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You are correct this is a staff failure, the failure lies in using the software in the first place. If we agree that the current situation is so exceptional th

You are correct this is a staff failure, the failure lies in using the software in the first place. If we agree that the current situation is so exceptional that we need to fully monitor all students taking exams (and that's still a big if, I also am a university teacher, we don't use any monitoring system. There are other solutions as well such as taking oral exams...), one could simply hire a bunch of proctors who watch the video feed. Considering the savings that universities have made they could send one to everyone's home even.

mkl 6y ago
Copy-pasting from my other comment: > I see it as a currently-necessary annoyance, as the least bad option. The alternatives have greater deficiencies: human invigilators using Zoom etc. don't scale (institution experience); oral exams don't scale (my experience moderating such assessments); no invigilation leads to cheating (by few students but enough to be a real problem, especially for professional qualifications - my direct experience and institution experience); shutting down education until the pandemic's over is unfeasible. Last year, we tried not monitoring, we tried Zoom invigilation, we tried orals. Lockdown rules prevented us from sending in-person invigilators in one semester (and we couldn't have hired even 10% of what that would take) and the other we invigilated in person like normal. We are spending more than ever before, so there are no savings. All of these methods failed. This year, grudgingly, we have moved to proctoring software.
- scrollaway 6y ago
  The bar to use such invasive, buggy, user hostile spyware should be a lot higher. Just because this solves your problem (it clearly doesn't) doesn't mean it's a good idea. Killing half the students also solves your problem. You need to live in a world where this is not an option, period. What's the next solution then? People forget there are always more manual solutions even if they take more time...
- amcoastal 6y ago
  As both a TA and a student during the virus, we did better and so can you. Stop trying to shoehorn your in person lesson plans and exams into virtual and design new material and tests. Dont be a shitty teacher just because you're too lazy to change your now dated ways.
  - mkl 6y ago
    Please don't make assumptions or resort to baseless insults. We have designed entirely new fully-online interactive courses in response to this. In other courses, where we have e.g. 640 local students and 10 online, they need to sit the same test for it to be fair.
    - amcoastal 6y ago
      Sounds like you need to design an online version of that course if you're going to allow online students to take it.
      - mkl 6y ago
        The expense isn't justified for 10 students, since this may well be the only year that course is offered online. They are not getting a bad deal out of it. The fully new online courses are first year, and the expectation is that students will come to study in person for the remaining years of their degree. The other course I'm talking about is second year, but those 10 students can't get into the country at present - a temporary obstacle.
        moistbar 6y ago
        > The expense isn't justified for 10 students, since this may well be the only year that course is offered online. So instead you'd rather waste money on a barely-functional piece of software that actively invades your students' privacy?
        mkl 6y ago
- aravindet 6y ago
  > human invigilators using Zoom etc. don't scale (institution experience) Could you explain further why this did not scale? I'm imagining an invigilator watching video feeds using an interface similar to, say, that used by security guards to monitor surveillance feeds. I would think that a single human invigilator can monitor more students using this system than an in-person setting. What am I missing?
  - mkl 6y ago
    In person, a single proctor can monitor 200+ students; our eyes capture far more detail and field of view than computer screens, and our peripheral vision is tuned for detecting unexpected motion. With Zoom, either you have one meeting with everyone in it, in which case students can look directly at each other, or you have a separate meeting for every student, in which case you need a large number of devices, all visible at the same time. I can't see the former scaling past 49, and I can't see the latter scaling past 20. If you had some software designed specifically for this and several big screens, it would still be pretty hard to pay anywhere near as close attention as you can in person. On top of that, there's always a bunch of annoying mucking about getting set up for Zoom invigilation: angle of camera, light, checking environment, etc. All that needs communication to and fro, and it can take up to 5 minutes for a single student. Now multiply that by say 100 (a bit of parallelism is possible, but individual communication is needed with each student).
    - michaelt 6y ago
      So get more proctors. Given the cost of college courses, schools could easily afford $5 per student per course, and $100 for proctoring 20 students for a single exam is more than fair.
- cycomanic 6y ago
  I find your statements in different parts of the thread quite contradictory. On one hand you say that things don't scale because of number of students, but then a bit down thread you mention it's not worth making a new course for 10 students (out of 640), but for 10 students in person proctoring is clearly not a problem. You also mention the issue of cheating for professional qualifications, but again, that's a tiny fraction of all exams. Regarding scaling of oral exams, there's actually some interesting research/calculations (I try to find the reference later) and the cross-over is somewhere around 150 students when oral exams become slower (I do think this is quite teacher and subject dependent though). Also about budgets, I believe that your department is spending more than ever, the issue is property services departments of the universities should be saving large amounts. Considering lock-downs and staff and students working from home, maintenance cost should be way down. I suspect though that money lands in completely different buckets (don't get me started on the business of university property services, we pay rent in our overhead cost when we get grants that are higher than renting office space on the main shopping street in our city).
  - mkl 6y ago
    Well I'm talking about decisions about different things by different people 1) running exams (institution level - run centrally), 2) creating bespoke purpose-designed online courses (mostly department level). The decision about exam invigilation was made at the institutional level, where 10 is a small number of online students for a course, and they have dozens of courses to worry about. For most of the institution's courses, other solutions don't scale, and for the institution as a whole they definitely don't. The course with 10 online students may only run online this year, and it takes hundreds of additional hours to make a purpose-designed online course (we're doing that for other courses where the material will be reused). The oral exams I moderated didn't seem like they could scale past 20 students. The reason our online students are online is almost always because they are overseas, and the majority of them have limited English. In that context, orals are discriminatory, stressful, and very slow. I'm in NZ. Our universities have mostly been operating in person as normal (i.e. costing just as much) with far fewer international students (who bring in money), except in addition we have comparatively small numbers of resource-intensive online students as well, and are attempting to bring parts of entire degree programs online for the first time.

