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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

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.
- cycomanic 6y ago
  Hah! I did my PhD in NZ and became a part kiwi (I still miss it to be honest). I'm back in Europe now, in Sweden and as you might know we have had a very relaxed (and very weird from a non-Swede perspective) approach to the pandemic. So we did have in-person and online exams, but all with proctering via zoom.

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.

cycomanic 6y ago
Hah! I did my PhD in NZ and became a part kiwi (I still miss it to be honest). I'm back in Europe now, in Sweden and as you might know we have had a very relaxed (and very weird from a non-Swede perspective) approach to the pandemic. So we did have in-person and online exams, but all with proctering via zoom.