Bernie Dodge, Ph.D.
San Diego State University
Published in 1996 as Chapter 12 in Brandon, B. et al, Computer Trainer's Personal Trainer's Guide, Que Education & Training, Indianapolis, IN, ISBN 1-57576-253-6.
In the previous chapter, Patty Crowell described some strategies for teaching about the internet, and for integrating internet use into the teaching of other subjects. This chapter picks up that second thread and carries it into more detail. Specifically, you'll learn how to use the World Wide Web as a vehicle for disseminating course materials and for creating active learning experiences within a classroom-based course. You'll also learn how to build on those experiences and incrementally move towards being able to deliver your courses to those beyond your classroom walls.
To pursue the ideas described in this chapter, your company or campus needs to be connected to the internet. Throughout this chapter I will refer to resources available on the World Wide Web. These resources will appear in underlined, bold text, just as they would on the web. The full addresses of these resources are listed at the end of the chapter.
It doesn't sound exciting, does it? And yet it doesn't sound extreme or outlandish, either, because it replicates the format of many classes we've all sat through or given. Lecturing works, at least for some situations, and lecturing to distant learners has pretty much the same effect as lecturing to those in the back of the room. It's an efficient way to get content across, as long as the content is well organized and the learners are sufficiently motivated to pay attention.
What happens, though, when the content is so rich and multifaceted that it resists being reduced to a well-packaged presentation? Have you ever tried to teach principles of good page layout to a room full of novice desktop publishers? Would a lecture about software piracy and intellectual property rights change anybody's attitudes or behavior? Can you really teach someone to troubleshoot their Excel macros by talking them though a sequence of bulleted lists?
These are examples of situations which call for higher level thinking than the usual lecture. What's lacking in traditional distance teaching, (and in traditional same-room teaching)? There are at least two things: active participation and meaningful, higher level thinking. What makes the World Wide Web exciting as an educational environment is that it is tailor-made for both.
In one, the goal is to transfer, as effectively and efficiently as possible, a concise and coherent block of information from the teacher or computer into the minds of the learners. Most existing computer-based training for adults has been designed with knowledge transfer in mind. Extraneous information is left out. The content is simplified. The emphasis is on individual learning and learners have a limited number of paths through the lesson.
This approach works well for the training of basic skills in areas of knowledge that are well defined and stable. For most of us, though, the world just isn't that way. As adults we face one ill-defined problem after another. The specific facts that we have to know change so quickly that some knowledge becomes obsolete almost as soon as we master it. The knowledge-transfer approach doesn't prepare us well for a messy world in constant motion.
An alternative way to think about teaching and learning is called constructivism. A constructivist trainer doesn't strip away the natural complexity of a subject. Instead, multiple perspectives are brought to bear. The goal of a constructivist learning environment is not the accurate transfer of content from the instructor to the learner. Instead, the learner is given tasks and opportunities, information resources and support, and is encouraged to construct their own version of the content, subject to revision through feedback. Many paths through the lesson are allowed and collaboration with other learners is stressed over lonely individual learning. A constructivist use of technology presents information to the learner in multiple forms from multiple sources and invites the learner to make sense of it.
The learner can acquire the information needed from several sources via the computer, and from off-line sources including his or her own prior experience, from information gathered while collaborating with other learners, and from references and other sources of expertise found somewhere far away from the computer screen.
In general, a constructivist approach is more learner-focused, and less teacher-focused. The emphasis is on making a set of tasks and resources available to learners, and creating an environment in which the learners can actively create their own meaning in that context, rather than to passively absorb knowledge structures created by the instructor. In this approach, the instructor's role moves toward being a coach and orchestrator of resources, and moves away from being the sole source of information. The emphasis is on cases studies, problem solving, and the creation of meaning.
In the last two years, a new technology has grown enormously in importance and accessibility. This technology, the World Wide Web, lends itself beautifully to constructivist, active learning.
Mosaic was the first of the graphical user interfaces to the World Wide Web. Later on came another program, Netscape, that added more features and faster speed. Both Mosaic and Netscape are what are called browsers... software tools that you install on your computer that let you look at documents on the World Wide Web.
