[mjbai]

Heya everyone,

What are your opinions about online homework and it's usage? I'm trying to help some instructors make a decision on homework systems. What systems have you used and what are the pros and cons?

We're considering quality, diagnostics, cost, ease of use, customization, security, and alignment to campus priorities. Any other objectives we should consider? And within those priorities that, what have you found to be the most important?

[Arkcon]

There are a number of opinions here:  http://www.chemicalforums.com/index.php?topic=24075.0

[mjbai]

Thank you for the link! I did see that thread but it's a little out of date and honestly, technology changes really fast. The thread also didn't help me understand the pros and cons of certain systems, only the pros and cons of online homework (which we've pretty much decided to go forward on).

Would love your opinions! Thank you!

[Dan]

There are not many people around here that approve of the online homework system(s), even fewer who implement them I'd expect.

I really would urge you to reconsider. It saves the staff time, but the students' education suffers.

[mjbai]

We're mainly considering it for intro courses where the number of students per class is in the hundreds. When facing cuts in budget, we're very limited in our alternatives. If you have any ideas on what your institutions have done, we will definitely consider it as we're in the early phases of deciding.

I'm curious to why people disapprove of online homework vs traditional homework. Studies I've read mainly discount any difference between the two. However, that's why hearing personal experiences is so important to us. How does the students' education suffer?

[Dan]

If work is marked by a human, methods can be checked and criticized rather than just the final answer. The student gets better feedback this way, rather than just checking the final answer - which may be marked wrong due to a minor rounding error in a multistep calculation. We get people posting on here, stressed because they think they completely misunderstand a topic because the computer said "No" where a human could have said "your method is correct, but don't round your numbers until the end".

You can get around this with multiple choice questions, but there are issues with multiple choice too.

The most important aspect in my opinion is that you input questions and grade output with no inspection of the process that links the two. In my opinion, it is vital to understand the process by which a student goes from question to answer in order to teach effectively - as a tutor you need to make sure that the process is logical and the student understands what they're doing. Otherwise they will not understand why they are getting the wrong answer, or why they might be getting the right answer for the wrong reasons.

[discodermolide]

We're mainly considering it for intro courses where the number of students per class is in the hundreds. When facing cuts in budget, we're very limited in our alternatives. If you have any ideas on what your institutions have done, we will definitely consider it as we're in the early phases of deciding.

I'm curious to why people disapprove of online homework vs traditional homework. Studies I've read mainly discount any difference between the two. However, that's why hearing personal experiences is so important to us. How does the students' education suffer?

Well I have had a look at some of these web pages. I tried them out but found that if I got stuck I just went off the page and forgot about it, but then I can afford to do that. I think that they are no substitute for homework set by a teacher to be in by a certain time. If you are really interested in the subject you will do it. And the teacher can follow your level of understanding and hopefully correct any false interpretations.
On-line homework does not have these incentives and you need to be really disciplined to do it properly. Maybe I'm not quite with the modern thinking here, but never mind.
My thoughts on the subject.

[Borek]

If you are really interested in the subject you will do it.

"No credit - forget it!"

This site is on line for almost 2 years: http://www.chemistry-quizzes.info/. The idea was to give students a chance to try more problems than they are given in their book/by their teacher. Questions are generated on the fly and while they are following a template, they can vary substantially (see http://www.chemistry-quizzes.info/quizz.php?m=r&fi=ph-weak/0000.php, and click several times on the Try question again link on the left to see what I mean; watch the constant).

So far there were just a few students that tried to solve anything - and I have directed people there multiple times.

[mjbai]

If work is marked by a human, methods can be checked and criticized rather than just the final answer. The student gets better feedback this way, rather than just checking the final answer - which may be marked wrong due to a minor rounding error in a multistep calculation. We get people posting on here, stressed because they think they completely misunderstand a topic because the computer said "No" where a human could have said "your method is correct, but don't round your numbers until the end".

You can get around this with multiple choice questions, but there are issues with multiple choice too.

The most important aspect in my opinion is that you input questions and grade output with no inspection of the process that links the two. In my opinion, it is vital to understand the process by which a student goes from question to answer in order to teach effectively - as a tutor you need to make sure that the process is logical and the student understands what they're doing. Otherwise they will not understand why they are getting the wrong answer, or why they might be getting the right answer for the wrong reasons.

