Formative and Summative Assessments

Both summative and formative assessments are part of every course.

One challenge with an online delivery is that many formative assessment techniques, which are frequently informal, quickly responded to, and adaptive, are not as easy in online courses.

Some of these techniques translate nicely into Discussion topics.

There are some great tools for Quizzes to help with learning during an assessment. For example, you can provide feedback based on incorrect answers (see right).

Canvas Quizzes

If you want to use a traditional test for a summative assessment, Canvas Quizzes (there are no tests) are a good way of doing this.

It requires additional work to create an assessment through Canvas, but there are many self-marking question types and there is excellent reporting on both individual and class performance.

There are also many settings that you can set with quizzes to limit access, randomize answer choices, or select questions from a bank. All of these can increase security on a summative assessment.

Of course, you can also add essay-type questions to your quiz and mark the answers in the SpeedGrader. This makes the assessment nearly as flexible as a traditional paper test.

517a - Quiz Creation: Settings from Instructure Community on Vimeo.

545 - Quizzes.Next Overview from Instructure Community on Vimeo.