Chuffed: Even without electricity, eLearning comes good

It's exam week here at Bond, and to my surprise and delight, a number of the academics using Blackboard for the first time this semester have chosen to run some portion of their final exam (as well as other pieces of assessment) online using Blackboard. They didn't get hung up on the reasons not to use online assessment, they just dove right in and tried it out. They were willing to experiment. Fantastic.

The lecturer of one of the largest classes run by the university is one of these willing academics so of course, the practical component of his student's final exam was conducted online through Blackboard. The exam was to be run in an envigilated environment within a computer lab at 10am this morning. Great.

Today, one of the reasons not to use online assessment showed itself in a big way. We had a major power outage this morning. The whole campus as well as the whole suburb was out for about 2 hrs. Back-up power kept the server room running, but not the lab computer or the lights for that matter, so no exam. The willing academic took it all in stride and rescheduled the exam for later this afternoon. Wonderful.

Then another reason not to use online assessment appeared. Some residual problems from the power outage this morning cause Blackboard to go down, as well as a few other services, and it went down in a fairly major way. We had power, we had computers, but we didn't have Blackboard. Nuts.

We got it back up fairly quickly and the students had an extra half hour to sit in the lab and study before finally being able to complete their exam. The willing academic? He'll do it all again next semester. Fantastic.