excelsior online classes

Do all excelsior courses have online exams?

 

my experience

In my experience with the Excelsior online classes, Motivational Psychology and Biodiversity, there are two papers, one of which is a full-fledged term paper, the other a shorter ~1000 word document, that comprise a significant portion of the grade,mandatory weekly discussion board participation that feels like everyone posting the weeks homeowrk and then engaging in artificial and inane discussion of each others work for 20% of the course grade, small percentage of grade multiple choice quizzes, and midterm and final exams that may or may not have a multiple choice section, but which largely consist of fairly difficult essay questions for which you have a four day window from their availability to submit. You could call this exam format online, in the sense that it is unproctored and the essay questions become available online and answers are submitted through a dropbox, but it is more of a take home essay exam format, equally as difficult as the take home exams I dreaded as traeditional student many years ago.

There are multiple markers for the course and grades are posted fairly quickly, but quality of instructor in their participation on the boards and in the meaningfulness and quality of comments to graded submissions can vary greatly.

In any case, I don;t find Excelsior online courses any easier than my proctored exam classes, but I intensely dislike the discussion boards. The discussions might be less artificial if everyone didn't have to post an initial response to every question every week, but since we do... it doesn't lend itself to meaningful discussion.

 

My experience differs in that the two courses I took (Project Management and College Math), did not have the annoying thread requirement. All homework, and tests for both of these courses were online, open book, unproctored.