Preface Acknowledgements Contents 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 URLs References
Free Course Web Site Service *
The Feature Set of Traditional Courses *
Content Creation *
Online File Exchange *
Asynchronous Communication (threaded discussions) *
Synchronous Communication (Real—Time Chat) *
Whiteboards *
Assessment Tools *
Gradebook *
Collaborative Work Groups. *
Messaging System *
Online Tutorial *
User Tracking *
Other Features *
OTHER SUPPORT ISSUES *
EXAMPLES FROM COURSEWARE PACKAGES *
Courseware as a Mini-portal *
UNL Electronic Course Catalog *
Student Tools *
The IMS Project *
INFORMAL OBSERVATION ABOUT USAGE *
GLOSSARY *
REFERENCES *
URLs *
Courseware makes it easy to become a Web-based teacher. After an initial time investment, it probably pays back in teacher time.
Learning is a difficult business. Teachers bring about learning. If learning is difficult, who would be foolish enough to believe that teaching is simple? The Web is a communications tool. We've noted earlier that using this tool to communicate with your students is — in and of itself — important. As a teacher, you should model the best in techniques including communication. Modeling may well be the most important thing that teachers do.
Figure 3.01. Childhood communication system of two cans, connected with string through small holes in the bottoms and held in place with knots. When spoken into, the cans vibrate and the string transmits their vibrations.
Early results suggest strongly and consistently that students in Web courses learn about the same amount as learners in conventional courses. Teachers have enormous opportunities to develop Web-based instruction. While many aspects of teaching change, learning outcomes need not be among these.
A simple, effective path exists to develop a Web teaching site for a course: use any one of several courseware packages. Courseware, or Web course management software {U03.01}, is computer software designed to support the activities normally incorporated by a teacher in a course. Using courseware, many traditional teaching materials can be put on the Web — syllabi, schedule updates (e.g., how a snow emergency has changed the schedule), the "please see me if" communications, etc. In the long run, computerizing these aspects will save you and your institution time. Ten years ago, it would have been essentially impossible to provide someone the opportunity to review every syllabus for every course in a school. Today, not only is this possible, but it is possible to compare similar courses at different schools around the world. There is evidence that students are checking Web pages before they enroll in courses [Chronicle, 6/4/99]. According to a survey of 10,000 prospective college students [Seymour, 2000], Web sites are the third most important source of information behind campus visits and conversations with current students.
The development of courseware applications is emergent. The first edition of Web-Teaching, published in April, 1997, did not make much note of courseware packages. Putting Your Course ONLINE, a PBS-sponsored teleconference held in November, 1997, made mention of courseware. At the time of this writing (mid 2000), courseware development is a dynamic area. Numerous products are competing for space in this marketplace, and comparisons {U03.02} of the products are available. We can speak with some confidence about an emerging feature set. If you are not yet engaged in Web teaching, you may be surprised by the features available for courseware.
A few courseware packages are easily managed from a teacher's desktop. More often than not, the software needs to be managed by someone with quite a bit of computer know-how, and the result is that these software functions tend to be centralized. Licenses for courseware packages can be costly. At the time of this writing, the University of Nebraska—Lincoln (UNL) campus supports about five different courseware programs. UNL faculty have developed an experience base that is shared widely on campus. Ours is not a one-size-fits-all campus. Many faculty have settled upon courseware named CourseInfo from Blackboard, Inc. {U03.03} Support for this software was assigned a full-time person, and involved about 3% of the credit hours offered at UNL after a single year. The staff created a monthly "brown bag" discussion group, and information provided in this chapter owes much to the conversations held by that group.
Blackboard.com provides a free service where instructors can create their own course site with their own learning materials and students. Provide a password to your students, or leave the course open to anyone for enrollment. With thousands of courses powered by Blackboard's easy-to-use software, Blackboard.com is one of the world's largest sites on the Web for online courses {U03.04}.
Before you begin teaching a course, you usually prepare a syllabus. In a well-worn course, your syllabus may not change much from previous offerings of the course. Your syllabus may include a detailed, date-specific calendar. It is customary, for example, to indicate when assignments are due and when examinations will be given.
