Professional Development Opportunities: Online Exam Design and Best Practices

April 27, 2020 / Faculty/Staff Highlights

Recently, faculty have requested professional development opportunities related to writing exams. How do you create exams or other assessments that effectively evaluate student learning, and, in an environment with no ability to proctor your students, discourage or prevent cheating? To help support you in this work, the instructional designers at NOVA Online have created two webinars on different aspects of this topic. Please see below for information on sessions and registration for these opportunities. We hope they will help you tweak your spring final exams and create the most effective summer assessments possible.

Webinar # 1 – Online Exam Best Practices (w/o Proctoring)
Tuesday, April 28 from 1 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. or Tuesday, April 28 from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.

Concerned about students and the temptation to cheat when you aren’t able to proctor exams? This workshop will go through the nuts and bolts of assessment design that NOVA Online faculty teams consider when designing strong online exams. Tools include question banks, randomization of questions, and time limits to minimize the impact of cheating and more accurately pinpoint what students know and can do. After highlighting high-impact, sometimes overlooked strategies, we’ll show you how these are configured in online courses and problem-solve participant questions and discipline-specific scenarios.

Opportunity # 2 – Question Design in Online Assessments
Wednesday, April 29 from 1 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. or Wednesday, April 29 from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.

Struggling to select the perfect assessment or exam in light of going online for remote learning? Did you know you can significantly reduce academic integrity violations by how you craft even a simple multiple choice question? This session will give an overview of assessment design choices commonly used across 350 NOVA Online courses and offer practical recommendations for how to strengthen multiple choice exams. We will discuss strategies for improving traditional exams, including how to create an exam blueprint and tag questions to taxonomies/levels of thinking to ensure your assessment is balanced and gets to the heart of what students know and can do. Surveying the assessment options, answering questions and giving examples can help you craft the strongest possible assessment.

Questions about these workshops? Contact Alex Case at acase@nvcc.edu.