Experience with an Online Assessment in a Lecture about Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering

This talk summarizes some experiences with a summative assessment or preliminary examination in a two-semester engineering course. An online assessment with numerical or multiple-choice questions was chosen, which required an elaborate preparation, especially in question design, but reduced the correction effort enormously. This investment is worthwhile for larger groups of more than 50 to 100 students. In contrast, online assessments with such simple question types cannot map and test all competencies that are possible via handwritten assessments. Therefore, other types of formative assessments such as personalized assignments with anonymous peer review for rapid feedback should be used along the semester. Another experience is that students cannot have enough information about the upcoming innovative online assessment, especially those with little experience in such formats to prevent ambiguity, queries, and frustration. Therefore, the same learning management system, similar types of tasks, the same input interface, and comparable scoring algorithms should be used for the summative assessment as along the whole semester. During the assessment, students should have multiple, low-threshold, redundant opportunities to ask questions, if possible (\eg, via a videoconference meeting, by phone, by email). The fear that students would perform much better in pure online assessment or that it would be much more difficult to evaluate their individual performance due to the usability of the Internet, numerical calculation tools or circuit simulation programs as well as the possibility of communication via online media, has not been confirmed, because the average score was very comparable to previous assessments in presence.

Chapter marks:
0:00 Introduction
0:21 Background and Motivation
3:53 Preparation
6:16 Announcement
6:50 Implementation
9:00 Evaluation and Outlook