Whatever the topic of instruction, there's one thing every learner wants to know: "How am I doing?" Feedback and assessment opportunities help answer that question.

Feedback
By feedback, we mean communication with the student that responds to his or her performance. Such communication can come from the instructor or from peers.

Feedback in the form of dialog and discussion helps both student and instructor. The student can use it to fine tune or correct his/her understanding. The instructional leader can make "course corrections" in midstream in response to student performance. Both synchronous and asynchronous technologies can be used effectively.

Instructor feedback to students might also be built into the online resource itself. For example, learners might be steered through an online multiple choice quiz, in which their response to a given question determines what page they'll see next. The follow-up page would comment on the chosen response, explaining why it's right or wrong.

Constructive feedback reinforces correct learning and helps wayward minds to find the right road again.

Assessment
By assessment, we mean a formal event or process that reveals how far each learner has progressed toward the objectives that were specified at the outset of instruction. In conventional teaching practice, assessment meant "testing," in one form or another.

Educators today seem united in their view that conventional testing reveals (at best) only part of what a student has really learned. But there is much debate about what the best alternatives to testing might be. Lots of experimentation surrounds assessment practices in face-to-face classrooms today.

Of course testing is possible in your online resources just as it would be in the regular classroom. So are writing assignments and other assessment approaches you may already be familiar with from your classroom teaching.

The Web 's multimedia capacity supports other kinds of evidence of your learners' subject mastery. Audio and video recordings can be posted and linked to comments. Debates that reveal a student's mastery of ideas can unfold in a real-time chat, or asynchronously on a discussion board.

How do you choose among all the possibilities? It really depends on the role you want assessment to play in your instruction. A full treatment of that issue goes way beyond the scope of this resource. Online or off, however, it's the learners who have the most critical need for the information assessment provides.