How can you properly assess students en masse? This is the question we asked ourselves at ESSEC Business School, when launching our strategic Small Private Online Courses (SPOCs) in the 2022-2023 academic year. With a public of 6000 students to train on core competencies and key strategic issues such as climate change, AI, entrepreneurship, diversity & inclusion, and responsible leadership, we needed to strike the proper balance between content and assessment without adding an unreasonable workload to our professors.
Given Moodle’s available assessment activities, we were able to consider deeply what we truly wanted to assess: theoretical knowledge; concrete skills, and their impact on the future careers of our students. Furthermore, we wanted to apply key indicators of engagement and impact, potentially contributing to the final grade in our new assessment strategy. Our solution was trifold: first, define a pertinent and learner-centric model, based on Bloom’s Taxonomy, Fink’s significant learning models, and a skill-based approach; second, reimagine the assessment strategy and the use of Moodle activities based on this new model; and finally, to make use of data tracking (specifically through Moodle Analytics) in order to improve student engagement and success rate. In this presentation, we will go straight to the heart of the matter: diffusing course content and assessing such large numbers of students necessarily implies a recourse to automatic correction, but thanks to Moodle’s extensive features, the negative impact of such methods can be mitigated to ensure student learning.