Assessing Individual Learner Performance in MOOCs

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have emerged as a prominent mode of online education, but the quality of assessments in MOOCs remains inconsistent. There has been a consistent gap between the state of the art in assessment and the state of the practice in both MOOCs and other forms of educational technology. Improving the quality of assessment has the potential to improve their usefulness for certification, formative feedback, and learning. In this chapter, we discuss this gap and efforts to improve assessment in MOOCs. There are several potential directions for improving assessments in MOOCs, including improving the psychometric properties of simple assessment types, such as multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank questions; creating richer assessment experience through more student interaction and more engaging experiences (e.g., games, and simulations), through leveraging help resources to see how students perform with some degree of support; and using more powerful technology such as automated essay scoring to better assess students. We discuss both existing efforts and ways that research in other communities can be incorporated into MOOC platforms.