If you use collaborative assignments in your online course, you should assess those assignments collaboratively, said Rena Palloff, online instructor and coauthor (with Keith Pratt) of several online learning books, including Lessons from the Virtual Classroom: The Realities of Online Teaching (2013), during a recent Magna Online Seminar.
“We’re firm believers that if you’re going to give a collaborative activity, you should assess it collaboratively. And what that means is that we ask students to tell us how they think they did as well as how they think their peers did in that collaborative activity. Obviously, those are privately shared communications, although we do debrief with the group in terms of how they thought the process went.
“And the information that’s gathered from those private communications really shouldn’t be given less emphasis than what you observe or evaluate less directly as the instructor, because oftentimes students will tell us in private communications things we don’t see, things that might have happened off-line.
“Group members assess themselves and their peers. They evaluate the process. Always, the veto power remains with us as instructors, and there have been times I’ve had to use that veto. But for the most part, the collaborative assessment happens within the group.
“We generally recommend using both group and individual grades. And so the students get an individual grade for their participation, and then the group gets a grade for the product they produced.”
