Love/Hate Relationship with Academic Technology

Now that our academic year is underway I can begin to realize the fruits of my labor from the time I spent this summer preparing my classes.  In my undergraduate Database Modeling course I have implemented online quizzes in our learning management system (LMS).  Using these quizzes, the students are able to assess their understanding of the readings through the online quizzes they take outside of the class.  The quizzes are setup as multiple choice questions that are automatically graded by the LMS and reported to the grading function.  The LMS allows us to make the quizzes available outside of the classroom and auto removes the need to manually grade the quizzes (I can now simply review performance on the quizzes to identify any trouble areas for the class).

While this process appears to provide great time savings and contributes to the students' exposure to the course materials, it has proven to lead to some additional challenges for the class.  Unfortunately, the web-based LMS does not take into account differing perspectives on how to operate the quiz functionality.  As a result, many students have struggled in completing the quiz and have become locked out of the quiz.  I end up hearing from several students during the quiz that they cannot submit their quiz and I must go back in and reset their attempt so they can access the quiz once again.

In addition to the challenges with the quiz functionality, it has also come to our attention the LMS has an error in grade calculation under certain conditions.  This leads to the faculty reporting incorrect grades (lower than the actual grade) and resulted in a lot of frustration by the faculty and students.

The academic technologies such as LMS were designed to improve student access to the course materials and facilitate learning outside of the classroom.  Most of the time, these systems are successful.  However, when they are not, they create extra work for the students, faculty, and staff and leave everyone questioning the value of the technology.

I don't blame the vendors over these issues.  Vendors gain larger market share by the volume of functions included in the software and not by the rigorous quality built into the system.  Vendors are incented to add additional functions more than they are to spend the time/resources to ensure all functions are error-free.  We as consumers of these systems must place more demand on software that operates without any issues than to push for more functionality.

I still love to incorporate new technologies to increase my effectiveness in the classroom.  However, at times, this leads to additional frustrations and additional work.  I think the frustrations we experience as a class can also be a valuable learning experience to these students as they move into the workforce; they will now see, firsthand, the results of software anomalies.