Thursday 19 September 2013

The future of study - online exams


Now I'm probably a bit behind the times here, as I haven't concerned myself with the methods of universities since I finished my last courses almost 13 years ago. All I know is that back then, we did most everything by hand. Computers were available in the labs, with a rather harried punk chick who assisted us hapless newbies into their mysteries. I often wondered what became of her.

Anyway, I was interested to read that exams, that final bastion of handwriting, are starting to be trialled online at a local university. A webcam monitors the student's attention to ensure there is no cheating. I agree with the thought that I would find it hard to write by hand for three straight hours these days.
"We've digitised our curriculum heavily at Massey but the one aspect still a bit of a contradiction is we then ask people to sit down and write for ... hours on paper. There's a physical issue about people's ability to do that and we think we have to invest in this technology to work out how we're going to address that problem in the future." ~ Professor Mark Brown
Check out the whole article here.

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