mkl 6y ago

Copy-pasting from my other comment: > I see it as a currently-necessary annoyance, as the least bad option. The alternatives have greater deficiencies: human invigilators using Zoom etc. don't scale (institution experience); oral exams don't scale (my experience moderating such assessments); no invigilation leads to cheating (by few students but enough to be a real problem, especially for professional qualifications - my direct experience and institution experience); shutting down education until the pandemic's over is unfeasible. Last year, we tried not monitoring, we tried Zoom invigilation, we tried orals. Lockdown rules prevented us from sending in-person invigilators in one semester (and we couldn't have hired even 10% of what that would take) and the other we invigilated in person like normal. We are spending more than ever before, so there are no savings. All of these methods failed. This year, grudgingly, we have moved to proctoring software.

scrollaway 6y ago
The bar to use such invasive, buggy, user hostile spyware should be a lot higher. Just because this solves your problem (it clearly doesn't) doesn't mean it's a good idea. Killing half the students also solves your problem. You need to live in a world where this is not an option, period. What's the next solution then? People forget there are always more manual solutions even if they take more time...
amcoastal 6y ago
As both a TA and a student during the virus, we did better and so can you. Stop trying to shoehorn your in person lesson plans and exams into virtual and design new material and tests. Dont be a shitty teacher just because you're too lazy to change your now dated ways.
- mkl 6y ago
  Please don't make assumptions or resort to baseless insults. We have designed entirely new fully-online interactive courses in response to this. In other courses, where we have e.g. 640 local students and 10 online, they need to sit the same test for it to be fair.
  - amcoastal 6y ago
    Sounds like you need to design an online version of that course if you're going to allow online students to take it.
    - mkl 6y ago
      The expense isn't justified for 10 students, since this may well be the only year that course is offered online. They are not getting a bad deal out of it. The fully new online courses are first year, and the expectation is that students will come to study in person for the remaining years of their degree. The other course I'm talking about is second year, but those 10 students can't get into the country at present - a temporary obstacle.
      - moistbar 6y ago
        > The expense isn't justified for 10 students, since this may well be the only year that course is offered online. So instead you'd rather waste money on a barely-functional piece of software that actively invades your students' privacy?
        mkl 6y ago
aravindet 6y ago
> human invigilators using Zoom etc. don't scale (institution experience) Could you explain further why this did not scale? I'm imagining an invigilator watching video feeds using an interface similar to, say, that used by security guards to monitor surveillance feeds. I would think that a single human invigilator can monitor more students using this system than an in-person setting. What am I missing?
- mkl 6y ago
  In person, a single proctor can monitor 200+ students; our eyes capture far more detail and field of view than computer screens, and our peripheral vision is tuned for detecting unexpected motion. With Zoom, either you have one meeting with everyone in it, in which case students can look directly at each other, or you have a separate meeting for every student, in which case you need a large number of devices, all visible at the same time. I can't see the former scaling past 49, and I can't see the latter scaling past 20. If you had some software designed specifically for this and several big screens, it would still be pretty hard to pay anywhere near as close attention as you can in person. On top of that, there's always a bunch of annoying mucking about getting set up for Zoom invigilation: angle of camera, light, checking environment, etc. All that needs communication to and fro, and it can take up to 5 minutes for a single student. Now multiply that by say 100 (a bit of parallelism is possible, but individual communication is needed with each student).
  - michaelt 6y ago
    So get more proctors. Given the cost of college courses, schools could easily afford $5 per student per course, and $100 for proctoring 20 students for a single exam is more than fair.
cycomanic 6y ago
I find your statements in different parts of the thread quite contradictory. On one hand you say that things don't scale because of number of students, but then a bit down thread you mention it's not worth making a new course for 10 students (out of 640), but for 10 students in person proctoring is clearly not a problem. You also mention the issue of cheating for professional qualifications, but again, that's a tiny fraction of all exams. Regarding scaling of oral exams, there's actually some interesting research/calculations (I try to find the reference later) and the cross-over is somewhere around 150 students when oral exams become slower (I do think this is quite teacher and subject dependent though). Also about budgets, I believe that your department is spending more than ever, the issue is property services departments of the universities should be saving large amounts. Considering lock-downs and staff and students working from home, maintenance cost should be way down. I suspect though that money lands in completely different buckets (don't get me started on the business of university property services, we pay rent in our overhead cost when we get grants that are higher than renting office space on the main shopping street in our city).
- mkl 6y ago
  Well I'm talking about decisions about different things by different people 1) running exams (institution level - run centrally), 2) creating bespoke purpose-designed online courses (mostly department level). The decision about exam invigilation was made at the institutional level, where 10 is a small number of online students for a course, and they have dozens of courses to worry about. For most of the institution's courses, other solutions don't scale, and for the institution as a whole they definitely don't. The course with 10 online students may only run online this year, and it takes hundreds of additional hours to make a purpose-designed online course (we're doing that for other courses where the material will be reused). The oral exams I moderated didn't seem like they could scale past 20 students. The reason our online students are online is almost always because they are overseas, and the majority of them have limited English. In that context, orals are discriminatory, stressful, and very slow. I'm in NZ. Our universities have mostly been operating in person as normal (i.e. costing just as much) with far fewer international students (who bring in money), except in addition we have comparatively small numbers of resource-intensive online students as well, and are attempting to bring parts of entire degree programs online for the first time.