**4.1 Forms of assessment**

In order to ensure that participants had studied the recommended reading material/s, they were engaged in various forms of assessment, including chart/discussion forums. Marking the assignments proved challenging.

In online teaching, the idea of group assignment had to be tackled with great caution. The traditional practice of assigning participants a task to discuss in a set could not be followed. Participants had to arrange their virtual meetings. However, while there may have been internet challenges, the group presentation based on virtual group meetings went very well. They learned to prepare PowerPoint presentations and to talk about their papers as opposed to reading their submissions.

Essays were another form of assessment used. Instruction for the first essay was that it should be 360 words and the second be 2000 words respectfully. The third and final essay was a portfolio of evidence, which required 3500 words. Asking participants to follow a word count was a challenge. This meant abandoning the idea of asking participants to present their essays in a certain number of pages. Many participants were not familiar with the idea of word count, which is why some exceeded the stipulated number of words. Yet, this was much easier work on assignment in which participants used word count instead of number of pages.

Three forms of rubrics were used for assessing the participants' assignments: rubric for assessing group work presentations, rubric for assessing chat/discussion response to a question during a synchronous session, rubric for marking an essay, and rubric for marking a portfolio of evidence. These were drawn from the internet and they proved helpful.
