ABSTRACT
In this paper are described some of my experiences gained while I gradually introduced the use of World Wide Web Technology (W3T) into my face to face lecturing of a stage 2 course. I describe the way in which my use of W3T changed from distributing notes on the Web to an investigation of how best to incorporate a variety of methods for enabling students to interact with the WWW course material to enhance their learning. Incorporating such interactions into the WWW material is being done in the 2nd and 3rd cycles of an ongoing action research plan discussed in this paper, and has lead to an ongoing research project for developing an intelligent tutoring system called WIT.
Keywords: interactive WWW, WWW distribution, face to face lecturing, intelligent tutoring systems.
Although a fourth cycle for W3Info211 is planned, only general ideas have been considered because of the rapid change in W3T and the importance of feedback from students taking the course in 1998. These ideas, discussed at the end of Section 2, include: storing all course material within a database to improve administration and consistency, introduction of chat rooms to allow for discussion of topics within the course, and so on.
Experiences gained from W3Info211 are forming the basis for a significantly more complex and ambitious project which involves the use of W3T for distance teaching of many courses collectively forming a Post Graduate Diploma in Health informatics. Initial design of this Diploma, known at the time as a Post Graduate Diploma in Medical Informatics, was presented as a paper at NAWEB 96 (Pascoe and Abernathy 1996). In Section 3, an update is given on this project and how development of this project has been influenced by experiences gained from W3Info211 and other teaching projects involving W3T.
My use of the WWW was for distributing course material in general and more specifically, for enabling students who missed lectures to collect the corresponding notes and slides without having to interact with staff in the department. This allowed more time for interacting with students at a problem solving level by automating some of the mundane yet important housekeeping tasks. Use of the WWW at this point in time was experimental and an optional extra which occurred more as a side effect due to the way in which the required resources were created, rather than as a fundamental teaching resource.
My plan for creating the WWW course notes was intentionally simple as I anticipated being short of time while teaching the course. I also wanted to minimise any opportunity for inconsistencies to occur as a consequence of providing multiple sources from which students could gain the material. In essence my plan was to develop a method by which all course material presented either during lectures or through the WWW came from one source document. My approach was to create documents that would be processed by: latex, a word processing package, to generate the printed version of the material; and by latex2html, a utility for converting latex source files into Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) documents, to generate a WWW version.
The course notes and slides were contained within one document, while separate documents were prepared for tutorial exercises and assignments. This approach was still oriented towards producing high quality material for the traditional face to face lecturing style as the quality of the WWW version of the material although very good, was clearly inferior to that which could be handcrafted.
I decided to structure the course notes logically into chapters, sections and so on according to the amount and complexity of the material being discussed. By the end of the course the notes handed out during lectures collectively formed a cohesive course booklet which students could use to assist their preparation for the final examination. When translated into the WWW environment, the individual chapters, sections and so on could be accessed from an HTML page containing hypertext links corresponding to the booklet’s table of contents.
Initially, slides were to be presented to students on paper at the start of the lecture, during the lecture using transparencies shown on an overhead projector, and after the lecture as a postscript file available from the WWW. However, the department made available laptop computers for showing slides as powerpoint presentations. Although this had obvious benefits in that lectures could be made more interesting with colour graphics and software demonstrations, incorporating this late change to the teaching environment disrupted the approach to producing the teaching resources outlined above. This disruption came from the difficulties in transforming the material (diagrams in particular) prepared for a latex document into a powerpoint presentation. Eventually, the powerpoint presentation became a resource that was developed independently of other teaching resources.
As is typically the case with teaching a new course for the first time, lectures tended to be prepared the night before the lecture was given. Thus, time was of the essence and although the approach described above seemed simple during planning, in practice there were many irritating peculiarities of the various delivery media that were time consuming and frequently frustrating. Midway through the course, the effort involved in preparing the delivery of course in 3 ways, face to face, handouts, and through the WWW, became too great and the WWW delivery was abandoned in favour for maintaining and improving the remaining 2 delivery mechanisms.
