Contextual
Presentation

Chemistry IT Workshop 16 November 1998









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Use of the Web for University Science Teaching in Australia

Ian Johnston and Mary Peat
UniServe Science

Introduction

There are a number of severe problems facing university science teachers today. In countries the world over, public funding agencies are questioning more closely the cost of traditional tertiary education. There are pressures on university teachers to work harder, to become more productive, to look after increasing numbers of students. While all this has been happening, new Information Technologies have blossomed, and in particular the World Wide Web seems set to become truly ubiquitous. Some university teachers have seen these advances as a way to improve the quality of their teaching. Their financial masters seem more interested in them as a way to increase its cost-effectiveness.[1]

The question that is becoming more and more pressing for teachers is: Is this the way forward? Should I be looking to do my teaching via the web?

Different kinds of use of the web

In Australian universities, academics seem to have decided quite recently, that they will start teaching with the web. There is suddenly much more activity in this field than there was a year or two ago. So it is instructive to survey the different ways in which it is being used. There are many surveys in the literature of what the technology can do[2], but of more interest here is to concentrate on what teachers and students use it for. The following compilation is by no means definitive, but it is indicative of what is happening.

The teacher as client

There are many web sites which are specifically designed to be a repository of information about, and sometimes suppliers of, teaching materials. As one example, the web page "Teaching Resources for Thermal Physics" has a list of demonstrations that can be used in lectures, complete with instructions, basic theory, and suggestions for how they may be used in a Socratic dialogue classroom interaction.[3]

UniServe Science itself maintains a web site which is of this character (i.e. it contains a searchable database where teachers can find information about software packages they are interested in), and there are corresponding sites in many other countries. These are primarily designed to be consulted by teachers, not students.

The student as client: Informal use

The simplest thing that many academics do when they first discover the web, is to "put up" their lecture notes, PowerPoint slides and course handouts for students to consult if they want to. Often there is no real intention that anyone other than those students enrolled on the home campus will access these, but there is always the hope that others elsewhere might drop in and use them to learn the material. Examples where this has been done thoroughly and with careful planning are at the Universities of Adelaide[4] and Melbourne, both at introductory level[5] and advanced[6].

There are also examples of materials structured in a considerably more sophisticated manner, essentially CAL packages in their own right, being made available to students via the web.[7]

In all these examples, the web is being used simply as a delivery platform which has the advantage that students can access it when and where they choose. In some cases students themselves are driving this move towards this kind of universal access as they become less able to spend time on campus.[8]

The student as client: Formal teaching via the web

(1) Delivery of material to be learned
A step beyond the last category is where the web is used as the prime means by which the course (or some part of the course) is taught. Here there is some sort of compulsion for the students to consult the web. If they do not, they haven't done what is expected of them and they can expect to perform badly.

There are, of course, institutions which specialize in distance learning and these institutions are starting to replace paper-based correspondence courses with web-based ones. In mainstream university departments, however, the idea of dispensing with live lectures as the main source of information transfer is not easy for ordinary academics to accept. Also many students feel cheated if contact with their lecturer is reduced by the introduction of web-based (or intranet delivered) materials, even those designed to give more flexible access and to allow more choice in learning outcomes.

Nevertheless some examples exist in special circumstances - for example, in the Medical Faculty at The University of Sydney medicine is a post-graduate degree and all learning materials are lodged on an extensive intranet[9], and Engineering Faculty at Murdoch University, which is a multi-campus institution[10].

A subsection of this category involves parts of experimental courses which may also be delivered by the web, often pre-lab exercises[11] or virtual field trips[12].

The student as client: Formal teaching via the web

(2) Student/teacher interaction
There are many schemes in this category, which seek to replace the interaction between teacher and student with an asynchronous mode of communication. Mostly they do so using email communication. It is relatively easy to incorporate a "MailTo" hyperlink into an HTML document, and this can be the basis of a relatively straightforward dialogue system with students. A good example of this is at the University of Technology, Sydney[13] or the "CyberTutor" project at The University of Sydney[11].

There are also more elaborate "telecollaborative" projects which involve students in discussions both nationally and internationally, following "local" experiments.[14]

The student as client: Formal teaching via the web

(3) Formative assessment and feedback
This is an area where much more work has been done. Many departments have had previous experience with computer assessment on personal computers and mainframes, and a lot of this know-how has been used to set up similar systems on the web.[15]

It is not surprising that this should be the category of use that has been so well developed. It combines the three main advantages that the web offers: (a) students can access it from wherever they choose; (b) they can get immediate feedback whenever they want it; and (c) because the web is essentially platform independent, they can do their work on whatever computer they happen to own.

In this particular area, many academics are realising the efficiency of re-using basic authoring models, and there is an increasing use of templates to offer students self-assessment modules.[16] [17]

The student as client: Formal teaching via the web

(4) Summative assessment and examinations
This is the most difficult category of the lot. We know of no department in Australia which attempts to carry out all final, summative assessment for a whole course through the web. The main difficulty is that the only form of computer assessment, whether on the web or not, that can be administered and marked by computer consists of multiple-choice questions, or simple numerical answers. Most science departments require more understanding-oriented assessment than this and therefore demand that their students be examined, at least in part, by human-marked questions.

