Ian Cavers and George Tsiknis
Department of Computer Science
University of British Columbia
This paper describes the development of a set of interactive, self-paced, hyper-media based noncredit courses providing a comprehensive introduction to the computing resources available on the UBC campus. The first web-based course in this series introduces the basic concepts of the Unix Operating System to novice users. This course has been designed as an active supervisor that guides students through new concepts by asking them to perform a series of tasks using the actual Unix tools they are learning about. Through the use of student self evaluation, interactive exercise, and quizzes the student's understanding is assessed.
The current version of this paper can be found at the URL:
http://roadmap.ubc.ca/papers/ic4unix.html
Keywords: WWW, Computer-Aided Learning, Web-Based Instruction, Unix,
WebCT
During the past 5 years the manner in which information is shared over the Internet has been dramatically improved by the introduction of the World Wide Web. As a direct result, the Internet has attracted new generations of users from every corner of the society. The wide acceptance of the Internet and the ease of use of its new services have established it as a preferred medium for many educational applications. In this paper we describe the development of a set of interactive, self-paced, hyper-media based courses providing a comprehensive introduction for students, staff, and faculty to the computing resources available on the UBC campus.
For the last three years grants from the Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund have supported our development and presentation of free lectures at the beginning of each academic term, which introduce computing resources available on campus. Lecture topics include the use of Internet services such as e-mail and the WWW, text processing, programming fundamentals, UNIX orientation, and much more. These lectures are open to the entire university community, but our primarily audience is students. At each offering this program reaches more than 1300 members of the university community.
Although the program is a huge success, there are limitations and difficulties associated with continuing in its present format. One of the most serious difficulties we face is limited accessibility to the lectures, because of classroom size, the limited number of lectures, and the frequent conflicts between lecture times and student schedules. In addition, one hour lectures are often found to be too short for introducing a moderately complex topic with sufficient detail. Unfortunately, increasing the number and duration of lecture offerings would dramatically inflate the on-going costs of the program, which are already substantial. Finding good lecturers is also difficult and paying for their preparation and lecture time is expensive. As a result, we have only been able to offer at most two one hour classes on a limited number of topics at the beginning of each term.
Another serious difficulty is the fixed format of each course presentation, which cannot be tailored to meet the specific pace and content needs of individual participants. In addition, direct experimentation with the course material during a presentation is typically not possible, on-line demonstrations are limited, and a student's grasp of the course concepts is not evaluated.
To overcome these problems and to experiment with ways in whichWeb techniques
can enhance the effectiveness of a presentation, we have embarked on the
development of a series of interactive, self-paced, hyper-media based courses,
which will provide hands-on experience to a wider audience with minimal
on-going costs. This paper describes the structure of the first course
in this series, which introduces the UNIX operating system to novice users.
We started offering this course in September 1996 and the development of
similar introductory courses on a variety of topics of interest to campus
computer users is under way.
It is widely acknowledged that the expectations of the typical University or College student have changed significantly during the last few years. While students continue to demand high quality instruction, the possibility of having unrestricted access to course material outside the classroom is also becoming increasingly important. The advantages of the Web-based instruction over the traditional in-class presentation with respect to time and space constraints are well recognized. By using Web-based course tools, we are confident that we can address the scheduling and content issues discussed in the previous section and that we will be able to address a larger audience at minimal cost.
Although location and time-independent instruction was the initial motivation for the project, our attention has been lately focused on the pedagogical issues associated with the Web-based course models. Our objective is to study hyper-media based techniques and tools which enhance the quality and effectiveness of instruction.
To that end, our UNIX course has an interactive (instead of a narrative) presentation style and provides hands-on experience with computing facilities and tools through on-line tutorials and interactive exercises. To improve the effectiveness, the course is divided into smaller units with distinguishable steps that allow students to tailor the material to their own level of experience and pace, and to gauge their level of understanding with on-line quizzes.
