The WWW - Opportunities for an Integrated Approach to Teaching and Research in Science

Riddle, Matthew D., Science Multimedia Teaching Unit, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC 3052, Australia. Phone +61 3 344 6400 Fax: +61 3 344 5803 Email: matthew@ariel.unimelb.edu.au Home Page: Matthew Riddle [HREF 1]

Nott, Michael W., Science Multimedia Teaching Unit, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC 3052, Australia. Phone +61 3 344 6400 Fax: +61 3 344 5803 Email: michael_nott@mac.unimelb.edu.au Home Page: Michael Nott [HREF 2]

Pearce, Jon M., Science Multimedia Teaching Unit, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC 3052, Australia. Phone +61 3 344 6400 Fax: +61 3 344 5803 Email: Jon_pearce@mac.unimelb.edu.au Home Page: Jon Pearce [HREF 3]

Keywords: WorldWideWeb, Tertiary Education, Science

Jumping off point

The World Wide Web (the Web) is being used to complement traditional lecture/tutorial/practical delivery systems for teaching science at the University of Melbourne. Projects now beginning involve physics and zoology.

Academic staff, at the same time as they are preparing learning materials for the Web, are considering the value for students and staff which may be gained by using this new internet-based communication medium. Thus, at a recent workshop at the University of Melbourne named Teaching and Learning on the Web (TALOW95 [HREF 4]), academic staff participants were asked to "predict whether the Web would enhance teaching and learning in tertiary education". According to their responses, participants could be broken into three groups: those who were positive about the value of the Web for teaching and learning; those who were generally negative about its value; and those who believed that the Web could improve teaching and learning only if the materials provided were developed according to good design and pedagogical principles. It was this group which gave valuable insights into the requirements of good educational design and implementation. Their views generally accorded with our own and with the literature. See Teles (1993).

The Web allows academics to manage learning in novel ways. It allows students to adopt a research orientation at the same time as they are acquiring information. Moreover the use of forms and newsgroups encourages peer collaboration and mentorship.

A chilling comment was that quality of learning materials would automatically increase because academic peers could call up your learning materials to see how good they were!

In spite of the general optimism of respondents to the questionnaire, one of our authors laments (Pearce) the demise of the lecture.

Respondents1

Respondents (numbering 11) in the first group noted that the Web:

"will help students become more independent learners and will provide them with more specific information"
"will enhance learning by making material available globally"
"will enhance teaching by making a wide variety of information easily accessible"
"has great possibilities for education in general"
"will not only improve teaching and learning but, through better communication, break down barriers between education and industrial sectors"
"will help with research and exploration skills"
"will offer greater specialisation and learner centredness"
"will provide quality and improve motivation"
"will enhance learning for those who dislike traditional approaches"
"will provide access to up to date material, which is well designed, checked for quality and therefore should enhance learning"
"will provide potential for international student collaboration"
"will free staff from routine teaching and facilitate learning and problem solving", and
"will enhance teaching and learning and spur interest among academics and students".

Respondents2

The less positive respondents (numbering 8) of the second group suggested that the Web:

"has no intrinsic value in enhancing learning"
"is probably an economic necessity with elitist undertones"
"will succeed it improves the cost/benefit of teaching and learning"
"may be limited, in terms of enhancing learning, to pure and applied sciences (algorithmic conceptual processes) compared to arts and humanities"
"the decline of linear print will have a critical impact on critical reasoning capability"
"has the opportunity to make or break or both"
"will be valuable for information interchange but maybe not for learning"
"may shift the cost of education to the learner with equity implications...or from teaching time to package development time"
"will become a dumping ground like photocopies in a libraries"
"in itself is only an electronic page turner", and
"would be effective in only some disciplines".

Respondents 3

Respondents (numbering 10) of the third group gave qualified support for the Web and in doing so provided rich clues to ways that they and their peers could use the Web to provide a greatly enriched learning environments for their students. Respondents captured many of the strategies cited in the literature (see Teles 1993). Thus they noted that the Web:

"will enhance learning but only if the designer structures the materials appropriately"
"will succeed only if high quality teaching materials are made available"
"will not have any effect unless staff take it up to enhance teaching and learning"
"could enhance learning, but this depends on the imagination, ability and determination of providers"
"could enhance learning but this depends on how well it is used"
"will enhance teaching and learning but this depends on how you (the designer/author) structures the material"
"will succeed depending on how programs are implemented"
"for effectiveness, is dependent upon on how the learning experiences are set up", and
"requires well designed content and accessibility for individuals or groups of students".

Physics project

Physics is a program delivered to a small number of Honours students at the University of Melbourne. The existing course is based on small group lecture/tutorials. Some students appear to have little trouble in learning the core subject matter and subsequently demonstrating appropriate problem solving skills. Others appear to find it much more difficult. The key reason for transposing the course to the Web is to support those students with difficulties. It will do this particularly by encouraging collaborative learning and mentorship. If successful the course may be made available to student groups in other institutions.

Populations dynamics project

Populations dynamics [HREF 5] is a program delivered in a 3 hour practical to second year Zoology students. The principles however relate to other parts to the course, and even to first year Zoology, so that materials developed in this program could be of much wider reference value. The teaching program at the moment is cumbersome and tends to be rushed: it is based on paper exercises, slide presentation and an aged DOS-based population dynamics simulator. Putting the program on the Web will allow the visually-enriching photographs of various animals and their habitats to be available to the students in their own time and even at home. A new simulator, written for the Web, allows the students to trial four different known population types and a "what if?" simulation sequence where the student can input fecundity, age of animal and other parameters. As with Physics there is an apparent wide divergence of ability of students in dealing with the concepts of population dynamics (Dr Rob Day, personal communication). In an attempt to deal with this, the program will focus on providing feedback and collaboration via the Web.

