For the first time, I'm teaching a class—Web Publishing I, appropriately enough—partly online. It's called a hybrid class, with one in-person meeting a week and the rest online. The college is promoting these as a way of attracting more students, and I thought I'd give it a try.
Too early to say much, since we just had our first class meeting yesterday, but I'm already learning that computers can be a pain in the ass in ways I never really thought about.
Question
6 is "fill in the blank." Pretty easy: the answer is "World Wide
Web Consortium" or "W3C". But what's been making me crazy is how many
ways of giving the correct answer can't be understood by the computer. Like
"W3Consortium" or "World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)," both answers rejected
by the computer. Yet any person can easily see they are correct.
So I spent way too much time today sending apologies to students and overriding the computer-generated score.
Part of the problem is my own newness to the process. I've learned that I need to try to anticipate EVERY SINGLE variation that might be entered. It's made me realize too, though, how easily the technology can drive our decision-making. I'm going to think long & hard about using another fill in the blank question. Plain old multiple choice questions don't leave any room for ambiguity. Is this better teaching/learning? Probably not.
Walking on the beach at Edgewater
What else can I say... I love it.