Best Practices - http://subchange.pbworks.com/best-practices

How to Improve Assignments

1. Link your online discussions to your assignments. This increases rle http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eqm03411.pdf
2. Utilize "divergent" questions in your assignments - These questions allow students to explore different avenues and create many different variations and alternative answers or scenarios. Correctness may be based on logical projections, may be contextual, or arrived at through basic knowledge, conjecture, inference, projection, creation, intuition, or imagination. These types of questions often require students to analyze, synthesize, or evaluate a knowledge base and then project or predict different outcomes. source - http://www.uwsp.edu/education/lwilson/learning/quest2.htm

3. Utilize "convergent"  questions   Answers to these types of questions are usually within a very finite range of acceptable accuracy. These may be at several different levels of cognition -- comprehension, application, analysis, or ones where the answerer makes inferences or conjectures based on personal awareness, or on material read, presented or known.
source - http://www.uwsp.edu/education/lwilson/learning/quest2.htm

4. Utilize "evaluative" questions in your assignments. These types of questions usually require sophisticated levels of cognitive and/or emotional judgment. In attempting to answer evaluative questions, students may be combining multiple logical and/or affective thinking process, or  comparative frameworks. Often an answer is analyzed at multiple levels and from different perspectives before the answerer arrives at newly synthesized information or conclusions.
source - http://www.uwsp.edu/education/lwilson/learning/quest2.htm

5. Develop assignments which emphasize crtical thinking which includes asking the student to reflect their reasoning about subject matter, and content and  on the purpose, solution of a problem, assumptions,  point of view, data, information, evidence, concepts, ideas, inferences, interpretations, conclusions, implications and consequences. source -  http://mathematics.clc.uc.edu/Vislocky/Critical%20Thinking%20part%20of%20syllabus.htm