Who's in your class? You probably receive some kind of formal list from your school's administration indicating the students that are supposed to be in your class. You may keep an attendance record. Especially in K-12 settings, you may be expected to share attendance information with your administration in a timely manner.
There may be some papers or reprints that you hand out to students. For some teachers, these materials may be very extensive. Also, you may use some videotapes or audiotapes.
You may lecture in class, probably using a board or overhead projector. In your classes, it is very likely that you engage in some discussion. If not, after segments of your lecture, you probably call for questions. You may have stu-dents work in small groups and report back either to the whole class or to you.
Students attending the course will ask questions during class. They also may ask questions outside of class hours, possibly during office hours. During this questioning, you may sit side-by-side, working on a common piece of paper as you share thoughts and ideas. You may already offer e-mail or telephone as a means for students to contact you. You may hold problem sessions or review sessions before each quiz.
You may include supplementary or enrichment activities for the students most interested in the course topic.
You may collect homework papers, or other papers required for the course. You may mark and return these papers, sometimes in class, but other times in some other way — possibly by insisting that students stop by your office to discuss their work.
You are likely to give quizzes and tests, and to maintain a gradebook. At the end of your course, you probably submit grades for individual students.
As of this writing, most of the courseware packages available can help you perform each of the tasks just listed. The principal difference, of course, is that you and your students need not be together at the same place. In fact, you may not even work concurrently but asynchronously.
By content creation we mean such things as are found in course syllabi and handouts. The tools should make it possible for you to create these materials without knowing anything about coding. So, links between your syllabus and the calendar should be automatically incorporated into the materials created.
Courseware usually will accept straight text and automatically encode it for HTML display. Most courseware also will accept encoded text, and is smart enough to know the difference.
Students turn in papers for grading. Instructors grade, comment upon, and return papers. Courseware systems develop strategies for supporting these exchanges. Trading papers with students over the Internet is something fraught with challenge. Even such simple tasks as attaching papers to e-mail often lead to misfires in communication. Effective courseware provides a means for facilitating these exchanges. Also, it usually permits teachers to comment on papers directly within the program, so that teacher comments standout when the papers are returned to the student.
Discussions where students can come and go are often thought to be a principal advantage of Web teaching. One way to handle this is to create a listserv, an automatic electronic mailer wherein a person mailing to the list ends up mailing to all members of that list. All such e-mail is delivered to each member. An alternative is to form a news group. The principal difference is that users of newsgroups peruse titles of messages and choose which ones to download. In a listserv, you get it and choose whether to read and whether to keep or discard it. In a newsgroup, you might not download the message at all.
Figure 3.02. Sample threaded discussion from Christine Ann Marvin's course, Family Centered Services.
The discussions are accessed across the Web; contributions are made through the Web. Good software keeps discussions organized according to threads and subthreads. A thread is a conversation theme. Contributors to the theme may choose to spin off sub themes. Participants also may create new threads. The software places contributions within such a hierarchy.
Threaded discussions are included in courseware products, and members of the class can contribute to these discussions. This is the principal topic of Chapter 5.
Teachers value in-class discussions, and often see asynchronous discussions as deficient. In the Internet world, so-called chat-rooms have filled the need of those seeking real time exchanges. Courseware often includes synchronous communication features, known as chats.
Be it a blackboard, chalkboard, or whiteboard, classrooms nearly always have some means of sharing sketches and drawings. In modern classrooms, overhead projectors may have replaced the permanently mounted board of yesteryear. Whiteboards usually have variously colored, erasable markers.
Real-time sharing of electronic whiteboards between students and teachers is an Internet reality. By choosing different colors, the various contributors to the whiteboard may have their contributions identified. Whiteboards, often linked with chat-rooms, are becoming standard courseware features.
Online assessment is becoming ever more important in Web teaching, especially as teachers become more experienced with Web formats. Courseware products usually include some form of online testing. This testing can have many features. Access to tests can be controlled so students have only one opportunity to take each test. The tests can be timed. Several item formats are available for tests. This is likely to be an area where substantial improvements are made in the near future. Testing is discussed in Chapter 15.
