Best Practices for Supporting Teaching and Learning Online

With online learning now being implemented at the University of Macau, committed teachers are holding classes online with UMMoodle and Zoom. This blog post features some of our colleagues’ tips and best practices. Let’s see what has worked well to support teaching and learning of different disciplines in an online environment.

.

Planning Your Assessment for Distance Teaching

By Dr. Alice S. Lee (FAH/ELC)

After three weeks of distance teaching, I hope everyone is getting used to this new way of helping our students learn. Planning ahead, we should all be thinking about how we want to assess our students’ learning in accordance with the intended learning outcomes (ILOs) set out for each course. As one of CTLE’s faculty advisors, I attended CTLE’s meeting on how to handle assessment going forward. Here are my takeaways for teaching staff:

1. Maintain maximum flexibility when designing assessment.
Students may have difficulty accessing technology and the internet. Some students are doing all of their coursework on their phones and are relying on their phone data to access teaching materials posted online.

2. Be mindful of introducing too many new tools to aid learning / assessment.
Having to learn a new tool so that students can learn content and then be tested on it adds unnecessary stress during this already stressful time. The bottom line is to keep things as simple as possible.

3. Talk to your students.
It’s important to know what difficulties they have and adapt your assessment accordingly. Give them options on how they can demonstrate their learning.

4. Pilot your assessments if you are using technology.
Even for something as simple as a Moodle quiz, the quiz appearance may change depending on the browser (Chrome, IE, Firefox, Safari) and the type of machine (PC, Mac, tablet, phone, etc.) students are using to complete the assessment.

On a personal note, I would like to add: Trust your students. This should be our default position. Let’s not stress ourselves out trying to ensure that no one is cheating on our assessments!