How can you evaluate language teaching effectiveness online?

In Finland, our national core curriculum defines the broad strokes of content and assessment criteria. As long as we’re operating within the curriculum, we’ve got a plenty of freedom to choose how we’ll approach the content. When we design exercises, we have to consider how they relate to the curriculum and how to balance the content of the course. I believe online learning deserves special consideration, however. It’s crucial to assess how well your material is supporting your students’ needs (i.e. can they learn the subject matter alone). Well designed materials that serve special needs students also serve the classroom as a whole. Moreover, one has to be sure that course assessment is fair and robust enough to handle cheating.

When assessing any particular skill, it’s helpful to have multiple methods of assessment. For instance, online learning makes it possible to give students an article containing the core vocabulary that you want to teach. After completing exercises that familiarise Ss with the subject matter, it’s easy to collect essays, short recordings and tests from the group. This lets learners with different strengths to shine. Additionally, it’s good to seek opportunities for peer assessment. Likewise, students should be taught to assess their own knowledge of the subject matter and the progress that they’ve made. If it’s possible for students to attend sessions together, games like Quizlet Live can show you a group’s level in a more casual way.

Some online learning platforms can give you data on how long it takes students to complete an exercise. While this can help you to assess the effort required by your exercises, it’s also likely that the readings are not entirely correct. For instance, a student might submit a long essay in less than a minute because they prepared it in Word before submitting the exercise on your platform. Of course, the student might also have asked ChatGPT or Gemini. This kind of data could also help you identify areas where individual students struggle. I’ve seen platforms that present you the data in a way that’s easy to follow. Other platforms collect data, but you have to collect it piece by piece.

Some things I find helpful are: 1. Interviewing students. 2. Reviewing their formative work. 3. Giving students ways to show their knowledge in multiple modes - this may look like making a video to show speaking abilities, open-ended writing prompts, cloze activities, interactive listening activities, etc. 4. Mocking proctored exams where the student shares their screen with the teacher while working on camera.

We develop online materials as a team. During the course, we collect information by observing data and interviewing students. After the course, we collect anonymous student feedback. This allows us to identify weak points in our materials. Small changes can be made independently, but we discuss the broad strokes at least twice a year. Usually, the school only needs to know who passed and who failed. Trends like the use of AI require school wide discussion and policy making, however. When I discover problems (e.g. using AI to make complete essays) during the course, I usually inform the students together and then reiterate what I want the students to do. I also follow students’ progress and contact struggling students directly.