Towards the end of producing the WWW material, I informally surveyed the students to gain an indication as to whether the students found this to be useful. The response I received was surprising and informative. Many students found the WWW pages to be useful and offered many suggestions on improvements. The most frequent suggestion was to restructure the way in which the material was presented.
Students were very strongly focussed on the division of the course into lectures and tutorials and found accessing the WWW notes, organised conceptually as a booklet rather than as a sequence of lectures, to be counter productive. Essentially, they would have preferred the material to have been presented as individual modules, one for each lecture. Overall, they were encouraging of the use of the WWW for distributing course material and even commented on this in the official survey conducted after the course was completed with only half of the material being available on the WWW.
Use of the WWW as a teaching resource rather than as a method of distributing course material was a key change in my perspective. This change was due to: reading Laurillard’s book entitled ‘Rethinking University Teaching’ (Laurillard 1993); becoming involved with distance teaching of a Postgraduate Diploma in Health Informatics (Pascoe and Abernethy 1996), and observing the rapidly emerging trend of using W3T for augmenting and perhaps replacing the traditional face to face lecturing paradigm.
I realised that I had neither the experience nor the resources that would enable me to change from the traditional face to face paradigm to one where students were taught entirely through the WWW. However, I was keen to expand my understanding and use of W3T, particularly in light of the intention to make significant use of this technology for distance teaching. Thus, I decided to continue developing the WWW material for Info211 in 1997 with 2 modest objectives in mind:
My first act was to investigate the use of a development environment for WWW material. I quickly realised that although an excellent tool for teachers who were minimally skilled in the use of W3T and computers in general, the environment I evaluated was relatively inflexible and cumbersome for my purposes. I had no time in which to investigate others so I adopted my previous approach of using latex and latex2html. This greatly reduced the variety of W3T that I would have otherwise had if I persisted with the development environment (chat facilities, on line testing, student management, and so on). However, at this point in time I wanted to evaluate the different W3T available before becoming locked into any one environment.
My second task was to provide access of the form requested by previous
students to existing WWW material. This was a relatively easy task
which was resolved by providing an HTML page containing a table of the
form shown below in Table 1. Each row in this table corresponds to
a lecture and much of the text are hyperlinks to sections of the course
notes, assignments, and tutorial worksheets. By the end of the course I
had achieved my first goal of making all of the course material for Info211
available on the WWW without too many sleepless nights.
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Tutorial Topic |
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Introduction | About Info211 |
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Course objectives - the big picture |
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Administration and review questions | Introduction to Labs and software available for use in Info 211 |
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Background |
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CASE, meta-data, and domains |
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Process Modeling | DFDs |
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Data flow analysis fundamentals |
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Case
and MetaData
Exercises |
Introduction
to Easy Case
Defining metadata in EasyCASE |
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Data flow analysis - examples | |||||||
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STDs |
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State Transition Diagrams | DFD exercises | DFD exercises |
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Conceptual Modeling | ERDs |
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ERD concepts and conventions |
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ERD- examples |
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Exercises on ERDs | Simple ERD exercises | |||
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Expanding ERDs: type hierarchies & inheritance |
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Integrity constraints |
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Implementing business rules - the use of triggers |
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Complex ERD exercises + DD |
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Integrity constraints: strong and weak entities , referential integrity | |||||||
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Another goal I had set myself for this cycle of W3Info211 was to explore the use of W3T to enhance my teaching. My first exploration involved the construction of animations using Macromind Director for explaining the use of a scanner and for describing the operation of software for acquiring sound samples from compact disks. The students were able to run and rerun these animations to gain an understanding of what they were to do. Furthermore, if they encountered difficulties while doing these activities they could refer back to the HTML page containing the animation before calling for assistance. This was a fruitful exercise as I began to grasp some of the technical limitation involved with different screen sizes and resolutions, network transmission speeds, and the importance of minimising the size of screen shots.
I next investigated the use of online interaction among a group of people through the Internet. In particular, I installed a chat server and began having regular weekly meetings with colleagues involved with the development of the Postgraduate Diploma in Health Informatics. This has proven to be very useful although not as simple as I had expected. There are tricks and techniques for communicating in this environment which are important if this style of communication is to be successful. This project is continuing and we are collectively gaining more experience with this W3T.
