When pupils go paperless

All University undergraduates will be limited to printing 2,100 sheets of paper this year, but the 84 students in ORF 405: Regression & Applied Time Series are trying to do away with paper entirely.

Operations research and financial engineering professor Rene Carmona, who teaches ORF 405, has eliminated the use of paper in his course by assigning problem sets on the computer and having students submit them through Blackboard. Graders give feedback on the homework by writing on electronic tablets that are linked to the computer.

“What I was trying to do is get paperless,” Carmona said. “With Blackboard, this is relatively easier, even though over the last few years, students still prepared the homework on paper.”

Carmona explained that he began the transition a few years ago by asking students to submit their finals via Blackboard, and this year he extended the online submissions to homework. His decision to go paperless stemmed from his beliefs about the importance of sustainability, Carmona added.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about greenhouse gas emissions in my own research,” he explained. “Maybe I am oversensitive to these issues, but I thought that was not too much of an investment that we could make. After all, it is only a baby step toward a more sustainable campus lifestyle.”

Carmona’s research focuses on curbing the production of greenhouse gases through building mathematical models to guide cap-and-trade policies, which encourage companies to limit their pollution.

“I routinely annotate PDF files,” Carmona said. “I’m using less and less paper myself in my own work, in my own research. It is easy to give pen-written feedback on a [computer] file.”

Alexander Wugalter GS, an assistant instructor for Carmona’s class, said he believes the process will benefit students as well as the environment.

“With the new [printing] quota in place, this policy has some advantages for students, since they can use [their allowed pages] for other classes,” he explained.

Carmona said students are adjusting well to completing homework assignments on the computer, and Wugalter noted that he hasn’t received many complaints. The paperless system has created more work for assistant instructors, however, especially as they adapt to grading online using tablets purchased by Carmona.

“Part of it is a matter of adjusting; part of it is due to the fact that writing on a pad as well as navigating through a PDF file is slower,” Wugalter said. “I can grade more quickly [now that I’ve adjusted], although it is still not as fast as it would be using paper.”

Another challenge is getting every student to cooperate with the system, Wugalter said, noting that some students have done the homework by hand and scanned it to upload onto Blackboard. Wugalter also noted that some students experienced problems because Blackboard does not allow users to upload assignments more than once.

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“I don’t claim that we have solved any problem yet, but we are learning, and hopefully this experience will show that it is important to [go paperless],” Carmona said.

He added that he plans to get feedback from students and AIs throughout the semester and that he will re-evaluate the system based on their comments.

“If we have to abandon the experiment this year, we’ll learn from it, and we’ll be able to do it again next year even if we have to organize a special training session to prepare the students before the beginning of class,” Carmona said. “What we are doing is very easy for non-mathematical classes. Humanities should seriously think about it if they haven’t already implemented such a procedure.”