How many of you educators are encouraging students to join the DL bandwagon? I like to give my students a sample of what it'd be like with a few online units, but always assume they'll be choosing the B&M route. I could do more to promote DL-but should I? Do they need to experience the traditional campus first?
From context your students are undergraduates. I teach on a graudate school of business and most of our students are over 30 (average age of 10,000 students in 38). About 14 per cent have never been to university and DL is their first experience. Over 23 per cent have already achieved post-graduate degrees (MSc, MD and PhD), mainly from campus universities, and the rest have Bachelor degrees, mainly from campus universities). So with the exception of a few, most of them are new to DL, if not to university. We are working with some departments in the University to set up distance learning bachelor degrees. My prejudice is that our market will be the over 30 segment who have not been to university at all. So clearly I do not believe you have to have gone to a campus university first, with the qualification that I am not sure there is a viable market (many thousands per course) for students under 25 in the DL mode just yet. Young students with no work experience will probably feel more comfortable in campus programmes; older students have less inclination to go the campus route (partying, etc.,) because they know they ain't going to live forever (an illusion common in earlier age groups). Should you encourage DL awareness? Yes. And to an extent you already do so, though you probably do not see it that way, when you give them 'assignments' to do off site and out of sight. That is a DL mode! (I refrain from my usual comments about the assessment integrity of such activity as that is not the theme of your question.)
I'm not an educator, so I won't comment on what Bruinsgrad should be doing. But from the student's perspective: The dividing line between DL and B&M is growing fuzzier and fuzzier. It's increasingly common for on-campus students to take a few individual DL classes, often for scheduling reasons. And many (most?) classroom-based courses have webpages and online materials, ranging from a bare-bones syllabus to readings, links, illustrations, worked examples, quizzes, discussion groups and graded on-line assignments. While DL is still something exotic for us old farts, the kids already consider it routine to access class pages from their laptops. I don't know if that makes them "DL students" in the Degreeinfo sense of 'earn a degree without ever setting foot on campus', but the distance medium certainly isn't unfamiliar to many of them.
Young students I should have clarified the student population. I assist high school students in researching and preparing for college. I'm a big fan of DL, but have been hesitant to offer it as an alternative for these kids, until they've had the traditional experience.
From my perspective as a high school educator, I have on several occasions pointed out the opportunities available through distance ed to students. However, few seem interested and not surprisingly so. Most rightly expect all the fringe benefits of university attendance; the social and cultural experience as well as the education. It strikes me that distance ed is fine for mature students in employment or those doing post grad. Whilst some undergrads might do some courses distance or online I doubt that we shall be seeing those venerable institutions of stone clad ivy or red brick shutting up shop at least I certainly hope not! Roy Maybery
I think it's a good idea to expose high-school students to DL. Why not let them and their parents know about all the options that are available? There may, after all, be some students who will think that higher education is out of their reach because of their situation will not allow them to pursue a traditional college education. The comparison of the traditional college experience to DL is irrelevant, if the former is not attainable. Furthermore, incorporating some online units into traditional high-school curricula may be beneficial to students whose learning style best matches that form of delivery. While adults may be more likely than others to need the flexibility that DL offers, due to employment or family situations, younger students may benefit from a varied approach to educational delivery, as well. * ____ *See, for example, Milken Family Foundation "West Virginia Study Results". This article reports on the results of a 1999 study conducted by the West Virginia Department of Education, in which it was found that incorporating technology into school curricula can improve student academic performance. See, also Wadi D. Haddad and Sonia Jurich."ICT for Education: Potential and Potency." In Technologies for Education: Potentials, Parameters, and Prospects. Wadi D. Haddad and Alexandra Draxler, Eds. Paris: UNESCO, 2002. This is an overview of how some schools have used infromation and communications technologies (ICT) in order to expand access, promote efficiency, improve the quality of teaching and learning, and improve system management.
A large part of a grade for some of the courses in my current program (graduate Computer Science) is given for programming assignments, done independently. Frankly, I can't see what you can substitute them with: you can't learn the subject (say "Compiler construction") without doing projects and there's no way a project of any significant size can be completed in class ("proctored" or otherwise), even in "three hours". Moreover, the concept of "closed book" is completely meaningless: noone in their right mind keeps all information needed to complete the program in his head. This is what "online help" is for. For all these reasons, your usual comments always seem too general and questionable to me. I guess my experience is not unique to the CS domain. Please don't take my comments personally.
Yet plagiarism of programming assignments is as much a problem as is plagiarism of essays, papers, etc. So I believe that closed-book exams are still valuable for assessment, though the programming assignments are essential as formative tools.
You are of course absolutely right (and all assignments-heavy classes I took so far have one or more of these). However, closed-book exams alone are clearly insufficient, and Prof Kennedy seem to suggest otherwise. I might misinterpret him, of course.