Here is a typical document on the web. This web page includes graphics both as a source of information and as decoration. Notice that some of the text is bold and underlined. These underlined words are called anchors or hot text. What happens when you click on an anchor? Your browser sends a request off to a distant computer asking for it to send the information for a different page. If you had clicked on an anchor in this illustration, the screen would have gone blank for a moment and then very quickly changed to a new page.
Each page that we are looking at resides on a computer called a server. A web server can be run on a personal computer or a UNIX workstation. The server need not be a fast, expensive machine. In fact, I set up my first server on a six year old Macintosh SE/30. When the traffic grew to the point of justifying the investment, we upgraded to a faster machine. Setting up a server is a fairly simple task, and corporations, university departments, and even elementary schools are doing it every day.
Every document on the web has an address called a URL or Uniform Resource Locator. A typical URL looks like this:
http://edweb.sdsu.edu/edtec/edtec_home.html
Here's a breakdown of each part.
http:// - This indicates that the URL is a web page. Other possibilities might include ftp:// for a file to be downloaded, or mailto: for an e-mail address.
edweb.sdsu.edu - This is the name of the particular webserver that the file resides on. The edu suffix tells you that it's in the education domain so that you know it's at a university.
edtec - This is a folder or directory on the server.
edtec_home.html - This is the particular webpage to be displayed.
What makes the World Wide Web especially exciting is that it also allows you to create anchors that download files for you or allow you to send e-mail to an individual. The web thus makes it easy to gain access to data, software and people. It's a user-friendly front end to almost everything on the internet.
HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, is easy to learn. To prepare a page for the web, you just embed special characters or tags in your document to tell your browser how to display a given word. To show the phrase "San Diego" in boldfaced text, for example, the HTML would simply look like this:
The phrase <b>San Diego</b> is in bold.
For a computer trainer, learning the basics of HTML should take no longer than a weekend. Excellent resources for learning HTML can be found on the web, and are indexed in A Primer for Creating Web Resources. The Web 66 Internet Server Cookbook contains recipes for putting pictures and sounds in your pages, serving downloadable files, and maintaining a server from a distance. If paper is still your preferred medium, a very well written book is Teach Yourself Web Publishing in a Week by Laura Lemay. An alternative method for displaying content on the web is the Adobe Acrobat format. This allows complex page layouts to be used, but users of your materials must all have the proper helper application installed on their machines. In a corporate environment with software standards in place, this shouldn't be a problem.
Once you have created your pages, you simply upload them to the server you'll be using. Most medium to large-sized corporations have already established a web presence, and many smaller companies have as well. Whether you purchase space on the machines of an internet provider or set up your own webserver, you need not be physically near the server itself. Most maintenance can be done from a distance.
What resources can you tap into? Here's a partial list.
1. External experts. Brilliant though you are, you probably don't know all that there is to know about the domain of your course. If you can get friends and colleagues, both in and outside of your enterprise, to volunteer to answer questions, you've broadened the pool of experience available to your students.
2. Newsgroups. What if you have a question and don't know who to pose it to? Newsgroups provide an invisible college of people helping people. They are a great source of up to the minute news about software releases, bugs, and workarounds. If you have your own newsserver, you can also set up internal newsgroups specific to your course to provide a space for students to exchange information on an ongoing basis.
3. FAQ Files. Most newsgroups maintain a list of frequently asked questions that have come up within that group. These can be a rich source of materials and pointers to other resources on the web.
4. Technical Notes. Most major software publishers (e.g., Microsoft, Novell, Claris, Adobe) have placed their technical notes on the web. You can wire these in as reference material and create activities that require your students to access them.
5. Software Archives. Patches, applications, utilities, documentation... there are many sources of useful wares ready to be downloaded. FTPing (i.e., grabbing) and decompressing this software is handled transparently by your web browser. You can place an anchor on a page that refers to a file and all your users have to do is click on it to have it delivered to their desktop.
6. Simulated people. Suppose you're teaching a course on desktop publishing and you want your students to have the experience of dealing with a difficult client. One way to bring that kind of encounter into the classroom is to set up an e-mail address with a fabricated name. Periodically, you answer the mail at that account while acting like someone else.
How do you create activities that make use of resources like these? The first step is for you to become a knowledgeably websurfer yourself. Keep an active list of what's out there and be thinking constantly about how you might make use of it. Here's a web page that incorporates several kinds of resources.
