ABSTRACT
Today, students in the online and blended learning environments understand the importance of regular and meaningful feedback about their academic performance. This chapter concentrates on the first area, assessment of the knowledge domain in the online and blended learning environments. At the instructional level, online and blended learning have rekindled interest in learning taxonomies as blueprints for assessing student learning outcomes. Authentic assessment deemphasizes rote learning, memorization, and test-taking ability. Newer adaptive learning procedures bear a direct relationship to criterion-referenced assessment and use the decision-making power of algorithms to determine which course objectives students have attained and which objectives comprise the best learning path for each individual. Using authentic assessment devices for evaluating the impact of online and blended learning provides several advantages, the most important of which is that it closely parallels future performance expectation. By combining many methods, techniques, and domains, blended assessment, like blended learning, can bring the best of many approaches to the impact evaluation process.
