Abstract:

As a teacher educator in a small Canadian university, I am familiar with in-person teaching of undergraduate Bachelor of Education students, and online teaching of graduate Master of Education students. The B.Ed. classes are typically composed of no more than 40 students per section, and the Masters courses usually include 15-20 students. In the fall of 2020, the entire university moved all classes online, with the direction to use asynchronous delivery.

Many things required adaptation. How could I create a community of learners? How could I make a course designed to be experiential as engaging as possible online? With asynchronous online learning, how could I know what and how the participants were learning? How could the learners themselves know what and how they were learning? To help me address these fundamental questions, I turned to the concept of pedagogical documentation.

Looking back will help explain why I decided on this direction for assessment. I had been comfortable with my array of assessment strategies for each of the two groups, graduate and undergraduate. With in-person classes, I used pedagogical documentation through observation and assessment of various participation/performance events, and required hand-in assignments for culminating evaluations. With the asynchronous Masters’ courses, a range of written assignments, including digital presentations, were used for assessment and final evaluation. I modified the assignments for creativity and variety over the years, but most changes were incremental.

Then COVID-19 jolted me out of my complacency.
Looking ahead to teaching the undergraduate course online in the fall, I decided to make two changes to my spring graduate course, as a rehearsal for changes to come. First of all, I decided to hold virtual office hours once a week, with voluntary participation. Secondly, ongoing assessment through learners’ weekly self-documentation of learning became the primary source of assessment. These two practices, viz., providing ongoing assessment and feedback, and holding regular virtual office hours, proved to be the keys to bringing my undergraduate online course to life when we had to go online in the fall semester.

This paper is a summary of how these practices contributed to greater authenticity of assessment, and an unpredicted boost in student engagement.

Keywords:

Rethinking assessment, pedagogical documentation, learner engagement, online learning.