Developing a learner-centered criteria to assessing group activities in blended learning environments

Since the appearance of learning management systems, establishing a fair and precise mechanism to assess learning activities has been a challenging issue. Evaluation of group's work in blended learning environments which these systems are used can be a more complicated task due to implicit factors affecting result of final group's work, like degree of members' enthusiasm or their social relations (namely, communication or negotiation between group's members known as group's dynamics). The aim of this paper is to define comprehensive criteria for assessing group learning activities, considering standard learning progress taxonomy, during blended educational courses. We proposed a framework for assessment of online learning groups with respect to three major activities namely, forums, wikis and messaging. We measured correlation between performing these activities and enhancing learning skills with respect to Blooms taxonomy. We considered different parts of course exams' grades to evaluate performance of students in groups considering this taxonomy. Our promising results led us to believe that applying these criteria in blended educational courses may enhance the quality of collaborative learning activities and help student to perform better in learning groups through formative assessment of groups' work.