Yesterday I performed an oral exam with the first four students in one of my courses, in the course Creative Concept development (M7016T) the assignment is plan and document a three-day creative workshop for a specific team (based on different scenarios). The plan is presented in a short
memo (maximum four pages), that is sent in before the oral examination. The oral exam consists of a 15 min informal discussion where the students explain the rationale for the design of the workshop and show that they can reason about and reflect over the choice of methods and their use. During the oral exam, students also use a ‘Smiley scale’ (see below) where the student has to assess themself.

The ‘smiley scale’ used in previous years. Red is the student’s assessment and green is my assessment (from Törlind 2019).

This year the current situation (COVID-19) forced me to perform the exam on distance, and I choose to use zoom and a shared whiteboard. I added time between each connection, to be able to save and clean the whiteboard.

The smiley scale where the student assesses themself how they have met the objectives of the assignment.

The feedback from the students was that they thought it worked fine, but the student that used mobile phones had a hard time to annotate on a stamp-sized document using the phone! My own reflection is that it works, but I miss the nuances in the physical interaction.

TIPS AND TRICKS

• Google docs or similar tool to schedule timeslot (used the collaboration function in Canvas).
• Recommend the students to use a computer with a headset or even better an iPad with a pen (much easier to annotate on the whiteboard).
• Run zoom with ‘waiting room’ so the next student does not jump into the running meeting
• Shared a template (with screen-sharing) where they would assess how they had met the objectives of the task. This was saved as documentation of the meeting (see the example above).
• Make sure to have a few minutes between each student, it always takes some extra time using technology compared to a physical whiteboard (the student should find the annotation function,  activate video etc)

RELATED PUBLICATIONS