Evaluating Community-Oriented Learning
The assessment of constructivist, community-oriented learning is a challenge faced by instructors in and out of cyberspace. In response to the assessment dilemma, Palloff and Pratt recommend using both formative and summative approaches to evaluation to foster the most effective learning communities, advocating particularly for formative evaluation as a critical complement to active and transformative learning: “If instructors are truly establishing a collaborative, transformative process, then formative as well as summative evaluation must be used” (145).
          Formative evaluation is collaborative and continuous. Students and instructors actively participate in educational assessment by reflecting on learning processes, course structures, and content. As a result, online classes using formative evaluation are more likely to adjust quickly when problems arise. One useful mechanism the authors offer for student reflection is a list of guiding questions for students to promote collaborative learning. These questions help students consider collaboration's role in their learning situation, as well as how work done together should be structured.
          Integrating formative approaches with summative ones in community-engagement classrooms is similarly important. Engaging communities from the classroom is a collaborative process: students collaborate with one another to complete complex tasks they would not easily accomplish alone in one semester; students and community partners collaborate to solve problems; students, teachers, and community partners collaborate to assess the success of projects. It is clear that community-engagement classes, online or off, benefit from developing together the qualities of good work and the characteristics of an effective class.
          Furthermore, until online learning and other types of community-engagement pedagogies receive the institutional and cultural status of traditional classes, it is important to demonstrate continually that they are developing and adapting to achieve their outcomes. Students and faculty, administrators and community stakeholders all require some form of evidence that their investments of time, energy, and resources are reaping the academic and social benefits claimed for this work. Each innovative pedagogy requires thorough and regular assessment to demonstrate its effectiveness and sustain support long after its appeal as a curricular novelty has passed.