Assessment of the online forum

Abstract

In the last decade, not only the advances in educational investigation but also the reforms promoted in the European Space of Higher Education, have brought about a change in the concept of learning, and in consequence, in the evaluation. However, the evaluation is today a task which is still unfinished in the Spanish university, in which the greater part of the teachers evaluate practically exclusively through a final exam based of memorised questions (Zabalza, 2003; Bonson and Benito, 2005). This traditional model is more obvious in online teaching. In this study we propose the integration of this new model of evaluation in the e-learning Moodle Platform and we propose the online forum as a communication tool with wide possibilities for didactic innovation and for the assessment from an alternative approach. We also offer a proposal to assess the online forum via an instrument like the rubric.