What Makes a Great Online Assignment?
By Robin Sutherland-Harris
While there are doubtless many similarities shared between a good online assignment and a good face-to-face assignment, how can we get the most bang for our buck when designing (or re-designing) assignments for online or remote courses?
Over the past few months, many York University faculty members have been engaging with our offerings at the Teaching Commons. In one recent course, Online Assignments: Deep Learning Through Engaging Assignments, participants worked in groups towards a final project that synthesized course learning and their collective experience and expertise as teachers. In this final project, each group presented a list of the top three characteristics they consider essential for an effective online assignment, including examples of how each characteristic might look when put into practice.
Many groups identified similar characteristics, indicating a certain amount of consensus across the board. We’ve selected two strong examples of participants’ work to share with you here.
For our first group (Kathleen Fortune, Poland Lai, Abril Liberatori, Jodi Martin, Ann Pottinger, Shabnam Sukhdev, and Veronique Tomaszewski), a great online assignment:
- Scaffolds skills or knowledge relevant to course or program
- Allows for creativity from students
- Has clear instructions and expectations for grading
To read more about their reasoning and for examples that illustrate the application of these principles in action, you can download their final project HERE.
And for our second group (Brigitte Hanson, Maria Figueredo, Susan Henders, and Linda Hargreaves), who took a more graphical approach to their project, a great online assignment is:
- Clear
- Meaningful
- Thought Provoking
In this pdf of their final project, they expand on these deceptively simple characteristics and connect them to student engagement.
How does this resonate with your experience of online assignments?
About the Author
Robin is an experienced educator who, over the last 10 years, has taught undergraduate courses in the Humanities, mentored and led graduate students as TAs and peer-trainers, and provided faculty development and support across the disciplines. She is passionate about the development of pedagogical literacy and teaching and learning excellence in higher education, whether in an individual course or at the level of curricula and institution-wide programming. In her position as an Educational Developer with the Teaching Commons at York University, she is the liaison for the Humanities (LA&PS). Robin’s current research explores the many facets of the curriculum renewal process for faculty, staff, and educational developers.