Wilmette Institute community outreach courses are not graded. However, grading is but a single aspect of assessment. As instructors gain a clear understanding of assessment and how to carry it out effectively, participant experience in our courses will be enriched. First, we will define key concepts of assessment and then explore best practices for implementing them.
Key concepts
Assessment. Assessment is a process that helps the instructor know how well each participant is fulfilling the course objectives at any given moment in the course. Crucially, it also helps participants see their own progress.
Feedback or formative assessment. Comments are given to learners on their work that aim to improve learning, not to evaluate learning. Feedback can be written or oral and can come from classmates, from experts outside the course, and from the instructor. To be clear, feedback that is given on assignments that have right or wrong answers cannot be meaningful beyond indicating the right answer. That type of interaction can be helpful when learning specific knowledge or when honing a skill, but not with understanding as it is defined here.
Who assesses? Just like feedback, several individuals can assess participant work. A key goal for instructors is to assist participants to gain the capacity to assess their own work. This may take time. If learners do not understand what is expected of them, and cannot assess their own work at a basic level, even after several weeks in the course, then the methodology focuses too much on the expertise of the instructor and not enough on building capacity in the learners. Quality rubrics can facilitate building this capacity in participants.
When should assessment take place? There is a common notion that assessment is the last step in a lesson. The notion that after students learn something it is time to see how well they learned it is erroneous for several reasons. Most important among them is that it sees assessment as separate from the teaching - learning process because its purpose is to test people's knowledge. Assessment is not about testing people's knowledge because knowledge is not the main goal - rather understanding is the goal, and because assessment is not about testing or proving anything. Carried out correctly - with feedback, dialog, iterations - assessment is integral to the teaching - learning process. In other words, assessment needs to take place constantly during the unit, from the beginning through to the end.
Rubrics. A high quality rubric helps participants know what is expected of them and provides support and guidance in making a quality product. Participants should be able to use it as a tool to make a good product and to assess the quality of their own product. Most rubrics confuse participants and are seen as an obligatory but useless course requirement. WI would be glad to support instructors in making high quality rubrics for their courses. Here are some sample rubrics that we use in one of our courses.
How does assessment work? Let's say, for example, that participants in a course are given an assignment, which could be an academic or a more social task, and afterwards they receive feedback on their performance (from classmates, somebody outside of the course and / or from the instructor). Feedback is based on the course or unit objectives and should be articulated in a clear, easy to understand rubric. Ideally, students are given an opportunity to react to the feedback by responding or incorporating the feedback into a new attempt to complete the assignment. Feedback motivates participants to go back to the readings to gain a better understanding. It asks questions that push students to learn more. Students love feedback and want more when it helps them understand more and perform better. Smaller assignments will build capacity and confidence in the student to successfully carry out a more complex assignment. Students turn in a rough draft of the complete assignment and receive feedback on it. They incorporate that feedback into the assignment and it turns out well.
Developing a course includes planning for high quality assessment as a teaching - learning strategy.
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Certificates of Completion
On the Methodology page, under the heading “Inclusion”, we highlighted the importance of instructors providing the necessary support for all participants to fulfill the course learning outcomes. This may mean making special efforts for specific students. Further to its efforts to facilitate increasing levels of engagement by course participants, the Wilmette Institute requests that all faculty participate in the following system which will also help them determine which participants should receive certificates of completion.
Faculty should determine the level of engagement for each participant during the course in order to know what actions to take with less engaged students. To do this, we will use the Moodle resource: Activity completion tracking. This may not be a perfect resource to measure student engagement, but it is a fairly simple and efficient way to support all of our students to fulfill the learning outcomes. Other reasons to use this resource include the following:
It is a helpful way for students to be able to track their progress in a course. Students have an easy way to see a checklist of what they have done so far.
It can also be linked to Course completion in order to allow both students and teachers to watch progress through a course. As each activity is checked off as "complete", the student moves further towards final completion of the course.
It can also be linked to Restrict access in order to allow the teacher to set criteria upon which a student is allowed to progress through a course and access materials.
