Evaluation of Students' Performance in Online Seminars via Email with Mobile Phones

The issue of evaluation remains a difficult problem in online seminars just as it has been in traditional discussion classes. When it is educationally more meaningful to give qualitative feedback to participating students, it is also part of the university teachers' "unpleasant duties" to have to provide quantitative grades for administrative purposes. In conventional discussion classes, it is common practice for teachers in Japan, as in many other countries, to give out grades by assessing "class participation," but its criteria have usually been simply subjective. Though we have not reached a solution to this problem, we are in the process of setting up relatively objective criteria for evaluating the students’ performance in our online seminars, based on such factors as "depth of insights" and "collaboration." Another perspective for evaluation, which is the evaluation of educational effects of online seminars, will also be presented.