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Salim ROSTAMI and Frank GOETHALS, respectively professors of Operations Management and Management of Information Systems at IÉSEG, were awarded the Digital Teaching Excellence Award last December, thanks to their projects developed to automate part of the teaching experience, and especially the exam generation and grading parts. They’ve told us more about their digital innovative solutions implemented last year and that have proven to have a positive impact on students’ learning.

Frank, Salim, can you tell us about the digital solutions you’ve implemented and why? 

Frank: My Excel class is fully online and there’s no face-to-face interaction between professors and students. It is an asynchronous class that allows students to organize their learning the way they want, including an exam at the end of the semester. At some point, the question of how to get students motivated to study regularly throughout the whole semester arose. So, I thought it would be a good thing to divide the semester into five equal blocks, each with a test at the end. But then, another challenge emerged: how can we manage such a volume of assignments considering that we have about 1,300 students following this course and that our students need to get feedback quickly after submitting their contribution? Indeed, getting feedback fast is valuable for the students as it helps them to understand what they got right or wrong and thus make progress. Relying on a single human being to accomplish this task for 1,300 students at a time is not realistic. We needed an engine for that… So, I developped a solution allowing the automation of the grading part. But then, of course, another issue came about: we needed to be able to provide a different test to each student, in order to avoid cheating. That’s why I developed another engine allowing to generate different files and instructions automatically so that every student would receive a different assignment. 

Salim : My initial motivation for developing a solution was the same as Frank. The difference is that my course is a one-week intensive face-to-face course with a final exam exactly the week after. Each session during the week includes an assignment, which needs to be corrected and graded by the end of the week, in order to provide students with feedback before the final exam that takes place the following week. It was intense and challenging to manage. In the first place, I created an Excel file that would generate different assignments automatically. Then, I finally designed a platform allowing to automate everything: both the generation of the assignment and the correction phase. 

Your projects appear to share similar objectives but differ in the way they were developed…

Salim : Yes, they’re completely different in terms of development. Frank used Excel, VBA and Python to implement his solution. Considering my solution, it is actually a website and not a software application installed on a computer. Students go to the website and log in with their credentials. This platform provides access to different sessions, each including course material and personalized exercises. Students can also submit their answers directly through the website and they receive feedback right away. 

What did it take you to implement these solutions? 

Frank : In my case there are two components. On the one hand, you have the generation of files for the assignments, and on the other hand, you have the grading part. For the grading, I managed to automate the process easily thanks to macros and formulas in Excel. So, to some extent, this was quite an easy task. The generation of different assignments was more complex, as it required some programming in Python. You must generate a unique Excel file for every student and a unique PDF file containing instructions for the assignment and create an XML file that outlines the specifics of each test so I could automatically import thousands of tests into IÉSEG’s intranet. 

Salim : For my part, I could have done it with Python or Javascript, but I decided to go further and get into web development to implement a standalone platform. I wanted a user-friendly solution where everything could be done in one place. So, I took an online course on Udemy, which is a 60-hour course that taught me the basics of web development. That was my summer project two years ago and then the web development itself took about six months. But I chose to do it, nobody forced me to do so. It was more like a hobby for me, I enjoyed working on this project. 

For me, the difficult part was the security part – making sure that the student’s profiles and the data sets where they get the assignments are secure and encrypted so that data nobody else could have access to it. I also needed to secure the data sets to make sure that the students cannot find the solutions from the data set itself. 

The long-term goal here is to be able to provide a fully online class where students can get the course material, see the questions, answer them and get feedback, all in one place. 

Have you been able to measure the impact of these digital solutions on your students so far?

Frank: When we look at the results over the years, we can definitely see an improvement in the final exam grades and that more students pass the final exams than ever before. So, the goal has been met I would say. 

Salim: I also did a comparison before and after the implementation of the web application. Students mentioned that they really appreciate receiving instant feedback on their work. The instant feedback is not applicable to all courses, depending on the subject, it might be necessary to wait until everyone has completed the assignment before sending the correction and grade.