As the idea of having an entire semester online was still being discussed I had an interesting conversation on twitter about a cool way to give exams. I wrote about in this blog a few times. The idea is simple, turn the student’s exam into a video project. Rhett Allain wrote an article in Wired magazine. In fact, he was the one who suggested that I do it on twitter.

So here is the basic idea: Students get their regular exam. They take it like normal. They take out their phones and make a quick video explaining their work. They send the video to me. I use the video to grade their exam. Talk about an activity that is a power punch of active learning goodness (and really good at assessing how much students know).

So I did it! And I will do it again! But this article is about how terrible it went the first time.

So let’s start with the good. Grading the videos was actually wonderful. I felt like I could really get into whether or not a student knew what they were doing. I actually gained a new found respect for colleague Sean Bentley and how effective he is as a teacher. The students were directly using ideas he taught (sometimes of a year ago). They didn’t hide it either. They said “Professor Bentley said …”. I was “foaming” at the mouth because I hadn’t considered a way to solve a problem before that came from his class.

From a teaching point of view it was great to hear voices for which I am helping them grow explain the science so clearly. For a teacher, it’s like music to one’s ears. Of course there is the other side of that too. You can really see when the student is guessing, literally because they tell you.

Okay, so then why so grumpy?

I initially thought, hey I will give them the 75 minutes of class time and an hour more to make their videos. Adelphi has a “club period” at the conclusion of class that almost every student on campus has free. So I said I’ll post the exam before class and told them I expected a link to a YouTube page by 2pm. HAHAHAHAHAHA!

I was speaking with a student about their wifi signal. They suggested it was going to be problematic. Aok. So I shifted the exam time from 10-4. Then no one would have any issues, right? Ugh! Of course most of the students decided to take the exam right up until 4 and then they started uploading.

So tests were excellent. They were some of the best exams I have seen in this class. There was enough sloppiness that I believe there wasn’t any cheating either. Of course they had nearly six hours to work on them. I didn’t want them to spend 6 hours on this. I wanted it to be a normal test.

BOOM! Its 4pm and students are now finally uploading their exams to YouTube. Of course it takes two hours for each student. I am getting all kinds of crazy emails, about how YouTube was blocking videos, etc. The STRESS was high. Before, we actually got started a number of people asked me why I wasn’t using Moodle. Crap, I should have used Moodle. But I didn’t and we were stuck with YouTube. There were permission issues too. It was a disaster.

DOUBLE BOOM! One of my students is an international student who managed to get home before he was blocked – home is on the other side of the world. So it finally occurred to me that day that he was taking the exam in the middle of night. My 4 pm was his 3 am. I felt so bad. Not only this. He was having a terrible time uploading the exam to YouTube. He didn’t get it uploaded until 9 pm my time – or rather 8 am for him. Every hour I would get an email saying he was trying but it wasn’t working. I was spending time with family for an hour or two and was offline. I would have been completely ok if he sent it in, in the morning.

CAPTAIN CAVVVVVVEEEEEEMMMMMAAAAAAAANNNNNNNN! I am loud and ridiculous but I really try to be a teddy bear whenever possible. This morning while watching the YouTube videos, my wifi continually shut down every two minutes. So I had something like 6 hours of student videos to watch and I had to adjust the wifi every few minutes. I started going mad, four letters were yelled, then it was just ridiculous, I had had it. I just bellowed out some hideous caveman scream. (I only yelled at the computer.)

It’s important to laugh at yourself.

The wifi seems to be working great now. Go figure.

When students have access to very fast internet at the university this could be a wonderful technique. I need to think about how to adapt this for exams in our current situation going forward. Connectivity is a problem.