Another technology I wanted to gain some understanding of was that which enabled students to annotate the WWW Info211 course material in much the same way that many people write margin notes as they read printed material. Enabling students to re-describe their perceptions of the material they are learning is a key component of the learning process. My investigation revealed that much research into annotating HTML pages is in progress and that in time this is likely to become possible. An interesting example that I may investigate further is that of CoNote by Davis and Huttenlocher at Cornell University.
While at the North American Web Conference in 1996, I was particularly interested in the use of W3T by Rosenblum and Healy for developing an Educational Intranet. They described the use of Shockwave and Authorware to develop diagram labelling exercises for students. I have pursued this idea a step further , and suggested to colleagues (A. Sallis and R. Kelly) that they investigate the possibilities of combining Java with JESS, an expert system shell implemented using Java, to provide diagram labelling exercises accessible through the WWW that could analyse the way in which the student interacted with the exercise, identify any weaknesses the student may have, and offer suggestions as to where in the accompanying WWW course material they might find some useful hints to increase their expertise. The result of their investigation is WIT (Web Intelligent Tutoring system) and, although in the very early stages of development, this system is beginning to demonstrate the advantages and difficulties with this WWW technology.
This investigation into methods by which my teaching can be enhanced using W3T is an ongoing process. However, during this cycle of W3Info211 I have gained valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of W3T. This enables me to greatly increase the value of the WWW teaching resource primarily by making this a far more interactive resource and one that could potentially actively facilitate the teaching process as demonstrated by WIT.
Although teaching of Info211 for 1997 has been completed, I have unfortunately missed the opportunity for gaining formal feedback from this year’s students on the usefulness of the WWW course material. I did, however, receive informal feedback on the material and students were definitely making use of this teaching resource which is encouraging.
Unfortunately, 1997 was the last cycle of W3Info211 because I am no longer teaching Info211 due to my involvement with the Post Graduate Diploma in Health Informatics. This diploma, to be taught almost etirely through the Internet, involves the teaching of 2 courses during 1998 and between 4-8 courses in 1999. In acknowledgement of the time and effort involved in preparing these courses, my teaching will be focussed almost entirely on this Diploma. In the next section I shall discuss the progress of course preparation for this Diploma.
At present, course delivery and assessment methods are being discussed and planned in light of my experiences with W3Info211 and the experiences of other colleagues involved with the Diploma. Furthermore, a new staff member with experience in W3T will be appointed in October. Thus, by the end of September, 1997, much of the planning will be completed and we will be placing course content into various prototypes for testing and evaluation.
Distinguishing between distributing course material and teaching through the WWW is important. Distributing material though the WWW although relatively easy is perhaps difficult to justify when comparing the effort involved with the additional benefits received by students. Use of the WWW for teaching needs to be planned so as to use appropriate W3T for supporting the particular teaching style you have adopted.
Introducing W3T into a face to face teaching paradigm requires a lot of time and effort. However, from the little experience and feedback I have I believe the effort is well worthwhile.
Laurillard, D. (1993), Rethinking University Teaching: A framework for the effective use of educational technology, Routledge.
Rosenblum and Healy (1996) Developing an Educational Intranet North American Web Conference, Frederiction, New Brunswick, Canada. http://www.uvm.edu/~hag/naweb96/zrosenblum.html)
Davis and Huttenlocher (1994) CoNote
Cornell University http://wheat.tc.cornell.edu/pub/davis/annotation.html
Richard T Pascoe
Lecturer
Computer and Information Science, University of Otago
PO Box 56, Dept Information Science
Dunedin, New Zealand
rpascoe@commerce.otago.ac.nz
http://sage.otago.ac.nz:800/~rpascoe/
©,1997. The author, Richard T. Pascoe, assigns to the University of New Brunswick and other educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive license to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The author also grants a non-exclusive license to the University of New Brunswick to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM and in printed form with the conference papers, and for the document to be published on mirrors on the World Wide Web. Any other usage is prohibited without the express permission of the author.