Benefits of Online Homwork?
 

I just recently finished two college classes that used exclusively online homework. One of them was a physics class using the Mastering Physics system and the other was a chemistry class that used a set of online quizzes as homework.

After finishing the classes and doing well in both of them I'm curious about how effective online systems for homework are. I understand that it certainly makes life much easier for the TA when it comes to grading but does that benefit outway the actual learning that goes on from doing homework out by hand? I personally found both systems to not be effective for my style of learning and ended up going back to the tried and true method of working each problem out by hand and keeping track of all the steps.

Both programs allowed people to simply open the book to the correct page, find the equation and plug in the correct answer. With hand written homework you must show work to get credit but with an online system there's not an equivalent way to measure a student's understanding until the test. Both classes used quizzes in recitation sections but a large number of people skipped the recitations because the quizzes in both classes were simply bonus points.

What I'm interested in are thoughts on how effective the online homework systems that others here have used are and how should responsibility for learning coursework be balanced between students and the university?

If there's any sort of math or picture drawing involved (which most if not all science and engineering classes do), I am very much against online homework.

I just got through a Numerical Methods course (using MATLAB) with online only homework. Mostly programming assignments, which is perfectly fine with online submissions. However, the one question per assignment that we had to do calculations "by hand," and the mathematical derivations and explanations we had to do for all the problems, there is the completely unnecessarily time consuming task of entering everything into Equation Editor. The time you spend using Equation Editor is simply busy work, and it takes 5 times as long to do a page of math. Time that could be better spent doing other practice problems.

I hate mastering physics! I just did it....I had a pretty poor average on the assignments and quizzes...The lack of feedback is pretty lame...you have no idea what you did wrong or how to do anything if you've screwed it up...yet I got an A on the midterm, and we'll see about the final. I very much preferred real assignments.

I had at least one online math quiz due every weekend over the last semester. Based on that, I'd honestly say that I strongly dislike online coursework. For this math course I've found that the online quizzes that we were tested on didn't pertain to the actual tests we had for the class, so that I'd make 100's on all of the quizzes, but then with that information in hand practically none of it applied to the actual tests. Another problem I've found with online homework (we used a system called iLrn) is that when doing math problems a .01 difference will effect whether you make or miss the problem, which is very frustrating when you don't know how they want you to round on all of the questions.

I agree with gatorade. The only class I had that used online homework was a Physics of Sound and Music course, and there was no way you could enter in the wrong answer anyway- it was more like busywork to make sure you were keeping up with the class.

God, I HATED that class

Doing online homework for math at the University of Calgary is a complete disaster. When it ask you for answers, you end up trying to enter the answer like programming a java program instead of simply entering the numbers.

And once you did, you don't have a fuckin clue as to what you just entered. You'd hope that you did it right otherwise, the system will bitch and moan until you do it right. Even if you did manage to fix the problem, you won't know where exactly was wrong. All you know is the right answer, but entering it into the online math website is a pain in the fuckin ass.

Can't say the dog ate it..

It sort of is like scantran where they instantly know if you are right or wrong. But to me I felt homework was about seeing how you did the process, to not just know if you are right, but if you know how to do it, and correct the person where he is going off. So I guess it would depend on the subject, and the type of exam.

Lol, well, I had the exact opposite problem where it seemed impossible to answer the question correctly, especially since occasionally it would be over questions that were never actually taught.

I wouldn't go so far to say I hated Math 141, though, it was just not very well put together (Which I think 99% of all A&M's business majors would go ahead and agree with that statement).

Exactly the case. With online homework there's no way to show that people understand the process and thus no way to be sure people on learning the material. That brings me to the second question, do universities have a responsibility to the students to ensure they learn the material or is that purely the job of the students?

Students have the job of teaching themselves the material; the university has the job to provide the material to the student. It's the student's decision to learn it or not using the materials (professors, library, etc.) the school provides. We could have a whole thread on this, though.
:thumbsup:

I agree that students have the responsibility for learning the material but the university in my mind also has the responsibility of making sure that students have effective tools to use to learn the material and in my mind, online homework is not an effective tool.