Assignments submitted early should be graded within six (6) days of the due date, not the early submission date. Coursework submitted late should be graded within six (6) days of the submission date. The same exceptions noted above also apply to this recommendation.

When assessing student work in online courses, instructors should return grades and feedback as soon as possible due to the faster pace and compressed timeline of courses in the online subterm. The standard requirement is a six (6) day turnaround time for grades. For assessments graded automatically by the LMS, instructors should review the scores and determine if there are patterns of missed questions and whether those patterns reveal an underlying issue with the question itself or the aligned instruction. In those cases, an instructor's discretion should be used to adjust a system-generated score on an assessment. Additionally, the instructor should determine whether to adapt/eliminate a problematic question from an assessment or develop supplementary/replacement instruction in the primary course shell. The procedure for doing so is detailed elsewhere, but changes to the primary course shell should be communicated to the Faculty Mentor and the SME.

Ideally, instructors will provide brief written comments for each student. The tone of the comments should be that of an encouraging coach – identifying positive elements of the student’s work while focusing on areas for improvement and ways to improve. Many instructors will find that this type of feedback can open communication with a student who would not otherwise engage based merely on a system-generated score. Feedback on assessments will convey the instructor’s active presence in the course and with student success.

Collaborative learning assignments encompass a range of assignments such as discussion forums, social annotation of an article, interactive maps and timelines, capstone projects, and interactive videos. As a minimum requirement to promote regular and substantive interaction, an online course will commonly include discussion forums as collaborative learning assignments. In an 8-week online course, it is common for the course to include two (2) or three (3) graded discussions.

Well-designed discussion forums and collaborative learning assignments effectively support learning, foster critical thinking, and give a human touch to the online classroom. Beyond a well-designed assignment or activity, an active faculty member can foster transformative learning experiences and drive student retention.59

Depending on the nature of the discussion forum prompt, the elements a professor evaluates will show up differently in scoring and feedback. For example, suppose an assigned discussion forum invites a range of opinions about a course topic. In that case, the instructor may be most concerned with evaluating the level of engagement, clarity of communication, and quality of argumentation students exhibit in their posts. In other discussion assignments, the instructor might be more focused on evaluating the quality of each student's comprehension, analysis, evaluation, and synthesis of the course readings.

For this reason, students and instructors will be helped by a rubric tailored to each discussion assignment. Although each instructor will use professional judgment when evaluating students' work, the rubric is helpful guidance that enables students to formulate quality posts in alignment

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