Tests and quizzes are often a go-to for instructors because they are fast, easy, efficient, and can cover a lot of content (Suskie, 2009). While tests and quizzes can be an effective, appropriate tool, they aren't always the right tool given what you want students to be able to do or know having had your course. Ask yourself...

Why am I including quizzes?
Do they align with my objectives and activities?
Do they effectively assess the kind of skills and knowledge I want my students to achieve in my course?

A good frame of reference is to consider the following. View/Download a PDF of the information below.

As you can see, many activities can be used for assessment, including portfolios, discussion forums, concept maps, diagrams, and presentations. Any tangible output from a learning activity can be assessed. Your choice of output—and the activity designed to generate that output—should be determined by your learning outcomes; this is just as true in the online environment as it is in the traditional classroom. First let's look at four qualities of assessments: Formative, Summative, Authentic, and Traditional; and how those qualities can be leveraged in different ways online.

Formative Assessment
Summative Assessment
Authentic Assessment
Traditional Assessment

Formative assessment is designed to provide feedback to both student and instructors about how well the learning process is going. Examples of formative assessment include self-tests, think-pair-share activities, and other low-risk assignments that allow students to demonstrate their knowledge, skills, and abilities.

Break it Down - Another option for formative assessment is to develop a larger, summative assessment (such as a final project) and break it into smaller components that can be turned in throughout the semester. This allows you to catch and address misconceptions, challenge students’ early analyses, and provide the opportunity for them to revise and resubmit each piece in a unified whole at the end of the semester or unit.

Self-Assessment - Formative assessment options such as ungraded self-tests using the Canvas Quizzes tool, think-pair-share activities in discussion forums or group spaces offer ways for students to assess their own understanding of course concepts.

Peer Reviews - An often overlooked option for formative assessment is peer review and feedback. When adequately scaffolded, peer review and critique can be a learning activity for both the student giving and the student receiving the peer review. The Assignments tool in Canvas provides options for blind peer review, or you can set up a Discussion where students post their thoughts or explanations or examples and then provide feedback to the person posting immediately above them. Students can be split into small groups where they can share an initial draft of a paper or project, each student gives feedback to all the other group members, and then they work together to synthesize their best efforts into a group report. Using the Group spaces in Canvas allows the instructor to see all of the initial drafts and student discussions while keeping each group separated from the other groups.

Summative assessment is designed to provide evidence that students have achieved a learning outcome or otherwise gained skills or knowledge throughout the course. End-of-semester exams, projects, portfolios, and presentations are often used to summatively assess students knowledge and skills. Courses that use a blend of summative and formative assessments provide more consistent support for learning than relying exclusively on a midterm and a final exam.

Final papers, projects, and portfolios have a variety of options in an online class. It's easy to incorporate media into Assessments, Discussions, and Pages - both in project instructions such as presenting a video case for analysis, and in student work such as recorded presentations, interviews, and demonstrations.

Authentic assessment asks students to demonstrate skills and knowledge by performing realistic tasks within the discipline. It provides opportunities to practice, consult resources, get feedback, and refine performances and products. Well-designed authentic assessments:

are realistic, using real-life situations with constraints, purposes, and audiences that impact what needs to be done.
require judgment and innovation to effectively solve unstructured problems
assess students' ability to use their knowledge and skills to negotiate a complex task as a whole.

Authentic assessment commonly uses strategies such as case studies, simulations, consulting (where students work with a real organization to explore a problem and recommend solutions that are evaluated by both the instructor and the organizational partner), internships, and service learning. However, depending on the discipline, authentic assessment can leverage simpler tools. For example,

situating statistical questions in the context of fantasy sports over several weeks of a season,
sending emails in a foreign language to request information about a travel destination and working with a small group to determine which destination would be the best vacation spot.

Traditional assessment (defined mainly as discrete-item testing) tends to emphasize the development of a body of knowledge or skill. Does a student know the who, what, when, and where? Traditional assessment strategies are helpful when you want students to identify one best answer and/or target isolated skills in a concrete fashion.

Something to keep in mind is that assessment methods do not have to line up with assessment approaches. For example, multiple choice test items can be developed to draw attention to contextual factors in an authentic case. In the same way, artificial and minimally contextualized cases can be used to identify who, what, when, and where without asking students to work with holistic, complex problems.

Online testing using the Canvas Quizzes tool provides auto-grading and auto-feedback features with a wider range of options than blue book or scantron testing. You can provide video, audio, and images as part of a question, and students can record or upload video, audio, and images as part of their answers. You can pre-set different feedback for different incorrect answers and even re-route students to a review page explaining the question in more depth.

References

Suskie, L. (2009). Assessing student learning: A common sense guide. (2nd Ed). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.