At Edinburgh, we are mostly moving to replacing our 3 hour exams with open book exams. We had initially intended these to be within 24 hour timeframes, but the University has mandated 48. Otherwise, things are as described in the previous post. So students will need to access an exam paper from a specific “start time” and submit their written answers no later than 48 hours than that start time. Easy! Having looked through the various options, I am going with the following 5 step plan based on Blackboard Assignments (rather than Turnitin), described below in terms of front of…
Category: Contingency Planning
Supporting student study in the “pivot” online
As mentioned in last post, we are focussing our current efforts on two strands – maintaining and promoting academic focus, and being active in student support, the second aspect being led by m’colleague Chris Mowat. In terms of academic focus, we are moving our closed book exams to open book. Of course this seems “easier”, but I think brings new challenges for students in their study. All that study time spent learning things off doesn’t seem as important now, and we are moving our focus to asking students to think about what questions are asking, showing their understanding concisely in answers,…
Managing and recovering from serious interruption to teaching
The internet has been full of amazing advice over the last few weeks on technical issues relating to moving online. I’ve nothing to add to that, but thought I might offer our perspective from managing the whole process overall. Below are some notes I have sketched out on how we have dealt and are continuing to deal with with events of the last few weeks. We are sharing these with other chemistry departments in UK/IE, and I am publishing here for more general interest. As well as sharing, I am keen to learn. What is missing, what isn’t clear… (what’s…