Online Testing with Blackboard: Lessons Learned (Perspectives from Three Engineering Faculty)

Online Testing with Blackboard – Lessons Learned (Perspective from 3 Engineering Faculty) During the past year, faculty managing concerns with COVID19 have turned to online exams to assist with summative assessment in their courses. As usual, there are benefits to using online exams in Learning Management Systems (LMS) and, of course, there are other aspects of testing in an LMS that could be done much better to suit our individual needs. In this paper, we will discuss some of the types of questions that we use in Blackboard Exams and some of the computer tools that we use to create them. We will discuss some of the successes that we have had, some tricks of the trade that we've used to address our objectives. Finally, we will discuss some tools additional tools that we use to mitigate cheating. This paper will touch on subjects such as: 1) Different types of Blackboard questions a. Calculated Formula b. Multiple Choice c. Fill in the Multiple Blanks 2) Software tools to help write questions (e.g.) a. Mathematica, b. Excel, and c. Visio 3) Handling multi-part questions 4) Mitigating cheating using software