What kind of questions one should ask students in the context of online learning?

• Evaluating students in online learning context

• Fact-finding questions should be abandoned

Of course, fact-finding questions should be avoided, and not only for online course but also for other forms of teaching. These kinds of questions have limited value in a long run and have been proven to be trivial for someone have access to the Internet.

Before I put my suggestions, I am still wondering what is the educational level we are talking about (school or higher education)? For clarity, I will put some examples on both educational levels based on my research and also based on my personal experience.

• Evaluating students in early school education to satisfy their curiosity

In the context of early school education, I assume that children will be glad to use technology in learning and the teacher can count on their curiosity and passion to learn with no need to enforce additional stress. For example, in Finland, a teacher asked first graders to record their voice while reading lessons texts, but each recording should be one minute in length. Parents and children may be unaware of the teacher’s intention. After three to four recordings, the teacher told the children that they have made a progress (or not) in term of their reading speed because she depicted the number of words each student read over the recordings.

• Plagiarism is rampant behavior in higher education

• Essay writing and reflection question may fail to engage students

In the context of higher education, the case is somehow complicated. I completely agree that academic dishonesty (e.g., cheating, plagiarism, ghost-writing, unpermitted cooperation, and leaking information about tests other have not yet taken) is rampant behavior among students. However, I did not agree that questions that ‘test insight, orientation and reasoning’ in general would be much better than fact-finding questions. Actually, that was one of our finding in the study below:

Individual learning experience in connectivist environment: A qualitative sequence analysis

• Only creative and practical tasks succeed to engage students

• Open-book questions could engage students in online learning

• Oral examination serves teachers with small number of students

We asked the participants in the experiment to solve 10 different questions, ranging in difficulty from easy to very complex. Only creative question (questions with no answer on the Internet) and problem-solving and practical tasks (which require students to generate products) have succeeded to engage the participants cognitively. A further qualitative analysis of our data (to be reported shortly in a study intended be submitted to Computers & Education journal) revealed extreme cases of plagiarism among students. For example, one participant was asked to investigate and to report on a given famous figure (a social activist), and also to write her opinion about him. What was then was that the student copied even the opinion of one of the commenters on the activist website as if it were its own. In short, there is no way one can precisely predict their students’ behaviors in a fully connected environment. Even though, I would recommend you think of open-book questions. Moreover, if your number of students is not so big, you may think of oral examination (10-15 mins/student) but, of course, with unique questions for each student. Controversial, creative and unsolved tasks could be other options, as connectivists has long recommended.

Understanding knowledge network, learning and Connectivism

 

Keywords:

• Connectivism

• Assessment

• Evaluation

• Online learning

• Distance education

• elearning

• Higher education

• School education

• Plagiarism

• Questions

• Tasks