International Journal of Educational Telecommunications
Volume 3, Number 2/3 1997
Special Issue
The WWW in Use in Higher Education
Articles
Preface
Betty CollisWeb Environments for Group-Based Project Work in Higher Education
Betty Collis, Toine Andernach, and NicoVan DiepenDeveloping a World Wide Web Section of a Management Course: Transporting Learning Premises Across Media
John D. BigelowThe World Wide Web in Engineering Team Projects
Paul S. Chinowsky and Robin E. GoodmanTeaching Through Adaptive Hypertext on the WWW
Paul M.E. De BraObservations on Web-Based Course Development and Delivery
T. Craig Montgomerie and Dwayne HarapnuikUn Meurtre à Cinet (Un homicidio en Toluca): A Web and Email Whodunit to Develop Writing Competence in Intermediate-Level Language Classes
Walter C. Oliver and Terri NelsonThe World Wide Web as an Environment for Collaborative Research: An Experiment in Graduate Education
John R. Wolcott and Joan E. RobertsonFrames-Based, Image-Oriented Instruction
Joan E. Robertson and Cliff solomonVirtual Office Hours: Facilitating Faculty-Student Communication
Craig A. Merlic and Matthew J. WalkerClassNet: Managing the Virtual Classroom
Mark J. Van Gorp and Pete BoysenThe MARBLE1 Project: A Collaborative Approach to Producing Educational Material for the Web
Sarah Price, Patrick McAndrew, Mary Cuttle, Roger Rist, Terry Mayes, Eric Bonharme, Ray Land, Jeff Haywood, and Hamish MacLeod
Abstracts
Special Issue Preface
The WWW in Use in Higher Education
BETTY COLLIS
Faculty of Educational Science and Technology
University of Twente, The Netherlands
Collis@edte.utwente.nl
The World Wide Web (WWW) and how it can affect higher education &emdash;this is a topic being discussed throughout the world, by theorists and visionaries, researchers and telecom vendors, politicians and persons speaking through the public media. Sometimes those actually involved in the use of the WWW in higher education are among those contributing to the predictions, but they are not the majority voices. Even less heard are those in the “front lines,” those directly involved with using the WWW in instructional delivery with courses in full operation at traditional universities. These are the pioneers and practitioners who are represented in this Special Issue of the International Journal of Educational Telecommunications, a special issue focused on the WWW in use, in higher education.
The 11 articles in this collection are an important and impressive collection for at least the following reasons: (a) They show what is possible and feasible with the use of the WWW in direct support of teaching and learning, in regular institutional situations, and thus give the field an important benchmark collection against which to consider the claims, dreams, and hopes of those making predictions about the impact of the WWW on higher education; (b) they represent a state-of-the-art collection of powerful and innovative uses of WWW functionalities, using levels of those functionalities now available to students and faculty; (c) they represent an international perspective, with cases from not only the US and Canada but also from the UK and The Netherlands; (d) they represent a wide range of disciplines, including theater, business management, language learning, and mathematics; (e) they represent a wide variety of levels of organization, from consortia at the national level, to support services for the department level, to individual courses or sets of courses; and (f) they represent a comprehensive overview of educational applications of the WWW in higher education and a wide range of instructional approaches which are strengthened or even made possible because of WWW functionalities.
Besides being based on the WWW in actual mainstream use, not in the framework of special research projects or abstract theorizing, these articles share at least two other characteristics that are important to note in this preface: One relates to their origin relative to the Special Issue itself, and the other relates to a critical point underlying the successful implementations that the articles describe.
