Best Practices for Supporting Teaching and Learning Online

With online learning now being implemented at the University of Macau, committed teachers are holding classes online with UMMoodle and Zoom. This blog post features some of our colleagues’ tips and best practices. Let’s see what has worked well to support teaching and learning of different disciplines in an online environment.

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Talking Points from an Online Faculty Meetup & Training on Academic Integrity of Online Exams and How to Build Quizzes

By Dr. Christopher Fulton (CTLE)

In an online meet-up in March, which was facilitated by Prof. Garry Wong, colleagues shared their experience, concerns, questions, and best practices on online exams and quizzes. In this blog post a few main talking points will be highlighted.

“How can we ensure academic integrity?”

A three-pronged strategy to promoting academic integrity has been used by Prof. Garry Wong. Academic integrity can be promoted by building assessment tools that ensure honesty and build trust.

• Promote academic integrity as a serious matter. Encourage students to be honest, in the syllabus, during class, before an exam, and on the exam paper or in the online quiz.
• Develop assessment questions which are more relevant to the course or individuals and for which answers cannot be easily shared.
• Try to monitor the integrity, which is usually done by observing students during an exam. In an online environment, this is going to be challenging, and the best practices for us are evolving.

One point which was discussed relates to the use of video conferencing during online exams. A wide variety of viewpoints were exchanged, and no consensus emerged on how or if Zoom could be used to monitor or proctor online exams. However, teachers with small classes could consider scheduling video conferences for one-to-one oral assessments.

In the training portion of this meet-up, I presented ways to build online quizzes for exams. Here are a few settings for quizzes in UMMoodle which can be enabled to help reduce opportunities for cheating:

• Set a time limit
• Limit attempts to 1
• Quiz layout: new question every page
• Navigation method: sequential or free?
• Shuffle answers of multiple-choice questions
• How questions behave: deferred feedback
• Set browser security to open quiz in a full screen pop-up, preventing copying and pasting
• Shuffle questions within the quiz

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Creating quiz questions can be time-consuming. An alternative way to create questions quickly is to write the questions in a text file and import those into a question bank. Examples of questions and answers in a GIFT format are below (.txt file, encoded in UTF-8, double carriage return separating questions).

// true/false
::Q2:: I have created quizzes in UMMoodle {T}


// multiple choice
::Q3:: When will the exam period start this year? { =20 May ~20 April ~2 June }


// fill-in-the-blank
::Q4:: Two plus {=two =2} equals four.

One point that was raised was that students may not be familiar with quizzes in UMMoodle, and it is important to prepare students for an online exam by having the students first complete a trial quiz. After students complete a trial quiz in UMMoodle, teachers should be prepared to provide their students with additional guidance on how to successfully complete an online exam.

A video recording of this online event can be viewed by UM colleagues. The video recording in on our Microsoft Stream site, which requires UM users to sign in using their UM Office 365 Pro Plus account, e.g. userid@um.edu.mo.

More information and blog posts on teaching and learning are on our website.

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Students who would like more information should pay close attention to their courses on UMMoodle. Video tutorials on how to use UMMoodle can be found at an ICTO page, A Distance Learning Quick Start Guide for Students.

Contact Points:
For teachers and students –

ICTO Help Desk
https://icto.um.edu.mo/help-desk-services/
Telephone: 8822-8600
Email: elearning@um.edu.mo