Technology & Instruction for UNEX

Test-taking in online courses often leads to discussions about cheating and possible ways to minimize cheating. In some cases, proctored exams solve the problem, but that's not always a good solution for everyone and it may require that students pay money for the serverice. Course management systems may allow for randomly generated exams using a bank of questions, something which can minimize the kind of cheating where students share information about tests. Another way to address this is to use project-based learning techniques rather than multiple choice tests. This can help avoid the temptation to cheat, but it would still allow someone else to do the work for a student enrolled in an online course. Apparently cheating on tests is a very big issue at Troy University in Alabama, home to 11,000 online students. They will soon require their online students to purchase the $125 security webcam made by Software Secure in order to monitor student work in online courses. The device in

Sophie is an open source project designed "to enable people to create robust, elegant rich-media, networked documents without recourse to programming". This week they released some documentation for the software and you can also download Early Release Candidate 5 for Mac, Windows and Linux and try it out. An update is coming sometime this month. The history of Sophie goes back to Voyager's Expanded Book Toolkit (I bought a copy myself way back when and then ended up creating my own tools for the project I did) through Night Kitchen's TK3 which was/is an interesting product that I guess never found a large enough audience. I tried that out several times and liked it, but never had a really good use for it. Sophie is potentially a nice tool for adding multimedia content to online courses. It looks easy to use and has some nice features. I think I'll try putting some of my tutorials into Sophie and see how that goes.