4 Tips For Creating a Successful Testing Experience in Online or Blended Courses

Online education provides students with many different options and flexibility in their pursuit of a degree.

Today, we see more and more colleges and faculty striving to meet their students’ needs by also implementing online tools and incorporating virtual components to their instruction, which leads to an increase in blended courses.

As a former president of an online university and faculty member, I understand the challenges of providing students with a great online learning experience. The two major challenges higher education professionals face in online or blended courses is creating a personalized experience for students, as well as setting up appropriate and strong frameworks to assess student learning in an online setting.

Finding a balance and a solution to these challenges led me to launch a web-based proctoring service that allows students to take tests anytime, anywhere, while maintaining the integrity of the course and/or program, as well as the student. Having seen these challenges from different perspectives—as a university administrator, faculty member and as a service provider—I’ve picked up key insights along the way to help create a successful online testing experience for students in online or blended courses.

1. Get creative

Educators are already familiar with using a variety of testing design strategies in their classrooms, but it might seem more difficult to use these same strategies when teaching an online or blended course. However, there are great testing platforms, proctoring services and innovative technologies that make it possible to implement different types of assessments online, such as open book or group exams that allow for collaboration. By designing tests in ways that make critical thinking and analysis more important than