by Carl H. Snyder, Department of Chemistry, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL
INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND
STUDENT RECRUITMENT
STUDENT ENROLLMENT
CHOICE OF TECHNOLOGY
COURSE CONTENT AND GRADING
ELECTRONIC DISCUSSIONS: NETMEETING
HOMEWORK AND E-MAIL
GROUP PROJECTS
DISCUSSION BOARD
WEB PAGE
CONCLUSIONS
INTRODUCTION
This
paper presents a personal narrative of my experiences as a novice
in developing and teaching a distance education section of a
traditional chemistry course for nonmajors. The description of
these experiences may be of value to others who are about to
enter the same arena.
BACKGROUND
In the spring of 1997 the University of Miami's School of
Continuing Studies wished to test the feasibility of adding
distance education sections to its course offerings. In order to
initiate this test with
CHM 101 has been taught as a classroom course, through the College of Arts & Sciences, every fall term (except one sabbatical term) since 1976. It fulfills a portion of the science requirement for University of Miami undergraduate degrees. This distance education section, CHM 101 01, would be administered through the School of Continuing Studies and would run along with the traditional section (Section G) in the fall of 1997. With my own extensive use of e-mail and Web pages in my traditional courses, both I and CHM 101 were viewed as ideal choices for the experiment.
I gladly agreed to create and teach the distance education section, as long as all involved recognized that I would be a complete novice in the arena of distance education. We proceeded on this basis.
STUDENT
RECRUITMENT
Student recruitment was handled by the staff of the School of
Continuing Studies, who prepared a description of the course for
recruiting. [Note 2]
STUDENT ENROLLMENT
Twelve students enrolled for the course. Of these, one dropped
before Section 01 sessions began. All of the remaining 11
students were women located sufficiently close to campus to
attend a preliminary on-campus meeting and to take on-campus
examinations. Of these 11, 5 successfully completed the course.
All of the remaining 6 withdrew from the course before the
withdrawal deadline. Thus all of the 11 students received either
a passing grade or a W (Withdrawal).
CHOICE OF TECHNOLOGY
With the full cooperation of the University's Information
Technology (IT) division, the summer of 1997 was spent assembling
electronic technology. Early in the process the IT director
asked the critical question: Do you want us to provide
the technology required by your pedagogic strategies, or do you
want to fit your pedagogic strategies into our available
technology? (At the time, suites of distance education
utilities were not available to us. We had to assemble our own
electronic utilities, piece by piece. [Note 3])
The answer was simple and obvious: I'll fit the pedagogy to whatever technology you can give me now. The overriding concern was that whatever technology we might use, it must be up and running for the first on-campus meeting. It seemed more reasonable to adapt the pedagogy to the available technology than to attempt to find technology for a preconceived pedagogic strategy, however well-suited that strategy might seem for distance education. Attempting to find programs to enable preconceived ideals would have carried the seeds of disaster. The evolution of Section 01 confirmed that this -- adaptation of available technology -- was a wise choice.
The following electronic technology was assembled and, where necessary, tested during the summer:
Electronic discussions, Submission of homework, and Group projects - These components are discussed in the following sections.
ELECTRONIC
DISCUSSIONS: NETMEETING
Electronic discussions were carried out via Microsoft NetMeeting,
Version 2.0. Because the graphics portion of NetMeeting proved
cumbersome in a rapidly-moving, synchronous chat session, we
relied exclusively on text-based discussions.
Discussions were scheduled for Mondays and Thursdays and usually lasted about 45 minutes each. Monday sessions started at 5:00 to accommodate working participants who wished to log on from their offices [Note 4] ; Thursday sessions began at 7:30 p.m. Students were expected to participate in at least one of the two sessions each week.
A transcript of one of the sessions reveals their general nature. (To maintain anonymity, the text has been edited to replace the names of the students with the names of famous First Ladies of U.S. history, and to replace my name with "Professor." The text has also been abridged to eliminate brief sections of irrelevant and repetitious discussion.)
