The Online Course

This fall I'm teaching an online Statistics course for the Ed Psych department (my new home department). The course starts October 6th and hopefully by then I will have students (right now students want to register but are having trouble since for some reason the process is different because it's an online class... anyway...)

I've been teaching an online Stats course for Central Tx College for the last few years. Their course is eight weeks, everything must be due by the last day, but there are no due dates or anything besides that. Also, the tests are randomly generated (there's a huge item bank) so it minimizes any cheating that might take place.

Well, for this course at U of I, I am creating the course (based off of what was taught in-person last year) and am creating the lessons, assigning the homeworks, etc. I struggled with how to assign certain homeworks (i.e. how do I make them do graphs and email it in? I don't! :) ). But what I can't figure out, is how do I do a test????

Some background information: some of the students are U of I local students, some might be from other U of I campuses, some might be non-U of I students. I am not allowed to force them to come to campus to do anything. It is possible to create a huge item bank of test questions so that, for example, question 1 is randomly selected from five items. However, I DO NOT have the time to do that this semester (perhaps this will be detailed in a later "boring" blog post, but I'll just say I'm BUSY this semester!). I don't have time to write that many items nor do I have time to code all of those items (and learn the program to learn how to code).

So how do I give them a test???? I know I won't permanently eliminate cheating, but how can I minimize the possibility that they will cheat?

I need ideas!!! Have any of you taken an online class? Do you have any ideas for how I can distribute a test to 10 to 50 (I honestly don't know how many) students?

ANY IDEAS????

Smile: I had a GREAT meeting with my advisor last Friday and today! I was really worried about how it would go (it was the first time he was reading my writing) and I was pleasantly surprised at how well it went! Hopefully it will be like that for the rest of the semester!!