Online quizzes

Quite aside from the whole question of cheating, I'm beginning to wonder if online quizzes have any place whatsoever in the grade book.

For one thing, even though our campuses (all three of mine, anyhow) are totally wired and even though every student supposedly has free access to computers attached to the Internet, there's always someone who is simply outside the electronic loop.

• One of my students works a full 40-hour week and is taking a full college load. I think she does her homework while driving to and from class. She says she simply has no time to take a 30-minute side trip to a computer lab to complete an online assignment.
• Another student is waiting for her father to bring her computer to school. In the meantime, she can't figure out how to use her roommate's computer (even when she can get access).
• Yet another lives in an off-campus apartment, and is waiting for the Internet guy to hook them up.

For another (difficult to believe) there are always a few students who have never actually touched a computer before. When I tell them to double-click an icon, I might as well be speaking Chinese.

For yet another, we live in a culture of imprecision. Diana Hacker's website asks students to type their instructor's email address in a box. Some students type their own. Some don't bother. Some can't spell "ashland" and some put too many letters in my name (or ad-lib the vowels). Wrong (or no) email address means I don't see their quiz results.

That was just the student side

The student foul-ups can be partially solved by pre-registering all students ourselves (if we're using Hacker or some other site that gives us a gradebook). It's extra work and begins to make me wonder if it's all worth the time. But what do we do about the instability on the part of the suppliers? MyCompLab went down in mid-August and only pulled itself back together after school started. Bedford did pretty much the same, but hasn't completely solved the issue of signing students into a particular course (the sign of their trouble is that so many "Help" links lead to error pages).

Maybe, when we total up the time invested, the most efficient solution is really to take that incredibly time-consuming Angel seminar, find an old Windows computer with a sound card (I think my church might have one I could use) and watch the tutorial, and just DO the Angel thing. It's only about a six-hour investment before we can begin writing our own quizzes.