AssessmentHow do I grade online discussions?
Establish clear criteria for each discussion. Make sure that you go into discussions early and encourage students to get involved. The best way to keep students engaged in a course is for you to be active in discussion boards. - Russell Roberson (University of Wisconsin-Parkside)
Discussion is essential for engagement, interaction, and learning in an online course. To maintain the quality of the discussion, you need to set clear expectations, and students need to understand the importance of their participation. Rubrics can be great tools to assess the quality of students’ discussion or level of discussion participation. They spell out the expectations you have of students and help you do objective grading.
Objectives:
- Compose expectations for an online discussion.
- Identify general categories of expectations for grading online discussion.
- Create a discussion rubric for an online course.
LISTEN TO THEIR EXPERIENCES
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
- Liu, S., & Liu, S. (2007). Assessing online asynchronous discussion in online courses: An empirical study (Vol. 2007, pp. 24–32). Presented at the TCC – Teaching Colleges and Community Worldwide Online Conference: https://etec.hawaii.edu/proceedings/2007/ liu.pdf
- Kanuka, H., Rourke, L., & Laflamme, E. (2007). The influence of instructional methods on the quality of online discussion. British Journal of Educational Technology, 38(2), 260–271. doi:10.1111/j.1467- 8535.2006.00620.x: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/ doi/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2006.00620.x/abstract
- Wyss, V. L., Freedman, D., & Siebert, C. J. (2014). The development of a discussion rubric for online courses: Standardizing expectations of graduate students in online scholarly discussions. TechTrends, 58(2), 99–107. doi:10.1007/s11528-014-0741-x: https://link.springer.com/ article/10.1007%2Fs11528-014-0741-x