With respect to the origin of this Special Issue, all of the authors were presenters at the first World Conference of the Web Society, held in San Francisco in October 1996. This conference, sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE), was a major event in the evolution of WWW applications itself, not only for educational implications but more broadly. Within this very successful conference, speakers from throughout the world shared their technical and application-oriented work. Many of the presentations represented innovative prototypes, showing at the R&D level the sorts of possibilities that WWW functionalities can have in business, education and training, and in society more broadly. Many other presentations represented analyses, frameworks, checklists, and other interpretative viewpoints on implications of the WWW. But one subset of presentations stood out: Those represented in this Special Issue, where practitioners, busy with the full and normal range of duties typical to faculty in higher education, were reporting on how they were already making substantial and significant use of WWW functionalities to improve the teaching and learning practice. Because such a collection of successful implementation cases is unusual to find, the idea of asking these presenters to revise their presentations in updated and full-scale articles for inclusion in this Special Issue arose. As one of the three associate editors of the International Journal of Educational Telecommunications, and also as an attendee at WebNet 96, I approached the authors and was rewarded by their positive and professional responses, which result in this Special Issue. All found time in their very busy schedules to prepare thoughtful and high-quality papers based on their uses of the WWW for teaching and learning. I appreciate very much their work and contributions, and I look forward to future WebNet conferences as sources of similar quality case experiences.
I mentioned another important common aspect among the 11 cases reported in the Special Issue. Although in every case the authors have a great deal of expertise with technical aspects of WWW use, what is interesting is that none of the cases began with a technology-driven motivation, but instead all arose out of real needs in the teaching and learning situation, as identified by those experiencing the needs. Because those needs can be powerfully addressed by WWW functionalities, the functionalities have been chosen or gradually evolved and are proving to be successful in their implementation. This is not the case with so many technology-use situations, where a technology advocate starts from the position of “here is what you can do with the technology...,” and then wonders why these “obvious benefits” do not diffuse into practice. These are stories of instructors and those who support instructors, working daily with (some times large) classes of students, and finding out from their own experience that WWW functionalities can improve the learning experience for all involved. This is what makes this an important issue.
I would like to thank my associate, Iris van der Kamp, for her support in helping me with the editorial task, Mrs. Karen Whitlock at AACE for excellent editorial and collegial interaction, and of course all the authors for their prompt, professional, and friendly responses to the many emails that have accompanied the realization of this issue in a very short time.
The Editor
Web Environments for Group-Based Project Work in Higher Education
BETTY COLLIS
Faculty of Educational Science and Technology
University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
collis@edte.utwente.nl
TOINE ANDERNACH and NICO VAN DIEPEN
Department of Computer Science
University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
andernac@cs.utwente.nl
nvdiepen@cs.utwente.nl
We discuss problems confronting the use of group-based project work as an instructional strategy in higher education and describe two courses in which course-specific World Wide Web (Web) environments have evolved over a series of course sequences and are used both as tool environments for group-process support and as the product environment of the project work itself. In particular we describe the use of specific Web-embedded shared workspace, communication-management and evaluation tools and their contribution to the management and educational value of group-based project work. The integration of instructional principles and strategies with the Web-based tools is also of particular importance. The 1996-97 versions of the courses analysed in this article can be found at http://www.to.utwente.nl/ism1-96/home.htm, for the first-year course in educational media design and at http://www.edu.cs.utwente.nl/~aitnlpbg/, for the first year course in applications of information technology. Both courses, at the University of Twente, use group-based project work as a major organizational form, but integrate all aspects of the courses within cohesive Web environments.
Developing a World Wide Web Section of a Management Course: Transporting Learning Premises Across Media
JOHN D. BIGELOW
Management Department
College of Business and Economics
Boise State University, Boise, ID 83725, USA
rmgbigel@cobfac.idbsu.edu
Universities are seeing a rapidly growing interest in developing World Wide Web (WWW) implementations of classroom courses. In translating courses from a classroom environment to a WWW environment, how can instructors both build on the course development that occurred in the classroom environment and avoid inadvertently limiting the possibilities of the WWW course? A “premise-based” approach is proposed, in which learning premises underlying classroom courses are extracted, then used as the basis for creating a WWW course. This approach is applied in developing a WWW section of an introductory management course (Bigelow, 1997). Six learning premises are identified and organized into a learning model. The model is then implemented in the WWW course. Illustrations of supporting email, WWW, and Toolbook resources are provided, and student reactions to the course are reviewed.