Nobody has to accept any generalisations, especially at the boundaries where they cannot be made to apply. The issue you raise is most interesting and I asked our Director of IT about your points. He confirmed that large projects in IT cannot be examined in 3hrs and a lot of programming code is written for you on web sites - apparently there are algorithms that are so famous you could not improve on them and should not try. Now this creates a fuzzy boundary between your own and somebody else's work, which I accept but this only compounds the attestation of fitness problem by devaluing its reliability. If a person's work cannot be fairly assessed because of the real prospect that it was not the candidate's how do we assess it? If we ignore the real possibility it was not the candidate's work and grade it anyway we compromise the integrity of the assessor institution's attestation. We could multiply a Computer Degree's validity by some constant to discount its grade to allow for the real chance that it was somebody else's work. From my file of cheating, it appears not to be confined only to computer science, so perhaps we are moving towards the general discounting of the degree as a measure of academic performance, except in the cases of degree exams that can be stated to be the candidates' own work with a very small probability of it not being so. Simply eliminating off site and out of sight assignments that count towards the final grade would improve the reliability factor, provided the final exams are closed book, 3 hrs, no choice of questions, independently invigilated and so on. It seems to me that adding to the risks of fraud is not wise. Our IT Director said he would know fairly quickly if a new programmer knew the hard engineering basics of IT, but he offered me no advice on how to make his long experience scalable in an exam regime.
I agree with this. Many don't have the option to go to a B&M school. IMHO, if one(young students) has the option and ability of doing either, I would reccomend B&M at least for maybe the first few years because they can gain good life and social skills, get hands on training at a reputable school, and look more promising to a potential employer who may balk at a DL only degree. If one has at least some campus time then they may well be looked at as one "finishing" their degree which seems to be more acceptable to those whom I've talked to on this subject. As for older students, most everyone knows that it's real hard to go to school with a family and working full time so they seem to be much more positive in this area. When I tell people I'm going the DL route at my company they give me that "look", but when I mention that I've been to three years of B & M and am finishing my degree then they say, oh that's nice. It does give it a positive light. Nevertheless, if one can't afford a B & M school, then this is most certainly an option and a lot better than nothing!
Well, there's still the need to evaluate software engineering skills of a student, and to TEACH him those skills through practice. It seems that we have a tradeoff between attestation integrity and the need to actually teach the students. I like your argument in favour of your own institution's methodology. You do raise valid points. I feel that in practice, an experienced professor will find the way to minimize cheating. One obvious way is to change the specifications for a project. In Compilers class, for example, students implement some rather standard programs (lexer, parser, intermediate code generator and final code generator). The professor can change the particulars of source language, intermediate language type (and precise format), parsing method and target machine. Burden of changing someone else's implementation will quickly approach the complexity of duing it yourself. Another trick is simply testing knowledge acquired while doing an assignment (in proctored setting). One can learn to, say, construct table-driven parser from the textbook, but completing the project can actually simplify the endeavour. None of those tricks are fool-proof, of course, and cheating can and do occur. I see no choice but to live with this fact, while trying to enforce the integrity by all means available. BTW, had someone tried to critique ESB exam regime? After all, skills of your students are never tested in projects that take longer than 3 hours, collaboration skills not tested, research skills etc... It can be argued that such a system is inadequate (I have no real knowledge of EBS pedagogy and therefore do not make such a claim).
Stanislav: "BTW, had someone tried to critique ESB exam regime? After all, skills of your students are never tested in projects that take longer than 3 hours, collaboration skills not tested, research skills etc... It can be argued that such a system is inadequate (I have no real knowledge of EBS pedagogy and therefore do not make such a claim)." Bearing in mind that this thread is about introducing students to DL and it is in danger of veering off message following your contribution on examining IT subejcts, I hesitate to give a full answer to your fair question. Perhaps the administrators will allow a short response. Yes, many have critiqued a final exam only regime for the MBA programme. I can discuss these criticisms on another thread should you choose. Collaboration skills are not tested as by definition DL students are not located in one place - if they are it ceases to be DL. On line 'tutorials' highlight response skills not collaboration. Working in groups on line has interesting group dynamics but they are not really testable as process skills but only as outcomes in which, again by definition, the interactive process skills are buried. Moreover, with an average age of 38 rather than 18-22, we aredealing with people with skill sets already formed (except for those who need counselling). The MBA is not a research degree like and MSc or DBA, though you could add in projects (with all the problems I regularly highlight). Research degrees test research skills but research elements in a bachelor or MBA which are conducted off site and out of sight are to shallow and wide open to mass fraud. Lastly, "simply testing knowledge acquired" by exam is not a sound pedagogy. The exam starts with the assumption that the knowledge has been acquired (summed in the examinable content of the course) and then tests for application, synthesis and evaluation by unsighted questions directed at any parts of the knowledge base under invigilated conditions. Memory testing it is not. Whether your subject is amenable to such testing is open to question and I agree you have raised some fundamental questions in assessing IT courses. I do not have an answer to that question but I am willing to consider your case.
