How assessment techniques make online learning effective and engaging?

Online learning is a significant investment for those willing to advance their careers, upgrade their skill set, or change careers while pursuing a full-time degree program or doing a job. Engaging the learners, eliminating monotonousness, and motivating them for continuous learning is the key priority of an e-learning program. Assignments, quizzes, and industrial projects play a major role in attracting and engaging learners with multiple responsibilities and different goals. As a higher training completion rate indicates that learners are able to meet their goals and course developers are serving their customers right, a variety of assessments are included in the trainings to benefit both the parties with different purposes. Let's take a look at a few forms of online assessment techniques and how they make the online learning experience better. 

1. Quizzes - Multiple choice, fill in the blanks, true-false, arrange in order, and match the following are a few common formats of quizzes used in both online and offline education. Quizzes help retain information in an interactive format and exercise the brain, enhances concentration, and attention power while finding a solution to a specific problem. They compel the brain to retrieve data, solve problems, and make remembering easier. Quizzes also help in preparing for the next or advanced stage of learning once the basic level concepts are mastered. 

Quizzes also help in detecting gaps in learning. Incorrect answers to any questions help develop an understanding of what concepts are the learners lagging behind in and encourages them to revisit those topics and strengthen their knowledge. While solving quizzes, learners get a different perspective of the subject matter, reduce stress, test themselves, develop enthusiasm to continue learning and complete upcoming challenges, build confidence when they witness their progress, and help in revising the concepts. 

2. Reading and listening comprehension - With communication becoming a major in-demand skill across industries, learners are increasingly enrolling in online language trainings. Imbedding features that can test learners reading, listening, writing, and speaking skills are essential to ensure that the learning goals are achieved timely and accurately. This helps in eliminating imbalance among specific skills and allows the learners to become as good in speaking and reading as they might be in listening or writing. 

In such features, let us say if a student is learning French, the learners see a word like ‘Félicitations’ its phonetic ‘fayli-si-taa-sion’ and its audio pronunciation on the screen. After going through these, the learners could record themselves speaking the word/phrase via the microphone and check if their pronunciation is correct or not. 

Reading and listening comprehension builds language understanding and accuracy, tests all the aspects of a language and polishes overall professional communication ability, and has a positive impact on learning. It also motivates learners to explore new words, practice more, and make their skill better. Overall, the feature tests one's ability to present themselves in the real world and apply their language skills professionally. 

3. Assignments and projects - Working on a few minor and major projects while learning online builds core domain practical skills, enhances problem-solving skills, strengthens researching abilities, gives a different perspective of the subject matter, polishes analysing skills, and makes a learner ready to solve real-world problems. Through project-based learning, learners identify a problem, define objective, design and develop the solution, and evaluate and demonstrate it. 

Multiple projects to assess learners' knowledge of every module is essential in online trainings. Assignments usually differ based on the subject: so, in a digital marketing training where the learners conduct a website SEO audit, create an email campaign, or Google ad campaign, in a C and C++ training they would create a cricket game or gully cricket app. This clearly defines that assignments and projects are focused on creating a habit of practice, sharpening domain knowledge, and making them internship/ job-ready. Projects or assignments reinforce the concepts learnt during lectures, motivate for exploring more, help in completing the training on time, improve learners’ performance, give the instructor an insight of learners in-depth learning ability, validate the skills, and add weight to learners’ resumes. 

Courtesy: Internshala Trainings - an online training platform