There are two, very different, uses of the Internet in our curriculum. The first is to use this technology to publish class material, increase interaction, include other resources or otherwise enhance or modify our courses. The other use of web-based courses or modules is to use pre-existing material, authored by someone else, to replace a portion of your course or even replace an entire courese in your curriculum. I think it is important for us to be able to understand how web courses are constructed and how they can use the interactivity of the Internet to weave assessment tools right into the fabric of the course (which is the first type of use). Then we can become much more sophisticated consumers of modules or even entire courses that have been developed by someone else.
Building in assessment to your own course
The basic approach for including assessment into a course is the same as for curricular revision with any new teaching strategy. This curricular revision hits at all aspects of the course simultaneously and a strategy has been developed that helps work though the process of embedding assessment. This process really starts with a complete syllabus for the course lists all of the specific student learning objectives. These learning objectives can then be categorized by their relative cognitive level and then specific choices concerning teaching and learning technologies made for each learning objective based on the explicit cognitive level. These choices of technology and learning objectives usually generate questions, such as "Do students spend less time in class if I make the notes available to them on the Internet?" or "Are students able to apply the concept of X to a new problem Y after they have worked through examples provided on the Internet?". Some of these questions will be important to the development of this course either in the same term or in future terms. These questions can be addressed using assessment techniques such as the CATs (classroom assessment techniques) described by Angelo and Cross (199*). If the courese has a class meeting period, there are many classroom assessment techniques that can be employed (see the paper for some examples). If your course doesn't have a class meeting time, you will need to employ Web Assessment Techniques and Tools (WATTS).
I would like to suggest a five step process for evaluating the use of "somebody elses" web content in your course or curriculum.
1. Determine your own curricular needs
Through a process of course or curricular evaluation, determine the specific learning objectives for students in this course or part of a course. This list should be very detailed and should identify the learning goals based on cognitive level, affective domain and other criteria that you deem important for the students' success in the curriculum.
2. Determine the expected learning outcomes for the web course
If the course or module is well constructed and documented, these learning objectives should be easily identified. If the course material does not have this information, you must determine a review process to obtain this information for yourself.
3. Consider the learning styles and levels
The culture of your course or curriculum may assume certain learning proficiencies in your students. Identify these and then determine if the course or module you are considering shares these same assumptions. If not, you will need to determine how the students will learn how to use the web-based material effectively. For example, you might offer a separate course on using web-based material or build that into entry level courses. It is very important to address these issues explicitly. Students and faculty have a great deal of experience using books and class meetings to increase their learning, this is a new medium for all of us.
4. Determine the match and mismatch between your needs and the offerings
The match and overlap at the level of student learning objectives should be tabulated. A substantial mismatch may not necessarily be bad if you have students who need exactly the material or review of the material contained in the web course. The preliminary material on the Western Governors' University describes how they will catalog the material from courses based on %overlap of previous courses and % new material for each student. This could be a very effective approach with a student body with diverse backgrounds.
5. Build in assessment for your own students
Once you have chosen the web-based course or module (or chosen a selection of them that fit your criteria) you need to build assessment into the course or curriculum that will use these resources. In the simplest form this would be to assess the learning effectiveness of a module incorporated into a course. This assessment could be in the form of a CAT, WATT or in-class test. It is more difficult to build in assessment for an entire course unless your curriculum already has an assessment and evaluation plan and methods for collecting information from students in follow-up courses. If the web-based course that you selected doesn't contain its own assessment process and you are providing student access to this course through an on campus web page, you can build the assessment into that part of the site and require students to do the assessment as part of the grade. Well constructed assessment tools will benefit the both you and your students.
Other resources on assessment and evaluation of web-based courses
These will be added in the next version
Literature cited:
Angelo, T. A. and K. P. Cross (1993). Classroom Assessment Techniques. 2nd Edition. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.