Designing transparent assessment strategies for online learning in HE (English language)

In Vytautas Magnus university (VMU), teachers are highly recommended to use Moodle tools for student learning progress measurement. The progress measurement tools allow students and their teachers to better navigate through the study course, its material, and activities as well as to track the individual student learning progress. Teachers can choose from either a course completion tool or progress bar or combination of both. These Moodle tools are rather advantageous as they allow teachers as well as students to monitor learning and change teaching/learning strategies corresponding to real-time situations. Besides, these tools can help students better plan their learning by allowing them to monitor their progress in a user-friendly manner. For instance, the progress bar has color codes, thus, the students can easily track their progress within individual courses as well as within all the courses the student is taking during the semester. As mentioned already, in the Moodle environment at VMU, teachers most frequently use the following progress measurement tools such as course completion tool (see Illustration 1) and progress bar (see Illustration 4).

Illustration 1. Course Completion in Moodle

Once the teacher enables course completion tracking and configurates the conditions and enters the criteria for course completion, the student can use this tool to monitor their own learning process. Consequently, this contributes to transparency of teaching and learning because students exactly know what they are expected to do during the course. 

The course completion indicates the status towards the completion of the course. For this function to work, it is necessary to set up the criteria or conditions for the course completion (see Illustration 2 below).

Once the conditions are set, students and teachers can start tracking the learning progress. As demonstrated below in Illustration 3, Moodle offers user-friendly reports with color codes, where the completion progress can be observed. Again, it is quite relevant for the students when it comes to self-regulated learning and planning. For teachers, it is also useful, because they can track how their students are doing in an online learning setting.

Illustration 3. Example of a Course Completion progress report (teacher’s view) (VMU Moodle environment)

While the course completion tool is supposed to help tracking of the overall progress in the study course, another tool, i.e., progress bar, can be used to track completion of separate assignments and activities within the course. As demonstrated in Illustration 4, a student can see that the midterm activity has not been completed yet, thus, they can take certain actions to address this.

Illustration 4. Progress bar report (student’s view) (VMU Moodle environment)

In short, Moodle provides teachers and students with different user-friendly options to monitor learning progress in real-time. Teachers can enable and apply progress monitoring tools at the overall course level or opt for more targeted tracking at the individual assignment or activity level. Application of progress monitoring tools can significantly contribute to preventing unwanted behaviors in students, allow for informed changes in instruction, and promote self-regulation in learning.