3.2 Planning for online assessments

As you prepare to adapt your course assignments for the online environment, we recommend you start by reviewing your current course assignments for the following:

Alignment between learning objectives and assessments. Confirm assessments are clearly connected to one or more learning outcomes.
Which assessments are essential to keep, which must be revised, and which can be removed. If an assessment is not closely tied to the course learning objectives, it should be removed or adapted for better alignment.
The balance of formative and summative assessments. Students in online courses benefit from multiple opportunities for formative feedback. Formative assessments can provide motivation for students to regularly engage with the course and provide an important tool to help them understand how well they are learning.

Formative and summative assessments

When you design assessments for your course, you should try to balance formative and summative assessments. The purpose of formative assessments is to collect information about students’ learning to inform the process of teaching and learning. You might rely on formative assessment to help determine whether your teaching practices are effective in helping students learn. Whereas students might rely on formative assessments to understand how well they’ve learned and where they need to focus additional studies to prepare for summative assessments. The purpose of summative assessment is to determine whether students have learned the expected learning outcomes. Thus, formative assessments are often referred to ‘assessments for learning’ to provide feedback while summative assessments are referred to ‘assessments of learning’ (Harlen, 2007).

Characteristics of formative assessment	Characteristics of summative assessment
Data is used to improve teaching or learning strategies or to help students and instructors understand where more study is necessary. Motivating learning tool: Students will receive feedback about their learning. They can adjust their learning strategies based on the provided feedback. Formative assessments may be non-graded or lower-weight assessments that do not heavily impact on the final grade since the purpose is mainly for providing support for learning.	Summative assessments are conducted to measure student’s achievement at the end of an instructional segment (i.e., unit, topic, term, or entire course) Summative assessments require the culminating demonstrations of learning based on the given feedback from the formative assessments throughout the course. Summative assessments are usually comprehensive and carry a high weight towards the final grade.

Characteristics of formative assessment

Characteristics of summative assessment

Data is used to improve teaching or learning strategies or to help students and instructors understand where more study is necessary.
Motivating learning tool: Students will receive feedback about their learning. They can adjust their learning strategies based on the provided feedback.
Formative assessments may be non-graded or lower-weight assessments that do not heavily impact on the final grade since the purpose is mainly for providing support for learning.

Summative assessments are conducted to measure student’s achievement at the end of an instructional segment (i.e., unit, topic, term, or entire course)
Summative assessments require the culminating demonstrations of learning based on the given feedback from the formative assessments throughout the course.
Summative assessments are usually comprehensive and carry a high weight towards the final grade.

Examples of formative assessment	Examples of summative assessment
Class polls, weekly quizzes, pre-knowledge/diagnostic test Worksheets with guided instruction for individual or group work Self-assessments, concept maps (opportunities for students to reflect on their own learning process) Peer assessments for group/individual work Discussion, brainstorming, whiteboard activity Constructive feedback on any work intended to help students revise or improve a product	Midterm or final exams Final product demonstrating cumulative learning (eg., video/audio recordings, blogs, websites, art works, portfolios) Final version of a paper Oral/video presentation, demonstration

Examples of formative assessment

Examples of summative assessment

Class polls, weekly quizzes, pre-knowledge/diagnostic test
Worksheets with guided instruction for individual or group work
Self-assessments, concept maps (opportunities for students to reflect on their own learning process)
Peer assessments for group/individual work
Discussion, brainstorming, whiteboard activity
Constructive feedback on any work intended to help students revise or improve a product

Midterm or final exams
Final product demonstrating cumulative learning (eg., video/audio recordings, blogs, websites, art works, portfolios)
Final version of a paper
Oral/video presentation, demonstration

The content in this table was adapted from
Glossary of Education Reform Links to an external site., Carnegie Mellon University Links to an external site., and Carleton University Links to an external site..

If you do not have formative assessment opportunities currently in your course, consider how you can adapt your course to include them. If you’re concerned about how this might impact your workload, consider using self-graded quizzes or peer-assessments.

Online assessment tools

If you are not familiar with how to add assessments to your Canvas course, you can find the step-by-step instructions for creating assessments on the UBC Keep Teaching site. You can also find Canvas assessment strategies for adapting in-person/traditional assessments on the UBC Arts ISIT page. Canvas also has a Course Analytics tool Links to an external site. that provides an overview of grade distributions for assignments and overall student participation in the course, which can be useful to get an overview of how well the class is doing as a whole.

There are many types of assessment tools in Canvas. Here is a brief overview of the most commonly used assessments tools:

Assignments: This tool can be used for papers, projects, lab reports, or other work students can submit online. Students can enter text directly into the Canvas assignment tool or can upload files, including multimedia. Assignments can be either individual or group-based. Canvas also has a SpeedGrader Links to an external site. tool which can assist with marking and providing feedback.
Quizzes: This tool can be used for quizzes, tests or exams. Quizzes can allow students either single or multiple attempts. There are a wide number of question types including multiple choice, true/false, fill-in-the-blank, matching, multiple drop-down, numerical answers, formula, essay, and file upload. Some question types even allow for automated grading. You can even integrate feedback options into quizzes.
Discussions: This tool is designed for asynchronous conversations and is best used with questions that don’t have one correct answer, although there are options that allow you to prevent students from seeing their peers’ answers Links to an external site. until they’ve provided their own.
Presentations or oral exams: While there isn’t a specific Canvas tool for this assessment type, Zoom provides options for synchronous presentations or oral exams. Both tools allow for breakout rooms so that a large course can be broken into smaller groups. This may be especially useful for language acquisition courses, where breakout rooms can be used for small group conversations and peer-assessment. For asynchronous assessments, students can create video recordings using the Canvas assignment tool Links to an external site. (provided you select "Media Recordings" under "Online Entry Options".