I'm sure everyone involved in course instruction is facing the same issue. The past 2 weeks have been rather hectic as I rush to reform the course and adapt it to a purely online course. It is certainly more daunting and more of challenge for science courses that have lab components.
I find myself not struggling as much as a few of the other faculty members that had never taught anything remotely or online. I've had some experience in teaching blended or hybrid courses, so I have had experience with conducting either asynchronous courses, synchronous courses via video-conferencing app such as WebEx. So for me, the work involves adapting my material that was meant for an on-site course into something more suitable for an online course.
As for the labs, I already have a collection of "virtual labs" that I had written previously that make use of the various online experiments such as the ones fro PhET, etc. So those actually require only minor rewrites and tweaks and they are good to go.
My main struggle and something that I still find a bit dubious, are the exams. I still do not believe that students will not cheat if they can when doing online tests and exams, no matter how much one tries. This is my main issue with any online courses, the ability to determine if the work was truly done by the student him/herself. I have heard many anecdotal cases where for the same course and same exam, students who took the online version scored significantly higher exam scores than the students who took the exam in class. So make your own conclusion there. I've written my exams in such a way that the questions are somewhat "unique" and can't be easily "googled". But there is no way to prevent the student from having someone else helping or even outright doing the exam for him/her. At the end, there is only so much one can do given the circumstances.
As of now, all I'm trying to do is survive the remainder of the semester with the new workload, and to stay healthy. I wish the same for all of you as well.
Zz.
3 comments:
I wonder how easy it is to produce automated "unique exams"? I'm imagining something where eg using multiple choice questions they get selected at random separately for each student from a pool of questions (with randomized orders of answers). Or perhaps in questions that involve "plugging in numbers" the software chooses randomly from some suitable numerical range? It depends a lot on the subject to what extent such type of questioning is feasible, and dedicated enough cheaters would likely find a way to get some advantage. But it at least would throw up a barrier to issues of simple "answer copying" and so perhaps if there is limited time available throw a wrench into highly coordinated cheating.
Terry,
For courses that make use of the publisher's site for HW/quizzes, etc., many, if not most, of the problems and questions usually come with numbers that are slightly different for each person attempting the question. So this is pretty common in many cases.
In my case, that isn't the issue. Rather, I'm trying to make sure they won't find one of my questions with something identical or similar that they can find by googling the web. So what I ended up doing is either come up with my own questions, or take something that is familiar, and simply changed the wording. If they cut-and-paste to do a google search, they often will not end up (at least not that easily) finding the exact problem.
It's not foolproof, but it's a small barrier. If they spend too much time googling and trying to find something similar to copy, they might run out of time to finish the exam.
Zz.
The prof for the QFT course that I took last year did a 24hr take home exam. I would characterize that exam as being made so hard, esoteric, and long that there was essentially no way you could cheat as you'd be too busy scrambling to attempt to apply what you learned to the problems he posed -- you were better off just trying the problems and doing your best at them.
Some of those problems could probably have been found in texts or papers somewhere, but the chances of you being a skilled enough researcher to find those solutions in the time given, and still be able to attempt the other problems, were pretty slim, despite the long duration of the test.
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