Thanks for your thoughts Dan! I can see where you're coming from, especially if it's automated homework or nothing. I agree that multiple choice isn't the best way to test higher level concepts. Also, it really IS important for the student to understand the thinking, not the answer.

My personal opinion going into this is that online homework has a place, especially as enrollment grows. However, students need human interaction as well. The support has to be scaffolded and everything should align. The best way I've seen it set up is where there are pre-lecture videos, lecture, reading, discussion sessions (which act more as a tutorial with group work), and then online homework. That seems to be the logical release of responsibility with multiple chances to understand the thinking behind solving problems. Also, if students start their online homework earlier (high hopes there), they can easily take it to office hours as well, much like how paper homework would operate.

Now, most of the programs out there also have feedback and hints, though I'm sure it doesn't compare to having a person walk you through the homework. I do think that there are some times where you have to know whether you can get to the right answer or not, especially when you have high-stakes testing, such as your final exam. You won't get coaching and you need to make sure you can get to the end without any help, and of course, practice on your own. Online homework is a good form of practice, but unfortunately, it needs to be assigned and given points otherwise students won't attempt it. Thankfully, most instructors only make it small percentage of their grade.

I do think some instructors probably are not using online homework well, and really having the students make a giant leap from being taught the concepts and then having to immediately  try it on their own.

Back to the main idea though, is there a place for online homework to be able to help students scaffold? We're really looking for personal experience or experience of others you know. That will be the best way to put it into context.

[mjbai]

We're mainly considering it for intro courses where the number of students per class is in the hundreds. When facing cuts in budget, we're very limited in our alternatives. If you have any ideas on what your institutions have done, we will definitely consider it as we're in the early phases of deciding.

I'm curious to why people disapprove of online homework vs traditional homework. Studies I've read mainly discount any difference between the two. However, that's why hearing personal experiences is so important to us. How does the students' education suffer?

Well I have had a look at some of these web pages. I tried them out but found that if I got stuck I just went off the page and forgot about it, but then I can afford to do that. I think that they are no substitute for homework set by a teacher to be in by a certain time. If you are really interested in the subject you will do it. And the teacher can follow your level of understanding and hopefully correct any false interpretations.
On-line homework does not have these incentives and you need to be really disciplined to do it properly. Maybe I'm not quite with the modern thinking here, but never mind.
My thoughts on the subject.

Online homework definitely should have the same incentives as traditional homework. The systems we've checked out including Mastering, MyLabs, Sapling, OWL, Connect... and many more. The students are given a grade on the assignments after due dates. The grade they receive will be put into their overall homework grade.

We hope that if you're interested in the subject, you'll want to explore more on your own. However, sometimes to do what you're interested in, you have to learn the parts that aren't directly interesting.

[mjbai]

If you are really interested in the subject you will do it.

"No credit - forget it!"

This site is on line for almost 2 years: http://www.chemistry-quizzes.info/. The idea was to give students a chance to try more problems than they are given in their book/by their teacher. Questions are generated on the fly and while they are following a template, they can vary substantially (see http://www.chemistry-quizzes.info/quizz.php?m=r&fi=ph-weak/0000.php, and click several times on the Try question again link on the left to see what I mean; watch the constant).

So far there were just a few students that tried to solve anything - and I have directed people there multiple times.

I've never seen that website, thanks for the link! Yeah, if students are already given problems by their teacher, I don't think they'd be that eager to try more problems unless they seriously weren't understanding the topic and were highly motivated (a rare mix I feel). I'm more on the lines of the idea that online homework has to be assigned, gradable, and useful to student learning. The products I know that are out there are not free, unfortunately.

[eazye1334]

We used something called WebWork for math homework in college, and I really did not like the concept all that much. My issue with it was that students would often spend more time trying to figure out ways to get answers faster rather than actually doing the problems. If it's a matching problem or something like that, all it takes is a few permutations to get it. I know tons of problems where people would guess hundreds of times to get the answer rather than just trying the problem. Obviously, those people tend to do worse on tests because they don't know the material, but it does is waste the time and teachings of the professor.

