Page 31 - Campus Technology, August/September 2017

SPECIAL SECTION: ONLINE LEARNING
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | August/September 2017
Launched in 2016, the exchange provides the technical infrastructure to allow cross-enrollment among schools. “If a student needs a course that they can’t get at their own college, there’s an open seat at one of the other colleges,” Hadsell explained. “In a really seamless way and with a couple of clicks they can enroll at that ‘teaching college’ and have all their units transfer back to their college.” Getting that off the ground, he noted, “has been a heavy lift for us.”
However, if students were going to able to obtain their credits online from any participating school, the one accepting those credits needed to know they were honestly earned. Likewise, the colleges were individually struggling to meet the regulatory requirements specifically related to student authentication.
Involve Faculty From the Beginning
OEI put together an online proctoring working group with “lots of faculty representation,” said Hadsell, which “paid off in the long run.” Other participants included people from testing centers and learning centers.
The first job was to evaluate options. An obvious one: using a proctoring service where somebody would watch the test- taker in real time but via webcam. Here’s where the faculty input was important: They didn’t care for that kind of solution. “We talked a lot about the psychological impact of entering into a live proctoring session and what it meant if there was
Faculty buy-in is all-important. Most instructors have cobbled together their own proctoring practices.
So getting them on board only happens when they’ve heard “from their peers that the workflow is not overly burdensome [and] that [they] don’t have to go back and watch 46 hours of video after offering a quiz,” said Jory Hadsell, executive director of the California Community Colleges Online Education Initiative (CCC OEI).
Find ways to use the proctoring for more than just high-stakes tests. “Validating student identity shouldn’t be a one or two times a semester thing,” noted Hadsell. “It should be something that’s happening on an ongoing basis — for weekly quizzes, for homework.”
Create sample language about the need for a webcam. The idea is that faculty can insert that into their syllabi and into the course description that students read before registering. “For us that generally satisfies the requirement that students knew before they took the class that this was something that they would need,” said Hadsell.
Evaluate for low impact. In the OEI online proctoring working group’s early conversations, the topic of dial- up connectivity surfaced. “Several of us snickered. Who’s still on dial-up?” Hadsell admitted. But California, like any state, has remote regions where dial-up may be the only way students gain access to lessons. For that reason, the online solution needed to have low bandwidth requirements.
Don’t rush into licensing. A per-exam model wouldn’t work for CCC, observed Hadsell. “We wanted to make sure that this could have unlimited use for students who were using it in an unlimited number of courses for an unlimited number of exams,” he explained. As a result, the deal the system negotiated with Proctorio calls for a one-time annual license cost per FTE student.
Keep up the momentum. OEI does webinars, on-demand videos, breakout sessions and dedicated events to train faculty on the use of the alternative proctoring systems. It has also created testing center guidelines to make sure rules are consistent.