The Covid-19 crisis continues to be severe, and the midterm exam period is nearing university. I have a lecture that runs independently every 5 weeks, so I had to finalise the grades every 5 weeks in the middle of the semester.
There may be many opinions as to whether you can conduct an online examination such as midterm or final exam online. I personally think it is possible, and I actually submitted the online graded scores to the university academic system. I will share the background and method of the online examination I conducted to those who are concerned.
The following environment and conditions seem to be required to conduct online classes.
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- You need an atmosphere to use online examination as a checking opportunity for the achievement of basic competency rather than differentiating learners.
- You need to ask the students to setup the camera that can supervise the minimum space of computer terminal, desk top area, and the students’s face.
- You need to use various types of quizzes rather than multiple choice or true/false quiz.
- You need to give the examination that differentiates its form from other student’s examination form, making the attempt to cheat fundamentally useless.
First of all, it is better to avoid applying a strict standard as a relative evaluation. Our country likes to encourage competition and lining up with scores because of the culture of college entrance exams. The right learning objects and check points to check their fulfillments are OK, but excessive competition can lead to bad results. Fortunately, in the Covid-19 environment, my university recommended the absolute criteria for grading rather than relative criteria. So, I would happily give a good grade as long as my students achieve the learning objectives. But for this, the teaching must be designed to focus the basic competency achievement. For example, if the learning object is like “the resistance values can be calculated using the relationship of voltage and current”, applying the law of Ohm gives a concrete criteria for the competency and the examination can be easily made. Even if the learning objective is described in the level of application and analysis of Bloom’s taxonomy, the measurement method can be specified as long as the learning objective is specified.
Students were told in advance that they would be supervise the test throughout the test with ZOOM’s video, and asked to secure the shooting angle so that the video camera could see all of the student’s face, computer screen, and desk, and view it on one screen. The picture below is a screen I created to explain to students the composition of the screen of a webcam shot with ZOOM. Many students have computers that do not have a webcam installed, so I recommended to use smartphone for desktop web cam setup, but there were also many students who cannot install it. When taking the online test, we asked to log in to the ZOOM with a purely by smartphone.
The picture below shows students how to adjust the camera angle using clippers, earphone straps and surrounding supports.
To be continued in the later article…..