While teachers nearly always have some tools for helping them manage grades, from simple ledger books to sophisticated spreadsheet programs, they nearly always have crude methods for sharing information with their students. Spreadsheet printouts and lists of exam scores are still found in most high schools and colleges.
Courseware can provide a communication system such that students can see what their instructors have recorded in gradebooks. Courseware often has tools for grading, too, but these usually are not yet especially sophisticated.
Having students work together in groups where the tasks and roles are structured has been found to lead to small increases in student learning. In classroom settings, teachers often have students gather into smaller working groups within the classroom space. Sometimes the students wander, but rarely far away from the classroom. In distance settings, it can be even more difficult for students to meet in groups of three or four than to attend a traditional class. For this reason, courseware may have features that support the collaborative work of small groups.
Figure 3.03. Modified screen capture of gradebook from a course managed using CourseInfo. Although the gradebook functions still are primitive, they remain very useful, especially for communications. This is a modified view of an instructor's screen. Students see only their own records.
Messaging systems allow for very quick communication between one Internet user and another. They are smaller than e-mail, but quite a bit faster, and uses Internet features other than e-mail. Both Microsoft and America Online, Inc. have developed messaging systems. Courseware may have messaging as a built-in feature.
Students need to be trained in the use of the courseware. Courseware packages usually contain an online assessment of students' online skills, as well as tutorials to help students learn to use the courseware.
Teachers often suspect that students work less at their coursework than might be desired. Online tracking allows teachers to keep records about student use of courseware.
Courseware may provide students the opportunity to create pages that bring together information from many sources. These can vary from current local weather to upcoming campus events. It works best when students can easily access all of their courseware courses at once, particularly with a single log-in.
The students in the courses sometimes are able to create informative home pages describing themselves. These can be both created and accessed through courseware.
The Bookstore or Book Room. If you teach at the college level, students are expected to buy their own books, and your school probably is connected with a bookstore that offers textbooks for sale. If ordering books for student purchase is a part of the pre-course or early course activities, then having students use the Web for book purchase is becoming ever more common.
Many Web courses coming out provide all or nearly all of the written material required for a course. Also, there is an emerging type of course that provides hypertext links to other Web-based materials (Chapters 6, 8, 11. 15 and 16) that augment or replace the role originally served by textbooks.
The Library. Library usage becomes problematic when teaching on the Web. In many courses, especially post-secondary courses, use of a major library may be an integral part of the course. If the reading for a course is very specific, workarounds for library access may involve making materials available on the Web. (Remember to acquire the appropriate copyright permissions; see Chapter 19.) Alternatively, students may be able to use inter-library loan services for some materials.
Advising. For full-time students in degree programs, advising is almost always a part of the institutional offerings. Advising has tended to be very much a face-to-face, one-on-one activity. In the world of Web teaching, advising changes; it enters the world of e-mails, messaging, and chats. Catalogs go online.
Programs of study, and even course schedules, can be generated automatically for individual students using Web-based software provided by their institutions.
Support Services. For the on-campus student, colleges include a wide variety of support services. Support services include the student newspaper, financial aid office, placement office (including resumé and recruiting assistance), and even a medical center or school nurse. Many schools have already begun to make some of these services available online, especially financial aid services. Students who work full-time and take a Web course to avoid a three-hour drive each way probably do not seek much more in the line of support services. But, there are not yet many full-time Web students. As the number of Web students increases, the demand for support services also increases.
The Web has encouraged selected providers to attempt to become portal sites — places where Web users routinely start their Web day. Providers of courseware see this as a strong possibility for them, as illustrated by this Blackboard screen at the University of Nebraska (Figure 3.04). Blackboard is continuing to develop an extensive management system, Blackboard Campus.
Figure 3.04. Modified screen capture for the opening screen provided for David Brooks on April 2, 2000. Brooks has access to five courses: a trial course he created, a faculty discussion group, and three courses he visits as an observer.
