FCN News 14 June 96


Note: read the hypertext version of this newsletter: <http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj/fcn/news/current.html>.

Contents:

Upcoming Events 

        June 1996              July 1996      
    S  M Tu  W Th  F  S    S  M Tu  W Th  F  S
                      1       1  2  3  4  5  6
    2  3  4  5  6  7  8    7  8  9 10 11 12 13
    9 10 11 12 13 14 15   14 15 16 17 18 19 20
   16 17 18 19 20 21 22   21 22 23 24 25 26 27
   23 24 25 26 27 28 29   28 29 30 31
   30

Events on campus of particular interest to FCN members (see also upcoming conferences below):

Educational technology and tenure/promotion

The UO Ed Tech committee met with Lorraine Davis, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, on June 10. The meeting focused on the evaluation and importance of instructional technology activities in the UO promotion and tenure process. Prof. Davis noted that the UO faculty senate recently established criteria for peer evaluation of teaching, and that the fifth of those criteria is:

The instructor's use of innovative approaches to teaching, and where appropriate, the use of instructional technology or other activities designed to enhance the learning process.

Davis warned, however, that efforts in applying instructional technology should not be seen as directly comparable with a referreed scholarly publication. Although procedures and standards vary from department to department, application of instructional technology will generally be counted towards one's "teaching," rather than "reserch" or "service." Davis noted that the weight given to use of educational technology in promotion decisions for regular teaching faculty will depend in large part on scope, creativity and impact, and external review of such efforts.

Web-based testing

Although many people at UO and elsewhere are using the Web to publish course syllabi and course related material, comparatively few use the Web for testing or student feedback. One reason for this may be the lack of easy to use software; faculty interested in doing an online test are often told they need to learn to write CGI programs or Java applets. There are, however, several tools available on the web that are designed to allow faculty to produce online quizes or self-evaluations without programming, ranging from commercial packages integrated with a full courseware development environment and free packages tuned to the goal of producing an online self-evaluation. For a collection of links to some free tools, see <http://stargate.jpl.nasa.gov:1084/RAGS/index.htm>.

One package with which I have had quite good success has been a modified version of the "qform" system developed by Bob Cunningham at U. Hawaii. Although this package is somewhat limited in its features, it is very easy to install and use. The major component of this package is the qform program, a copy of which is installed on darkwing as ~jqj/=bin/qform. This program accepts a "score sheet" or "quiz file" for a multiple-choice exam and generates an HTML page containing a form with the list of questions. When a student visits the form and fills it out, the exam is graded against the score sheet and the student told how well he or she did.

If you're interested in trying a sample quiz, visit the web page <http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj/sample-quiz.html>. This quiz took me about 2 minutes to put on the web, starting with a Microsoft Word document containing the text of the questions and answers.

If you're interested in putting your own quizes on line, you can use my copy of qform and the associated CGI script.

  1. First, prepare a score sheet in the format expected by the program. Save it in your darkwing directory, let's say called lib101-a.quiz.
  2. Copy or move the quiz file to my scoring directory to make it available to the grading program:
    cp lib101-a.quiz ~jqj/qform/
    (note that if someone else has already copied a file with the same name you will get an error message).
  3. Run the qform program to compile the score sheet into an HTML form:
    ~jqj/=bin/qform lib101-a.quiz > lib101-a.html
    This creates a file called "lib101-a.html" containing the HTML form. Publish the form by moving it to your public_html subdirectory.

If you don't have a darkwing account but want to try out the process, prepare a copy of the score sheet and mail it to me at <mailto:jqj@darkwing>.

The format of score sheets is very simple, and is described in detail in <http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj/qform.html>.

Note: my version of qform is currently set up for self-evaluations, not for graded exams, interactive online "labs", or homework submissions. The major focus is on providing students with instant feedback as to the correctness of their answers. To use it for quizes you would need at a minimum (a) to record the results when students took the test, (b) to deal with issues of authentication [how do you know which student this is when he/she takes the test?], and (c) to make sure that the score sheet is protected and inaccessible to students who have not yet taken the quiz. Though these issues could all be resolved, I haven't worked out a scheme that is both easy to use and addresses the concerns. If you are interested in doing web-based exams but want more than the low-tech approach of having your students send you their assignments by e-mail, let me know and we'll see what we can put together.

Pyramid scheme busted on Internet

We've heard for years that chain letters on the Interent are not only in bad form but likely to be illegal. In fact, the Federal Trade Commission recently acted to confirm that claim, and shut down an operation they likened to an electronic chain letter, in which people who invested $250 were told they could get a 2000% return. The FTC won a court order freezing the assets of Fortuna. In addition, the court has ordered the repatriation of $3.5 million transferred by the company to an account in Antiqua. The scam itself used to be on the web as the "explosive Fibonacci sequence" at <http://members.gnn.com/fortuna/fortuna.htm>, though that page will probably be gone by the time you read this newsletter.

New from IAT

The Institute for Academic Technology at the University of North Carolina, <http://www.iat.unc.edu/>, is one of the more active sites for educational technology. Among the notable new information resources from IAT are:

Conferences and workshops, real and virtual

This is a selected and somewhat idiosyncratic list of upcoming conferences relevant to educational tech., both "virtual" (online) and traditional. For conferences that require physical travel, my emphasis is on conferences in the Northwest and on those I find personally interesting. The Educom calendar, <http://educom.edu/../events.calendar>, contains a more extensive list of mainstream conferences.

Virtual conferences:

Traditional conferences and workshops:

The Lighter side

Subject: Signatures
From: Ken.Cross@Aus.Sun.COM (Ken Cross - ISR - Sun Sales Agent)
Signature - the little aphorism that people put at the end of email so that recipients wonder what the heck they're talking about.
One-Line Signatures captured from the Internet

Administrativa

The UO Faculty Consultants Network Newsletter is published (approximately) twice a month. If you have materials for inclusion in the newsletter you can send them to <mailto:jqj@darkwing>. This newsletter (as well as other FCN-related material) is available on line in <http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj/fcn/>.

last edit
by: JQ Johnson<mailto:jqj@darkwing>UO Knight Library