The environment used for delivering such courses imposes certain technical limitations that we had to consider when designing our courses. The most difficult impediments to an introductory course on UNIX come from the computer facilities available on the campus and the hardware and communication facilities available to a typical user at home. The majority of the labs in the Department of Computer Science and other instructional units of the University, are largely equipped with monochrome or gray scale terminals connected to a LAN with direct Internet access, but with limited or no sound capabilities. In contrast, color displays and sound hardware are typically available on the users' home machines, but the network link between home and campus is restricted by the relatively small bandwidth of modem communication.
These limitations discourage us from using sound, color and sophisticated
animations in out presentations. We employ alternative techniques to improve
concept comprehension and emphasis, and to keep the interest level of the
user high. The following sections describe in more detail the methods and
styles we employ in the UNIX course.
With the support of the Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund and the BC Provincial Government Innovation Fund, we have created the first web-based course in this series using the interface and tools of the WebCT environment. (WebCT is a tool developed in the Department of Computer Science at UBC that facilitates the creation of sophisticated World Wide Web-based educational environments.) The content of this first course introduces basic concepts of the Unix Operating System to novice users. The course has been designed as an active supervisor that guides students through new concepts by asking them to perform a series of tasks using the actual Unix tools they are learning about. Through the use of student self evaluation, interactive exercises and quizzes the student's understanding is assessed.
To take the course, students need WWW access with the Netscape browser and an application providing Telnet access, but do not have to provide their own Unix account. When a student registers for the course, he or she is given a Unix account on a machine dedicated to exclusive service of our interactive courses. This is a plus for two reasons. First, by providing a Unix account free of charge students can have extensive exposure to Unix without having to purchase or otherwise obtain access to a Unix account in another manner. Another important concern on our part is providing a uniform platform to all students of the Unix course. When the account is provided by our administrator, it allows us to give more direct and accurate feedback to the students within the course material. During the presentation of course material on the Web, a student is asked to click on a terminal button to open a Telnet connection to their Unix account. After the student provides his or her userid and password (provided to them through our Web-based registration system), the telnet session provides them full access to their Unix account. As the lesson continues, it persuades the student to apply the concepts he or she is learning directly in this Telnet window. As the students perform the suggested tasks, the course provides direct feedback. In case of more involved interactive exercises the student can ask for explanations and suggestions, or view detailed solutions to problems.
Three interactive lessons comprise the Unix course, each of which is further divided into a number of tutorials. Each tutorial contains a series of steps that introduce the lesson material, and administer the exercises, progress evaluations and quizzes. The intended length of each lesson is approximately one or two hours, but students are completely free to proceed at their own pace and repeat or review lessons at their leisure. A useful feature of the Web CT environment permits students to automatically return to the position in the course where they left off at the end of their last session.
The first lesson of the Unix course explains how to install the necessary tools and applications required to properly access the course. It then introduces the basic techniques for logging in, logging out and describes how to issue Unix commands. Finally, the first lesson teaches students how to access Unix manual pages for on-line help.
The second lesson deals with basic file system concepts. Students learn filename and path concepts, and experiment by navigating through an existing directory system. Their Unix account gives them their own home directory in which they practise creating a hierarchical file system and creating, deleting and moving their own files.
Finally, the third lesson provides addition tutorials regarding the manipulation of files, and an exposition of more advanced topics including: file and directory permissions, elementary process management, combining commands with pipes, searching for files by name or content, shell commands, and customizing a Unix environment.
As previously mentioned, the course is broken into lessons, each of which consists of several tutorials. Each tutorial is further divided into individual steps introducing new concepts to the students or requesting their participation in an exercise. The course presents each tutorial step in a separate document. Alternatively, we could have placed an entire lesson in a single document and allowed students to scroll back and forth at their leisure to review previous material or to scan ahead in the lesson. We chose to present material in a segmented manner to help students focus on relatively small and manageable tasks and reduce the distractions presented by other material. Students are encouraged to follow through the steps of the lesson in a linear fashion, however, they are not constrained to this navigation paradigm as discussed below.