At the University of Nebraska—Lincoln, a course catalog has been set up with a structure parallel to the traditional paper catalog (Figure 3.05). Many courses are listed, and the number grows each semester. Choosing a college leads to lists of departments. Choosing a department leads to lists of individual courses.
Figure 3.05. Modified screen capture from top page of UNL electronic course list. This is at the college unit level.
Each student has access to a set of tools. The tools in Figure 3.06, a standard subset, were issued for enrollment in a graduate statistics course.
Figure 3.06. Modified screen capture from student tools page. The student manual feature provides instruction for students about using CourseInfo. The student calendar can have entries made by course instructors.
One menu choice is communication. This affords six options, one of which is e-mail. Choosing e-mail brings up a screen from which other options are given, as in Figure 3.07. For the instructor, this amounts to the same as having created several listservs.
Each student has the option of developing a personal page. Few students in this course took the opportunity to create personal pages. Threaded discussion was an option, too, as illustrated earlier in Figure 3.02. Students did avail themselves of this option. Most of the questions were technical; there was not much give and take. This is probably typical for statistics courses at this level.
Figure 3.07. Partial screen capture from e-mail options.
IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc., {U03.05} is a coalition of academic, commercial and government organizations, working together to define the Internet architecture for learning. IMS is short for instructional management systems. This initiative emerged from efforts at EDUCAUSE (then Educom).
The scope for IMS specifications, broadly defined as "distributed learning," includes both online and off-line settings, taking place synchronously (real-time) or asynchronously. This means that the learning contexts benefitting from IMS specifications include Internet-specific environments (such as Web-based course management systems) as well as learning situations that involve off-line electronic resources (such as a learner accessing learning resources on a CD-ROM). The learners may be in a traditional educational environment (school classroom, university), in a corporate or government training setting, or at home. For example, the IMS Learning Resources Meta-data Specification (www.imsproject.org/metadata), benefits the learner looking for information with a meta-data aware search tool both when the search is of Web-based resources and when she or he is searching through a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM encyclopedia in their computer at home. Content developers who have implemented the IMS Learning Resources Meta-data Specification will have made it much easier for the people doing the search to find the resources they want in a much more efficient way, since meta-data allows users to be much more specific in the search terms they can specify.
IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc., {U03.05}
As of this writing, it is not clear how much impact the IMS Project will have.
When inquiries are made among faculty about the use of course management software, it does not surprise us that most of the features available to faculty go unused. As with many powerful software packages, the available feature set exceeds the feature set actually used by most users.
courseware (course management software): computer software designed to support the activities normally incorporated by a teacher in an online course.
feature set: in software jargon, a set of operations provided in a particular software package. For example, browser software is expected to include making, editing, and displaying bookmarks as part of its feature set.
portal: a Web site or service that offers a broad array of resources and services, such as e-mail, news, weather, forums, search engines, and online shopping malls. Most of the traditional search engines, such as Yahoo, have transformed themselves into Web portals. Courseware providers are seeking to establish themselves as portal sites. They have interests in two portal strategies: one for students, and the other for faculty as researchers.
thread: in Web-based discussions, a way of linking contributions (posts) which address the same or closely related topics. Responses to the original post are automatically linked to it.
Chronicle of Higher Education, 6/4/99, "Students Say They Check Course Web Pages Before They Enroll," page A31.
Seymour, L. "Giving the Web the New College Try," Washington Post, March 28, 2000, p. A11.
U03.01. Online Learning: Courseware Demos, http://www.utoronto.ca/cat/courseware/demos/ (accessed 6/7/00).
U03.02. Comparison of Online Course Delivery Software Products, http://multimedia.marshall.edu/cit/webct/compare/comparison.html (accessed 4/9/00).
U03.03. Blackboard, Inc. http://blackboard.com/ (accessed 4/2/00).
U03.04. Create a CourseSite®, http://www.blackboard.com/bin/courseinformation.pl (accessed 7/18/00)
U03.05. IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc. http://imsproject.org (accessed 4/2/00).