For those of you who have expressed some interest in the whole online course integrity issue at UHCL (and you know who you are) I wanted to post a little update.
As you already know, Dr. Williams, Dr. Rusth and I are proctoring this semester. They proctored a bunch of things, and I only required ProctorU.com for the final exams. Funny enough: when I gave students the choice of taking the exam, online, with a proctor, or coming to campus to take it on a Friday or Saturday afternoon, most students (overwhelmingly) chose to simply come to campus.
The pilot study for ProctorU in the School of Business continues over the summer and into the fall, when we have our AACSB (accreditation) visit. The university will also be testing two or three other systems including RemoteProctorNow and one other. All of these include some "lock down" of the browser and remote system during the exam, but I'm not sure they all involve live proctors.
We haven't moved forward on instructing students to pay for their proctoring sessions yet - I'm not sure what folks are waiting on at the university. I figure that when local students figure out that university resources are being used to pay for online student testing they'll probably blow a gasket. Who knows? Seems very unfair to ask local students to pay for (directly or indirectly) the cost of online student exams. Seems unethical, almost.
One more issue for the alums: Some MS Finance students have started complaining that advisors are letting other students "skip" the seminar class. I'm not sure how that happens - it's the capstone course for crying out loud. I'll have to check into it and report back as to whether that is actually happening, and whether it's become some kind of game ("but my roommate got to do it..." etc.). Dr. Kathleen Williamson is responsible for that kind of thing, so I'll have to ask her about it once I get some more of this grading stuff behind me.
Watch this space for updates.
