Lesson exercises
Courses typically comprise 12 lessons with a subsequent 12 exercise
assignments. When the number of students is high, there is a pressing
need for supervisory teachers to handle the exercise-correction
workload. At the College of Sør-Trøndelag we have
generally employed students to handle this job. However, it is
recommended that the teacher should correct exercises for approximately
10 students.
Below are the guidelines for supervisory teachers working in distance
teaching at the College of Sør-Trøndelag:
GENERAL REQUIREMENTS:
- An exercise should be corrected
and returned to the distance learning student within four days
of reception, preferably sooner.
- Comments should be made on
everything, including both good and poor aspects. Praise good
work. You must obviously point out errors, but never forget to
explain the correct answer.
- Post a brief description of
yourself at the group news site, including your name, where you
live and/or where you are from, what you are doing in Trond-heim,
what you are studying, your particular interests etc. Invite questions.
RECEIVING, CORRECTING AND RETURNING ANSWERS
- Store incoming answers on
your home directory as they arrive
- Correct answers within four
days and return them to the students. Always correct exercises
in the order they arrived (check file date). Always return exercises
the same day they were corrected.
- Exercise in the Word file
format use a style called Comment which you may use when
commenting on exercises (it uses an indented red font).
- When you have returned the
exercises they should be copied to the directory Y:\home\fu\retur\<subject>.
This serves two purposes: 1) The teacher may observe the progress
of the distance learning student and also your comments, to counsel
you should you need assistance 2) You retain a back-up copy in
case the distance learning student claims he never received the
corrected exercise (happens occasionally).
- Occasionally exercises may
not be passed. These will be returned to the distance learning
student bearing the required note that this exercise has not been
passed, indicating its shortcomings.
OTHER TASKS
- Update approval lists after
each correction session. Your personal approval list is found
in the directory Y:\home\fu\godkj\<subject>\<yourname>
- Participate in newsgroup discussions,
answer questions etc.
- After completing the correction
of all lesson exercises draw up a list giving an overview of the
most common problems encountered by the students. E-mail this
to the teacher.
- If the questions you receive
from distance learning students are of general interest you will
post both the question and the answer on the news site. Always
make the question anonymous by removing all traces of the person
asking the question
The figure below shows the main features of the lesson cycle.
It starts with the distribution of a lesson comprising the course
text and exercises. The student completes the lesson and works
on the exercises, producing answers to be sent to the supervisory
teacher.
The answers must be sent as e-mail attachments as this ensures
exclusive communication between the student and the supervisor.
The answer will most frequently be a Word document, though programming
examples or spreadsheets etc. might also be sent.
The supervisory teacher corrects the answers by commenting directly
in the Word document as shown in the figure below. You see the
question first, the student's answer indented from the question,
and finally the comments from the supervisory teacher.
Different paragraph indentation helps to distinguish questions,
answers and comments as shown in the figure below. Colours may
also be used, as they enhance readability: for example questions
in black, answers in blue and comments in red.
After correction, the supervisor returns the corrected answers
to the student as an e-mail attachment.
Naming files is an important issue. The supervisor will usually
send exercises named exerc01.doc, exerc02.doc etc. But what will
they be called when they are answered and returned by twenty to
thirty students?
They will of course be called exerc01.doc and when each individual
student uses this file name there is a danger that you will have
only one answer in the end, namely the one last sent in (also
called exerc01.doc), as all the others will have been overwritten.
Therefore we give our students the following guidelines:
Note! It is essential when naming
files (the exercises) that this is done in a particular way when
they are returned to the supervisor. Receiving documents from
many students when all files have the same name, for instance
exerc01.doc or 02exerc.doc etc., is not a feasible work method
for supervisors.
Therefore a particular naming
convention will be used for the files (exercise answers) being
returned to supervisors, as follows: The eight first characters
in the file name will adhere to the following pattern:
NNEEEEFF
- NN refers to the exercise
number corresponding to the exercise file you received
- EEEE stands for the four first
letters in your surname
- FF stands for the first two
letters in your given name
01normka.doc
If a person's surname is shorter
than four letters the file name becomes correspondingly shorter.
Created by Geir Maribu, 16. November 1996