Mini-Project Magic

Leon Liebenberg (Grainger College of Engineering) is a teaching associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering who emphasizes team-based project learning structures in his courses. “You need to leverage the relationship between cognition and emotion until you find the magic ratio that works in your specific course,” says Liebenberg.

In this episode of the CITL Podcast Teach Talk Listen Learn, Liebenberg explains his interest in self-regulated, student-driven courses and how he explored this approach while teaching in South Africa and Switzerland before arriving in Illinois. “The one thing that I believe about higher education is that we really have this huge responsibility to give our students the opportunity to learn techniques and strategies to deal with accelerating change, with increasing complexity, and with the inevitable change we are all dealing with.”

Check Out Canvas Catalog

Canvas Catalog offers non-credit (e.g. MOOC, certification, boot camp) courses available to the general public for a fee. The platform is ready offer self-supporting non-credit courses to the general public for professional development, continuing education, broader outreach, and recruitment. Offerings can include Canvas versions of existing MOOCs as well as non-credit “sitting-in” versions of existing campus courses. See the Office for Professional Education's webpage on Open Education for more information or contact canvascatalog@illinois.edu to add your course to Canvas Catalog.

Campus Qualtrics License Information

All current Illinois faculty, staff, and students now have access to the campus Qualtrics license with additional functionality. You need only an active NetID and password to log in and activate an account on the new campus license.

Set up any NEW Qualtrics surveys in the new illinois.qualtrics.com instance so that we can minimize the number of open surveys that need to be moved. Please be aware that none of your existing surveys, workflows, or other assets will exist automatically in the new account; they must be intentionally uploaded into the new account. Existing Qualtrics data must be either downloaded and/or copied from your old account before December 2023.

If you need to migrate surveys and/or data to the new license, please see communications sent from your college/unit brand manager. If you wish to migrate on your own, several resources are available: both the Qualtrics Account Transition Guidance page and one-on-one consulting.

Canvas Open Office Hours
Every Thursday
11:00 am - 12:00 pm, Zoom
Host: CITL Instructional Support Team

Art of Teaching Lunchtime Seminar Series
Thursday, May 4
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm, Zoom, registration required
Host: Emily Forbes, CITL Teaching & Learning Consultant

Stay tuned for this semester's events! Bookmark the CITL Event Calendar for all upcoming workshops and the Training Services (formerly FAST3) Calendar for additional training opportunities. 

Authentic Assessment

Assessment is authentic when we connect testing to the kinds of work people do, rather than merely asking them to provide easy-to-score responses to simple questions.You may be thinking that this definition for authentic assessment sounds a lot like a definition for authentic learning activities. This is absolutely correct! It's critical that your student learning activities and assessment both capture the elements that are relevant to the real-world skills they will need for success. Your students will practice these skills and receive formative feedback from you during learning activities. Authentic assessment should ask them to apply these skills to other real-world conditions that they are likely to encounter so they can ensure their conceptual understanding will transfer to novel situations. 

Assessment results are valid to "the degree to which evidence and theory support the interpretation of test scores entailed by proposed uses of tests" (Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, 2014).Your assessment can be authentic and valid when it produces multiple examples of evidence that students are able to perform real-world tasks in real-world contexts. We can also be more confident that the type of evidence our assessment produces is valid when its items or performance criteria are well-aligned to their student learning objectives and activities. 

Here are steps you can take to create your own authentic forms of assessment:

1. Identify Learning Objectives: Your learning objectives are what you want your students to be able to do after they have completed their learning activities. The nature of this learning should drive your selection of assessment and learning activities.
2. Define Relevant Tasks: Relevant tasks will come from the real-world activities that are performed in your discipline. What are professionals doing now and what may they be doing in the future that your students need to be prepared for?
3. Identify Essential Performance Criteria: Relevant tasks can be broken down into specific steps, or sub-skills, that align well with the critical elements of the task. Remember that authentic tasks are often messy or ill-defined, so your students may be asked to demonstrate their judgement as they evaluate how they will adapt (transfer their knowledge) to the novel situations presented by your authentic assessment.
4. Develop a Rubric: Analytic rubrics are a very good way to assess students' authentic learning in a reliable and valid manner. The performance criteria will come from your analysis of the essential components of relevant tasks. Your understanding of what quality performance looks like will allow you to define the scoring/achievement levels and descriptions of levels for each criterion.