How Do We Make Remote Learning Better? Listen to the Students
Between April 21 and May 14, 2020, we surveyed 3,113 undergraduate college students from 31 universities across the U.S. about their remote learning experiences.* The survey was anonymous, took 10 minutes to complete, and consisted primarily of closed-ended questions. Students had the option of writing in answers about their experiences with remote learning at the end. Their answers should guide how we, as educators, make remote learning better for this upcoming school year — for our students, and for ourselves. This 5-part series is a collaboration with Amy Jordan, Alyvia Walters, and Luna Laliberte.
Lesson #5. Develop Evaluations That Feel Fair
Evaluating students is never easy, and it has become even more difficult in a remote environment. Testing always raises trust issues between students and faculty. Making a remote term less fraught may mean changing your approach.
Your trusty timed exam format may no longer work. Students reported that professors restricted time allowed for online exams to try to prevent students making them open-book in the spring. But, as a student noted, this “hurts the ones who wouldn’t have [cheated] anyway, because we now have to rush through exams and have less time to check over answers.” Timed exams are especially difficult for students with unreliable internet access. When each question takes longer to load, there’s less time to take the test. And if the test stops loading entirely, students fear their technology’s failure will lead to their own. Students with learning differences or who are taking coursework in a second language were especially likely to report anxiety over having less time to show what they know.
Level the playing field. Students feel that cheating is so rampant in online evaluations that they may be disadvantaged by not following suit. One student commented, “I was put in a position of deciding to be honest and have my test be graded against cheaters (and suffer), or join them. We should not have to choose between our integrity and a grade that honestly reflects our ability to learn.” Reevaluate your syllabus from this perspective. Are there graded assignments that may make for easy cheating? If so, how can you remedy that to protect students’ integrity? Also consider whether a curve still fairly reflects student learning in relation to their peers in a remote environment; many worried that curves incentivized dishonesty in the spring.
Open book, open minds. Students also had creative suggestions for evaluations better suited to remote learning. Rather than simply assigning more work or making traditional exams more difficult than they normally would be, consider an open-book alternative. Evaluations that require students to apply key course concepts, rather than merely provide definitions for those concepts, are a highly effective way to do this. Have students engage with course materials in order to explain a current event, or solve a practical challenge, with a relevant variation on problem-based learning to flex their critical thinking muscles. Just make sure not to rely on semester-long group projects when you do!
New to this series? Start at the beginning with Lesson #1.
*More information on methodology: The survey was developed by Vikki Katz and Amy Jordan, approved by the Rutgers University Institutional Review Board and ran for three weeks on the Qualtrics platform, between April 21 and May 14, 2020. A total of 3,113 undergraduates from 31 U.S. universities that had shifted to remote instruction participated. Ninety-four percent were between ages 18 and 24. Sixty-five percent identified as female and 35% male, somewhat more skewed than the general 4-year college population (56% female and 44% male, according to the National Center for Education Statistics). A total of 10% of participants identified as African-American, 18% as Asian, 13% as Hispanic, and 62% as White; an additional 17% selected multiple races or ethnicities. The project was supported by the School of Communication and Information, and by the University Research Council, at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
