If you want to make the most of your assessments, you need an eLearning authoring tool that helps you offer more than a collection of carefully crafted questions. Assessments are a great way for learners to demonstrate their knowledge, but depending on the context (and the learner!), this demonstration can look very different.
In some cases, your learners will be in a position to quickly confirm their understanding of key topics or routine compliance issues. These learners will appreciate an assessment system that allows them to quickly showcase their knowledge and return to their day-to-day activities.
In other cases, your learners will need a helping hand as they tackle new and potentially challenging material, and your assessments can provide exactly that kind of environment.
In either case, assessments can play a hugely useful role in ensuring that your learners are receiving the support that makes sense for them. Read on to discover how assessments can pass course completion signals back to your learning systems, how to provide immediate feedback for your learners, and how to craft feedback that creates a lasting impression—even when the assessment is over.
Use assessments to trigger course completion
Although you’ll want to make sure compliance courses and eLearning more broadly are completed with integrity and thoroughness, that doesn’t mean you can’t grease the wheels a little.
While some eLearning content is constantly evolving or communicates brand-new information, this will inevitably be coupled with regular training that some of your employees are already familiar with.
By using assessments to trigger course completion, you can give your learners the option to skip past the various screens that make up your course and dive straight into the questions. This isn’t always the default setting—in Gomo, for example, course completion is tied to visiting every screen in every topic unless configured otherwise—but in the right circumstances, this can be an efficient move.
Not only will your learners be able to demonstrate their pre-existing knowledge with a minimum of fuss, but you’ll also show that you respect their time by letting them return to their work!
When you’re structuring your eLearning projects, assessments are just one piece of the puzzle. Discover how to keep it simple:
The simple life: How a simplified eLearning project structure sets you up for successProvide your learners with feedback
Sometimes, your learners are going to get things wrong—and it’s worth thinking about how best to provide feedback for their answers. A big, red cross might make the mistake clear, but without any feedback or elaboration, some assessments might start to become disheartening or inadvertently encourage guesswork.
As luck would have it, authoring tools like Gomo will allow you to offer inline feedback. Whether your learner takes one or multiple attempts at the same question, you’ll be able to craft feedback that clarifies their mistake, guides them towards the right answer, or prompts them to return to the relevant course content.
Want to know more about Gomo’s features? Discover some hand-picked favorites:
Gomo in 2022: 5 exciting updates, from live delivery to instant previewsRemember these 3 scoring and feedback tips
Giving feedback is one thing, but how do you make sure it’s doing the trick? When it comes to giving your learners feedback and totaling up the score they receive for each assessment, try to think about the following factors.
1) Give clear feedback
Inline feedback is the perfect opportunity to establish or reinforce a key point for your learner, aiding any future assessment attempts and providing a clear rationale for the correct answer. These benefits will be undermined, however, if your feedback is ambiguous or contradictory.
2) Make it detailed
Your feedback may be clear—but that doesn’t mean it can’t also be thorough. After all, your main goal isn’t to trick your learners or to hope they’ll fail, and explaining precisely how they went wrong will set them up for success down the road. Studies have shown that detailed feedback on incorrect answers can lead to strong results compared to corrective feedback, so injecting your inline comments with a little specificity is well worth the effort.
3) Enable score tracking
Instant, premade inline feedback is a great feature for users looking to learn and reflect while they’re in the midst of your quizzes, but it’s far from the only string to your feedback bow! In Gomo, ticking the ‘set course score’ box will ensure that your learners’ scores are reported back to your LMS. This allows you to reap the data-fuelled benefits of your users’ results in a more comprehensive way—and, thereafter, act on the areas where employees are struggling.
When it comes to making the most of your assessment data, Gomo’s got you covered:
6 practical tips for applying assessment and quiz data to your eLearning contentWant to take a deeper dive into the world of eLearning assessments?
Then you’re in the right place! This article is an excerpt from our recent ebook, ‘7 assessment best practices: the dos and don’ts of creating eLearning quizzes’. The ebook reflects on a wide array of practices and considerations for every step of the assessment authoring journey, from selecting the right question type to making the most of post-exam analytics.
Check out the full ebook below.