Each lesson in the course uses a variety of tools to enhance the learning experience of the student. Some of these tools are provided by the WebCT environment, while others are unique to our course presentation style. Figure 1 illustrates the typical view of a lesson we provide to the student.
Figure 1: The Presentation Environment of a Typcial Lesson
In general, once working in the WebCT environment, the student should largely ignore the browser's navigation buttons, and use the tools and buttons provided by WebCT and the course material. As shown in Figure 1, we divide a typical window into three frames. The top frame is the WebCT tool bar. It provides some navigational aids and a number of valuable tools that enrich the course environment. For example, the glossary tool provides definitions of terminology used in the course, and the chat room and bulletin board tools permit students to communicate with the course administrator and other students in the course.
To the left of the course notes is a navigation tool called the Lesson
Navigator. This frame contains a scrollable table of contents for the current
lesson. A pointing finger (
)
appears at the currently visible tutorial or tutorial step. A student can
click on any entry in the outline to move to the corresponding course notes.
This tool provides the student with ultimate control over their path through
the course material. As well it provides them with feedback regarding their
progress through the lesson.
The right hand frame below the tool bar contains the actual course notes for the current step of the lesson. A scroll bar allows the user to move around within the notes of the step, and at the bottom of the step's notes is a button (not visible in Figure 1) that the student can select to proceed to the next step of the lesson. Despite our best efforts, students find some steps confusing or make mistakes that do not permit them to proceed with the lesson. We attempt to identify these steps and include an additional material or helpful hints. When the student clicks on the (Huh?) button at the bottom of such a step a small Guide window appears, as illustrated in Figure 2. The Guide window provides a list of questions that might be bothering the student. When he or she selects a question from the list the answer appears below the question. Additional buttons at the bottom of tutorial steps initiate the interactive exercises and self-tests discussed in the following section.
Figure 2: Guide Window Example
Our interactive courses (and the Roadmap to Computing lecture series)
are also supported by an on-line reference manual. It contains additional
information about the topics presented in the courses and more. The reference
manual is equipped with a selectable table of contents and a searchable
index and it is accessible from the interactive courses. Both the latest
version of the reference manual and the Unix course are accessible from
the Roadmap homepage at http://roadmap.ubc.caWhile
the reference manual is freely available to all users on the Web, the interactive
course requires both WebCT and Unix accounts on the host machine. Students
who want to take the course get an account by filling out an on-line registration
form available at the same location.
One aspect that is often overlooked in traditional courses is material that helps a student to assess their comprehension and estimate their progress in the course prior to formal examinations. Many students benefit from more frequent feedback than can be provided by the instructor through examinations and assignments. If a textbook is used in a course, certain exercises in each chapter can be selected for assessment, but in many cases there is not a clear indication of the concepts being tested by each exercise. In addition, detailed solutions to these problems are not readily available to students. The need for self-evaluation is even greater for the self-paced, Web-based courses, because the careless students can more easily overlook important topics.
For these reasons, we pay particular attention to student self-evaluation in the Unix course. At the end of each lesson the student works through a series of interactive exercises and takes a quiz. Each interactive exercise describes a task that must be accomplished by the students using their expertise learned in the Unix lesson. At the student's request, the system provides a number of hints or presents the final solution. While performing the interactive exercise, students are given seamless access to Unix manual pages describing the commands they are manipulating. The implementation of these features does not disrupt the exercise, and in fact enhances its presentation. Figure 3 illustrates a window containing a portion of an interactive exercise. As in other steps of the lesson, the left most frame contains the Lesson Navigator. Below the frame containing the instructions for the current exercise, however, we introduce a new frame. This frame contains buttons allowing the student to proceed through the steps of the exercise, review exercise steps, requests hints, look at a detailed solution, and access Unix manual pages, all without losing their place in the exercise.
Figure 3: Interactive Exercises
At the end of each lesson students are encouraged to take a self-evaluation quiz to determine the degree of their knowledge on the current topic and whether it is advisable for them to repeat portions of the tutorial. Each quiz is a selection of multiple choice for which the WebCT quiz tool provides the student immediate feedback as shown in Figure 4. When the student clicks on the bullet corresponding to a particular answer WebCT presents them with a check mark or an X indicating success or failure. With the X mark we include an explanation why that particular answer is wrong. Students are free to choose any number of different solutions until they determine the correct answer.
