INTERACTIVE ONLINE LEARNING AND ASSESSMENT Geoffrey Crisp Learning and Teaching Development Unit The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, AUSTRALIA 5005 E-mail: geoffrey.crisp@adelaide.edu.au Assessment tasks performed in an online environment allow teachers the opportunity to expand the type of question traditionally presented to students in a paper format. Interactivity in online assessment will engage students with the task as hand and permit assessment to become a genuine teaching tool rather than just evaluation. Using java applets and browser plugins, teachers can create assessment tasks that encourage active participation of the student and permit the student to use real data to show their learning. The interactivity inherent in this approach allows a student to explore, to make errors, and seek their own solutions to the problems presented to them. Introduction The constructivist approach to learning allows students to engage in authentic activities that encourage and facilitate learning. An active constructivist approach enables the teacher to participate in the learning process and not simply provide the scaffolds upon which learners passively assemble their discipline experiences. 1,2 Ron Oliver has published extensively on the requirement for authentic learning and assessment tasks in the online environment. 3,4 Herrington and Oliver have proposed 10 characteristics to define authentic activities that could enhance student learning. 3,5 One of these characteristics is that authentic activities for learning “Are seamlessly integrated with assessment”. 6 Assessment tasks have a direct impact on the future learning strategies that students will adopt and so feedback from both formative and summative assessment is crucial. The authenticity of an online task is increased when the student can understand its relevance to their later employment. If students are actively engaging with tools and resources they will potentially use in employment they are developing their capabilities and not simply storing content that may be useful at some future time. Students may be able to use learnt content within the narrow discipline context in which it was learnt, but are often not able to extend its use to new situations. How do teachers encourage students to use content in a wider context? One means of encouraging productive activity after content is forgotten is to allow students to construct their own scenarios by providing interactive tools. Allowing students to play “what if games” is a powerful learning strategy because the student is able to control the learning context. The student is able to “break the rules” and “visualize” the consequences rather than simply being told to learn the rules. Direct experience, the opportunity to make errors, and the ability to construct solutions are all activities that develop capabilities that remain after specific content is forgotten. Why should learning using online resources provide better learning outcomes compared to more traditional modes of course delivery? It would make no difference if the methodologies adopted by teachers were the same in both cases. This is the essence of reports on “no significant difference” between traditional and online modes of delivery and student performance. 7,8 Improvements to student learning outcomes are to be found when changes are made to the way the curriculum is presented and to changes in the assessment tasks. 9,10,11 Indeed, having the same expectations of students when they 840 ISBN 1-876346-47-7 © 2003 EDUCAUSE IN AUSTRALASIA