Alternative Assessment Support

Oral presentations

Many assessments take place in the form of oral presentations. In order to transfer such assignments online, there are a number of possibilities.

Moodle Video Assignment Type

You can set up a Moodle assignment and specify video as the submission type. Students need to create and upload videos to York St John Media Library in order to submit.

The Digital Training team have produced a guide on recording and creating a video in PowerPoint.

Instructions for students on how to submit video assignments are available here.

For more details, please see the related FAQ below.

Teams Meetings

Teams meetings are easy to set up and invite students to. If you wish to conduct a live assessed presentation, a Teams meeting would be one option although it is important to bear in mind that some students may not have good internet connection or may be using a mobile phone to attend the Teams meeting. Where possible, give students the opportunity to practise before the assessment, either with you, other students or the Digital Training team.

You can record Teams meetings and have control over the recording after the meeting if you need to give someone else access at a later date.

Setting up a Microsoft Teams meeting for teaching remotely

Joining a Microsoft Teams meeting

Teaching through a Microsoft Teams meeting and accessing lesson resources afterwards

Flipgrid

For formative oral assessments, Flipgrid is an excellent tool for creating and sharing video content quickly and easily. It is designed to encourage conversation and gives the option to allow students to comment orally on each others' work.

For more information and related courses, please see our Flipgrid web page.

Multimodal Assessment

Mahara

Mahara is the main eportfolio tool used at York St John. It allows students and staff to collect and present materials, resources, and to record experiences during the course of their studies. It could be used over this period by students wanting to share their progress on work with tutors.

See guides and more details on our Mahara web page.

Class Notebook

Class Notebook is a tool available through Office 365. It enables a tutor to set up an online notebook which and to give access to to specific students. Each online notebook consists of:

Student Notebooks — private notebooks that are shared between each teacher and their individual students. Teachers can access these notebooks at any time, but students cannot see other students’ notebooks.
Content Library — a notebook for teachers to share course materials with students. Teachers can add and edit its materials, but for students, the notebook is read-only.
Collaboration Space — a notebook for all students and the teacher in the class to share, organize, and collaborate.

See guides and more information on our Class Notebook web page.

Quizzes

Moodle Quiz

Moodle has a powerful quiz tool which is widely used across universities for both formative and summative assessment. It has a wide range of question types and many settings which enable you to dictate how much time students have to complete quizzes, whether or when they will see feedback and whether they are able to attempt the quiz multiple times.

Moodle Quiz training and guides

Setting up an online exam using Moodle Quiz

Moodle Quiz Activity Guide

Moodle Quiz FAQs

H5P

H5P is a versatile tool available through Moodle which facilitates the creation of diverse resource types. One of these is the quiz question type. If you would like to use H5P to create quizzes, we would recommend you only assign formative quizzes created in this tool. Please use Moodle quiz for summative quizzes.

See guides and more information on on our H5P web page.

Microsoft Forms

Microsoft Forms now offers the option to create simple quizzes with feedback. You might benefit from using Microsoft Forms if you would like to include your quiz at the end of a Sway presentation or add it to a tab in Teams, since these Office 365 tools are easily compatible.

How to create a quiz with Microsoft Forms

Microsoft Forms: Creating Authentic Assessments course

Peer review activities

Peer assessment can encourage students to really engage with assessment criteria as they assess the work of peers. As you seek to maintain a learning community amongst your learners and help them to keep developing a critical approach to learning, setting up online peer assessment might be a good alternative to some of the activities you would normally carry out in face-to-face teaching.

We have access to two tools which enable us to carry our peer assessment activities online:

Moodle Workshop Activity

This is an excellent tool which has been used by a number of academics at York St John with success. Its many settings make it highly customisable and versatile. Please work through the following guides to set up the Moodle Workshop activity.

How to Create a Moodle Workshop Activity Part 1- The Initial Setup

How to Create a Moodle Workshop Activity Part 2 - The Five Phases of the Workshop activity

We also have a couple of case studies from academics at YSJ who have already used the Workshop activity in their teaching.

Turnitin Peermark

Turnitin PeerMark provides similar functionality but within the Turnitin assignment type. This tool is slightly less customisable but also slightly quicker and easier to set up.

Turnitin PeerMark - Setting up Assignments

Turnitin PeerMark - Accessing Reviews

Open ended work

Both Moodle Assignment and Turnitin facilitate submission of essays (and other types of assignments), marking and delivery of feedback within Moodle VLE. However, they offer slightly different functionality.

See this post to decide which tool would be more appropriate for you.