The World Wide Web in Engineering Team Projects
PAUL S. CHINOWSKY and ROBIN E.
GOODMAN
School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332-0355, USA
pchinow@ce.gatech.edu
robin@eiffel.ce.gatech.edu
The introduction of new communication technologies such as the World Wide Web (Web) is creating unique opportunities for engineering professionals to develop new coordination and communication strategies. Of particular interest is the capability of teams to interact remotely in a virtual team environment. Whereas traditional project coordination required regularly scheduled face-to-face meetings, technologies such as the Web are introducing concepts such as asynchronous coordination, remote videoconferencing, and centralized information centers. These remote forms of communication and coordination facilitation introduce a unique set of questions and issues into the engineering domain, such as the efficiency of the technology and the appropriateness of the technology. This paper introduces one approach to examining these issues through the use of the Web as a communications medium in the engineering classroom. The paper provides initial results from studies being conducted at the Georgia Institute of Technology and analyzes the issues facing educators and developers in the pursuit of advanced classroom communication technologies (Project URL: http://civilstat90.ce.gatech.edu).
Teaching Through Adaptive Hypertext on the WWW
PAUL M.E. DE BRA
Department of Mathematics and Computing Science,Eindhoven University of
Technology
PO Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands
debra@win.tue.nl
Since early 1994 the introductory course 2L670, Hypermedia Structures and Systems (http://wwwis.win.tue.nl/2L670/), has been available on the World Wide Web (WWW) and is an optional part of the curriculum in computing science at the Eindhoven University of Technology. The course has since been completed by more than 200 students from six different universities, five in the Netherlands and one in Belgium.
In order to participate in this course the student only needs a WWW browser. There is no need for separate email, netnews, bulletin boards, or ftp software. (Although these additional tools could be useful for communicating with the teacher and with other students and for handing in the final assignment.)
In this paper we present the evolution of this course, from a static hypertext document (used in 1994) to a fully adaptive hypertext courseware (used since January 1997). The current edition of the course features automatic evaluation of small tests, a repository for assignment work, a discussion system, complete monitoring of each student’s progress, and adaptive content and link structure. We also reflect on the problems students have experienced with each version and the solutions that have led to the current courseware and that will lead to future developments.
Observations on Web-Based Course Development and Delivery
T. CRAIG MONTGOMERIE and DWAYNE
HARAPNUIK
Division of Technology in Education
University of Alberta , 3-104 Education North
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2G5
craig.montgomerie@ualberta.ca
dwayne@oanet.com
In this paper we discuss the development and delivery of an award-winning credit course, The Internet: Communicating, Accessing, and Providing Information (Montgomerie & Harapnuik, 1996 http://www.quasar.valberta.ca/nethowto), which is delivered completely over the Internet. During May and August of 1996, more than 100 students took the course. This paper provides a description of this course as well as a set of observations and recommendations for the development of future courses. After a discussion of the development of the course, the philosophy of the course is presented. A discussion of the structure of the course includes the instructional design, an acknowledgment of androgogical principles, and the support for multiple methods of learning as well as a discussion of the technical details of the course design. Examples of the kinds of student learning are then provided, followed by estimates of the cost to design and deliver this course. Student-generated evaluations of the course in particular and this kind of learning in general are then provided. Finally, a set of observations, suggestions for improvements, and recommendations for future course development are provided.
Un Meurtre à Cinet (Un homicidio en Toluca): A Web and Email Whodunit to Develop Writing Competence in Intermediate-Level Language Classes
WALTER C. OLIVER and TERRI NELSON
Department of Foreign Languages
California State University
San Bernardino, CA 92407-2397, USA
woliver@wiley.csusb.edu
tnelson@wiley.csusb.edu
Un Meurtre à Cinet (Un homicidio en Toluca) is an intermediate-level language, role-playing project in which students collaborate to solve a murder mystery using email, a listserver, and a World wide Web (Web)-based environment. (See a demonstration of a multiple media package, including Internet activities, Web site, email murder mystery, and student CD-ROM at http://flan.csusb.edu/documentation/MurderDemo/Overview/overv.htm.) The murder mystery is designed to provide those students who study language at a distance with an opportunity to work collaboratively in a linguistically and culturally rich context without ever having to meet face-to-face. The use of email focuses attention on the subtleties of using writing as a communicative tool since students’ ability to solve the murder mystery depends upon their ablity to ask challenging questions to gain the information they need while avoiding giving answers that incriminate themselves (http://flan.csusb.edu/documentation/MurderDemo/title.htm).