WebQuests are deliberately designed to make the best use of a learner's time. There is questionable educational benefit in having learners surf the net without a clear task in mind, and most educational and training institutions must ration student connect time severely. To achieve that efficiency and clarity of purpose, WebQuests should contain at least the following parts:
1. An introduction that sets the stage and provides some background information.
2. A task that is doable and interesting. The task could include a series of questions that must be answered, a summary to be created, a problem to be solved, a position to be formulated and defended, a creative work, or anything that requires the learners to process and transform the information they've gathered.
3. A set of information resources needed to complete the task. Many (though not necessarily all) of the resources are embedded in the WebQuest document itself as anchors pointing to information on the World Wide Web. Information sources might include web documents, experts available via e-mail or realtime conferencing, searchable databases on the net, and books and other documents physically available in the learner's setting.
4. A description of the process to follow to complete the WebQuest.
5. Some learning advice on how to organize the information acquired. This can take the form of guiding questions, or directions to complete organizational frameworks such as timelines, concept maps, or cause-and-effect diagrams.
6. A conclusion that summarizes what they will have accomplished or learned by completing this WebQuest.
You can read more about the underlying rationale of WebQuests by browsing the About WebQuests document whose address is given at the end of the chapter.
Think about all the things that you do as an instructor that are repetitious or clerical. If you could move those things onto the webserver's plate, you'll have more time to create a better learning environment in other ways. Here are several possible tasks that are appropriately delegated to the computer:
1. Interactive FAQ's. In any course, 20% of all possible questions come up 80% of the time. Instead of taking up class time dealing with these, place them in a database of pages organized by a branching tree of questions and subquestions.
2. Testing. As you move towards distant delivery of your course, you lose the ability to sense who knows what among your students just by watching their body language. Frequent small-scale tests will provide the information you need and let you focus your attention on those who need extra help.
3. Tutorials. The web lends itself well to the kind of one-frame-at-a-time tutorials that have been the staple format of computer-based training since the '60s. For well defined stable content, you can move parts of what would have been a lecture into this more interactive format.
4. Meeting scheduling. Outside of class time, you'll want to make yourself available by phone, videoconference, or in person. The web can provide a way for individuals in the class to sign up for a particular time slot so that your time and theirs is well spent.
5. Course evaluation. The best instructors don't wait until the end of a course to find out how it was perceived by the learners. Putting an anonymous evaluation form up on the web and encouraging its frequent use will allow you to make mid-course corrections quickly.
6. Feedback database. In providing feedback to learners on their performance of complex skills such as programming, page layout, or spreadsheet design, you find yourself making the same kinds of comments repeatedly. A web-based feedback template would allow you do pick and choose from among common comments and edit them into a personalized reply efficiently.
It is a simple matter to place a form on the web that collects information from your learners. To actually send that information to the server and process it, though, goes beyond simple HTML into the realm of CGI: the Common Gateway Interface. It is here that most web developers stop because creating CGI programs at this point requires the ability to program in C, Perl, or AppleScript. As time goes on there will be ready-made CGI's available to accomplish most tasks, but for the near term there's a learning curve here that stops most people.
If you don't have the programming resources in-house to add Phase 3 automation to your course, you should at least keep your eyes open for packages of CGI's to appear on the market. The comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi newsgroup is an excellent resource to watch.
If you ask anyone who has conducted a course over the internet what it's like, the first thing they'll tell you is how much time they spend answering e-mail. It's for that reason that I strongly recommend implementing Phase 3 before you move your class to distance education. Creating tools that allow for efficient testing, question-answering, and feedback will allow you to scale up your course to many additional learners at a distance without breaking your back.
The transition to Phase 4 can be as quick or gradual as you like. I'd recommend first allowing just a few distant participants to join a classroom-based course. Pay attention to the gaps in what they learn by not being physically present and fill that gap by adding more materials to the web or more activities that bring them into interaction with the non-distant students in the course.
Once the bugs are ironed out, you can make your course "partly virtual" on a routine basis. Your class list will include people you'll never physically meet.
