Learning Solutions

Purdue is piloting their home-grown tool, Hotseat, which:

“creates a collaborative classroom, allowing students to provide near real-time feedback during class and enabling professors to adjust the course content and improve the learning experience. Students can post messages to Hotseat using their Facebook or Twitter accounts, sending text messages, or logging in to the Hotseat Web site.”

It is built so that it can accommodate the latest social tool students use. Expected full campus rollout next year.

http://www.itap.purdue.edu/tlt/hotseat/

I like this approach, since it is not being marketed as a “facebook killer”, but a way to harness the power of these type of sites for the classroom.

Contacting them to see if this will be available to other schools.

From Higher Ed Morning:

Not so long ago, students relied on crib sheets and word of mouth to cheat. And while some of those methods live on, cheating today has taken a new twist.

Here’s Education-Portal.com’s list of the eight most popular ways students are cheating (in no particular order):

• Copying — Whether it’s eyes roving during a test or a so-called “study group,” it’s still copying.
• Buying papers online — It doesn’t get much easier than this. Papers on just about any topic you can think of are available — and most can be downloaded instantly.
• Cheat sheets — This perennially popular form of cheating is made even easier with today’s electronic devices.
• Take a picture — If a professor leaves a test on his desk, all it takes is the click of a student’s cell phone camera to steal it.
• “Can I go to the bathroom?” — Once there, a student can call or text friends for answers during a test.
• MP3 players — Students can put anything on their iPods — including lecture notes. And with many professors letting students listen to their MP3s during tests in order to focus and relax …
• Cell phones — Is there a better — or easier — way to store data?
• When is a candy bar more than a candy bar? — Believe it or not, some students have peeled off the wrapper, scanned it, edited the nutritional info into test answers and rewrapped the candy bar — where it sits on the student’s desk during an exam.

As long as teachers continue to rely on basic levels of assessment, then cheating will occur.  If a student can pass your class by cheating, then you are doing a disservice to that student.

Education is not about how well one does on a multiple choice test. Can the student apply the knowledge gained to the world around them?

Teachers need to get away from the objectiveness of learning, and assess at a higher level, thus eliminating the term cheat from their vocabulary.

How do you cheat in a open discussion forum? How do you cheat on a group project, with an oral presentation? Am I able to cheat at my workplace?

In the past 5 years, I have not been assessed with a multiple choice test, I am assessed on my multiple decision-making skills.

When will this stop being an issue?