As a long-time project manager in the software engineering industry and especially during my time at Apple Computer, I’ve had to work in environments with a frenetic pace, to say the least. Limited time was available to manage multiple projects, let alone deal with the intricacies of the details. Hence, I learned early on to deal with the exceptions rather than the norms. This is a widely used management strategy called Management by Exception (MBE).

Management by Exception
Management by Exception is a “policy by which management devotes its time to investigating only those situations in which actual results differ significantly from planned results. The idea is that management should spend its valuable time concentrating on the more important items (such as shaping the company’s future strategic course). Attention is given only to material deviations requiring investigation.”
 
(from Wikipedia)

How does this relate to teaching online classes and D2L specifically? Well, D2L provides a wealth of reporting tools for tracking student progress. You can spend a lot of time and effort using these tools to track how much time a student spent in a module or on a quiz or even how long they were logged on to D2L. For example, the screenshot below shows the statistics for the time spent in a module for one particular course (the student names are omitted).

This particular module should have taken the student between 45-60 minutes to complete. Now, I could use this report to measure student engagement and perhaps even give them participation points for the time spent in the module. However, there is a big ‘gotcha’ in this report, and it relates to the little information icon at the end of all but the second line. If you click on the icon next to the first line, you get the following dialog:

This means that the student’s time in the module was not accurately reported. It is most likely because the student navigated away from the D2L module in a nonstandard fashion. They may have simply closed their browser or gone to a different webpage. In other words, they just ‘disappeared’ in D2L’s view, thus losing the ability to track their time. In reality, student #1 probably spent more time in the module than indicated in this report. On the other hand, the last student in the list spent 5 hours and 34 minutes in the module. If the student is logged into the module and goes off to make dinner leaving the browser up and running, then the time is still recorded by D2L.

So that leaves us with the question, “How should these reports be used if they are inaccurate?” It simply goes back to the original premise of management by exception. If a student is having difficulty in a class, such as poor performance on quizzes, lack of participation in a discussion, or other performance issues, you can use these reports to check how much time they were actually online. You are dealing with the exception rather than trying to use the reports for evaluating engagement of each student. Simply put, they should not be used to measure actual participation due to the inaccuracies of the report.

I suppose the best way to illustrate this is an example from an online course I taught a few years ago. This was an introductory Mathematics course and I received the following email from a student:

“I wanted to email you because I was checking my vista for homework and was disheartened to find that we had a test this coming Tuesday. I was caught off guard by this, because in our previous class we weren’t informed that we would be for sure having a test. I feel that it would be only right to let us know that there would be a test at least one class period before. I was wondering if there was anyway that we could postpone the test to review the concepts that will be on it.”

Normally, I am a really nice guy and would give consideration to a student having difficulty; however, I checked the report and found that this student had been online a total of 18 minutes during the previous two weeks! Needless to say, the test was not postponed. While I did not use the reports to measure student progress, they were helpful in dealing with this exception.