The final stage in Phase 4 is optional: making a class completely virtual. If your course is so completely articulated and automated that a motivated learner can do it all from a distance, then you're ready to detach it from the traditional face-to-face class that served as its starting point. At this stage you'll need to deal with modifying policies in place at your institution involving course credit, registration, starting and ending times. If you can accomplish this, you will have created a course that people can take when they need it and where they need it. Your course will have transcended both time and space!
1. RealAudio. Some websites allow you to click on a picture and hear a greeting or introduction in the form of a sound file. You have to wait for the file to download before hearing anything, though, which tries the patience of all but the most fervent websurfers. RealAudio is different. It begins to stream audio to your workstation almost immediately. It's like radio on demand. For distance education, the usefulness of RealAudio is obvious. All of the spoken communication that makes up a bulk of a traditional class can be digitized and made available as needed. As long as this doesn't lead back to the "talk, chalk and a hairy arm" tradition, RealAudio could become a standard feature of distance education on the web.
2. VRML. Virtual Reality Modelling Language (pronounced ver'-mul) is an embryonic set of tools and conventions for portraying three-dimensional space on the web. Instead of seeing a static picture, you'll be able to hold your mouse down over a graphic and see it from multiple perspectives, zooming in for detail and veering in any direction. For distance education, this allows for a more intuitive depiction of content: imagine seeing bubbles labeled with all the major concepts in your course. Lines linking the bubbles represent the relationships among them. Zoom in on a bubble and you've arrived at a webpage describing it in more detail. You might also use VRML to create a simulated learning environment with a reference room, laboratory, and help desk.
3. Java. Most of what's available on the web is inert. You can admire it but not interact with it. Java is a language for writing small programs (applets) that are downloaded as part of a web page. This will allow the web to take on most of the characteristics of the interactive multimedia you would find on a CD-ROM.
4. MOOs. MOO stands for Multi-user dimension, Object-Oriented, which doesn't at first convey much about its meaning. A MOO is a shared virtual space that people can help create from their own computers. You can set up your conference room the way you like it and invite others to join you there. At present, most MOOs are text-based. When they begin to become more graphical, (soon) they will become the most popular places to be in cyberspace.
These
developments, and others, will make distance education more and more
practicable on the web as time goes on.
The second challenge is a more pleasant one. It's a challenge to our imaginations. If you could open up your classroom to the world, and the world to your classroom, what would you do differently? Over the next few years most educators will need to answer that question. Personally, I'm eager to see what we come up with.
http://edweb.sdsu.edu/people/bdodge/CTPTG-Bib.html
Jonassen, D. H., Wilson, B. G., Wang, S., & Grabinger, R.S. (1993). Constructivist uses of expert systems to support learning. Journal of Computer-Based Instruction, 20(3), 86-94.
LeMay, L. (1995). Teach yourself Web Publishing with HTML in a Week. Sams Publishing.
Montgomery, J., Campbell, R., & Moffett, C. (1994, Oct-Nov). Conducting and supporting a goal-based scenario learning environment. Educational Technology, 34(9), 15-20.
Schank, R. (Graham, W.) (1994, Oct-Nov). Goal-Based Scenarios and business training: A conversation with Roger C. Schank. Educational Technology, 34(9), 27-29.
