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Hello All,

I am going to share with you my approach to keep the students engaged in the class and motivate them to be present in class. Last semester, I taught intro to statistics as my first class as a PhD student. I wanted to encourage students to come to class so I designed small in-class questions on qualtrics and told students that it would not be graded.
On qualtrics, it is easy to design small tests and it was free for me so I used it. However, I guess there are apps similar to what I did. Before each session, I designed a few questions on qualtrics for different parts of the session. Each question was chosen to cover the concept I talked about in different parts of the class. Students would be asked to click on the link and submit their names and then solve the question. Then, they would see a page that said they should wait until being told to go to the next page which had the next question. At the end of the session, I would show the answers to students and ask them about their answers. Also, I would show the descriptive statistics of their performance which is provided on qualities. It would give them good feedback if they understood the concept I had just discussed. I saw many students got engaged and were waiting to see if they got the right answers.
I tried to make it more interesting so I told them to submit an ID and I created a leaderboard that would show their performance on these tests in each session. Furthermore, I told them the top 5 students would receive an extra 5 points. Students would receive points based on answering each of the questions and They could see their performance on the leaderboard. This approach also helped me to know the participation of each student in class given that I did not take attendance.
I wrote a code on python that receives the excel file extracted from qualities and grades it and updates the leaderboard. I will attach a copy of a test and related file. I hope you find it helpful.
This ended up being helpful during the online classes given that most students did not turn on their video and I did not know if they were listening. You can also add timing to the questions that how much time they have to solve each problem and other features using qultrics.
This approach helped me to engage all students in answering questions and thinking. Usually when we ask questions most students feel uncomfortable to answer. This way they are more comfortable. On the other hand, I was able to take my breath for a minute while they were trying to solve the questions.

Thanks,
Ali

------------------------------
Ali Simaei
PhD Student
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge LA
225-9164899
------------------------------

Hi Ali, 

That's a great way to engage students and test their learning synchronously. I can see how it will be so effective while teaching on Zoom. Thank you for sharing. 


------------------------------
Ali Ahmed
PhD Candidate
University of Massachusetts Lowell
Lowell MA
832-8930837
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 07-29-2020 06:10:36 PM
From: Ali Simaei
Subject: New approaches to assessment when students cannot be readily supervised- My approach to evaluate the students' understanding using gamification

Hello All,

I am going to share with you my approach to keep the students engaged in the class and motivate them to be present in class. Last semester, I taught intro to statistics as my first class as a PhD student. I wanted to encourage students to come to class so I designed small in-class questions on qualtrics and told students that it would not be graded.
On qualtrics, it is easy to design small tests and it was free for me so I used it. However, I guess there are apps similar to what I did. Before each session, I designed a few questions on qualtrics for different parts of the session. Each question was chosen to cover the concept I talked about in different parts of the class. Students would be asked to click on the link and submit their names and then solve the question. Then, they would see a page that said they should wait until being told to go to the next page which had the next question. At the end of the session, I would show the answers to students and ask them about their answers. Also, I would show the descriptive statistics of their performance which is provided on qualities. It would give them good feedback if they understood the concept I had just discussed. I saw many students got engaged and were waiting to see if they got the right answers.
I tried to make it more interesting so I told them to submit an ID and I created a leaderboard that would show their performance on these tests in each session. Furthermore, I told them the top 5 students would receive an extra 5 points. Students would receive points based on answering each of the questions and They could see their performance on the leaderboard. This approach also helped me to know the participation of each student in class given that I did not take attendance.
I wrote a code on python that receives the excel file extracted from qualities and grades it and updates the leaderboard. I will attach a copy of a test and related file. I hope you find it helpful.
This ended up being helpful during the online classes given that most students did not turn on their video and I did not know if they were listening. You can also add timing to the questions that how much time they have to solve each problem and other features using qultrics.
This approach helped me to engage all students in answering questions and thinking. Usually when we ask questions most students feel uncomfortable to answer. This way they are more comfortable. On the other hand, I was able to take my breath for a minute while they were trying to solve the questions.

Thanks,
Ali

------------------------------
Ali Simaei
PhD Student
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge LA
225-9164899
------------------------------