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Center for Teaching and Learning

The Center for Teaching and Learning provides a list of proactive steps you can take to ensure you can continue teaching in case a short- or long-term disruption emerges. The center also describes best practices for delivering remote instruction. 

Digital Tools for Remote Teaching

Digital Learning Services offers a variety of guides on important tools you would need to continue your course during a disruption. Zoom is an essential tool that you can use to hold class sessions online and/or record your lectures. Kaltura is another important platform that allows you to upload, edit, and share your Zoom recordings directly in bCourses. 

Berkeley Public Health Bcourses Template

If you would like to use a BPH Template in your course, you can do so by finding it in Canvas Commons. Follow these steps to learn how to search for the template and import it into your course site.

Remote Examinations

As with any good exam, exams delivered remotely should challenge learners to combine the skills, abilities, and knowledge gained through the course to perform a specific task. Students should be assessed on the quality of their answers and the process they used to arrive at their answer. This approach is aligned with the Council on Education for Public Health’s model for competency-based assessments. 

Campus policy currently does not allow for external vendors (ProctorU, Examity, Honorlock, etc.) to be contracted for proctoring online exams, but instructional teams do have the option of proctoring students using Zoom. 

The Center of Teaching and Learning offers these strategies for Zoom proctoring. 

The Berkeley Academic Senate has very helpful tips for remote non-proctored exams. 

Designing Remote Examinations

In the absence of remote proctoring options, concerns about cheating and exam validity can be reduced through the design of the exam.  Some strategies to mitigate the absence of proctoring are suggested below:

  • Include an integrity pledge that students must digitally sign with their names and student ID numbers.
  • Offer more frequent lower-stakes assessments instead of infrequent high-stakes exams. 
  • Connect exam questions to course activities and other assessments (student paper, class project, previous discussion, lab) that the student has completed.

Bcourses

You can leverage the features in bCourses to create exams that your students can complete remotely from anywhere with an internet connection. Any work students submit online can be reviewed, commented on, and graded by an instructor or GSI. You can watch this video to learn how to create an exam that your students can access remotely within bCourses, or you can review the Canvas guide. 

Gradescope

Gradescope is a web app for grading exams, quizzes, projects, and homework faster online. 

Gradescope offers two modes for online testing: Homework / Problem Set, where students submit a PDF of their work, and Online Assignments, where students fill in answers directly inside their web browsers. For Online Assignments, Gradescope just added a Maximum Time Permitted feature, which gives students a set number of minutes to complete the exam from the moment they open it. You can review this guide to learn how to build the exam on Gradescope. 

The other assignment type on Gradescope (Homework / Problem Set) can be used in conjunction with a fillable PDF to offer a remote exam. The videos below explain the advantages of using fillable PDFs for your exams. The tutorials were developed by Stephannie Holm, MD, MPH, who was heavily involved in the development of online advanced epidemiology courses. 

Resources for OOMPH Faculty

Although OOMPH courses are fully online, disruptions might affect your instructional designer’s ability to support your course. Please review this page which contains answers to common questions about the OOMPH program.