Online use-outside-resources quizzes

With open-note, open-book, open-Internet, collaborate-with-others quizzes, you can mimic a work environment.

These questions can be more difficult - think application questions rather than definition questions. Students have to take what they have learned and apply it in a brand new situation. Or you can give students a problem, and students have to identify the additional information that they would need or the steps they would need to go through to solve the problem.

In a work environment, when employees encounter a problem, we don't just throw up our hands and say, "I don't know that." Or at least the employees who wish to stay employed don't do that. Instead, we turn to our coworkers, and we dive into whatever written material we can find. You can use your quizzes to prompt the same behavior of your students.

With a pool of questions, you could have Canvas randomly pull a set of questions for each student. Student A may get questions 1, 2, 8, 17, and 23. Student B may get questions 3, 4, 10, 16, and 22. Student C may get questions 7, 9, 15, 19, and 25. If Students A, B, and C all work together to answer the questions, they would have had to figure out the answers to fifteen different questions. The quiz becomes a tool for helping students learn the material, not just an assessment of the result of their learning.

Just because each student answered five essay questions, that does not mean you have to score all five. You can randomly choose one or two questions to score. Students have to do their best to answer all of the questions because they don't know which one(s) you'll select. It is just like working customer service. While not all of the employee's customer interactions will be observed, all of them need to be high quality.

Caveat: if you use open-everything essay questions, write your own questions. The first thing students may do is Google the question. Assume that all publisher test banks are publicly available on the Internet. For questions you've written, periodically do a Google search for your questions. Many Highline College students use "study help" sites like Chegg.com. (Links to an external site.)For a monthly fee, students can post their homework questions and get "help" in the form of someone else answering the question for them. Answered questions are made available to other paying students. If you find your question posted, request that Chegg.com remove it (Links to an external site.) as a copyright violation; they've posted your content on their website without your permission. Or you could leave a few questions there to identify students who are using the site. Paying for answers is a serious violation of the student code of conduct.

Examples from Highline faculty

Sue Frantz's week 2 write-to-learn assignment Download Sue Frantz's week 2 write-to-learn assignment

where students answer six essay questions but only two questions are scored

Laurinda Bellinger's documents she uses to have students evaluate each other's contributions to group work.