Elementary Statistics has been a difficult subject in the eyes of many social sciences and humanities students. One of the reasons that student performed badly in the subject is the lack of revisions and practices throughout the semester. Many students thought that they can catch up with their learning at the end of the semester with a few days of revision. Such learning strategy usually ends up badly for them.
Ideally, if the students can work on weekly assignments and review the timely feedback given to them, the students are not going to fall very far behind. Unfortunately, it is quite difficult to do so in large classes. In the first semester of 2018/19, we adopted an online learning platform solution provided by the publisher. With the help of the online system, students can work on a small set of online exercises every week and they will get instant feedback on whether they have mastered the topics taught in that week.
Here are some of our experiences in using the system from the semester. First of all, students were assigned several questions every week that they could complete in an hour or so. The exercises were individualized, meaning that they could not copy the answer from each other but discussions among peers were still permitted. Examples were also provided to the students should they encounter difficulties in completing the online exercises. If a student could not get the answer right for the first time, they were allowed to try for unlimited times before the deadline. Although these online exercises contributed only 10% to their continuous assessment, majority of the students really wanted to get that "100% correct" every week and keep working on the exercise until they solved the questions.
In general, our students are positive about doing exercises online. However, they are not so eager to try out the self-learning materials provided by the online system. It seems that our students really need some "incentives" when using this type of system. It is not going to work if we do not integrate the online exercises into their continuous assessments. Of course, there are issues when using a new tool in teaching. For instance, getting the students to register correctly on the system is a tedious task. However, the cost of such online platform is not particularly expensive as compared to a typical textbook, consider that the system does provide electronic version of the textbook. Despite of some issues in our first adoption, it seems to be a viable tool for a large subject team, particularly if you want to keep students engaged throughout the semester.