Creating Authentic Assessments for Online Music Courses

The need for identifying authentic assessments, or learning tasks, in online music courses is becoming integral as the rate of online music course offerings has been exponentially increasing. Supportive research also suggests that instructors teaching in higher education may require a paradigm shift in their pedagogical approach as they develop social-constructivist based authentic assessments for music subjects taught in an online environment. To assist with the understanding of both why and how to generate authentic assessment for a Bachelor's-level online music course, the chapter explores the nature of authentic assessment for music and Koh's Criteria for Authenticity in Authentic Assessment. Finally, to provide a practical exemplar of how online discussions can be used as an authentic learning tool in the online music class, an online discussion task for a songwriting class is identified and examined through the lens of Koh's characteristics.