look into some of the topics that my colleagues chose.
I chose to speak about Assessing MOOCs. A large part about assessing MOOCs is using peer assessment. What made me really connect our soapbox to assessing MOOCs was that we were asked to peer assess two of our colleagues during our hangout.
When you are assessing MOOCs there are often many students that are enrolled in the MOOC course. We often wonder that if there are so many students, how do you know that the students are doing so well if there are so many, where does the assessment come in? This brought back a journey that I took when we enrolled in a DLMOOC during our Distance Learning class with Ian. Although we were not being "assessed" by anyone in the MOOC, we all knew that Ian was watching us and the work we completed, so ultimately we were being assessed.
However, many MOOCs are not looking into automated grading. For multiple choice, true/false and short answer, automated grading has been working for many years. However, many MOOCS are looking into automated grading for essays. If you begin grading essays through an automated grading system, you take out a lot of the creativity and personality that students put into their writing. This is a benefit of having a human teacher correcting these types of assignments.
All in all, upsides and downsides to MOOCs and ways to assessing them. As MOOCs become more and more popular, assessment strategies will become more common. This may mean students will have to go to a facility to take an exam or an exam may be corrected by a computer teacher. Only time will tell.
Here is a link to my presentation on Assessing MOOCs: Assessing MOOCs Presentation
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