Throughout the year 2004, Utah State University offered three introductory long-distance statistics courses (Stat 2000) for students in its International Program in Hong Kong. These courses had the main instructor in the USA, a local instructor in Hong Kong, and were based on the electronic textbook CyberStats. Students had to work fully electronically - from homework submissions to the taking of exams. In the first part of this talk, we report on our experiences with such a course, including everyday problems and their possible solutions. Results of surveys conducted towards the end of the three courses will be presented as well.

In the second part of this talk, we will discuss the effect of the ordering of questions on the student behavior for one of these courses. While the effect of the ordering of questions in sample surveys has been well investigated, there has been no study so far that examined the effect of the ordering of exam questions on the exam behavior of students. One of the questions we tried to answer was: Do students usually answer exam questions in sequential order (independent from the exam questions) or do they tend to jump from one exam question to another while leaving some types of (apparently more difficult) exam questions until the very end? As it turned out, many students answer exam questions in almost perfect sequential order.