Assessing the Humanities Online

Assessment of student learning within the humanities is a fraught subject for students, faculty, and administrators alike. Transposing humanities teaching and learning to an online environment requires collaboration between faculty, online course developers, and support technologists to approximate traditional assessment strategies. This presentation will focus on three modes of online humanities assessment. Drawing on examples from the first full year of HarvardX MOOC and residential hybrid classrooms, the speaker will describe lessons learned from experimentation with machine grading, peer assessment of critical writing, self-assessment, and asynchronous participation metrics, as well as the application of these methods to residential learning.

OUTCOMES: Understand the goals of traditional assessment in the humanities * Identify strategies used by HarvardX humanities projects * Extrapolate practices and experimental opportunities based on empirical findings