Are You Listening to Students?

As we finish up the "Year of Education Online Work" (aka YEOW!), it's normal to reflect on what has had the biggest impact on student success, and what has not. On the positive side, the mobilization of institutions to provide access to teaching and learning has been phenomenal. Those who are worn out by the Zoom sessions and glitchy technology, still manage to find a way to be creative, experimental, and connected to students. Many are re-thinking the value of hybrid and online delivery from a positive mindset, not a deficit one—they are listening to their students with openness and making adjustments as the semester progresses.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are missed opportunities that abound in distance education, and authentic assessment is one of them. If faculty are the engine on a train and instruction is the cargo, assessment is the caboose. The caboose is coupled at the end of a freight train, intended to keep a lookout for load shifting, damage to equipment and cargo, and smoke. This blog post seeks to debunk the need for ed tech's caboose: surveillance technology. Faculty, keep writing your exams! Assessment should be classified as cargo (more learning is taking place), and not a lookout post that broadcasts to students, "I don't trust you!"

I've been in higher ed long enough to know, some will never be convinced ed tech software is designed to bust students and is not equitable. "Those who are not persuaded by the ethical and empathetic position should know that proctoring software fails miserably when checked against the science of learning too. Students have to deal with the extra cognitive burden of thinking about questions like 'Are my eyes looking in the right place?' 'I didn’t move my head too much, did I?' 'I’m not cheating but will the instructor think I am?' 'I opened another app because my kid's teacher just pinged me.' etc."

I highly encourage you to read, ​Refusal, Partnership, and Countering Educational Technology’s Harm  by Charles Logan, and the New York Times article, Keeping Online Testing Honest? Or an Orwellian Overreach? 

In April 2020, UC Berkeley provided instructors clear guidance on assessments in a COVID-era. Below are recommendations from this document, applicable to all segments of higher ed.

• Reduce the anxiety many students are feeling about the uncertainty of how remote exams are going to work. Keep in mind that this is not only unfamiliar but also likely inconsistent across their different classes. 
• Communication about the format might also deter misconduct. For example:
  • Use question banks and randomly shuffle the order of questions or answers
  • Open book/open notes: design exams to reflect mastery over recollection; set time limits
  • Final papers and take-home exams, for which students have more than 24 hours to complete. Require use of (only) course materials cited ; deterring use of internet
  • Construct scenarios to which students must apply knowledge derived
    from course lectures and readings. (Auto-gradable questions can be used.)
  • Provide a previously unseen document, source, dataset, etc., and ask how it could be used to support or contradict arguments
  • Allow extensions for students who receive accommodations. 
  • Deploy different versions of the exam created using  Question
    Banks
  • Argument-driven essay exams, curation assignments, applied assignments, and mock peer review assignments* can offer opportunities to assess student learning

* Mock peer review assignments give students an article/chapter/proposal related to the course and assign them the task of assessing its strengths and weaknesses and making recommendations using the ideas and concepts they learned in the class. This could be an article or chapter students have not seen before.

Cabrillo's installation of Proctorio is going away in December. What remains available to faculty is Turnitin's SimCheck (a similarity checker), and Respondus LockDown Browser (no live proctoring). We can continue to influence our institutions and define how we keep teaching in an equitable manner. We can also eschew using these tools that pit our students as adversaries, and support each other in using authentic assessment techniques and open education resources. See OER and Online Learning Faculty Quick Start Guide.