Context

Before I delve into my personal reflection on supervising an exam via skype, I thought I would put it all into context for you.

Who are the students? We train electrical apprentices online. They do their regular work, and instead of going to TAFE they complete their theory training online. Our students age from 16 to 50+. Their time for training is sometimes at their workplace, in an office, one day a week, and sometimes it’s at home after work, and sometimes it’s even on their holidays. It doesn’t really matter when they do their training, but their exam has to be supervised, which menas it has to be done Monday – Friday, between 8 and 4.

How are they assessed? Because of the way this training is done, students take differing amounts of time to finish competencies, and we rarely have more then one student doing an exam at a time. Students have to book in the time that they want to sit their exam as well, so staff can manage when students sit exams. Online exams are just one of the methods of assessment for each competency (we’ll talk more about that another time). We use moodle, and so our online exams are moodle quizes. For those interested, we put a time limit on the exam, and the review options are all unticked, except for feedback and scores in the final collum.

Why are they supervised via webcam? They’re supervised by webcam so that we know that it is indeed the right student taking the exam, and so that we can be sure that they don’t have textbooks, or other things on their desk, or computer to help them (assuming the exam they’re doing isn’t open book).

Personal Reflections

Today was my first time supervising one of these exams online (though not the first time they’ve been done in our organisation). He’s a quick run-down of how it happened.

• Student calls because they’re booked in for an exam.
• We both have skype open and add each other. Start video call (student only- I’m not on video, and I’m on mute for voice too while they’re doing the exam)
• Survey room/screen/desk with webcam. Webcam is positioned so that both student, and their desk and computer screen can be seen by the webcam.
• Give student exam password and move skype to extra screen or corner of current screen.
• Periodically check on student, record exam if necessary.
• Student calls/talks via skype when they’re finsihed. Call is ended.
• Exam is marked, student and employer are emailed the results, is a resit is necessary, then student books in to do that.

Positives? When I said on twitter that I was supervising an exam via skype I got a few responses from people thinking that this was going to be really hard. These people probably thought that there would be multiple students; but with only one student, it’s a very easy, stress-free way to supervise exams. I personally found it easy to manage, and while it was another thing I was multi-tasking, I was able to give it the attention it needed, and also cary on with some other tasks. I did some work on my computer like emails, and created some slides- things I would have been doing had I supervised him in ‘real life’.

Negatives? There weren’t really any negatives that I can think of. Perhaps, if I had to give an answer, I would say having to listen to them was annoying- not that he was speaking, but there were keys typing and things like that. Simple solution is to turn down the volume, or put on some quiet music- that way I could still hear him if they need to talk to me (which they would only be doing if they had finished).

Technicalities

Why Skype? Well, most people have heard of skype, so it’s not a ‘new’ thing to a lot of people. This is a big deal, because there are already some ‘new technologies’ students have to ‘learn’, and we don’t want to make this too big of jump for them. It’s also free, easy to download, and easy to make an account, plus people will actually use it for other things- not just their training. It’s true that skype has limitations- like only being able to video call with one person at a time, BUT as I mentioned earlier, with students booking in times to do exams, this isn’t really an issue. Plus, we have 8 computers in the office. If was vital that more then one person was doing their exam at the same time then they could just connect to another skype account, and another staff member, or that same staff member could monitor them on the extra computer.