As a default setting, the Wilmette Institute will turn on the activity completion tracking and the course completion resources in all of its Moodle courses. There are certain actions instructors must take to activate this resource. Here is a detailed video explanation about how to turn on and use activity and course completion in Moodle.
First, we need to define the term “activity”. An activity is any type of assignment that you ask your students to do. For example, if you ask students to read, to watch a video, and then participate in a forum about the reading and the video, then this unit has three activities. Other activities include quizzes, essays, field work like giving surveys or having conversations with specific people, making a presentation, participating in a class discussion, or contributing to a glossary.
We assume that all activities that are assigned in a course contribute to the course learning outcomes, and are therefore important to complete. However, we suggest that instructors turn on activity completion only for a few activities for the whole course, maybe 3 to 5. Choose these activities carefully so that by completing them you can consider that the participants have completed the course. The final self-assessment, the student satisfaction survey and the participant course evaluation must have activity tracking activated because they are essential to receive the course completion certificate, but do not count them among the 3 to 5 activities you choose to include.
Only the activities with activity completion tracking turned on will contribute to the course completion report.
Once your course is set up in Moodle, and when you have identified the activities that you want to use for activity completion tracking, do the following in Moodle for each one:
Turn editing on for the course.
On the activity you have identified, click “Edit” and then “Edit Settings”.
Click on “Activity Completion”.
Click on “Do not indicate activity completion” and change it to “Show activity is complete when conditions are met”. (Do not use the option “Students can manually mark activity as completed”)
Set the conditions. The box “Students must view this activity to complete it” should be turned on. Never require a grade, as we will not be grading activities. The other conditions are up to the instructor. For forums, we recommend using the “Require posts” and “Require replies” options.
Even though we all want our students to complete activities on time, we recommend caution when setting due dates for activity completion purposes. If you activate this option, please communicate your expectations for punctuality clearly to your students at the beginning of the course.
Save and return to course.
Continue in this same way until you have activated activity completion for all of the selected course activities.
We do not recommend setting activity completion for “Pages” or website links or links to readings because the only criteria available is for students to view them to complete them. Clicking on a URL (a web page address) does not indicate that a student has read the content. This is why it is better to use activity completion on activities in which students have to demonstrate their understanding upon completing the reading or watching the video. This includes forums, quizzes, presentations, discussions, essays, etc.
Additionally, the activity completion tracker will be used to determine course completion, and students who complete the course will receive a certificate of completion. In other words, certificates of completion will be generated automatically from the course completion status of each student.
The Wilmette Institute will activate the course completion resource for all of its courses, but just so you know how to do it, here are the instructions.
Turn editing on for the course.
Click on the wheel with a downward arrow next to the course title on the main page of the course.
Click on “Course completion”.
Click “Condition: Activity completion”.
Activate all of the activities that appear in the list.
Make sure the “Condition requires” is set to “ALL selected activities must be completed”.
Save changes.
Finally, locate the Course Completion block on the bottom of the right column of the main course page. It should indicate how many activities are required to complete the course. Additionally, it will indicate the number of completed activities as the course progresses.
Click “View course report” to see the status for all of the activities being tracked for all students. Students can also see this report, but only for their own activities.
To receive a Certificate of Completion for a course, a student must complete all of the activities that you have identified in Activity Completion as well as the two participant surveys at the end of the course.
Please check the “View course report” resource during the course. If you see that a student has not completed one of the key activities, it is important to reach out to that student (privately) to inquire about the issue and to offer assistance and support. It goes without saying that these emails should be friendly, upbeat and supportive. If you see that the student is not logging in to the course enough, or is not spending enough time with the activities, you can mention these issues. We encourage you to listen and be supportive of the student and his or her circumstances, but we also suggest that you maintain the course completion requirements. Students can make up activities at your discretion.
An important detail is that the course completion settings cannot be altered once the course has started, so all of these settings need to be in place before participants begin the course.
