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INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN TIPS: Communication
Communications evaluations: How do I assess communications?
Formative Assessments of Communications
Instructors can conduct formative (i.e. practice, non-graded) assessments of student
communications viewing the messages of the students. For example, by using the sort
and collect features in Blackboard’s Discussion Board, an instructor can readily view
the number of messages posted by student in alphabetical order of the students’ last
names. The anonymous feature in Blackboard’s Discussion Board feature can also
facilitate creating a class wide level formative assessment. Also, the Virtual Classroom
can also be used for real-time formative assessments by viewing the messages and markups
of the students as soon as the messages and markups are made and reviewed in the archive
of a Virtual Classroom session.
Formative Assessments of Communications
Instructors can also conduct summative (i.e. authentic, graded) assessment of student
communications by creating and communicating to the students a rubric for the communications
that map the grade to the levels of the evaluation criteria such as quantity of messages,
quality of the messages, etc. For example, both students and instructors can create,
spell/grammar check and save their messages in a RTF (rich text format) file and then copy
and past their messages in the Discussion Board forum, thus instructors can even include
grading, grammar, and similar traditional grading rubric criteria in their rubric for student
messages in the Discussion Board forum.
Netiquette and Acceptable Use Policies
Netiquette and acceptable use policies can be used to help form “ground
rules” or common guidelines for communications and behaviors involving the
use of the Internet and private networks such as Blackboard and DePaul’s
network. Also, instructors can incorporate Netiquette (see general
Internet communication etiquette) and DePaul’s
ResNet policies (policies for using DePaul’s network and computing resources
available in the residence halls) into their formative and summative evaluations.
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Comunication Evaluations