Exercises can be provided in several ways:

Without solutions:

Students must submit the exercises either electronically or on paper for the teacher to provide feedback. This reduces the opportunity for students to "cheat" by looking at the answer, but takes a lot more of the teacher's time and does not allow for immediate feedback for the student.  It may be useful for subjective-type questions or summative evaluations.

With solutions provided online by the teacher for students to check:

Students would do an exercise and then check their answers with a suggested solution to measure their level of understanding. This allows the students to check their own work and obtain immediate feedback.  This method leaves the control on how to use the exercises with the student.  Some students may look at the solutions without trying the questions potentially reducing their value.  This method may be the only practical way to provide suggested answers to subjective questions.

With solutions provided by other students:

Students may share their responses with each other to obtain feedback.  This can be done through a discussion board or by email with online buddies.  This can increase the interaction among students and encourage peer learning.  On the other hand, some students may not value the input of other students and some may not be motivated to participate unless some marks are attached to the process.

With comments provided by an external expert:

If you can enlist the help of an outside expert, you could have your students post their work to a discussion board or email their answers to an external expert who is willing to provide feedback either to the discussion board in general or to each student specifically.  Although it may be difficult to find volunteers, industry feedback would be very relevant and inspirational to students and could be a way for employers to interact with potential applicants.

With computerized marking:

Various software packages are available to develop online exercises that can be assessed by the computer.  Students receive immediate feedback and often find these activities motivational and fun.  Various question types are possible such as multiple choice, true or false, matching and fill in the gaps. These question types are not well suited for subjective questions. While these exercises may be time-consuming to create in the first place, they can be used repeatedly with no further effort by the teacher.  Some software packages also provide automatic feedback to the teacher on student performance.  Since students may be able to "cheat" by working collaboratively unless you have a very large data bank of questions, these exercises may be best for formative assessment.

Sample exercises using Hot Potatoes.

Click here to download Hot Potatoes software.

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