Several facets of this NetMeeting session are immediately obvious. Since the session immediately followed an examination, student preoccupation with grades is a dominant feature. Also, the nonlinear nature of a synchronous discussion is clear. While one participant is preparing a response to another, a third individual interjects a comment on another topic.
The Chemical Jeopardy deserves special comment. [Note 5] To stimulate student activity (and to provide extra credit), a variation of Chemical Jeopardy was used in which I presented an "answer" and a student volunteered to respond with the appropriate "question." To eliminate typing speed as a factor in awarding credit for correct "questions," the student had to sound the buzzer (figuratively) by sending a single letter, such as an "x", to the NetMeeting discussion. On posting of the single letter, further discussion of the "answer" was deferred until the student who buzzed had typed and submitted the "question". That is, the student who buzzed reserved a bit of time to respond to that "answer".
As an additional variation, a different student then sounded the buzzer (again figuratively, with a single letter) to report whether the first student's "question" was right or wrong. Both the "questioner" and the "grader" were eligible for a small amount of extra credit for correct responses. This proved to be a popular activity on the NetMeeting sessions. To keep the game moving at a fast pace, I often had a prepared a set of typed "answers" ready at the start of the NetMeeting session. I could enter them as text strings as the game progressed.
Perhaps because of both the inherent spontaneity of synchronous communication and the use of Chemical Jeopardy, the discussions sessions seemed to be the most popular part of the course. In addition, I thought I detected the development of a sense of community within these sessions. Finally, in keeping with the open spirit of electronic communications, I encouraged the students to participate in the electronic discussion sessions, including Chemical Jeopardy, with an open textbook in front of them. Perhaps this was making a virtue of a necessity, but it seemed to work well.
HOMEWORK AND E-MAIL
Students were assigned weekly homework consisting of selected
end-of-chapter problems. They submitted their work by e-mail to
the course e-mail account. Little or no novelty is associated
with either the homework or the e-mail communications between
individual students and me. Neither topic is pursued further in
this presentation.
GROUP PROJECTS
In practice, the term "Group Project" became a misnomer. In the
spirit of cooperative education, I had intended to have the
students work, electronically, in groups. With more than half
the students dropping the course, the remaining students seemed
to prefer working individually. The two projects are described
fully in a document that was posted on
the CHM 101 01 Web page. (The second project was designed to
instill a critical attitude toward information posted on the Web,
as well as to explore chemistry.) Please note that URLs for Web
pages associated with the projects date from 1997. Some may be
obsolete by now, not quite two years later.
DISCUSSION BOARD
In contrast to the freewheeling spirit of synchronous discussions
via Netmeeting, the messages posted to the discussion
board seemed formal and even artificial in spirit. Despite some
of my own efforts to generate a robust, all-round discussion of
chemistry, students overwhelmingly used the board to discuss
chemistry with me rather than with each other.
Techniques I used included:
Several good postings did appear. Those included here are the best of the lot rather than typical examples. (To preserve anonymity I have deleted some header information and have replaced the names of the students with the names of some of our more famous U.S. Presidents.) They are:
None of these postings generated the sort of general discussions I sought. I welcome suggestion on how to generate vigorous discussions using asynchronous postings.
WEB PAGE
The Web page was the central information
repository and served as the portal to CHM 101 01. It is typical
of many course Web pages in application, yet unique in design.
It is better understood by direct examination than by detailed
description.
CONCLUSIONS
This distance education section was offered only once; it has not
been repeated. To my knowledge, no distance education courses
have been offered through either the College of Arts & Science or
the School of Continuing Studies since the conclusion of this
course. This was an experiment that, for reasons I am not aware
of, has not been repeated in any way.
What is written below is a summary of my own, highly personal thoughts and impressions, based on my experiences teaching one semester of a distance education section of chemistry for nonscience students. These thoughts and impressions are subject to change with the gain of additional information and experience.
I came away from this experience with three major conclusions:
1) Distance education requires a great deal more time (both real and perceived), from both the instructor and the student, than does classroom education.
