Course Assessment Strategy

Creating a course assessment strategy closely aligned with the essential intent of the course will serve two purposes:

1. It will give you a good idea as to whether your learners are in fact learning.
2. It will create opportunities to provide learners with feedback to guide them through the learning process.

Therefore, it is important to create opportunities for multiple assessments throughout the course, at regular intervals. Assessing learner knowledge regularly helps learners pace themselves while consolidating their learning; it also gives instructors an idea of how well students are doing and provides valuable opportunities to provide feedback and remediate learning if necessary. This is what we typically call formative assessment. If learning assessment only occurs at the end of the course (summative assessment) there will be no opportunities to provide guidance to support learners to succeed in the course.

Defining a Course Assessment Plan

To define an assessment plan for your course, think about the essential intent of the course and what  assessment events would best demonstrate student learning. As you saw in the example of the Vehicle Maintenance course, we determined that a two phased submission of a vehicle maintenance schedule would best demonstrate student knowledge, supplemented by a couple of quizzes. The assessment strategy for your course will depend on the course content, your learners and what you are trying to achieve with your course. 

It is also good practice at this time to determine the weight and grading of each assessment event based on how comprehensive they are and whether they are cumulative or not.

Make sure you consider the duration of your course as you decide on the number of assessments that will best demonstrate student learning. Although you should aim to keep the workload "doable" for the student, you should also ensure that there are multiple assessments to give students the opportunity to recover their grades if they write a 'bad' exam, for example. Here is an example of an assessment plan: