Today has been a day of learning. Which of course means that it has been a day where a lot of things have gone wrong.
It’s important to make sure that when something goes wrong, you learn, and if you learn something, it’s important to try and remember it.
1. Giving your e-mail and telephone number for support means a phone call every time
I learned a similar lesson recently, if you want someone to answer a question and you offer a phone call or a meeting, you’ve just scheduled a meeting.
Early in the year I gave my email and phone number as a way of waylaying any stress for students taking an online course for the first time. It was pretty easy to realize that this wasn’t a great idea when I woke up shortly after 6 am because I fell asleep on my phone and it was furiously vibrating.
While the intention behind giving students a security net of immediate support was good, it wasn’t the right call. A phone call is pretty immediate, and I found myself dropping what I was doing to help as soon as I reasonably could, but it would’ve been pretty disruptive if I had been working with others on a different project, or something time sensitive.
It also meant that students would call immediately when something went wrong, not taking a moment to try sorting any issues on their end. Moving forward I’m going to try and address the more common issues before they happen, even something as simple as refreshing the page sorted almost every issue.
And no more phone number for students. Getting an email allows me to prioritize issues and workflow, it also lets me keep a log of the issues for future runs and creates a useful record (e.g. I don’t have to ask for a student’s name to check an attempt because it’s in the email).
2. Present solutions with options
Unfortunately today’s issue was on the facilitation side of the equation. We had some shuffled and randomly selected questions drawn from a sequential question bank, so some students would get questions making reference to previous questions that they likely didn’t have.
The instructor and I sat down first thing this morning to review the problematic questions, assessing them individually and reviewing student attempts to try and ensure that they were not being unfairly penalized. This helped, but these poor questions likely did damage outside of themselves, becoming time sinks for students who were confused by the lack of context, or who got stressed because they had to make a guess.
We wanted to help students who struggled through the exam without punishing students who did well. The other instructional designer suggested bringing three potential solutions to the instructor and letting the instructor make a decision from there. I drafted my three suggestions and met with the instructor and got to talk about the pros and cons and whether they were a fair reparation given the problem with the assessment.
In the end, we decided to create an optional grading scheme for students who wanted to deflate the value of this assessment and increase the value of an upcoming assessment. So far we’re waiting to hear back from students, but hopefully they agree that this is fair to themselves and their classmates. And if it isn’t, hopefully we can find an amicable solution.
I’m sure these two pieces aren’t the only things I’ll get out of this, but I’m sure that more lessons will come as I reflect on today moving forward and seeing how it ultimately resolves.