Category: Teaching

Online exam cheating? Don’t spy on your students; make better tests

The COVID-19 pandemic means more online exams than ever before. But privacy shouldn’t be sacrificed for academic integrity.

Cheating on exams is the biggest academic integrity concern for online classes. Schools and universities have invested in all sorts of security measures, from ineffective lockdown browsers to webcam monitoring that students call “an invasion of privacy.”

Requiring a lockdown browser and webcam surveillance isn’t just overkill for academic integrity, it’s invasive and discriminatory toward low-income students. That’s because those security measures often run into compatibility issues with older computers and Chromebooks, the most common budget laptop.

Automated surveillance also reinforces stigma that make students apprehensive about participating in online education. Don’t have the luxury of a quiet room to attend online classes? Does being home mean you’re responsible for taking care of family members coming in and out of your camera shot? Automated systems will flag those circumstances as suspicious, spiking anxiety in an already anxious time. Faculty can override them, but that still means applying extra scrutiny to students who have done nothing to warrant it.

I don’t require webcam surveillance on account of the compatibility issues and – let’s be honest – the creepiness of the whole thing. Nor do I require a lockdown browser when most students have an unlocked smartphone sitting right next to them.

The solution doesn’t have to be a surveillance state. Teachers have plenty of less intrusive options when it comes to exam settings, and the style of the assessment itself.

Continue reading “Online exam cheating? Don’t spy on your students; make better tests”

5 tips from my first week teaching online from home during coronavirus closures

Two days after I published “8 tips for setting up and teaching online classes during coronavirus closures,” my campus transitioned online. Here are some of the lessons I learned from the first week to give those of you about to begin an idea of what to expect.

Two days after I published “8 tips for setting up and teaching online classes during coronavirus closures,” my campus made the decision to transition online due to COVID-19 for the remainder of the semester. After two days of canceled classes and a weekend to prepare (not great, but better than some peer institutions in our state), our first week of online instruction just concluded. Here are some of the lessons I learned to supplement my original tips and give those of you about to begin an idea of what to expect.

1. Explain what’s changing

Students need to know how your course is going to work moving forward. In my original article, I suggested:

It might also be helpful to draft a temporary syllabus, explaining how existing class policies, schedules, and assignments will change during the period of online instruction. In everything, clarity will help.

After making one and talking to students about their other courses, I’d strongly encourage this as something worth the time investment, even as our time is limited. Not only is the syllabus useful to students, but it may also help with grade disputes that arise from any changes you institute.

I created an “Online Transition Update” syllabus, highlighting (literally, in yellow) parts that were changing (e.g., attendance requirements, scheduling of exams), and removing some of the unchanged boilerplate stuff that makes syllabi eight pages long and unreadable.

I did the same for instruction sheets and rubrics for major assignments that changed, such as a service learning project that can no longer include an in-person pitch to our community partner (☹).

In line with Original Tip #1 (“Make it easy to navigate”), I put all of these new documents in an “Online Transition Info” folder and put it right at the top of our online content so it’d be the first thing students see when they log on. In line with Original Tip #2 (“Make it accessible”), that folder also included a video walkthrough of the Blackboard course and links to all the different ways students could contact me and each other.

2. Communicate early and often

The morning my classes went live, I posted an announcement to my course page on Blackboard, which was also emailed to all students. Four quick points:

1. Here’s how to use the course (direct to the “Online Transition Info” folder)

2. Here’s what we’re learning about this week (direct to the week’s learning module)

3. Here’s what’s due this week (direct to the week’s assignment folder)

4. Here are the opportunities to join us live this week if you’re able (include links to live sessions)

Continue reading “5 tips from my first week teaching online from home during coronavirus closures”

8 tips for setting up and teaching online classes during coronavirus closures

Suddenly teaching online because of COVID-19? Learn from me, a Blackboard certified online instructor – or perhaps more relevant – a guy who suddenly got thrown into online teaching with no idea what to do.

Update: Since this post, I’ve transitioned my classes for online delivery, and shared 5 more tips from the first week of working from home.

Universities are closing campuses and moving classes online to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus, or COVID-19. Positive cases are on the rise, both because of spread and increased availability of testing.

On that trajectory, it’s likely that many of us will be doing some online teaching in the very near future. And while universities act like this is the simplest transition in the world, it’s not. Online instruction is an entirely different animal, and throwing professors who haven’t done it before into the fire is not going to work.

My first job after completing my doctorate was as a full-time online lecturer, something I had never done before. It was a ton of work, but in the end I found a groove of teaching courses that students enjoyed and I felt like were meeting the course objectives I would have set in a traditional classroom.

So, learn from me, a Blackboard certified online instructor… or, if you prefer… learn from me, a guy who suddenly got thrown into online teaching with no idea what to do. Continue reading “8 tips for setting up and teaching online classes during coronavirus closures”

The Media and the Death Penalty in Arkansas

The world watched as Arkansas attempted a rapid series of executions. University of Central Arkansas Communication students spoke to media witnesses. Here’s what they learned…

The State of Arkansas attempted to execute eight men in an 11-day span in April 2017. The rapid pace, brought on by the imminent expiration of the lethal injection drugs, drew national and international attention to a correctional facility along a rural highway near a town of 523 people.

This semester, beginning four months later, I taught a special topic course on public relations, the press and public affairs at the University of Central Arkansas. We chose the executions as our local issue to examine, looking at the relationship between journalists, government institutions, and advocacy groups in framing and disseminating information to the public.

One of our goals was to communicate what we learned to the larger campus community. As I began to schedule possible guests, they were requesting the same dates. And so we decided to bring four broadcast journalists on the same day and hold a public forum. To my knowledge, it marks the first time since the executions that those witnessing and reporting on them have come together to speak about those experiences.

On Wednesday, November 15, we welcomed three witnesses – one from each of the TV news groups in Little Rock – and one public radio reporter who reported heavily on open-information struggles between media and the Arkansas Department of Corrections.

The event was entirely prepared and implemented by students in the class. Their PR know-how secured a location and resources for the event, as well as promoted it on campus and to the surrounding community (here’s their news release; you’ll see some of the other materials below). Meanwhile, they used their journalistic skills to research the executions and the major players involved.

On the day of the forum, students handled everything from seating and administering extra credit to streaming, facilitating media covering the event, and moderating our panel.

It’s a proud day for a professor when all I have to do is invite the crowd to give them a hearty round of applause at the end of a job well done.

You can watch the archive of our Facebook Live stream here:

Thanks to some dedicated live tweeters, we have quite a collection of highlights from the event. Enjoy… Continue reading “The Media and the Death Penalty in Arkansas”

Trust in a fake news world

“Fake news” defined an election, and continues to play a prominent role in the presidency of the candidate that most benefited from all of its forms. Gather a bunch of journalism educators together, and it’s no surprise we’re going to want to talk about it. That’s what happened in Chicago at the 2017 annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). Continue reading “Trust in a fake news world”