This year, I chose to use online homework in Applied Stats for the first time.
I had resisted this in my first couple of years because I was trying to deemphasize calculations in favor of conceptual understanding, and I largely wanted students’ practice to be about the work of interpreting and writing about stats outside of labs, which involved work with larger data sets. But I didn’t really want to grade all of that practice, either. In my first semester, I assigned and collected homework, graded it on completion, and then realized that I was still spending a lot of time looking at it to confirm completion and see where students were having issues. After that, I moved to providing suggested homework problems, asking students what they had done and which ones they wanted to talk about, discussing one or two in class, and then posting solutions. I was mostly happy with this!
But.
Students needed more practice with the kinds of calculation or more basic skills work that I was asking them to do. So last spring, I included a few online, infinitely repeatable quizzes outside of class on topics like these. And students thought it was helpful to have them! They liked the autograding and the sense of checking their understanding, and my reaction was something like, “Ohhhh, this is the use case of online homework!” So this semester: weekly online homework.
A month in, I feel very mixed about it.
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Math In The Sky 