The project makes extensive use of realia. The use of a Web-based environment allows for the distribution of this realia electronically, and the use of a listserver facilitates extensive asynchronous interactivity among the students regardless of location. Initial results, based upon attitudinal surveys, demonstrate that in most cases, students perceive this to be an interesting and valuable activity. Some students, however, expect instructors to pay more attention to grammatical accuracy when evaluating performance. A follow-up study will address these issues.
The World Wide Web as an Environment for Collaborative Research: An Experiment in An Experiment in Graduate Education
JOHN R. WOLCOTT and JOAN E.
ROBERTSON
School of Drama
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195, USA
wolcott@u.washington.edu
joan@u.washington.edu
During the past 2 years the Internet has become an integral part of scholarly communication. However, it is difficult to find research which focuses on the educational potential and pitfalls of the World Wide Web (WWW) as an environment for collaborative research and publication. This study seeks to examine this area by using a group of doctoral candidates to collectively develop an extensive and diverse Internet document. More specifically, the authors have attempted to answer several basic questions: What happens when a group of researchers attack a single problem from different perspectives, working in an environment in which research findings, notes, insights, and inquiries can be shared and linked on a regular and continuing basis? How is the information which results from such an investigation to be integrated into a formal hypertext document? How is such a document, composed over time, to be designed and edited? Finally, how is such a document to be constructed so that it will be useful to others?
Results of this preliminary investigation suggest that students with serialistic or dualistic learning styles do not readily develop open hypertexts, despite repeated encouragement toward a nonlinear approach. The discussion includes various means of enhancing future studies of this nature, in particular the establishment of several design conventions. Drawbacks of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) are also discussed, and suggestions are made for future research and development. The WWW site created by the students can be viewed at
Frames-Based, Image-Oriented Instruction
JOAN E. ROBERTSON and CLIFF SOLOMON
Mailstop # 357155
IAIMS, University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195, USA
joan@u.washington.edu
csolomon@u.washington.edu
The explosive development of the World Wide Web (WWW) in the late 1980s occurred concurrently with the development of the Integrated Advanced Information Management System (IAIMS) 1 initiative at the University of Washington in Seattle. Having determined that the Internet could deliver many of our computer-based instructional modules, our goal was to create an authoring tool that would serve as a template for our materials. A computer shell was developed. This shell, made up of interlocking Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) files and common gateway interface (CGI) scripts, is used as a template for the development of our modules. This gives us a standardized user interface that facilitates the use of the packages we create.
Three factors guided the development of the template shell: (a) the requirement for layout flexibility within the computer screen, (b) navigational concerns, and (c) the need for effective and efficient use of graphics. These factors are discussed in depth, and in this paper, we demonstrate the educational advantages of the frames feature. The development of our frames-based, image-oriented instructional template is described, and several examples are presented of the template applied to dermatology, radiology, pharmacology, skin biology, and musculoskeletal disorders.
Feedback from 54 students who have used the modules is presented. The paper concludes with our assertion that using a frames environment can give the computer educator a flexibility which has many pedagogical advantages, and by using a three-tiered approach to graphic display, bandwidth limitations can be balanced with students’ pedagogical needs. An abridged version of one of the modules is available for demonstration purposes at: http://www.hslib.washington.edu/courses/demo/. For a complete overview of the University of Washington’s IAIMS program, go to http://www.hslib.washington.edu/iaims/. In addition, http://healthlinks.Washington.edu/courses/demo/ goes to the home page of HealthLinks, a WWW site developed jointly by the IAIMS staff and the University of Washington’s Health Sciences Library and Information Center.
