Creating Electronic Assessments in a Snap!

Many faculty have discovered that the electronic exam tool in a system like Bridges has a variety of benefits. To list a few:

• An electronic quiz can be used as a review tool by your students. You can set up a pool of review questions and then create a quiz that will draw a random set of questions from this pool each time a student accesses it. For example, a pool of questions could contain 30 questions and the quiz would draw out a random 10 questions. This means that every student gets a different quiz. In addition, you can set a quiz so that students can take it multiple times so students can go through it repeatedly to test their grasp of the content. You can even include feedback so that students understand why they got something wrong or right (no more multiple guess!) This strategy really helps the students focus their study on areas that are the weakest.
  
  
• If you notice that your students are coming to class ill-prepared, you can require them to take an electronic quiz before they come to class. You can set it so that the quiz becomes unavailable once class starts so that any student who has not taken it will get a zero (can be weighted as part of their participation grade if you'd like). This strategy assures that most of your students will at least skim through their reading before class.
  
  
• If you ordinarily give your students a quiz during class time, electronic quizzes are a great way to move this testing outside of class. This frees you up to dedicate the time with your students to more active learning activities.
  
  
• Pop quiz - or if you don't mind taking a few minutes out of class time, you can administer a pop quiz that will give you instant feedback on where your students are having difficulty. This strategy presupposes that all students have a laptop or other mobile device to access an online quiz.
  
  
• No more grading! If you normally use multiple choice exams, electronic quizzes or tests are a wonderful time saver in that Bridges will automatically grade the exam, produce the grade within minutes for the students (if you release the grades that way) and also record the grade in the online grade book. Students really appreciate this instant feedback.
  
  
• Continue to build question pools. Utilizing publisher test banks or your own questions, you can continue to add to your question pools from semester to semester. You can even ask students to submit questions for the pool or trade questions with your colleagues.
  
  
• Create a survey by using the same quiz template but without points. The survey will be anonymous but will aggregate all the answers so you can read through them. This is a great way to do course evaluations or to elicit opinions or preferences from your students.

So, you're probably thinking "Sure, but I bet this is a ton of work!" Well, it can be - however we purchased a site license this year for a product called Respondus that allows you to feed in quiz questions from a Word document, a publisher's testing program, or from another system like Blackboard, and automatically reformat them and upload them into your Bridges course. It can literally take minutes. How perfect is that! I think it may even be better than a scantron :)

If you are interested in installing your own copy of Respondus on your home or office computer, please send an e-mail to id@rwu.edu and request the download and passkey information. There will also be a tutorial session on using Respondus on Wednesday, October 20 from 1 - 2 p.m. For more info and to sign up, please see our October Workshop Schedule at: http://departments.rwu.edu/id/instruction/rwu_bridges_workshop_10_10.htm

Welcome back to Fall 2010!

Welcome to a new academic year. Why does the summer seem so long in May and so short in August?? I guess it's one of those age-old mysteries.

The Instructional Design team has had a busy summer with a lot of new things to share. First and foremost we are working with our talented IT colleagues to bring our Bridges course management system up for all courses for Fall 2010 powered by Sakai. Any faculty member who would like to use this new system with their classes is welcome to try it out. There are many wonderful features that will be sure to please everyone. Many faculty have already started exploring with an impressive number achieving Sakai certification and others attending the full-day virtual Summer Institute webinar held on August 20. The ID team is also offering instructor-led sessions, both virtual via Elluminate and on campus, during the month of August. It's not too late to sign up - check our registration info and topics at: http://www.timetosignup.com/rwusignup/signupsheet/1701 More on this to come...

Forty-six faculty and deans participated in the E-Portfolio Institute this summer that was generously funded by Provost Laura deAbruna. This four-day intensive workshop was offered in three separate series with two in June and one in August. Faculty explored the use of e-portfolios for learning, assessment and professional development. Our Bridges system offers an integrated e-portfolio option that will be a great benefit for faculty who opt to use it. One of the highlights of the Institute was the creation of a professional e-portfolio for each participant that included a digital story of each person's professional journey. What a wealth of talented and experienced faculty we have! Our hope is to have a website up soon that will feature some of these professional faculty e-portfolios so you all get to see them as well.

Upgrades are happening during the month of August to both our Panopto CourseCast lecture capture system as well as our Elluminate web conferencing system and we're also bringing back the Turnitin Anti-Plagiarism software that will be accessible to both Blackboard and Bridges users. Another new edition to our instructional toolbox is Respondus. This application does a great job of creating electronic quizzes that can be used in either Blackboard or Bridges. It's easy to learn and is a huge timesaver for faculty. We'll be offering some workshops on these and other topics during the Fall semester. Stay tuned....

I'd also like to put in a word for some of the work our Learning Commons partners have been doing over the summer. You all were sent a notice in late Spring about our new video collection. Veronica Maher can fill in anyone who missed the announcement about a substantial digital video collection that is now available to faculty or you can view the nifty video that Barbara Kenney produced at: http://www.youtube.com/user/BJKenney1. Also, our library now offers a texting option to connect to our library staff. How cool is that! To find out more about this option for our community go to http://library.rwu.edu/mobile/ Thanks to Sue McMullen for all her hard work on this new benefit. In addition our Center for Academic Development has brought two new people on board to replace retired administrative assistants. Wendy McDonough and Patsie Almonte will be a great support for the Center (although Wendy's help will be missed in the Library). Also the Center will feature a new tutor reporting application called TutorTrak that will automate tutor scheduling and tracking. Thanks to all the hard work by Karen Bilotti along with our IT colleagues in getting this set up.

So... lots to hear about. Looking forward to seeing all our faculty at the upcoming Fall Faculty Conference on August 31 and hearing all your stories about what you did for your summer vacation :)