Instructor: Time must be spent not only on the preparation and presentation of subject matter, but also on establishment and maintenance of the electronic facets of the course. It takes a great deal of time to interact with a class of students, individually, one-by-one, via e-mail, discussion board postings, synchronous discussions, and the Web. It takes far more time to do this than to interact with 10 to 500 students in a classroom, and with a fraction of these before and after class and during traditional, on-campus office hours.
(In a real sense, the time-intensity of this section was eased by my ability to prepare and present the entire course from my home office via a modem connection to the University's communication system. There was no need to travel to campus for this session. Furthermore, in the broadest sense the old saw applies: On the Internet no one knows you're a dog! Or, I might add, knows that at the moment you look and feel like a dog!)
Student: I suspect that even if the total amount of time spent by each student in learning the subject matter might be roughly equivalent in both a distance education section and a classroom section, the time spent in distance education is far more active than the relatively passive time spent in the classroom, no matter what the mode of instruction is in that classroom: lecture, cooperative, discovery, constructivist, etc. I sense that the distance education students spent more active time in this section than in any lecture course. I have no substantial data to support this, but am extrapolating from my own experiences.
2) For success in a distance education course, the student must be more highly motivated, more self-disciplined, more mature, and must have or make more time available for the course than is required for success in a classroom-oriented course.
All the students enrolled through the School of Continuing Studies were mature individuals. Many were working full time while taking this course and had little time available for the additional burdens that seem to be inherent in distance education.
It seems to me that especially in distance education, this burden of education falls almost entirely on the student. The instructor provides the guidance, but the humane ambiance of the physical presence is missing.
I am pleased that I was able to communicate -- by electronic means -- this need for individual, active, largely self-directed study to all the students early in the term. Students quickly recognized that a great deal of work was being expected of them, and that the distance education section would put serious demands on their time. Those who could not place a high, personal priority on these demands recognized quickly that withdrawal from the course was an option to be considered seriously. I am pleased that it was not necessary to issue any failing grades.
Having written all that, I should also point out that I quickly found it desirable to provide a plethora of extra credit to the students. One extra point here, half a point there, applied frequently and liberally, seemed to spur the students on. This might be one of the secrets of success in teaching a distance education course.
3) Distance education is suited best to postgraduate, graduate, and perhaps senior (and maybe even junior) undergraduate studies.
The sense of community found in the physical assemblies of classes, especially in the freshman year, is missing. I think this sense of physical community, at least early in the students collegiate career, is important to the four-year transformation of an entering freshman into a graduating senior.
I enjoyed teaching CHM 101 01, and would gladly repeat the experience. But I also suspect that advances in the electronic delivery of information will force on us the need for equally important advances in meeting the challenges of electronic education.
1. C. H. Snyder and J. Shelley, "Applications of
Networked Computers and Electronic Mail in a Chemistry Course for
Nonscience Students," CHEMCONF '93: Applications of Technology
in Teaching Chemistry, Summer, 1993, paper #11. Anonymous FTP:
info.umd.edu
Path:
/inforM/EdRes/Faculty_Resources_and_Support/ChemConference.
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2. The classroom version of the course
operates without an associated laboratory but includes many
lecture-demonstrations. We had hoped to include a large number
of lecture-demonstrations with this 01 section by videotaping
demonstrations and mailing the tapes to the enrolled students.
Accordingly, the course description includes a statement that
students are expected to have access to a videotape player.
Unfortunately time did not permit the preparation of these tapes.
Videotapes were not used.
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3. For information on distance education
packages currently available, see:
www.public.iastate.edu/~mikealbr/links/coursetools.html
and
www.pitt.edu/~w
ashburn/compare.html
My thanks to Bill Vilberg, Instructional Technology Support Coordinator,
Instructional Advancement Center, University
of Miami, for these URLs.
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4. Several of the students were University of
Miami employees who had permission to use their office computers,
after hours, to participate in NetMeeting sessions. Logging on
from the office was a matter of convenience.
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5. For information on Chemical Jeopardy, see
the article "Chemical Jeopardy", Deavor, J. P., J. Chem.
Educ., 1996, 73, 430. A search for
"Chemical Jeopardy" on AltaVista produces 17 links to Web
pages.
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