Introducing WWW Technology into Tertiary Teaching: A Personal Perspective.
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.
Introduction
In this paper are presented the results of an ongoing action research plan
(labelled W3Info211) for introducing the use of World Wide Web Technology
(W3T) into tertiary teaching. More specifically, discussion is focussed
on the first 3 cycles of W3Info211 during which W3T was introduced to an
Information Science Course comprising 100 stage 2 students located at the
University of Otago, New Zealand. W3Info211 involves three cycles,
which are:
-
Initial construction of an austere WWW Homepage for the Info211 course
in 1996 to distribute lecture notes;
-
Revision of the Info211 WWW Homepage for 1997 to incorporate additional
navigation aids requested by students in 1996.
-
Further revision to improve, reorganize, and update course content, and
to extend the Info211 WWW Homepage for 1998 with: interactive exercises;
facilities for students to annotate course notes; improved graphics (requested
by students in 1997); and automatic feedback tailored to specific student
needs.
Phases of W3Info211 for each of the cycles are discussed in Section 2.
Included in this discussion will be reflections made by the author during
these three cycles. For example: the effort involved in delivering the
Info211 course both on and off line at the same time; matching the use
of W3T to the educational pedagogy for Info211; and student feedback on
the availability of a WWW Homepage for Info211.
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.
W3Info211
W3Info11 is an action research plan that I have been using to incorporate
the use of W3T into a stage 2 information science course taught face to
face. This plan has involved 3 cycles, each for the annual presentation
of Info211 starting in 1996. An action research plan comprises 4
phases: Reflection, Planning, Action, and Observation. In the following
sections, comments will be presented on each phase of each cycle.
Cycle 1: 1996
This was my first year of teaching Info211 and although the content of
the course was reasonably well established I needed to develop my own teaching
resources. Traditionally, these resources would be notes and slides
for the lectures I would be presenting and tutorial exercises which smaller
groups of students would complete under the supervision of tutors. At the
time I was considering what resources to develop for this course, I became
interested in the use of the WWW.
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.
Cycle 2: 1997
In considering how to present Info211 for the second time, I gave much
thought to the practicality of presenting the course both face to face
and through the WWW. I reflected upon my previous year’s experiences
both in terms of the time and effort involved and in light of the students’
feedback. Although significantly more time and effort was involved in delivering
the course both face to face and through the WWW, students were stimulated
to some degree through the use of this medium.
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:
-
to have complete WWW notes for Info 211 by the end of the course; and
-
to have investigated the use of W3T to enhance teaching.
Although keen to use the WWW for more than distributing course material,
I realised this was best approached over 2 cycles. In this, the first ,
I planned to establish a role for the WWW within my teaching of Info211
while exploring exactly how W3T could be used productively to enhance teaching
and learning. In the next cycle I would incorporate the results of this
exploration into the established WWW material.
I divided the Course delivery into three parts, each complementing
the other by providing more detail and giving greater flexibility to the
student for learning. These parts were:
-
Powerpoint presentations, which were used during lectures and which were
distributed in printed form before each lecture for students to annotate.
The presentations were intended solely for lectures and contained only
the essence of the material being presented;
-
WWW material, which students could access both on and off campus either
on line or in printed form. This material was intended to provide concise
background material needed by students to place the lectures in context.
-
Textbooks and other similar literature available at bookstores and in libraries.
The WWW material contained references to relevant sections of various textbooks
and to articles in journals which would further develop the students’ understanding.
My intention was to provide sufficient information within the WWW material
to enable students to benefit from having hypertext links to clarify the
use of terminology and associate related material within different lectures.
I was aware of comments by Laurillard (1996) on how
overuse of hypertext links could fragment the material presented and potentially
destroy the continuity and planned evolution of the material being presented
from lecture to lecture. I was also mindful of the student’s feedback
on presenting material on a lecture by lecture basis and planned for including
such access to the WWW material.
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.
Table 1: Navigation panel used by students to access course
material by lecture.
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.
Cycle 3: 1998
The previous cycle was important in changing my perspective on the use
of W3T for teaching. I have gained some practical insights into the
use of this technology and look forward to applying these in my teaching.
At present there is a noticeable lack of formal feedback from the students
and my intention is to gather much more to establish how this new technology
is being accepted and used. This feedback will be more important
as W3T is used for teaching rather than for distribution. Since this cycle
is intended to be a true reflection of this aim, development of appropriate
feedback mechanisms (surveys either on the WWW or as part of the official
course feedback form) will need to be developed in this cycle.
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.
Post Graduate Diploma in Health Informatics
In a paper presented at NAWEB 96 (Pascoe and Abernethy
1996), a description was given of the overall structure of the Post
Graduate Diploma in Health Informatics (at the time called Medical Informatics).
Since the presentation of that paper, a significant amount of infrastructure
has been put into place, including University approval of the course, a
budget and funding, and development of individual course content
is progressing well.
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.
Conclusions
Teaching both face to face and through the WWW involves additional time
and effort, even though an approach expected to minimise the effort was
adopted. With experience the additional effort involved could be further
minimised.
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.
References
Pascoe, R. and Abernethy, D. (1996) Teaching
a Diploma in Medical Informatics using the World Wide Web North American
Web Conference, Frederiction, New Brunswick, Canada. http://www.uvm.edu/~hag/naweb96/zpascoe.html
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.
