LockDown & Monitor: Instructor Training
Respondus Monitor sessions were up 300% last week. We expect that to grow significantly in the coming weeks as thousands of instructors try online proctoring for the first time. Respondus Monitor has scaled smoothly so far, with no issues to report. (More on this below.)
RESOURCES
While technology scales easily, humans don’t. With over 700 universities ramping up their use of Respondus Monitor in a significant way, we are seeing large increases in technical support volume. About 80% of support questions are very basic – such as where to find the tool in the LMS, or how to set an exam so it requires students to use Respondus Monitor. We have put together a set of resources that we encourage you to share with administrators, trainers, and instructors.
DAILY TRAINING WEBINARS with LIVE Q&A
Please (pretty please!) direct your faculty to the daily training webinars for LockDown Browser and Respondus Monitor: https://web.respondus.com/webinars/. The trainings are about 45 minutes, with an extended Q/A period where questions are answered live. The trainings are an amazingly effective way at getting instructors quickly up-and-running with these applications.
SCALABILITY
We are getting questions about the scalability of Respondus Monitor for situations where thousands of students start an exam simultaneously. The quick answer is that the autoscaling has worked smoothly so far, even in situations where thousands of students at a university began an exam at the same time. However, we are planning for exceptionally high volume scenarios (eg. final exams) where thousands of students across hundreds of universities might start an exam proctoring session during the same minute. If our autoscaling isn’t fast enough (it takes about 2 minutes to launch new servers), students will enter a queuing system with a countdown clock showing when the proctoring session will begin. In the rare event that the queuing system is triggered, the countdown clock isn’t expected to last more than one minute.
For more information, contact: Educational Technologies at edtech@uconn.edu