How do we assess student learning in the online setting?
Traditional tests and papers can work, when appropriate. But here’s the thing: Students need to feel invested quickly in the semester, they need frequent grading opportunities, and they need regular feedback.
We need to do more, and more often. So, moderation is the key. Otherwise you’ll kill yourself grading.
There are a world of ways we can measure student learning, assign points and grades, and provide more feedback to students quicker than usual. Think about graded discussion board posts, response papers, writing exercises, and short projects that add up to larger, end-of-semester projects.
And have students provide feedback to their peers, which is a way of sparking conversations, getting more feedback for students, and reducing faculty workload.
Maybe take that annotated bibliography assignment and turn it into a semester-long project that is graded in parts over the course of the term. When spread out over the semester, it emphasizes active research on the part of the student for a longer period of time.
Here’s an example from Ian Lynam’s Japanese Graphic Design History course:
Parallel Narratives.
The goal of the Parallels Narratives assignment is to promote a widening of the conversation around design history rather than using a top-down model, filtered by the teacher, which is the primary focus of the lectures in this course.
Here, we are employing a grassroots approach to the initial collection of research. This information is unfiltered and structurally unedited. Capturing topics of interest and entry points to these “parallel narratives” is our goal.
What the researchers, AKA you, build with this information, what connections you find, and how the topics change and grow over time is not in the teacher’s control or dominion.
Assignment Particulars
The bibliography assignment is a semester-long challenge. It takes the place of a medium-length research paper, and is not something a student can put together at the last minute. This is one of its charms.
Together with compiling a unique knowledge base and honing research techniques, the student strengthens time management skills and compilation processes. For this variation of the Parallels Narratives project, students must research, write a note for, and assimilate 3 to 4 valuable and well-researched sources per week.
The Assignment
This semester, you are assigned a semester long research project. It is a 40-citation annotated bibliography on a designer, design group, or movement that you feel is missing from the design history “canon.” You will research a person, group, movement, or phenomena who is not well-known and does not command much, if any, space in Western graphic design history books so far. (That means no Kamekura Yusaku, Helmut Schmid, or Yokoo Tadanori.)
Essential Research Questions
1. Which designer narratives have been overlooked or excluded from the history of design?
2. How has the construct of modernism altered our perceptions of design history?
3. What new constructs can we all agree will ensure that all historical voices are heard?
4. Whom do you wish I had mentioned?
Project Instructions
This semester long project is a researched, annotated bibliography with approximately 40 separate annotated citations of books, websites, interviews, documentaries, articles, newspaper clippings, in-person interviews, and any other evidence you can find that this person or design group lived, created, and made work worthy of representation in history. **Please note that you will not be able to obtain enough research from the internet alone.**
The annotations need to be about 50 to 75 words long. All annotations should use MLA format and be free of spelling and grammar errors.
Project Outcomes
– Make critical connections and understand context through informed exploration within self-directed inquiry and research processes.
– Formulate a reasoned stance, mapping intention to resources.
– Expand learning resources to support project development, integrating skills.
– Expand and apply research sources to inquire about science, culture, and society.
– Extend your understanding and use of the spectrum of digital and analog research methodologies to generate fresh ideas.
– Communicate to diverse audiences with purpose.
This variation of the Parallel Narratives annotated bibliography assignment is based on the framework provided by Cornish College of the Arts’ Natalia Ilyin, Elizabeth Patterson, and Robert Baxter.
Here are some learning assessment tool and techniques you could experiment with:
Interviewing
Student projects revolving around first-person research, such as video or email interviews, help encourage their sense of agency in the world.
Canvas Discussions
Contributions to the discussion forum can count as class participation or more. Try combining 5 to 10 minute Zoom lectures or student presentations with discussion board commenting.
Developing critics
Writing short pieces of criticism, starting with established formats such as record reviews, is a method for imbuing students with authorial agency and for developing their own approaches to writing critical texts which can be directed from either first person or more objective-seeming editorial approaches.
Group Work
Split large groups into smaller groups for discussions and/or presentations.
