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Software Goes Through Beta Testing. Should Online College Courses? (edsurge.com)
"Testing online courses is not standard practice at traditional colleges," points out a new article at EdSurge -- though beta-testing is part of the process for other online learning sites. jyosim summarizes their report:
Coursera has recruited a volunteer corp of more than 2,500 beta testers to try out MOOCs before they launch. Other free online course providers have set up systems that catch things like mistakes in tests, or just whether videos are confusing. Traditional colleges have shied away from checking online course content before going live, citing academic freedom. But some colleges are developing checklists to judge course design and accessibility.
"It would be lovely if universities would consider ways of adopting the practice of beta testing," says Phillip Long, chief innovation officer and associate vice provost for learning sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. One factor, though, is cost. "How do you scale that at a university that has thousands of courses being taught," he asks... How much beta testing makes sense for courses, and what's the best way to do it?
A senior instructional designer at the State University of New York says "On most campuses, instructional designers have their hands full and don't have time to review the courses before they go live... We're still trying to find the magic bullet that motivates people to review other people's courses when they're not being paid."
"It would be lovely if universities would consider ways of adopting the practice of beta testing," says Phillip Long, chief innovation officer and associate vice provost for learning sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. One factor, though, is cost. "How do you scale that at a university that has thousands of courses being taught," he asks... How much beta testing makes sense for courses, and what's the best way to do it?
A senior instructional designer at the State University of New York says "On most campuses, instructional designers have their hands full and don't have time to review the courses before they go live... We're still trying to find the magic bullet that motivates people to review other people's courses when they're not being paid."
Traditional colleges have shied away from checking online course content before going live, citing academic freedom.
What the hell sense does that make? That's like saying I don't check my texts for errors before hitting send because "Freedom of Speech, bitch!"
I am posting as AC for -reasons- (not sure what all is NDA, etc)
But Coursera courses go through a beta test before they are launched. I'm not sure how many 'learners'(they don't call them students) go through it, or if it is just Coursera Staff... but there -are- _some_ people who go through the course(s) early.
Their new platform sucks IMHO. It is difficult for Instructors to actually produce meaningful content since their platform is 24/7 on-demand only now and new course sections start every 2 weeks. So it is impossible for a lot of good academic practices because of the platform design.
Can no longer: release an assignment, set a due date, have it submitted by that date, release the answers, do peer review based off the answers, and then have the peer-review be a mechanism by which 'learners' not only see the 'right' answers, but also are required to evaluate others' answers.The reason for this is that the platform requires that the -same- assignment be released again in 2 weeks, so no way of ever releasing answers publicly. And there is no way to produce _quality_ assignments for every assignment for every course every 2 weeks (unless that is all you are doing & we have University Classes, etc. still)... And that still ignores possible updates to course material, planning new courses, etc...
This is very serious when it comes to [redacted] assignments like I like to produce for my courses... I've also heard that it is even a bigger issue when it comes to Computer Science, Engineering, or Maths classes because they can only ever tell you what are 'wrong' answers (due to auto-grading) but never tell you the RIGHT answers...
No.
"Government is like fire; a handy servant, but a dangerous master." -- George Washington
Maybe you should not have tried to go to college without first learning something in high school.
I never went to high school but went to college anyway. High school is overrated anyway.
In many cases, the beta testing of classes taught in traditional settings is just to teach them. As someone who is teaching an online science course and doing so for the first time, I'm building my class based on lectures when I taught the same class in a traditional setting. Although it's a different instructional format, I'm not sure that beta testing would have been helpful. My class is an elective requirement, and although my students might never care about meteorology again, I try to teach them a bit about how science works (in general) and force them to do higher order thinking (~80% of the grade is based on levels of thinking above recall in Bloom's Taxonomy).
It's a legitimate science class, and any good instructor should be constantly testing their teaching and trying to improve. Every semester I've taught, I've learned from what I've done well and what needed improvement throughout the semester. There isn't a single beta test, but any worthwhile instructor should always be working to improve the quality of instruction. That's been no different this semester, even though it's an online class. I have made a couple of changes to my instruction this semester, which I believe are for the better. You can't simply prepare a class from the beginning and expect that you won't have to change anything during the semester. Instead, you need to have clear objectives for your class, and make changes as needed to either assess whether those objectives are being met (assignments and tests) and how to prepare the students to meet those objectives (instruction).
Any good instructor is always working to improve a class, even during the class. Instead of a single beta test, each week of my class is like Patch Tuesday, where I learn from how the students did the previous week, and always make minor or major tweaks. It might be as simple as explaining concepts again that students didn't understand as well or as complex as making changes to my learning assessments.
For a good instructor, a beta test isn't as important as the continual revisions during the semester. I can certainly say that I've gotten better at teaching this class as the semester has gone on. If I'd prepared the entire class prior to the semester and beta tested it, I might have missed some things that could be improved upon during the semester. Beta tests are no substitute for periodic updates to software. And they're no substitute for continually improving courses.
