The Design, Implementation and Assessment of an On-Line, Open-Book Quizzing Environment for an Introductory Materials Science Course.

Abstract

AbstractThe authors have developed, implemented and assessed an on-line, open-book quizzing environment for the introductory materials science course, “Materials In Today’s World”. The course is offered as an E-Education course and students may complete the course from anywhere that permits access to our course management system, ANGEL. For reasons that were both pragmatic and philosophical, we decided that the exams/quizzes would not be proctored, they would be delivered wholly on-line, and would be open-book.In the current paper, we will present and justify our philosophy, of on-line, open-book quizzes: the rich feedback, which is a feature or our quizzing system, QuestionMark Perception, is used both as a teaching tool, and as a means to refine the quiz database. We have replaced the original “high-stakes” midterm and final exam, with a series of lower-stakes, weekly quizzes, which are generated from a large question database. Student response to the quizzing environment is generally very positive.