4.3 What’s an Assessment Package?

When sharing open textbooks, one of the most valuable course ancillaries is an assessment package. This is the collection of assignments, activities, and rubrics that future instructors can use to assess student achievement of course level learning outcomes.

What is it for?

At its best, the Assessment Package offers future educators a transparent and easily adaptable pathway for student engagement that:

• aligns with the textbook learning outcomes, which have been aligned with the state learning outcomes
• centers the experiences of traditionally underserved learners through the use of Universal Design for Learning, Transparency in Teaching and Learning, and Culturally Responsive Teaching
• incorporates open educational practices, or opportunities for students to generate knowledge and openly license their own course work for future users

In this project, an Assessment Package is a folder in Google Docs with shareable links to all assignment prompts, activity prompts, and rubrics. This is how course pilot instructors will:

1. Share assignments, activities, and rubrics with their instructional designer for brainstorming and review prior to moving content into the learning management system (LMS)
2. Share assignments, activities, and rubrics with Workforce Advisory Board members in the second year of the grant cycle. After the course pilot is complete, Workforce Advisory Board members will offer feedback and suggestions to align assignments with workforce skills and scenarios. Using this feedback, as well as feedback from students and their own experience of teaching, course pilot instructors can revise the assessment package before attaching an open license to it.
3. Share assignments, activities, and rubrics as openly licensed outputs in a course pack after the third year of the grant cycle. After a course iteration is complete, course iteration instructors revise and prepare their assessment package for sharing with the revised textbook.

Sample Course Assessment Package

In this sample Assessment Package for CCJ 399: Mental Illness and Crime [Google Folder], course pilot instructor Shanell Sanchez (Southern Oregon University) shares the grading rationale and assignment prompt for major assessments in her course.

The Assessment Package will be linked in the Open Course Pack site that is associated with the openly licesned textbook.