Examples can be found of systems which take care of part of a student's assessment without the intervention of a human teacher[18], and of systems which handle the administration of examinations, but leave the marking undone[19].

Conclusion

The main point the authors would like to make is that the amount of work going on in this field, is truly phenomenal, especially in light of the fact that it all started such a short time ago. It is difficult to say anything definitive yet about whether all this effort will prove successful, but two observations might be made.

  • It is not clear that much pedagogical progress is being made in this area. Many of the young, enthusiastic academics writing HTML web pages and Java applets are not experienced CAL developers, and they often seem to be unaware of lessons learned earlier with regard to the design of effective teaching materials. Many of the same mistakes are being made all over again as were made ten years ago, this time on the web rather than on PCs or Macs.
  • The vexed "not invented here" syndrome is still with us. Experience shows all too clearly that science departments (along with most university departments) treat their teaching as a cottage industry and will not use materials developed by others. There is often the perception that developing materials for use on the web is cheap, because the platform is "freely" available. That is a misconception. It takes just as long to develop good web materials as any other, and time is the main cost. Unless that cost is shared, it will very soon be seen to be unsustainable.

    • References

    1. See for example: Massy, W.F. and Zemsky, R., "Using Information Technology to Enhance Academic Productivity", White Paper for EduCom National Learning Infrastructure Initiative, June 1995, http://www.educause.edu/nlii/keydocs/massy.html
    2. See for example: Patterson, E. and Novak, G., "Communicating to Teach and Communicating to Learn: Using the World Wide Web for Science Teaching and Learning", UniServe Science News, 8, 1997, 3-5.
    3. Fekete, P., McInnes, B.A. and Walker, P., "Teaching Resources for Thermal Physics", http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/teach/thermal/thermal.html
    4. Roberts, I., "Online Resources - A Systematic Solution", Proceedings of Workshop: University Science Teaching and the Web, UniServe Science, 1998, 50-53.
    5. "Interactive Tutorials for First Year Chemistry at The University of Melbourne", http://www.chemistry.unimelb.edu.au/CAL/TT/chemcal.html
    6. McKellar, B.H.J. and Thompson, M.J., "Honours Level Quantum Mechanics on the World Wide Web", OzCUPE2: Proceedings of the Second Australian Conference on Computers in University Physics Education, eds. Pearce, J.M. and Jamieson, D.N., University of Melbourne, 1995, 103-106.
    7. Franklin, S., Peat, M. and Mackay-Wood, R., "Virtual Learning Resources: The First Year Biology Way", Open Learning Australia Virtual Conference, 1998 http://www.ola.edu.au/virtcon/franklin/paper.htm
    8. Figures taken from a survey by the University of Sydney, Faculty of Science, 1994: "Extent to which full-time students are in part-time employment."
    9. "Graduate Medical Program", Faculty of Medicine, University of Sydney, http://www.medfac.su.oz.au/medfac/indexc.htm
    10. Lee, P., "On-line Engineering Experiences", Proceedings of Workshop: University Science Teaching and the Web, UniServe Science, 1998, 7-14.
    11. See: Proceedings of Dry Labs Workshop, 1996; Proceedings of Computer Assessment Workshop, 1997; and Proceedings of University Science Teaching and the Web Workshop, 1998, UniServe Science, http://science.uniserve.edu.au/pubs/procs/
    12. Williams, M. "The virtual field trip, Blue Ice: Focus on Antarctica" http://www.onlineclass.com/BI/blueice.html
    13. Green, D., "Learning Dialogues Using the World Wide Web", Proceedings of Workshop: University Science Teaching and the Web, UniServe Science, 1998, 34-37.
    14. Harris, J., "Mining the Internet: Organizing and Facilitating Telecollaborative Projects", Information Transfer, 16, 1996, 37-41.
    15. As just one example, First Year Biology at The University of Sydney offers weekly computer quizzes to all students. The project was set up in 1994 and the delivery mechanism was revised in 1995/6.
    16. Dalziel, J. and Gazzard, S., "WebMC: A Web-based Multiple Choice Assessment System", Proceedings of Workshop: University Science Teaching and the Web, UniServe Science, 1998, 25-27.
    17. Peat, M., Franklin, S. and Mackay-Wood, R., "The Development of Self-Assessment Modules: use of tailor-made templates", CUBE97, Virtual Conference on Computers in Biology Education, 1997, http://www.liv.ac.uk/ctibiol/vCUBE97/home.html
    18. Lewis, R., "RALPH", Proceedings of Computer Assessment Workshop, UniServe Science, 1997, 28-29.
    19. Burton, C., "An Author Usability Trial for the Networked Assessment Toolkit (NEST)", Proceedings of Workshop: University Science Teaching and the Web, UniServe Science, 1998, 18-24.
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