It is fundamental to keep in mind that it is not by listening to a lecture that a student learns, but that it is by doing, by being active.

When learning online, self-assessment activities allow you to do just that, although they are not the only ones.

One of the main characteristics of online courses is that learners do not have direct contact with the teacher and can only interact with them in a much more limited way than face-to-face.

Accordingly, they can't question him when they have doubts or questions.

It is therefore fundamental, when designing online courses, to plan multiple self-assessment activities so that each learner can check his or her understanding of the concepts presented to him/her.

These activities should be offered after each new video or course page introducing new concepts. It is not necessary for the grades obtained to be memorized. It is probably even preferable that only the learner should be aware of them so that he or she does not fear that they will be used for his or her final assessment.

In this section, you will find self-assessment activities, the main purpose of which is to allow you to check that you have understood the different concepts that are presented. Marks are not recorded or transmitted to anyone. They simply give you an indication of the quality of your answers.

These self-assessment activities are of four types:

• Drag and drop onto image (ddi) exercises allow you to check if you can find your way around a sketch or a chart. You operate by simple drag and drop;

• Gap-fill exercises (gfe) with a contextual image require a little more concentration on your part, but is very fruitful in ensuring that difficult concepts are well understood. From a pedagogical point of view, it is an excellent exercise because you are asked to rephrase what has been presented in the book in order to construct sentences that make sense, the missing texts being offered in drop-down menus;

• Categorization exercises (cat) complement the previous two activities well: you organize elements into categories and thus learn to distinguish their characteristics;

• Finally, single-choice questions and multiple-choice questions (quiz) allow you to test your knowledge in a fairly broad way, but they are not very user-friendly tools.

Do these exercises with attention and concentration: if you succeed, it means that you have mastered the underlying concepts. If you make mistakes, it means you need to rework them. Some of these notions are much more subtle than they seem at first glance, and it's only natural not to fully understand them right away, but with some practice you will.

For Teachers

We have prepared solutions for you to create such self-assessment activities. They are shared as open educational resources, so don't hesitate to reclaim them. Two sets are available, one based on H5P technology, which is well suited if you distribute your resources in an LMS, and the other as HTML 5 pages independent of the delivery platform.