[Panos]

Not the case for the class in the blog post, but we also have many online classes. Many professionals prefer these online classes because they can attend without having to commute, and can do it from a place of their own convenience.

Such classes do not have the luxury of pen-and-paper exams, and asking people to go to testing centers is a huge overkill.

Take home exams for such settings (or any other form of written exam) are becoming very prone to cheating, just because the bar to cheating is very low. Oral exams like that make it a bit harder to cheat. Not impossible, but harder.

[ninalanyon]

I did a C# module online run by a Norwegian University. It was worth 6 points, 180 grants you a bachelor's degree in Norway (or did, I think there have been changes since). The course ran over ten weeks and there were weekly assignments. Of course it would have been easy to cheat on those but there would be no point because there was a five hour invigilated open book exam at the end of the course. Had to go to a testing centre about 35 km away to take the exam but that really wasn't a great inconvenience. If I had wanted to pursue a whole degree then I would have had 30 such exams, roughly one a month if you do the degree over the traditional three years. That doesn't seem like overkill to me, it's a lot less effort than attending lectures and tutorials for three years as I did for my Applied Physics degree.