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.

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Discussion of Best Practices for Online Assessment @UM

By Katrine Wong, Chuang Wang, Glenn McCartney, John Chan, Miguel Costa, Patrick Chu, Dora Gago, Alice Lee, Alice Lei, Thomas Lok, Ricardo Moutinho, M. P. Ramaswamy, Emily Wang, Bingpu Zhou and Chris Fulton

CTLE Academic Staff Advisors, the Dean of the Faculty of Education, Associate Dean of the Faculty of Business Administration and the Director of CTLE recently met online and discussed ways to support students and conduct online assessment of learning.

Communication, flexibility and adaptability are key during this period.

It is vital to maintain communication with students during this period of online learning. Email, UMMoodle, Zoom or WeChat are platforms that can be used to communicate with students. As teachers, we need to communicate with students to better understand their needs and provide updated information. Indeed, and inevitably, the assessment strategies for our courses will need to be adjusted since mid-term quizzes/exams cannot be scheduled on campus and we feel that students must be fully informed of any changes in this aspect.

Adopting different approaches to assessing undergraduate and graduate students’ learning is advised. For graduate courses with fewer students, we can use open, take-home assignments to assess higher-order thinking skills. We can use Veriguide or Turnitin to help us check academic honesty. For undergraduate courses, it is good to have timed, closed tests to assess individual learning.

Be flexible. Provide students with options to submit assignments through UMMoodle or email. Whenever possible, use assessment tools and resources that your students can access.

• If a tool or app works well for group work, group interaction or sending timely information, such as UMMoodle or WeChat, then use it.
• If a ‘mid-term’ is still chosen during the class schedule (on Zoom for example) and there are technical difficulties or students no-show, one may have to consider doing a ‘make-up’.

We also recommend that more short, low-stakes quizzes, case-studies and small assignments be introduced. This should greatly reduce the stress that students feel on a timed, high-stakes mid-term quiz/exam, on which the students could face technical or network issues. Also, it is a good idea to reduce the weight of mid-terms. What is most important is that assessments show that students meet the intended learning outcomes of courses.

A note of caution: if a course is connected to an international accreditation process, we need to ensure the assessment keeps in line with the requirements.

Two well-known tools at UM that are used to check for academic honesty are Veriguide and Turnitin, which can help with reviewing text-based assignments. For online assessments, we will continue to explore new tools such as the attention tracking function in Zoom, Safe Exam Browser or full-screen mode with UMMoodle quizzes and find out what works well with our students and colleagues.