Figure 4: Self-Evaluation Quiz
Although our Unix course and subsequent courses are not for credit,
we plan to introduce a timed quiz at the end of each course. WebCT provides
a tool for managing such exams, but marking is performed manually by the
course instructor. The quiz has a limited time, at the end of which the
paper is automatically submitted. These quizzes will provide the student
with an addition source of feedback and will provide us with important
data for assessing the effectiveness of ourWeb-based instructional techniques.
In addition to offering an important service to the University community, the Unix course also provides a testbed for studying the effective use of WWW as an educational medium. Our main interests include the study of Web-based methodologies that enhance comprehension, sustain student attention, and make the learning process more enjoyable. Therefore, course evaluation and student feedback are of paramount importance to our project.
In consultation with experts at UBC, we have designed a questionnaire that asks specific questions about the various aspects of the course. Questions on the contents, methodology, presentation style, and the delivery method have been included in this evaluation. At the end of the course the students are asked to fill out and submit this detailed evaluation of the course together with their comments and suggestions.
At the end of each term we plan to analyze the data we have collected
from the student responses and use the result to revise or even redesign
the course for the following term. We expect to use the experience we will
gain from the offering of this first course to guide us in the development
of the remaining courses of the pilot project.
With the support of the Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund and the BC Provincial Government Innovation Fund, we have embarked on the development of a series of interactive, self-paced, hyper-media based courses providing a comprehensive introduction to the computing resources available on the UBC campus. The first web-based course in this series introduces the basic concepts of the Unix Operating System to novice users.
The project is driven by two main goals. The first goal is to provide location and time-independent instruction to all members of the campus, avoiding scheduling conflicts and accessibility constraints. The second goal is to provide a testbed for exploring new methodologies and presentation styles which take full advantage of the capabilities of the new media to improve the effectiveness of instruction.
A serious problem we have experienced with the traditional in-class lectures is the lack of computer access for demonstrating concepts. With computer-based learning we can both explain concepts, and demonstrate them through the same medium. Furthermore we can integrate interactive exercises and on-line quizzes into the learning process, permitting students to practice their new skills and evaluate their progress. The World Wide Web course also increases its educational effectiveness by allowing students to tailor their learning experience to suit their own pace and existing level of knowledge. Instead of sitting through a lecture of familiar material, students will be able to move directly to specific portions of the course of interest to them. This is especially advantageous for the orientation of computer users in the university community given the tremendous variance in their computing experience.
A truly innovative aspect of this approach is to design the course with a high level of interaction. The course presentation alternates between asking the students to perform a series of tasks using the tools they are learning, assessing their knowledge, and guiding them through the new concepts in a way that is interesting, enjoyable and effective. The students are able to directly manipulate the actual tools, systems, and environments as they are learning about them.
The Unix course described in this paper is the first in a series of
on-line Web-based introductory courses. We plan to continually monitor
the effectiveness of our instructional techniques during the 1996/97 academic
year. Using the experience gained from this first course offering, we will
continue to develop additional courses in the series and apply successful
techniques to our regular curriculum.
We are grateful to Glendon Holst and Eddy Ma for their contributions
in the development of the interactive courses and the documentation for
this series. The help of Murray Goldberg and Sasan Salari with respect
to WebCT is also acknowledged.
Ian A. Cavers
Instructor
Department of Computer Science
University of British Columbia, Canada,
V6T 1Z4.
E-mail: cavers@cs.ubc.ca
George K. Tsiknis
Instructor
Department of Computer Science
University of British Columbia, Canada,
V6T 1Z4.
E-mail: tsiknis@cs.ubc.ca
N.A.WEB 96 - The Second International North America World Wide Web Conference http://www.unb.ca/web/wwwdev/ University of New Brunswick.