[LON-CAPA-users] Online Exam Questions

Todd Ruskell lon-capa-users@mail.lon-capa.org
Sat, 14 Jul 2007 07:36:49 -0600


>> 1) Right now, we are planning to hide all resources except the online
>> exam just before the exam starts.  Is there an easier way to restrict
>> student's access to all the other already existing resources in a course
>> during an exam?
> 
> Not that I'm aware of.
> 
> Seem like something like the COM blocking (as noted below) would be
> needed.
> 
> Maybe even added it to the com block as an option (restrict user to
> folder(s) X & Y)

This sounds like a nice feature to add, but I like to be difficult.
Right now COM blocking is pretty coarse-grained.  It applies to all
students in the course (no section grain) and as mentioned somewhere, it
is tied to the user, not user/course, so its scope is quite large.

I can envision a situation, especially at a school with a testing
center, etc. where perhaps slots or some other mechanism is used to
schedule an online quiz, "sometime on Tuesday", and while taking the
quiz, you don't want the student to have access to the outside
resources.  You probably wouldn't want institute the current COM
blocking, in addition to the proposed resource access restrictions, for
all students in the course for the entire day.  On the other hand,
students talk, so maybe this situation would only arise at institutions
with strong honor codes,  so the restriction of resources is unnecessary?

We experimented a couple years ago with online exams for our large intro
courses.  It went well, but because of the numbers of students and the
numbers of computers we had access too, we had to give the exam in two
waves.  This meant a COM block for all students that was at least two
hours longer than it needed to be.  Not critical, because at the time
LON-CAPA was used for only one course here, but could be problematical
in other situations.

Not knowing the internals of LON-CAPA, how about a yes/no PARM,
"Restrict access to this folder/resource" that could only be effective
if the "time limit" PARM was in effect?

Todd

-- 
Dr. Todd Ruskell
Senior Lecturer, Department of Physics       Office:  Meyer Hall 326
Colorado School of Mines                     Phone: 303-384-2080
1523 Illinois Street                         Fax: 303-273-3919
Golden, CO 80401