Assessing Blended Learning

Ok. So you’ve integrated diverse tools for blended learning into your course. Your students are writing blogs, interacting through wikis, using online courseware managed by a learning management system, and downloading podcasts to their MP3 players; all this is in addition to face-to-face meetings. And your assessment consists of a paper test in class. Right? Well, maybe, but maybe not.

The past ten years have seen the embracing of many different aspects of assessment in schools and workplaces, particularly in EFL and ESL English courses. The use of authentic assessment including performance tasks and project work have opened up a plethora of opportunities to truly assess more diverse aspects of learning than the paper and pencil test is capable of doing. Assessment has become, as it should always have been, an integral part of curriculum design. In fact, Grant Wiggins (1998 ) in his seminal book, Educative Assessment, suggests that assessment is, in essence, “visually indistinguishable from what takes place during good instruction”. (p.3)

Principles of Assessment

If we can agree on several principles about assessment, we will see that by planning assessment as part of curriculum design, we are actually informing that design, and in so doing, building the right mosaic for our blend.

• The purpose of assessment is to inform learning and teaching, as well as to audit learning.
• It’s possible to assess only a sampling of what was taught.
• Components of assessment should be reflective of components of teaching and learning.
• In English Language Teaching (ELT), assessment should reflect the big picture objectives for which the language is being taught (e.g., to engage in conversation, to read academic articles, to collaborate with others at work).

Designing Your Assessment

So in a nutshell, embed in your assessment both the big picture objectives for your course and the online and offline formats and tools you are planning to use. If your most basic objectives are communicative, use a communicative or quasi-communicative task as part of your assessment. If your objectives are more academic and reading-based, then include academic reading as part of your assessment. If your course components include blogs and wikis, use them in your assessment.

But most important of all, plan your assessment as you are planning your course design. In this way, assessment will begin to inform your curriculum and you will be able to implement the constant spiral design of teaching, learning, assessment.