Documents on the World Wide Web
About WebQuests - A document outlining the definition. [http://edweb.sdsu.edu/courses/edtec596/About_webquests.html]
Adobe Acrobat - This format is becoming more widely adopted as a way to display complex page layouts. You can download free reader sofware from this site. [http://www.adobe.com/Amber/Index.html]
ChibaMOO Papers. This collection of papers on Multidimensional Object Oriented environments provides some glimpses of how to create virtual spaces for collaborative learning. [http://sensemedia.net/papers]
CS330, Concepts of Programming Languages, is a course taught at Brigham Young University by Dr. Phillip J. Windley. It is fairly complete, containing the complete text of the lectures, assignments, a newsgroup and pointers to other resources. [http://lal.cs.byu.edu/cs330/homepage.html]
EdWeb - The web site for the San Diego State University College of Education. [A HREF="http://edweb.sdsu.edu">http://edweb.sdsu.edu]
Engines for Education - Roger Schank's vision of a new model of education and training. [http://www.ils.nwu.edu:80/~e_for_e/]
Java Home Page - Java is the next leap forward for the web. It will add a new degree of interactivity by allowing small programs or 'applets' to be included in a page. [http://java.sun.com/]
How to Grow a Webserver - A presentation about both the mechanics and the social technology of creating a community of web publishers. [http://edweb.sdsu.edu/people/bdodge/growweb.html]
Introduction to Common Lisp Programming for Artificial Intelligence, a course taught at the British Open University, can be taken entirely at a distance. Tutorial groups function via email listserv groups and selected live MUD/MOO/Chat sessions, partitioned into specific topics. [http://kmi.open.ac.uk/courses/dmzx863.html]
LRNG731: Advanced Object Technology, is another such course taught at the George Mason Program on Social and Organizational Learning in Fairfax, Virginia. [http://gopher.gmu.edu/bcox/LRNG731/00LRNG731.html]
Primer for Creating Web Resources - This is an excellent index of tutorials and guides for HTML and CGI development. [http://www-slis.lib.indiana.edu/Internet/programmer-page.html]
New Tools for Teaching - by James J. O'Donnell at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor O'Donnell has gone all the way to Phase 4 and has conducted several courses on the classics to learners spread over the globe. An inspiring read. [http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/teachdemo]
RealAudio - The first practical demonstration of audio streaming which allows users to click and hear audio almost immediately as it downloads. [http://www.realaudio.com./]
VRML - Virtual Reality Modelling Language - An extension of the web that allows users to manipulate 3-dimensional graphics on web pages. [http://www.vrml.org/]
Web 66 Internet Server Cookbook - A readable guide to specific techniques for web development. [http://web66.coled.umn.edu/Cookbook/contents.html]
WebQuest Template - A structure for creating WebQuests. [http://edweb.sdsu.edu/courses/edtec596/webquest_template1.html]
WebQuest1 - An example WebQuest through which student teachers learned about the Archaeotype program. [http://edweb.sdsu.edu/courses/edtec596/webquest1.html]
WEST: Web Educational Support Tools - This new company provides server-based tools that automate the creation of tutorials and tests, monitor student progress, and facilitate interaction with instructors. [http://west.ucd.ie/]
World Wide Web Workbook - A useful tutorial that introduces new users to the conventions of the Web. [http://sln.fi.edu/primer/primer.html]
A few months later, I had installed Mosaic on my computer and evangelized about it to anyone within earshot. I visited websites that described how to set up your own webserver and write in HTML. On my own birthday, September 5, 1994, I was ready to give birth to EdWeb, the website for the San Diego State University College of Education. With the help of my laboratory staff, I added page after page of content. Our first attempts were Spartan or ugly (or both). Later on we got better at it and I gave a few workshops on HTML development. The price of admission to the workshop was that attendees had to volunteer 10 hours of their time putting more of the College's resources on to EdWeb. By bartering HTML skills for free labor, I widened the number of web developers at our site to over twenty in a short time.
EdWeb is thriving today as we begin to put more and more of our courses on the web. In less than two years I've gone from "What's Mosaic?" to webmaster, and I look forward eagerly to the technologies of audio and video delivery coming soon.
The exercise took about two hours and involved students working in groups to answer a series of questions. In the front of the room there were paper copies of part of the Archaeotype documentation. We set up a videoconferencing unit in an adjacent room through which the students could interview a California teacher who had implemented Archaeotype in his classroom. In the back of the same room was a speakerphone with which another group could interview one of the designers of Archaeotype who was at home in New York City.
The WebQuest document itself was placed on the San Diego State University webserver so that the students could look at it from any computer in the building. As part of that document, there were anchors that led them to a number of project reports and theoretical papers on the Web.
Each student team met to divide up the labor of accessing each of these resources among themselves, and then they split up. After an hour and a half, they reformed their groups. The final step of their task was to communicate to each other the insights they'd gathered and to teach each other so well that I could walk up to anyone in the group and elicit a complete explanation of what they learned.
As an educational experience, this first WebQuest worked extremely well. Everyone in the class was actively engaged for those two hours, and each came away with a depth of understanding that I could not have given them by lecturing. Rather than to stand on center stage as the only source of information, my role instead was to walk from group to group and serve as a learning coach. It's actually a more enjoyable role!