Importance of Self-Assessment

Incorporating opportunities for self-assessment in the learning process provides adult learners with the opportunity to control their own learning progression. By doing self-assessment activities, learners are able to quickly measure their own progress and make decisions about how to move forward. Self-assessments can take the form of quizzes with a variety of question types, essays, reflection articles, much in the same way as formative and summative assessment. However, self-assessment activities must always include an answer key, in the case of quizzes, or answer guidelines in the case of more open activities, such as problem solving or essays. Self-assessment activities should also provide guiding feedback for the learner.

Reading Activity

Take a few minutes to read the section on Planning and Writing Self-assessment in COL's booklet: "Creating Learning Materials for Open and Distance Learning". In this section you will find a good overview of why self-assessment is important and a few examples of self-assessment questions.

As you can probably predict, planning, designing and implementing self-assessment activities takes time. When planning the self-assessments for your course, it is important that you take that into consideration, as the development time will have an impact on your deliverables.

Next you can work through the Moodle video tutorials that show you how to get started using the LMS. After that, you are ready to start working on the second book in this module, which will guide you through sequencing and structuring content and adding resources.