This practical application presentation shares the results and experience gained via applying Formative Assessment (FA) in a faculty development course about designing and teaching e-Learning courses. Due to the steady increase in enrollment and the desire to maintain educational qualities, the Egyptian universities encourage its teaching staff to utilize the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in teaching practices. Therefore, an e-Learning faculty development course about designing and teaching online courses has been developed. The course's central approach is to teach e-Learning by setting an e-Learning example, i.e. utilization of e-Learning to teach e-Learning. In other words, the teaching staff participants experience e-Learning as students in this course which runs for 15 weeks. The course has been taught to an average of 20 participants per offering several times over the past five years. The course primary goal was specified as enabling participants to design and implement instructionally sound distance learning materials for delivery over the Internet. The Moodle course management system (CMS) is utilized in delivering this course. The course has six modules and each module has about six short lessons with an average of 300 words per lesson. Each module has a multiple choice and matching questions bank. In addition, each module starts with a pre quiz and ends with a post quiz where questions are drawn randomly from this questions bank. Participants are allowed to take the pre quiz once and the post quiz five times. Statistics of quizzes are shared and discussed among participants. On the other hand, many academics, in their quest to enhance their students' learning, are diversifying the assessment tasks in order to broaden the skills assessed and to regularly inform students on their progress. Such diversification of assessments is fueled by the increase in utilizing the ICT to enhance education. This is mainly due to the fact that ICT can make collecting and analyzing data a routine and timely-undemanding task. FA, which researchers sometimes refer to as assessment for learning, is activities to collect and use the collected data. Therefore, FA includes activities performed by instructors and/or their students to collect feedback data. Another vital step of FA is using such data to modify the teaching and learning activities to enhance the students' learning. FA's modification of teaching can occur when the course is offered again, during the teaching of subsequent modules or lessons, or within the timeframe of teaching the current lesson or module. Accordingly, when it comes to timescale FA can be classified as long cycle, medium cycle, or short cycle. Reviewers of research in assessment have reported substantial learning gains when FA activities are introduced into teaching practices. However, researchers also indicate that short cycle FA can have the biggest learning impact as it is considered a continuous assessment process. As an example of a long cycle FA, when the course was first offered about five years ago, it was noticed that the average score for most modules' post quizzes was about 75% and participants were missing some vital points in the different lessons. Through online discussions it was noticed that many participants just scanned the short lessons of the course. This has lead to redesigning the lessons to include serious games. In addition, each lesson is now followed by a set of multiple choice and matching questions which are displayed randomly. Participants were allowed to answer such questions as much as they wish. However, each time the system receives a wrong answer, the system directs the learner back to the lesson for further review. A 70% score was required to pass the lesson and move to the next lesson. Now the average score for most modules' post quizzes has increased to about 85%. Dylan Wiliam and his colleagues identified five key strategies for formative assessment and they make a distinction between "strategies" and "techniques." These strategies are: 1) clarifying and sharing learning intentions and success criteria, 2) initiating effective activities and discussions that bring out evidence of learning, 3) providing feedback that help students' advancement, 4) triggering students to help each other in learning and 5) promoting students' ownership of their own learning. Now let us look at some of the techniques which are implemented in the course to fulfill these strategies. Although the objectives of each lesson and assignment were clearly stated by the beginning of the lesson or assignment, activities to clarify learning intentions go beyond that. In one activity participants designed a post quiz for a module and commented on their peers' design of the quiz. In addition, submitted assignments were shared and revisions were permitted to accommodate peers' observations. In the course evaluation, 88% of the participants agreed that it was clear to them what they were supposed to learn. The course relies on different forums with specific functions for initiating discussions among participants and receiving instructor's feedback. For example, the "Questions and Comments" forum had an average of over 150 different threads. Points were awarded for helping peers and answering other participants' questions. The course statistics indicate that each participant had an average of 10 forum postings per week. The course evaluation shows that there was unanimous agreement between participants that the forums in the course are an effective way for communicating with their peers and the instructor. 83% of the participants agree that such forums enhanced their understanding of the course material and encouraged deep thinking. 41% strongly agree and 59% agree that discussions helped them understand how their colleagues feel about the course. In conclusion, the final course questionnaire reflected participants' positive reaction as 59% strongly agree and 41% agree that the course stimulated their desire to learn. Also 47% strongly agree and 53% agree that the course improved their learning ability. All assessment statistics were presented to and discussed by participants.