Perusall
The Perusall app for use in Canvas – to foster a “shared reading” of course materials. It has potential for helping both students struggling with the technical side of our subjects and also those for whom English itself is a challenge
Making social media social
Community oriented projects, such as class Instagram or Tumblr accounts with a shared login can help increase a sense of class community.
How is your course content extensible?
For production classes, consider exercises in business email-writing, contract-making, creating quotations/estimates, and drafting invoices. Creating applied business documents and asking the students to go through the cycle of business documents with one another is valuable real-world training.
Class journaling
Embodied learning is incredibly important. For lecture-based classes such as history and literature, requiring students to keep a journal and sketch slides that they should remember, including important facts such as creator, date, context alongside is an effective mnemonic tool, as re-drawing important pieces of history helps people remember things. This can be graded.
For example, Mariko Nagai has assigned “Reflection Notes” in her classes. Instead of taking attendance, students are given points to fill out a form at the end of each class. The form asks the students to submit three comments or questions. The instructor replies to all comments and answers the questions.
It creates an ongoing dialogue between individual students as well as with the entire class.
Create a timed test through Canvas Quizzes
It takes time to input questions and answers into Canvas, especially if they include symbols, equations, tables, graphs, etc. But you can easily make your test in a different format, such as PDF or Word document, then you can convert each page of the test into an image file (e.g., JPEG with a minimum resolution of 600 pixels/inch) and create one “File Upload Question” where the jpeg file is to be embedded.
Create an assignment with submission type “File Uploads” where the students will submit their solutions/workings after they finish the test. It is easier to mark a student’s submission using SpeedGrader if the submitted file is a single PDF instead of multiple image files.
It is recommended that students submit their documents in a file-upload assignment instead of uploading them in the file-upload questions of the online test created in Quizzes because the annotation tools that work with a file-upload assignment are not available in Quizzes. Here are some tips on how to increase security to minimize cheating in Canvas quizzes
Here’s an assignment from Ian Lynam’s Arts in Cultural Context class, which he does with the class collectively – prior to assigning the project individually, in order to get them to loosen up about writing.
Word salad
What the heck is a Word Salad?
Word salad is a “confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases”, most often used to describe a symptom of a neurological or mental disorder. The words may or may not be grammatically correct, but are semantically confused to the point that the listener cannot extract any meaning from them.
The writer Trinie Dalton used the idea of “word salad” for a chunk of her amazing book Baby Geisha. She made lists of seemingly disconnected words and then wrote a form of anti-story which uses all of those words.
It’s a really great way to connect the dots in your head and is really good for mental ‘stretching’.
I suggested this to my grad student Heather and she sent me this list of words:
1. Handling
2. Fifth-fastest
3. Silt
4. Acoustic
5. Goats
6. Plaid
7. Tourist
8. Routine
9. Graffiti
10. Depletion
I wrote this back to her immediately:
Rode the goats around the track again. They’re an ornery bunch—they kicked up a mini dust-devil in the silt left from the last flood when I was harnessing them to the chariot. It was like herding cats, or even worse, tourists. Too much hassle for this to become routine, getting them in the plaid collars—I got like five good chomps on my hands and arms handling them. My left arm looks like a WildStyle graffiti piece made of welts, but painted by some acoustic singer songwriter. I gotta tell dad to quit stealing every animal that tickles his fancy—the old blue burro, the fifth-fastest pony they were going to put down at Saratoga Raceway, the hydra, and that damn sad-eyed hound dog he’s taken to calling Ol’ Depletion…
… But then, who says “no” when your dad is King?
Writing that was fun and one of the goals in this class is to make you more comfortable with writing, so…
1. Make a list of 10 totally disconnected words that you like.
2. Take a walk around the block.
3. Make a story or anti-story out of it.
4. What does your salad taste like? Add proverbial ‘dressing’ until tasty.
5. Bring your Word Salad to next class. (YUM!)
Information gathered by Sunghee Ahn, Dennis Bacani, Ian Lynam, George Miller, Mariko Nagai and Makoto Negishi, April 2020. Images by George Miller. Art by Ian Lynam.
G.W. Miller III 