If you find following these instructions a bit confusing, then you may prefer a video explanation. Here are three videos of a teacher training session on this topic:
Activity & Course Completion Basics: Why and How with Justin, Niki, and Candace (October 2021)
Full version: https://youtu.be/D905iC7I9eY (37 minutes)
Part 1: https://youtu.be/-QD5Ss2cOMY (19 minutes)
Part 2: https://youtu.be/FpZ6njwEPpw (17 minutes)
Timeline
As the course comes to an end, the instructor needs to decide if he or she will continue to receive work for previous units or not, and what to do with those late submissions - to give credit for them, to give feedback on them, etc..This decision should be clearly communicated to participants. If a participant does not aspire to obtain the completion certificate, then late submissions are fine even though the instructor may not have time to give proper feedback.
All course work should be turned in before the last day of the course.
WI has a grace period of two weeks after the course ends to turn in late assignments. However, the grace period does not give students the opportunity to turn in lots of late assignments and expect them to count towards the certificate. Nor should students expect such late work to receive feedback. Rather, the grace period is meant for students who have communicated specific issues with the instructor during the course and have asked for an extension on specific assignments. These should be agreed upon. This can be facilitated by sending an email to all participants stating that if anyone would like to use the grace period to turn in specific assignments, the student should communicate which assignments to the instructor. The instructor should count those assignments turned in during the grace period and should give feedback on them.
WI will then compile the documentation for the instructor evaluation and schedule a post course faculty meeting with the instructor as soon as possible.
Please read the following message that will be published on Moodle for all participants to read:
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Certificate of Completion
All Wilmette Institute courses are open to all people who can access the online courses and materials. We are very happy to have you in this course, and you should know that you are welcome to engage with the course to the extent you wish, as all levels of engagement are welcome.
However, if you would like to obtain a Certificate of Completion for the course, you will need to complete a subset of activities selected by your instructor. The completion of these activities will be one way the Institute can tell that you are engaged in the course, and learning.
If you do not understand the requirements for your course, we invite you to contact the office of Student Services for assistance (Email: learn@wilmetteinstitute.org; Phone: (847) 733-3466.
The Wilmette Institute will measure your engagement for the purpose of awarding you a certificate through completion of specific activities in the course. Your instructor will choose activities that when completed will count towards the Course Completion Certificate. If you complete the activities chosen by your instructor, you will receive a Course Completion Certificate. Other assigned activities are important, but do not count towards the certificate. For example, in a unit your instructor may assign a reading, a video to watch, and participation in a forum to discuss the reading and the video. Then your instructor may require participation in the forum.
All activities that your instructor chooses to include for the course completion certificate will be marked as complete or incomplete automatically by the programming in Moodle according to the conditions set by the instructor.
To see what activities will be tracked as part of the course completion certificate, look for a block on the right column in Moodle called “Course completion status”. When you click on “View course report” you will see the required activities and the status of each.
Remember that the Wilmette Institute does not award grades in its community courses. If an activity is marked as complete, this is not a grade by any means. It is simply a reflection of your engagement in the course. If an activity is marked incomplete, your instructor may contact you privately to offer support for you to complete it.
Engagement or completion is determined independent of any special circumstances. If you are unable to complete an activity/assignment due to aggravating circumstances, you should communicate the circumstances to the instructor and arrange to make up the assignment.
In addition to the specific assignments chosen by the instructor, completion of the course also requires filling out two participant surveys at the end of the course, and posting a Self-Assessment. The surveys are anonymous, unless you wish to be identified, which you can do in the final question. The Wilmette Institute will issue the Certificate of Completion at the end of the grace period, so these three elements should be completed before then. They can all be found at the end of the Reflection and Application Unit, at the bottom of the Classroom Page in Moodle.
Student Satisfaction Survey. Through this 2-minute survey, tell us how well you liked the course, and help us prove to donors and public agencies that we deserve their support and recognition.
Student Course Evaluation Survey. The results of this evaluation will be very useful for faculty when they review the course.
Student Learning Self-Assessment Forum. This forum gives you the opportunity to express what you have learned during the course.
Revised: 04/01/2022