Steve Earp, Manager of the Student Shop for Pratt School of Engineering wanted to help students learn how to use the shop safely, and document that students had successfully completed safety training before they started on their projects. His workspace is crowded with feet of file cabinets from previous years, stuffed with paper copies of student answers on safety quizzes. He wondered how to use technology to give quizzes and track student progress, before the paperwork completely filled all of his available space. Steve’s previous projects include creating a website for students to easily access the materials they need to use the machine shop for their projects, producing videos demonstrating machine usage, and he was one of the first at Duke to use iPads to offer video help at the point and time of need. Successful certified tool and die makers like Steve think creatively to build what is needed; he began by listing his requirements. Students must:
- have access to safety videos and quizzes easily
- watch each safety video
- complete a quiz on the safety video successfully (defined as 80% correct)
- be able to retry quizzes a limited number of times to achieve success
- answer different questions for each iteration on a specific topic
- get immediate feedback after they submit a quiz, so they can correct their misunderstandings immediately.
Steve worked with the Center for Instructional Technology to customize a Sakai site to meet his requirements. He did not want to manage student enrollment, so students in courses that require machine shop projects received directions to enroll themselves in the Sakai site to begin their safety training. When they get to the site, they receive directions on the front page about the safety tests.
To present each safety video to students, the first question on each quiz contains an embedded video and students are asked if they watched the video before they can proceed to the questions. The second part of the quiz contains five randomly selected questions from a pool, presented one at a time. Once a student submits her answers, she can see her score, and if she chooses, she can watch the video and take the quiz again, up to three times. Each time, the same video is available, but the questions are likely to be different. Students must achieve a high score before they can progress to the next part of safety training, which includes hands-on work with Steve.
Steve can monitor the student grades on the quizzes within Sakai, both on individual quizzes and on the cumulative score, which determines when students are ready for the next part. He can also see how much time each student spent on each quiz, as one way to check if they’ve actually watched the video he produced. He discovered that, although you cannot change quizzes that have been taken by students in Sakai, you can correct questions if they are drawn from a question pool.
For the first time, Steve can work with students on their projects on day one of the semester. In previous semesters, he’d spent the first six weeks of the semester on safety training, delaying student projects significantly. He expects to keep improving on this safety training process, adding to it as the years progress.
If you have specific learning requirements for students in your Duke course, contact CIT for help thinking through the appropriate settings and capabilities. Or, consult the help guide on tests and quizzes to learn more about the options.