Virtual Office Hours: Facilitating Faculty-Student Communication
CRAIG A. MERLIC and MATTHEW J.
WALKER
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
merlic@chem.ucla.edu
mjw@chem.ucla.edu
The design and implementation of a World Wide Web (WWW)-based instructional tool titled Virtual Office Hours (VOH) at http://www.chem.ucla.edu/uclavoh/ is described as implemented in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry (http://www.chem.ucla.edu/dept/Chemistry.html) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) (http://www.ucla.edu/). The project is designed to facilitate communication between faculty and students through on-line access to a wide variety of instructional materials and on-line question-and-answer capabilities. A key aspect of the project is servicing an entire department without requiring faculty to learn or use Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). The project now serves more than 20 classes and 4,000 students in each school term, and it often generates more than 150,000 accesses in a single week of usage.
ClassNet: Managing the Virtual Classroom
MARK J. VAN GORP and PETE BOYSEN
Durham Computation Center
Iowa State University
Ames, IA 50011, USA
mvg@iastate.edu
Education continues to move on-line through the World Wide Web. Classrooms of students and teachers are no longer restricted by time or distance. ClassNet (http://classnet.cc.iastate.edu/) is a tool which manages these virtual classrooms: It automates many of the administrative tasks associated with global Internet classes. Through a simple interface of Web forms, students may perform activities such as class registration, assignment submission, and grade retrieval. Meanwhile, instructors may perform tasks such as managing assignments, controlling class enrollment, communicating with students, and monitoring student progress. This article highlights features of ClassNet’s design and functionality and provides examples of its use.
The MARBLE1 Project: A Collaborative Approach to Producing Educational Material for the Web
SARAH PRICE, PATRICK MC ANDREW, MARY CUTTLE,
and ROGER RIST
Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh EH14 4AS, UK
sprice@icbl.hw.ac.uk
patrick@icbl.hw.ac.uk
mary@icbl.hw.ac.uk
roger@icbl.hw.ac.uk
TERRY MAYES
Glasgow Caledonian University, Glasgow G4 0BA, UK
jtma@glasgow-caledonian.ac.uk
ERIC BONHARME and RAY LAND
Napier University, Edinburgh EH14 1DJ, UK
e.bonharme@dcs.napier.ac.uk
r.land@central.napier.ac.uk
JEFF HAYWOOD and HAMISH MAC LEOD
University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9YL, UK
J.Haywood@ed.ac.uk
Hamish.Macleod@ed.ac.uk
The MARBLE Project (http://www.marble.ac.uk./marble/) is a collaborative venture which provides learning materials on the World Wide Web (Web) to students at three higher education institutions in Scotland. Several Web-based products have been prepared and this paper focuses in detail on three of these. The subproject Computers in Teaching and Learning concerns itself actively with how it is that students learn; it is a task-based program of study that explores those aspects of the Web which are successful in encouraging deep learning structures. As an experiment in peer tutoring it hasimplemented a system of many-to-many Web conferencing. The Geotechnical Engineering component of MARBLE introduces the student to the coastal morphology of part of the Scottish coast. Students had found previously that the course enabled them to understand the theory and processes of coastal change, but that classroom expositions did not give them a feel for the study area itself. Comprehensive image-rich materials for the Web have been produced to assist students in making valid comparisons between the visual appearance of the area, conveyed in photographs, and representations on geological and land maps. The Mathematical Assessment component of MARBLE implements a wide range of multiple-choice questions in several mathematical areas. The objective is to test thoroughly the knowledge of incoming groups of students so that they can rate their own knowledge and so that the lecturers can be informed of the correct level to pitch their introductory lectures. The entire test is presented and marked on the Web and concludes with on-screen feedback.
The collaborative nature of work on the MARBLE Project has been an important feature of development. Since one influential report into higher education in the early 1990s claimed that “Duplication of effort is wasted effort,” the project’s collaborative nature sought to produce efficiency gains and yet, crucially, to produce material that enables the student to advance in the learning process.