Wow, what a semester. Hats off to educators everywhere who have continued to engage their students through a whole new paradigm of teaching and learning.
During this time I have been monitoring the listservs and getting emails from faculty at the college concerned about assessment projects. So I’m going to offer my perspective on what to focus on this semester as we all shift to a new teaching and learning reality.
- Keep your focus on the students. Help them move into an online environment that they may or may not have previously experienced, and continue to work to engage students in learning experiences. This is the MOST IMPORTANT thing.
- If you have an assessment project that you were working on in your courses, program or department that translates to an online format, terrific! Go ahead and capture the assessment data, but be sure and annotate in your data collection that the methodology and pedagogy of this semester was impacted.
- This may sound like heresy to some of my colleagues, but if assessment data isn’t collected in the Spring 2020 semester, because you were overwhelmed with moving your teaching from face-to-face to online, or because your assessment strategy didn’t translate over to an online format, or you were given extra responsibility mentoring your colleagues who had never taught online, etc., etc. It’s okay! We’ll get started again in the fall.
- I think I already mentioned this – but keep your focus on your students. Assessment is all about improving student learning, at this time nothing is more important than making sure your students are navigating this new educational universe.
Finally, thank you. Thank you for you adaptability, thank you for your focus on students, thank you for soldiering on. You are appreciated!
Sheri H. Barrett
