Abstract—Blended learning has become more and more popular for educators and students. It is crucial to have appropriate assessment methods to enhance the learning quality and effectiveness of teaching. Lab intensive course teaching poses more challenges. In this study, traditional assessment methods, i.e., lab exercises, demonstration, written report, and multiple choice questions are combined in an innovative way. End of course evaluation and course grade reveal that the students benefit more by getting higher marks in the blended assessment compared to the written questions alone process during a two-year experiment. Index Terms—Blended learning, assessment methods, laboratory intensive courses teaching. I. INTRODUCTION In recent years, blended learning has become popularly accepted as a way of learning and teaching in higher education. Traditional face-to-face instructor-led teaching has been augmented through combining various e-learning technologies, pedagogical approaches, and instructional methods to accomplish optimal educational learning outcome [2]. The key to the success of blended learning depends on the strategy adopted in selecting the right combination of media that will bring highest throughput using lowest possible cost and simpler e-learning tools [1]. The widely deployed World Wide Web and popularity of various social networking techniques empowers the development of many e-learning tools for delivering, tracking, and managing education and training. They are WebBoard, WebCt, Blackboard, Sakai, Moodle, myCodeMate, and WileyPLUS, just name a few. Using these systems, a virtual learning environment is created so that students can learn anytime, anywhere after class. The communications between students and instructors, and the students themselves have been strengthened in the virtual learning environment. A wide variety of digital learning content are integrated into the virtual learning environment easily that makes both teaching and learning more efficient and effective. Moreover, some systems provide interactive functions, such as online forum and exercises, which help actively manage the progress of group projects and learn how to apply techniques to solve real-world problems. Course learning assessment is the process faculty use to grade student performance in the course. It is one of the critical parts to collect information systematically on the Manuscript received August 20, 2012.; revised October 29, 2012. The authors are with Computer Science and Engineering Department, Oakland University, Rochester, MI 48309 USA (e-mail: gqu@oakland.edu, l2lu@oakland.edu). success of overall course, program and university curriculum. The goal of course learning assessment has three-fold: 1) the course learning objectives can be linked effectively and consistently along the assignments, exams, course structure, grading, and the actual teaching; 2) instructors can be informed on what does work and what does not in their classrooms or the virtual learning environment; 3) students have direct feedback on their own progress in the learning. Due to the nature of the subject, some courses have a significant laboratory component in order to accomplish the educational goals. For example, system administration course for undergraduate students majored in Information Technology at Oakland University requires the students to acquire skills in different aspects of the system administration through individual hand-on assignments and group projects. We adopted blended learning mode for this course that we have face-to-face classroom teaching, lab sessions and the course content is managed through Moodle. Homework assignments and exams are popular methods for course learning assessment. For laboratory intensive course, the assessment poses more challenges to the instructors to assure the quality of learning. In this study, we proposed to utilize blended assessment methods to combine the traditional assessment method in an innovative way that written questions were authored and instructed in the lab sessions, based on the results of submitted written assignment, multiple choice questions were designed to reinforce the learning. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section II, related work will be presented. Section III describes the different assessment methods and new challenges. Section IV gives the experiments for blended assessment in the laboratory intensive course. Section V shows the results. We conclude our work in Section VI. II. RELATED WORK Computer Information Technology (CIT) is a discipline that explores how to design and deploy computer-based techniques to solve real world problems. Therefore, it is crucial to improve students‟ comprehension and retention of concepts and principles of information technology in order to empower them with necessary skills to solve problems outside of the classroom. One way to accomplish the goal is through laboratory activities. Particularly in courses like system administration (CIT 348), intensive laboratory activities will play a distinctive and central role in the curriculum. These laboratory activities are designed to knit course concepts into „real-world‟ problems that students will learn the knowledge by exploring methods through first-hand experience. A Study on Blended Learning Assessment Methods for Laboratory Intensive Courses Teaching Guangzhi Qu and Lunjin Lu International Journal of Information and Education Technology, Vol. 2, No. 6, December 2012 603 DOI: 10.7763/IJIET.2012.V2.214