As someone already pointed out, having no real feedback from the homework is tough as well. With the homework system being so black-and-white, there's no opportunity to give credit for what the student did right. There's plenty of times where there is one mistake in a problem, say a mis-balanced equation, but the student did the following steps correctly. Obviously this isn't worthy of full credit, but the student certainly deserves some credit for understanding while making a mistake. The online homework allows no room for this.

[fledarmus]

You get what you measure. If you are measuring how quickly people can pick the correct answer out of five possibilities, then you get people that can quickly pick the correct answer out of five possibilities. If you are trying to determine what a person understands about chemistry, it may not correlate all that well with how quickly they can pick the correct answer out of five possibilities, and the more they practice, the less it will correlate.

Most simple testing systems are fairly good at correlating with subject matter understanding on naive subjects, but that correlation goes down with increasing use of the test, and even faster with greater importance being placed on the test results.

[mjbai]

We used something called WebWork for math homework in college, and I really did not like the concept all that much. My issue with it was that students would often spend more time trying to figure out ways to get answers faster rather than actually doing the problems. If it's a matching problem or something like that, all it takes is a few permutations to get it. I know tons of problems where people would guess hundreds of times to get the answer rather than just trying the problem. Obviously, those people tend to do worse on tests because they don't know the material, but it does is waste the time and teachings of the professor.

As someone already pointed out, having no real feedback from the homework is tough as well. With the homework system being so black-and-white, there's no opportunity to give credit for what the student did right. There's plenty of times where there is one mistake in a problem, say a mis-balanced equation, but the student did the following steps correctly. Obviously this isn't worthy of full credit, but the student certainly deserves some credit for understanding while making a mistake. The online homework allows no room for this.

Yeah that's definitely painful. It seems that online homework is dominated by multiple choice. However, there are open ended answers for calculation type problems that can prevent random permutations. It's definitely about the quality of the question.

Currently the systems all have "feedback" and none of them only tell the student the answer is right or wrong unless the student is WAY off. I know MasteringChemistry has socratic hints and common wrong-answer feedback. However, you'd be right, there's no way of getting partial credit, unless there was an easier way for students to show work online.

Fledarmus, our purpose for using homework is to give students low-stakes practice with problems (and eventual assessment of understanding). We won't make the homework more than 15% of their grade. There are usually lab components, discussion participation, and exams.

Thank you for all your opinions! Every issue you raise up, we will hopefully address in implementation.

[Vivielle]

As a current undergrad chemistry major, I have to say that I (and probably greater than 90% of my classmates) HATE online homework. A big reason for this, and one that previous posters have mentioned already, is that when a human is grading your homework they can let you know if you just made a small mistake (i.e. made a calculator error, forgot to divide by 2 etc) or if you completely missed the boat. For most online homework systems (and 4 have been inflicted on me thus far) if you get it wrong you get it wrong with no explanation why and you have NO idea why, a lot of the time. That makes the homework into a very stressful experience because it can be hard to determine if you really know what's going on, and are just making little mistakes, or if you are grossly incorrect in your approach to the problem.(And yes, I know that there is the textbook, the professor's office hours etc, but those resources still don't really reduce the aggravation that online homework systems can cause.)

Another serious drawback to the online homework, and again this was mentioned earlier but I thought that you might want to hear this from a student as well. Many times online homework turns into a "How can I beat the system and just get this thing over with?" type of exercise. I know that that's what I do personally, and then to actually learn the material I will go and do problems out of the book.(Also I find that for whatever reason I consistently get more problems correct if I work them out of a book as opposed to the online system.)

Another reason that students often dislike online homework is that it is usually expensive. For general chemistry at my school, students were having to get a roughly $100 access code and the textbook, which would be about $100 as well (at least those were the prices 3 years ago, and I highly doubt it's gotten cheaper since then).

Finally, another point to consider is that many systems have a peculiar, highly specific way that they want you to type answers in (i.e. I've had homework where you would have typed water as H_2_O and H2O or H₂O would have been considered incorrect). Basically that adds another layer of potential aggravation and another place to make an error that really has nothing to do with your understanding of the material.

Sorry to have such a long and somewhat ranting reply, but online homework is one of my pet peeves.