(1) Diversification of assessment subjects and techniques is essential. Every participant in the course is a subject of assessment. Apart from teacher assessments, self-assessment and peer assessment can be incorporated. Teachers’ assessments can guide students’ learning, while the students’ self-assessment encourages reflection, and peer assessment fosters mutual learning among students.
(2) Alignment of assessment content with practical relevance is crucial. The design of assessments for learning activities should highlight connections to students' professional development and work-related contexts.
(3) A priority should be placed on learning and understanding within the assessment framework, rather than merely focusing on scoring or grading. Assessments should focus on students' performance in learning activities and provide encouraging or constructive feedback.
IV. Improving teaching ability to advance the high-quality development of distance education
How can teachers embrace the post-pandemic distance education? We hold that it's crucial to enhance teachers' ability to integrate online and offline teaching modalities. The competency in distance education serves as a crucial metric for evaluating teachers' aptitudes in this new era. Teachers' distance education teaching competence is bifurcated into two dimensions: digital literacy and distance education teaching ability. Digital literacy is delineated through five aspects: awareness of digitalization, knowledge and skills of digital technologies, digital application, digital social responsibility, and professional development. Distance education teaching ability, on the other hand, encompasses a range of elements including courseware design, contents creation, interactive design, formative assessment design, summative assessment design, and online and offline teaching. While the facets of digital literacy and instructional design have been elucidated above, the primary focus here is on the expertise required for successful blended online and offline teaching.
1. Establishing an integrated online and offline teaching system. When constructing a blended teaching system that integrates both online and offline approaches, it is essential to follow the principles of systematic development, placing students at the center and prioritizing quality. The principle of systematic development necessitates viewing online and offline teaching as a unified whole, ensuring seamless connections between them. It involves ascertaining which content is suitable for offline teaching and which are suitable for online teaching based on dimensions of teaching quality and effectiveness, thereby achieving a harmonious integration between the online and offline environments. The student-centered principle not only requires that the design of offline teaching focus on students' knowledge acquisition but also mandates that online teaching centers on students as the main participants in teaching activities. This approach involves structuring the teaching process in a manner that suits students' learning preferences, departing from the traditional “host" model in which the teacher dominates the lectures like an anchor. The principle of prioritizing quality emphasizes that all teaching activities must aim to ensure the highest standards of teaching quality, with the assessment of teaching quality primarily grounded in students' perspectives.
2. Vigorously promoting integrated media teaching. In the post-pandemic era, teachers are making significant efforts to promote the use of integrated media teaching. Integrated media materials connect textbooks and micro courses through QR codes, thereby serving as a bridge between online and offline learning. This approach integrates traditional textbooks with videos, audio contents, teaching platforms, and online discussions, thereby enriching the content of teaching materials, and improving the readability and extendability of such materials. Integrated media teaching is exerting a profound impact on the development of learning resources and classroom instruction in distance education. Integrated media teaching facilitates blended learning by seamlessly combining online and offline components, autonomous and collaborative learning, as well as teacher-led and student-centered approaches. This strategy draws from a variety of pedagogical theories. The micro courses in the integrated media teaching materials emphasize the integration of "learning, assessment, evaluation, and guidance," fully reflecting the interactivity and participation. This approach prioritizes the integration of learning and practice, places emphasis on progression and motivation, thereby fostering genuine learning experiences. It aims to ignite students' interests while improving learning efficiency.