Good Practices for Remote Safeguards Courses’ Assessment Activities

For the past two years, safeguards courses sponsored by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) NA-241 Office of International Nuclear Safeguards Human Capital Development (HCD) program have been conducted remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While lectures are relatively easy to adapt to a remote environment, facilitating assessment and evaluation activities online with the same effectiveness as in-person activities presents difficulties, specifically from the point of view of engaging students, promoting understanding of concepts discussed in the lectures, evaluating the degree to which those concepts are learned, and fostering a sense of community amongst the course participants. In this paper we review how effective the various assessment activities of recent remote HCD-funded safeguards courses were in engaging and assessing remote learners in an interactive, collaborative, and experiential way. We summarize lessons learned from facilitating remote assessment activities and consider how to improve future facilitation and delivery of such activities, including additional ways to effectively engage participants remotely. LLNL-ABS-832003