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 with specific criteria. The rubric is also beneficial in relating assignments to course learning outcomes and assessing students' proficiency.

In addition to using a rubric to assess students' discussion assignments, instructors should provide written feedback to help students understand the strengths and weaknesses of their work and how to improve on future assignments. Once again, substantive feedback on discussion assignments promotes student success and reinforces a sense of the instructor's presence within the online course. Like other written assignments, feedback should be meaningful, constructive, timely, specific, actionable, and cordial.

Aside from written discussion assignments, online courses often include more formal writing assignments such as reviews, essays, or research papers. Each written assignment should have an accompanying rubric. The rubric forecasts to students the general framework within which the instructor will evaluate and score their work. It also prevents an instructor’s “pet peeves” from being unduly determinative in a student’s grade on more significant assignments such as research papers.

Since writing assignments such as research papers are often due in the last week or two of a class (especially during the 8-week subterms), they often showcase the cumulative knowledge, skills, and abilities students have developed throughout the course. The assignment’s focus and the instructor’s evaluation should involve the course learning outcomes directly or indirectly. Therefore, in addition to faculty evaluating each student’s ability to produce work following relevant formatting conventions, instructors should use professional judgment about how much

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