REVIEW
Hi Chris. I think you’ve managed to find one of the biggest ‘holes’ in the online learning ecosystem: assessment. I taught a blended ICT 8 class at my current school, and creating authentic online assessments was probably one of my biggest issues. The fact that students can log in at any time, and complete quizzes with a tutor (or parents, or classmates), makes the creation of authentic assessments difficult. The course currently has a ‘pass/fail’ system in place, and while this works for a Grade 8 class, it may not be sufficient for a course in higher education, where a more detailed level of summative assessment results may be required. While the venture you propose does solve some of these issues (the fact that new questions are being generated all the time, so ‘repeats’ are rare), if there are opportunities for students to ‘game the system’, they will. Perhaps questions could be sent out in a time-sensitive fashion (they must be answered in “x” minutes), and/or they must log in from a specific computer at a designated location (university computer lab, or a ‘polling station’-type place) to prevent multiple participants answering questions for one person. Of course, all of this adds to the ‘bottom line’, and one of the main reasons for this venture is its cost-saving measures. I’m not sure if there is a solution to this problem, but I’m not sure calculus and economics (courses that require mainly numerical responses) is the way forward. Perhaps essays (using turnitin.com, to reduce plagiarism) still need to be read and assessed by humans after all if we want authentic student evaluation…