I'm in a new online course at the University of Maryland. There are definitely some pain points (for me, at least) that could be eliminated with some beta testing, as well as some standards for what its reasonable to expect students to do in terms of work outside the classroom. Beta testing (or at least offering the course at a reduce cost for the first one or two offerings) would make being a guinea pig a bit more palatable. Instead, I have a grade in my degree program dependent upon the whim/good sense of an instructor. I don't know what outside observation there is to ensure that the treatment is reasonable.
And happy little unicorns will frolic in my yard.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
Well that explains why you were unemployed for years around 2009.
I was unemployed for two years (2009-10), underemployed for six months (working 20 hours per month), and filing for Chapter Seven bankruptcy (2011). That has nothing to do with my lack of high school education, an A.A. degree in General Education (1994), and an A.S. degree in Computer Programming (2007). Plenty of educated people got laid off during the Great Recession. Unlike those with or without high school diplomas, I've bounced back to where I was financially ten years ago.
The Republican Party need to fix their nomination process: "Senator, checked. Congressman, checked. Governor, checked. Reality TV Star..?! Oh, hell, why not? What's the worse thing to happen?"
I used to work at TEEX (which has some good free cybersecurity courses, btw) and they enforce a policy of alpha testing followed by beta testing. Even minor changes to already-released courses require an appropriate degree of testing. All changes must be approved by a separate department, a curriculum department which is independent of the departments which run the various types of courses.
How about college students be taught what skills would be useful at a job? I mean, nobody wants to hire people straight out of college, so why not provide the work experience during college? Actually, I would let college students sit in on meetings in my company. I would do it for free, of course I am not paying them either since they aren't working for me. I mean, even if there is no work for unskilled people .. colleges should hook up deals so that individual students (maybe no more than 3 at a time) could get invited to local profession-relevant companies. A different company each week for a one or two hours. They wouldn't be allowed to ask any questions during the session, only observe others working -- watch the machines go .. maybe attend a meeting even. I feel like having students experience work environments would be valuable, for one thing it would dissuade many of them from getting a job and help them gain a much needed pessimistic futuristic outlook as to what having a career means.
In some cases, I'm guessing when a college or a state writes a contract for creating these courses, the length of time of the video content must be the most important clause in the contract. My son signed up for Texas' online high school physics class last summer in order to avoid taking it during the school year. It was very clear that the objective of the course materials was to consume required amount of time and not really to teach physics. It was more like a remedial drivers ed class one takes as punishment for speeding than anything that resembled a real class. I imagine that quite a few online classes come into being based on this "time content" model.
I think I've spotted the flaw in this plan. Anyone else?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This is true. One of my friends did civil engineering and he had to make his own.
IHAW,TTSP,DFTTYW, etc
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Why? Are you a Mormon or something?
Still, unlike Joe_Doylem you can generally string a coherent sentence or two together. Which was, I think, the point.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
And why he's a fat fuck
Because I was born big. No diet can fix bigness.
He never did any sport.
Not in grade school. Rode my bike all over the place in college. When I had a restaurant job and lived ten miles away, I road my bike 20 miles per day for three years. I still do cardio at the gym.
Why? Are you a Mormon or something?
I was misdiagnosed as being mentally retarded due to an undiagnosed hearing lost in one ear, spent eight years in Special Ed and got tired of being treated like a well prized idiot by the school system. Especially since I blew out the annual evaluation on the genius side of the scale, which my teachers always called a statistical fluke. My parents let me stay home during my high school years as I taught myself. I had a personal library of 800 books when I turned 18-years-old.
In the 1960s there were false answers listed in the back of some text books to catch students who simply copied answers rather than actually thinking out the solution to a problem. Actually a similar tactic could be employed to catch teachers by placing false information in the texts. I have seen professors with lofty credentials repeat a false fact that they were taught when they were in college and it tends to get handed down from generation to generation. the reason why is quite simple. Even at the Ph.D. level many professors have never actually done any original research. Their research is limited to studying what professors that came before them accepted in their training. This exists due to the depth of study is limited as professors might have to spend months on some rather obscure information that often was not available a few years ago.
One of the roles of postgrads is often to give feedback on course material before is it put into practice.
Now I'm faced with choosing how to raise my own children: home school or high school?
I'm not sure what the right answer is for you. What I've seen in my own experience is that kids want to learn but that desire to learn is often snuffed out by the school system. Society has too many adults who stopped learning once they get out of school and then get stucked in life because they can't learn their way into a better situation. The desire to learn as a kid and keep learning as an adult must always be paramount.
Anyone who denigrates you for missing the "high school experience" is a selfish idiot.
I had trouble getting entry level, minimum wage jobs because I didn't have a high school diploma and an associate degree didn't count. Once I got established in my technical career, no one cared about my lack of high school diploma.