1.1 Integration of formative and summative examinations
Taking into consideration the characteristics of distance learners, some schools have enacted appropriate reform in students' evaluation, that is, "to evaluate the students' study during the teaching and learning of the subject" [2]. This type of evaluation is generally based on students' day-to-day assignments. Assignments are handed in to the instructor for grading, the instructor provides feedback to the students, and a formative score is later obtained. Some schools also include the students' attitudes, behavior, and participation in study groups or school-organized learning activities as a percentage of the students' formative score. This score accounts for 20%-40% of the total score for a given subject. The students take a summative assessment after they finish studying the subject, and both formative and summative scores are incorporated into the total score for the subject.
1.2 Partially open-book examination
As distance learners are mostly on-the-job adults, this evaluation system stresses the students' ability to solve practical problems, especially those closely related to production and social life. Closed-book examination requires mechanical memorization of theorems, definitions, formulas and laws, while in the workplace these would be frequently looked up in reference books. It is of little significance to memorize this material, so some schools adopt the partially open-book examination. This means giving students permission to take related theorems, definitions, formulas and laws to the examination room for reference. Some schools stipulate that it is up to the students to decide what they extract. The school uniformly regulates the paper that can be used, essentially limiting the scope of the extracted material.
1.3 Open-book examination
In this kind of examination, students are asked to read related information or collect source material through outside research, and then complete a major assignment of substantial size and quality within a given period of time to obtain a score for the subject. Another approach is to allow students to take reference books or their course notes to the examination room for reference.
1.4 Web-based course assessment reform
This method incorporates information technology into the assessment process, and can be divided roughly into two categories. One has no formative assessment; after completing a subject, students must take an online examination and receive a computer-generated score for the subject. The other uses formative assessment, either exclusively or in conjunction with summative examination. For subjects without summative examination, students complete a total of 6-7 online assignments throughout the course according to the time and place specified by the school, and receive a final score for the subject based on the aggregate score of all the assignments. Some subjects combine the formative assessment with online or written summative examination.
Generally speaking, the development of distance education has brought about gradual reforms in teaching and administration, including valuable and effective exploration into new approaches for learning evaluation. However, these reforms have been experimentally applied to a limited number of courses, and have not been implemented comprehensively in distance education teaching and management. Even with reforms, many problems still exist.
2. Learning evaluation in distance education in China – existing problems and their analysis
2.1 Major existing problems
People are fully aware of the important function of learning evaluation, which is often described as a teaching baton. Learning evaluation serves multiple functions, including diagnosing teaching methods used by instructors, evaluating the quality of teaching resources, detecting problems in distance education teaching support, and understanding students' learning methods, behaviors, strategies and goals. Thus it plays the role of correcting teaching and learning behaviors. Nonetheless, distance learning evaluation often takes the form of a simple examination for various reasons, which are substantiated as follows.
Assessment of the students' ability is neglected and learning evaluation becomes the learning objective. We must train our learners with sufficient knowledge, quality of character, and the ability to solve problems in real life and production so that they can adapt to and promote the development of society. Therefore, both teaching and learning evaluations should center on serving the aforementioned training objectives. However, in reality, there are cases when study is simply a means to acquire a diploma; learning evaluation is hardly related to the aforementioned objectives and becomes the learning objective itself. What is more important is that the "single evaluation model cannot live up to the objectives of examining the learners' overall abilities in a complicated learning process."[3]
Summative assessment of students' learning is overemphasized while formative assessment is neglected. First, the summative assessment score is excessively weighted. At present, scores for distance education subjects are made up of formative assessment and summative assessment, with the summative assessment counting for up to 80% of the total score. As a matter of fact, both formative assessment and summative assessment function as a learning evaluation for the students, and their relative weights should be decided by the nature of the subject. For some subjects, formative assessment may be suitable as the method of learning evaluation. Second, formative assessment nowadays is becoming a mere formality, replaced by day-to-day assignments that do not perform the role of formative assessment. Some formative assessment scores are rather arbitrary scores given by instructors just before the final examination. There is no assessment, no process of correcting the students' learning methods or behaviors and no teaching guidance.
Emphasis on uniform "testing" and lack of individualized "evaluation" has turned learning evaluation into a completely test-oriented education system. Most learning evaluations in distance education resemble or employ the uniform, concentrated final examinations used in traditional education, which stress "testing" and seldom reflect improvement in teaching concepts and methods, and application of teaching strategies. They focus on testing and not on evaluation. Due to the lack of individualized evaluation, the results of examinations cannot be used to analyze the teaching and learning process, let alone provide an objective evaluation of the teaching quality of a school.
Learning evaluation relies heavily on traditional examination methods and fails to utilize information technology, thus lacking the characteristics of distance education. The web-based reformation of course examinations is an important method of learning evaluation in distance education, and has been widely used by some foreign distance education institutions and some professional continuing education programmes in China. However, in China's distance education, teaching evaluations have just started pilot applications of this method, and student evaluations continue to use the traditional medium of paper. Instructors evaluate student work in assembly-line fashion, and inevitably such evaluations are somewhat arbitrary and subjective.
Too much importance is placed on testing the students' memorization of knowledge rather than the students' ability to comprehensively utilize knowledge to solve practical problems, and tests are often disjoint from the textbook. This problem can be seen in evaluations that focus on knowledge for memorization and question types such as fill-in-the-blank, term definitions, short answer and essay questions. The answers can be found by opening a book, and students can cram at the end of the term without spending much energy on their studies at other times. Since most of the content is knowledge for memorization and rarely deals with practical problems, the evaluations fail to test the students' ability to solve practical problems. There are also some questions that have little to do with the requirements of teaching materials, and the evaluation strays from the textbook. As a result, the students' self-study and initiative are affected because of the failure of the evaluation to reflect their independent study and problem-solving abilities.
The advantages of distance education are not fully reflected in practical teaching evaluation, for it mostly adopts the methods of regular institutions of higher education and neglects the fact that most of the learners are on-the-job adults. This problem stands out more prominently in the practical teaching of literature, law and economics programmes, in which the practicals are made up of two parts: outside research and graduation thesis. If outside research can be said to have the traits of practical teaching, then the graduation thesis is for the most part theoretical and academic research. How can it be regarded as "practical" teaching? What are the "practical" contents of this practical teaching? Furthermore, most of the contents of outside research have little bearing on the students' vocation and actual work. Thus, the benefits of practical teaching are not achieved and the advantages of distance education are not fully exercised.