Srikanth Uppala
Qualcomm Inc.
ABSTRACT
In 1993 our colleague Jon Dorbolo started teaching an introductory philosophy course [Dorbolo, 1994] which made heavy use of "conversation activities" in which pairs or groups of students used email to asynchronously engage in carefully designed communication exercises. In 1996 we received funding to improve this philosophy course, to develop the completely web-based first term calculus course CalculusQuest(TM) [Bogley and Robson, 1996], and to develop an extensive set of tools called QuestWriter(TM) [Sechrest, 1997] that supports those pedagogic and management aspects of web-based courses which were desired by faculty and students and which could profit from computer mediation.
Experience with managing email activity led to the development of an engine which automates many aspects of what we now call "Communication Activities". This engine supports activities involving pairs of students. The computer handles the tasks of matching students (in two user-selectable ways), enforcing deadlines, sending out automated reminders, storing all student work, and making gradebook entries. The instructor can easily review a complete set of student exchanges, assign grades, and add individual comments, all from a web form.
We included two communication activities in CalculusQuest(TM). One of these occurs at the beginning of the course and is preparatory to the introduction of limits. The second forces students to write, think and communicate about the mean value theorem, one of the foci of our course. Each of these CA's involves a detailed set of instructions guiding four exchanges between partners.
CalculusQuest(TM) has been run 3 times at Oregon State University and several times at Linn Benton Community College. Data from the first two terms of the OSU course were gathered and analyzed for performance, for communication patterns, and for attitudes towards web-based pedagogy. These results have been presented and published by Scott Chadwick [Chadwick, 1997]. General descriptions of QuestWriter(TM) and CalculusQuest(TM) can be found in [Bogley et al., 1996a, 1996b].
In this paper we present two things.
First, we discuss details of the implementation of Communications Activities within QuestWriter(TM). Our goal is to elucidate the operation of CA's from the instructor's, student's, and support staff's point of view. Technical details are available in [Uppala, 1997]. Second, we report the our observations of the pedagogic impact of using CA's in CalculusQuest(TM).
What we observed is that CA's contributed gratifyingly well to the targeted conceptual understanding and provide a valuable and here-to-fore unavailable means of assessing student thinking. On a less positive note, many students were impaired by the lack of expressive power and imprecise use of mathematical terms and were generally reluctant to critically evaluate, let alone truly criticize, a partner's work. We also feel that CA's facilitate what we call the "hard core/soft touch" approach to teaching mathematics characterized by increased levels of supportive interaction and communication among students and instructors aimed at achieving measurable proficiency in some of the conceptually most difficult areas of the subject.
We do not pretend to understand the full range of possible applications of CA's in teaching mathematics, nor the degree to which they can be effective. We conclude our paper by discussing the directions we are taking based on our own experiences and making some suggestions to others interested in using computer-mediated structured communication activities in their own courses.
REFERENCES
W.A. Bogley and R. Robson, CalculusQuest(TM), 1996.
http://iq.orst.edu/cq. (Login as "guest" with the password "guest".)
Bogley, Dorbolo, Robson, Sechrest, New Pedagogies and tools for web-based calculus, in: WebNet '96, World Conference of the Web Society Proceedings, edited by H. Maurer (AACE, 1996) pp. 33-39.
Bogley, Dorbolo, Robson, Sechrest, Pedagogic Innovation in Web-based Instruction, to appear ICTCM'96 proceedings, Addison-Wesley.
S. Chadwick, Evaluating Web-Based Virtual Courses: Research Results and Implications, http://iq.orst.edu/pubs/wwweval.html.
J. Dorbolo, InterQuest(TM) Introducing Philosophy, 1993-1997.
http://iq.orst.edu/03phl01.html.
J. Sechrest et. al., QuestWriter(TM) Documentation. (Current status: old version in http://iq.orst.edu/meta, draft new version in http://iq.orst.edu/doc/final/QWHome.html)
S. Uppala, QuestWriter(TM), a Toolset for Web-based Instruction, 1997. Master's Thesis. Available in postscript at http://www.cs.orst.edu/~uppala/rpt.ps.tar.gz
Robby Robson
Department of Mathematics
Oregon State University,
Corvallis, Or 97331-4605
robby@math.orst.edu
http://www.orst.edu/~robsonr
Dick Schori
Department of Mathematics
Oregon State University,
Corvallis, Or 97331-4605
schori@math.orst.edu
http://www.orst.edu/~schorir
Srikanth Uppala
Qualcomm Inc.
suppala@qualcomm.com