Assignments to be submitted

Traditional home exams as a learning activity

Home exams can be given in many different ways. Different exams can be more/less useful depending on the disciplinary content and on students’ previous experiences.. A more comprehensive home exam often works well as a regular learning activity for the course. It is not unusual for students to work on home exams for a few days, or even up to two weeks. However, it is important to be clear when the teaching activity is over, when the actual exam begins, and when it is time for evaluation.

A common type of home exam is one where students receive three or four general questions to work with. Answering questions of this kind should normally require students to use a breadth of knowledge that they are expected learn during the course. Most often, students have several days to provide the often comprehensive answers that are expected. In order to encourage students’ interest and prevent cheating, many teachers often add a personal element to the question, e.g., that students should provide answers based upon a garden close to where they live, reflect upon a personal experience, or comment on a company/organization that they have experience working with.

Of course, home exams can occur in many other forms, but teachers always need to prepare the exam with consideration to the fact that students have literature, the Internet, people around them, etc. Therefore, home exams are rarely appropriate for testing factual knowledge. However, teachers can effectively test even factual knowledge under the conditions that this part of a more comprehensive analysis that students are expected to conduct.

Project assignments

Students can work with different kinds of project tasks online, both individually and in groups. Group project assignments can be a good way to create a social context for students who are working from home; otherwise, there is a risk that loneliness and the feeling of being left to fend for oneself can negatively affect students’ motivation. If teachers can use project assignments to help students begin interacting amongst themselves, it is also possible that student cooperation will continue with other academic work.

Project assignments are often used to help students learn how to collaborate in ways that will prepare them for working life, and students often experience project work as being more authentic. Project assignments can be of a practical or theoretical nature. Students can use different kinds of locally-collected data and then analyze it online in relation to the course; students can also do theoretical analyses or literature reviews.

Read and write

If we go further back in time, distance teaching meant that students received literature and material by mail, read, and completed different kinds of written assignments related to the literature. These completed assignments were then sent back to the teacher for correction and feedback. We can work with this basic method today as well and make use of more modern features such as peer feedback, collaborative writing, or serial writing (where one student builds upon what others have written).