Providing clear expectations and effective feedback to students can go a long way towards helping students stay motivated to complete future learning and assessment activities in the course. In this UDL section, we describe alternatives for quizzes and assignments.

Quizzes

If students are unable to access the LMS to complete quizzes, faculty can view a quiz in Preview mode, Copy and paste the questions into a Word document, and then Save As a Word or PDF document, before sending it to the student. You may want to add the Quiz name to the document before saving as only the questions are copied. The student can manually mark answers on the quiz and return it to the professor. The professor then enters the grade in the gradebook with a note in the feedback section that the quiz was taken and graded manually. Retention of student works should follow institutional policies on academic document retention.

If it is important that your quizzes be taken with a specific time limit, find out when the student can take the quiz, email it at that time (or use your email’s timed send option) and require the student to return it within the required time period. Remember that many students may work during your teaching hours and may not be able to take it at your convenience. Contact the technical support on your campus to find a way to send emails at specific times.

Feedback on quizzes can be sent via email or text, but grades can only be communicated via the LMS or via telephone once the student has clearly verified their identity using their school ID to maintain FERPA requirements.

To maintain the academic integrity of your quizzes, you may want to have all students in your course sign an Academic Integrity statement at the beginning of each course or include one at the beginning of each quiz. Here is a sample statement.

By signing or typing my name in the space below, I affirm that in completing this quiz, I neither gave nor received help, I did not share this quiz with others, and I used only the allowed materials while taking this quiz. _____________________________

For more ideas on maintaining Academic Integrity, see Course Three in the USG Online Instructor Certification Series.

Assignments

To create multiple means for students to demonstrate that they’ve met a course objective, it is important to review the goals of the assignment. From there, brainstorm a variety of ways that students could show that they’ve met the learning objectives. Here are a few examples.

Have students conduct phone interviews with experts in a particular field to do research on a project. Have them turn in their interview notes and then write a paper on the topic or use the notes for a presentation. The student can send you their PowerPoint slides via email and then give their presentation over the phone.

If students need to make a presentation, but can’t upload their video, you can have them give it over the phone. You can also have them send you their slides or images of their slides for grading that aspect of the presentation.

There are a number of resources for Virtual Lab assignments. The USG eCampus team has collected many of them for Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Environmental Science, Geology, Human Anatomy, Oceanography, and Physics in this Virtual Lab Resources document. It is available on the Keep Teaching USG site.

Above all, invite students to share barriers with you as they work on learning activities and assessments for your class. You can then work together to find ways around any barriers that still remain.

As discussed above, follow these FERPA guidelines for providing feedback and grades.