Feedback using forms and newsgroups

Feedback forms in the Population Dynamics program will allow students to submit their reports directly to the tutor. This allows students to tackle problems set by the teacher and return them for marking. Newsgroups will be established for both projects to promote unstructured group collaboration so that students may see, evolving over the duration of the course, a composite of answers to common problems encountered in the course. Tutors and lecturers will also be able to respond to questions posed. The ability of Web-browsers to view news provides a consistent interface for students.

Online student peer collaboration and mentorship

The Web may allow a form of "cognitive apprenticeship" (Collins, Brown and Newman, 1989 ) in-so-far as students are able to work collaboratively with their peers and with their teachers ("mentorship") over the network (Teles, 1993 ). The implication is that learning can be promoted by collaboration and group interaction. Although such collaborative learning is mediated by the computer, the process itself is composed of human interactions, in contrast to the non-networked multimedia-facilitated learning provided by CD-ROM. The experience may further approximate an actual apprenticeship if it adds context-richness to the learning environment through the creative use of its visual, audial and dynamic interface. Developers of programs are acutely aware of existing limitations of the Web in delivering interactive multimedia but equally optimistic of its potential.

Anytime any place

The University of Melbourne provides optical fibre networks throughout the campus and, for the programs outlined here, sufficient high end workstations which run the client software for the Web (Netscape) to serve the students involved in the Physics and Zoology programs.

Managing learning

Use of forms and newsgroups will allow the lecturer to keep an eye on the progress of each student and facilitate early intervention if there are problems. The lecturer can engage in an iterative process during a set time for the lesson (perhaps days or weeks). The onerous task of helping each student is made simpler by keeping responses to commonly asked questions in the Newsgroup. Forms allow students to submit their final report for evaluation and advice.

Research orientation

A major task of the science lecturer is to keep encourage the student to engage in research activites at the same time as they are acquiring the corpus of knowledge relating to the discipline. Obviously the Web can facilitate this activity with students being able to call important research oriented Web sites internationally. An important task of the lecturer will be to encourage such activity without the student getting lost. Thus the lesson must be structured and cues to keep the student on track.

Conclusion: the changing role of lecturing

The days of lecturers holding sway in a lecture maybe on the decline as universities move to electronic presentations and remote access for students. But what does this imply for the role of the lecturer? Are we simply doing the same job via a different medium, or is the very nature of the job changing?

Traditionally the lecturer's role was one of the fount of all knowledge, with additional input from libraries, labs and tutorials. Lecturers provided structure and a personal touch to their lecture presentations, but books, videos, and other resources were created by third parties and were reasonably rigid.

Now the lecturer's role might be regarded as a combination of author, technician and guide.

The author's role is the traditional one of course design, deciding lecture content and designing resources to aid in its learning by students.

The technician's role is one of creating these resources and setting them up in a suitable way for students to access. This includes: construction of documents comprising text, graphics, video segments, etc; setting them up in an electronic form on a Web site and providing access via a suitably designed set of HTML documents.

The guide's role is a new one: a blend of instructional designer and resource guide. We can now take on the responsibility of not only providing references for students (whether it be to libraries or to electronic documents) but can also provide them with a structure, and appropriate electronic links, to facilitate their learning of the subject matter. Considerable thinking and design should go into this activity. It offers us a way to give students a structured guide to their learning without being overly prescriptive and certainly without limiting the scope of their exploration.

Clearly this guide should be thought out in terms of sound pedagogy rather than convenience of access as was the case with paper-based materials. For example, it is now quite feasible to routinely direct students to examine the presentation of a topic in several different documents and make comparisons, whereas in the past this might have been an arduous task.

References

L Teles (1993) "Cognitive Apprenticeship on Global Networks", in L Harasim, ed. (1993) "Global Networks: Computers and International Communication" MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 272-81.

A Collins, J Brown and S Newman (1989) "Cognitive Apprenticeship: Teaching the crafts of reading, writing and mathematics", in L B Resnick, ed. "Knowing, learning and instruction: Essays in honour of Robert Glaser." Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates, Hillsdale, NJ.

Hypertext References

HREF 1
: http://infomac1.science.unimelb.edu.au/SMTU/Matthew.html - Matthew Riddle's Home Page.
HREF 2
: http://infomac1.science.unimelb.edu.au/SMTU/Michael.html - Assoc Prof Michael Nott's Home Page.
HREF 3
: http://infomac1.science.unimelb.edu.au/SMTU/Jon.html - Jon Pearce's Home Page.
HREF 4
: http://www.agfor.unimelb.edu.au/TALOW95/TALOW95.html - TALOW95 Home Page.
HREF 5
: http://infomac1.science.unimelb.edu.au/SMTU/Pop.html - A description of the Population Dynamics Project.

Copyright

© Southern Cross University, 1995. Permission is hereby granted to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction at educational institutions provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. Permission is also given to mirror this document on WorldWideWeb servers. Any other usage is expressly prohibited without the express permission of Southern Cross University.

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AusWeb95 The First Australian WorldWideWeb Conference