| Online curriculum and assessment designers face the same epistemological dilemma present in any other modality: What constitutes an educated person, and how can we provide certainty to the educational process? The answers to this question are entrenched in each individual's perspective. As such, designers must agree upon and articulate a coherent vision of education's role and shape. This vision is the starting point for understanding what constitutes a learning experience and how to best assess student interaction with knowledge. However, the process of finding these educational values carries additional urgency within the online environment.
Technology has been both an innovation and an impediment to effective education—in this way, it is dialectic. While technology enables learning experiences to take place beyond the confines of the classroom, reaching previously disenfranchised students, it has also fallen short of addressing certain human perspectives in the educational process, particularly the need for affiliation. The same asynchronous model that provides access to a broad array of students can also appear to be a cold, mechanistic system of rote skill development and demonstration. In the mind of the alienated online learner, there is nothing more than the concrete reality he or she perceives—a solitary person engaged in an overly technical correspondence course.
Curriculum and assessment designers can transcend these challenges by abandoning linear approaches to curriculum and assessment planning. Their task is to offer meaningful and humanizing classroom and assessment experiences to students. Despite the validity and reliability of standardized, psychometric assessment, course content cannot be reduced to quantitatively measurable packets of information and corresponding assessment. This pre-packaged methodology has a place in the practice of education, but in the online environment where human contact is limited, standardized assessment must be coupled with qualitative work that fosters peer dialogue, critical thinking and analysis, and the sense of education as a force for the betterment of individuals and their society. The alignment of the qualitative with the quantitative will help ensure that learners are actively engaging the course material, not merely serving as repositories for facts and formulas in hopes of scoring well on an objective examination.
Problematic to a mixed-method approach is the issue of standardization, which is of great concern to curriculum planners, assessment designers, and faculty. Without clear and objective measures, educators are faced with the challenge of subjectively assuring that learning is taking place at the appropriate levels and addressing appropriate content. Because of technology's potential to alienate, the question of standards is highly significant to a growing and decentralized online modality.
We propose a model of online curriculum and assessment development that integrates standard quantitative measures with qualitative measures, including rubrics that simultaneously address learners' personal development and cognitive processes. By addressing both aspects of learning, faculty can bring students to class more effectively, regardless of their distance to the learning. |
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