The courses are being canceled

The courses are being canceled

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Source reference:  “Wikipedia and my own imagination”. It doesn’t take more than that to pass one out of three distance courses revised by Lundagård. The direction at the Department of Geological Sciences has now decided to cancel.

“We simply weren’t very smart”, says the director of studies. 

 

Alasdair Skelton works as a professor at the Department of Geological Sciences at University of Stockholm and he is the director of studies for distance courses. He has been involved in the process of designing the currently debated distance courses, and he thinks it’s regrettable that the marking on the Geology courses has been this:

“We committed our first error when we didn’t set a maximum limit for the amount of students accepted to these courses. Instead we made it possible for everybody to get accepted. Subsequently, we had loads of students and we became shorthanded, says Alasdair Skelton.

It has been to easy for students to get through the courses by more or less only using Google search, and on the Flashback forum people are talking about  “the absolutely most laid-back course you could take this summer is 7,5 distance credits of dinosaurs.” Cheating and distribution of exams is something that the people in charge at the University are aware of.

“Yes, unfortunately, it has come to our knowledge. That’s why we believe it’s time to cancel these courses. In order for us to accept the amounts of students that applied last summer, we have to a build a much larger database with questions and make everything “Google safe”, otherwise the cheating will continue. And cheating is hard to control in such large groups, Skelton continues.

This issue evolved during the summer, which made the department decide to cancel the course in their index. Yet, they were available for application during the fall semester 2012.

“The fall semester doesn’t attract as many students, so we didn’t have any problems. The crucial part was summer, when we had twice as many students than expected”, says Skelton and continues:

“We simply weren’t very smart, and we didn’t set a limit for the number of applicants. That resulted in us having way too many, and way too many who applied to the course for the sake of financial aid instead of interest in the course content. This is reflected in the level of work effort.

Martin Jacobsson, Head of the Department of Geological Sciences, acceded his position last fall, and he says that he at an early stage was briefed about the deal with the 7,5-credit courses.  After having discussed the issues, the project managers and Jacobsson mutually agreed to cancel these courses.

“Yes, I don’t see any problems with the actual course material or the course literature, but as you are saying, however, there have been deficiencies in terms of marking the assignments. It’s the product of us having had to many students per teacher. Our ambition is still to complete an entire package of courses that can result in a Bachelor’s degree in Geology Studies at a distance”, says Martin Jacobsson.

Read also: 7,5 credits in 48 hours

Lundagård keeps revising – Share your experiences with us here.

 Text: Dennis Jörnmark Callstam

Translation:  Maximilian Aleman Tennell

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