Empowering learners to engage in their authentic online assessment

The purpose of this chapter is to share an assessment practice that utilized an authentic online activity as both a learning activity and an assessment item. The assessment required students to identify their best contributions in the learning activity and submit those items for assessment. This shift in assessment required students to reflect on their learning, to identify evidence of their learning, and fostered further develop their metacognition skills. Gulikers, Bastiaens and Kirschner’s (2004) five-dimensional framework for authentic assessment was used to examine how authentic instruction and authentic assessment were aligned in the online activity. Three recommendations for research and practice are presented.