Hello:
I've just finished my first semester using a web site to facilitate
teaching a course, and I'd like to share my experience with it to get some
feedback from others who have also tried using websites.
The course was an MBA capstone course. I teach this on campus in a
traditional classroom. The class meets once a week, on Tuesday evening, for
three hours. There is no distance learning component. It is a traditional
seminar, with about twenty students in the class. Students typically
organize themselves into about five teams.
I do not use a textbook. Instead, the reading consists primarily of journal
articles and one or two supplementary books. I make extensive use of
Harvard Business School cases, both for discussion and for written
assignments.
For each class, all five of the student teams prepare to present the
discussion case. Then, in class, I select one team at random to actually
present the case, and a second team, also at random, to critique the
presentation. There follows a general discussion of the case and the
assigned reading material.
The mid-term exam is a team take-home case. Also, each student writes a
four-part paper, called an Individual Project, during the semester. In this
paper, they analyze their current work situation and develop a plan for
their company and for themselves.
This is the class for which I used a website called CourseInfo.
CourseInfo is a class management set of webpages. It appears to work with
any browser, including AOL's, although Netscape communicator and internet
explorer 4.0 appeared to be the ones most commonly used by my students.
The site consists of a number of different online modules, and I used it in
a number of different ways to support the student learning experience. The
announcement feature on the homepage was a good place for general
information and for an information backup to general email. Of course
there's the standard page to set up the syllabus and course description. I
noticed practical advantages to being able to communicate with individual
students, a group of students, or all of my students at any time, without
having to wait for the next class meeting.
I had students upload all of the papers that they submit, and I graded them
and sent them back. Because we were not tied to submitting paper, I offered
students the option of turning in drafts of their papers early (via the
CourseInfo) so that I could give them preliminary feedback. For any given
assignment, about half of the students took me up on my offer. It
definitely improved the quality of their learning experience, judging from
the improved quality of the papers. This early feedback also gave them more
control over their grades. For me, grading a paper the second time was much
faster than grading one from scratch, so I'm not sure that I put in much,
if any, extra time doing this for my students.
A related benefit was my ability to manage the students' workload. For
example, this class met once a week, on Tuesday nights. But because
students were submitting papers by uploading them rather than turning in
hardcopy, I wasn't limited to having Tuesday night due dates. Students had
the ability to submit papers at any time. In practice, they frequently
opted to have papers due on Sunday evenings or first thing Monday morning.
CourseInfo's communication module was probably the most used feature of the
site. Each team had a homepage, and they used its chatroom feature to hold
online team meetings to work on their case preparations. This was pretty
important, since students were all commuting, and arranging off-campus
meeting sites was generally inconvenient.
The discussion board was the most active single feature, so far as I could
tell. Because there were twenty students in the class, classroom
discussions generally left several people out� the shy ones. Initially, I
decided to remedy this by using the discussion board as an extension of the
classroom discussion. Thus students who were not as extroverted as others
were able to participate actively in 'classroom' discussions. To energize
the discussion board, I would usually seed it with a few cryptic comments
of my own about the next class's reading assignment and what that might
have to do with the assigned case. This made the discussion very relevant
for the upcoming case presentations.
As you can imagine, the discussion board took off. It became the 'hot' spot
on CourseInfo. In addition to accomplishing its intended purpose of
including shy students in the discussion, it emerged as an ongoing daily
dialogue centered around course topics. By the third week of the semester,
the quality of the written and oral case presentations shot up, and it
stayed higher than I've ever seen it for the next twelve weeks. This, in
turn, energized the in-class discussions.
The grading module allowed students to use their password to access their
grades at any time. This had a number of advantages over other approaches.
First, it kept the students much more informed about where they stood with
regard to their grades. This saved me time answering individual questions.
Again, it further reduced the amount of paper with which I had to deal.
Instead of walking into class carrying thick folders full of student papers
and grading materials, I would just bring the night's discussion case�
nothing more.
Putting this all together, the total impact of using CourseInfo was greater
than the sum of its parts. At least for this class, CourseInfo radically
changed the nature of the learning experience. Students were used to having
a one-night a week class 'meeting,' with maybe one outside team meeting
every two weeks to prepare assignments. The addition of the site
metamorphosed this more traditional experience into an ongoing,
interactive community of learners� literally active on a daily basis. I
personally had more fun teaching this course than I've had in a long time.
Comments, thoughts?
_______________________________
Eric L. Hansen, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Management
Department of Management
College of Business
California State University, Long Beach
Long Beach, CA
elhansen@csulb.edu