‘NEW’ AUTHENTIC ASSESSMENTS FOR PHYSICAL GEOLOGY IN AN ONLINE MODALITY

With the increased teaching of geosciences online, we have all been struggling to develop ways to authentically assess our online students without adding excessive grading times. Best practices of online teaching suggests that there should be a variety of assessments at various levels of Blooms taxonomy that incorporate a students interests. In addition to converting all lectures, labs and homework assignments to an online modality, I developed 2 new assignments during the Fall 2020 semester that were exclusively for an online environment. For the Introduction to Physical Geology lecture class, there was a new assignment in which students were asked to pick 1 topic in geology and write a ‘One pager’ on it. These ‘’One Pager’ documents are commonly used by many organizations as ways to concisely deliver a message on a focused topic. For the ‘Final Exam” of the Introduction to Physical Geology Laboratory class, students were asked to pick one lab and design and produce an ‘infographic’ on some aspect of that lab. An infographic is typically a 1 page visual description of a topic, essentially a well-designed poster. Details and results of these assignments will be presented.