Annotations: The key to collaborative teaching and learning on the Internet

Introduction

Annotations

In general, an annotation is defined as any object that is associated with another object by some relationship. The annotation object may be of any type and the relationship between the annotation object and the object it annotates may also be of any type.

To see how annotations can be used to improve distance education I will first sketch an outline of conventional print based distance education at the Open Training and Education Network (OTEN) which provides distance education to NSW TAFE students and students throughout Australia and overseas.

Distance education at OTEN

Firstly, learning materials for each subject need to be prepared. These materials contain everything that a student needs to know to study the subject including references to textbooks, activities, assignments and administrative information. Learning materials content is generally contracted out to course writers who are not located at the OTEN office in Strathfield, Sydney.

Once the learning materials have been printed, they are sent to students located around Australia and overseas. The students work through the materials using their own computers and software in their homes.

At various points while working through the materials students are required to send assignments into the OTEN office. These are marked and commented on by teachers and then sent back to the student. Most of the teachers are not based at the OTEN office and do the work on contract from their homes. The comments that teachers write on these assignments are very extensive. Their purpose is to provide students with comprehensive personal tuition and in many ways replace the face to face interaction that students would receive in a normal class situation. It is at this point that a substantial amount of the teaching takes place.

There is a telephone Help Desk with a free call 1800 number to support IT students. The Help Desk is staffed by teachers on a roster basis and provides some after hours assistance. Several of the Help Desk teachers are not based at the OTEN office and do their Help Desk sessions from their homes.

At the end of a subject students are required to sit a test at a local supervision centre and again it is marked by contract teachers who are not based at the OTEN office.

Teaching and learning as individuals

Problems with this system

The limited contact that contract writers have with OTEN teachers also makes it difficult to produce materials of this quality. Many redrafts are often needed to be carried out at OTEN after the writer has finished, to bring the materials to this level.

Students generally have to work problems out for themselves. Students do not receive the benefit of hearing questions that they would never have thought of asking.

Teachers have to rely mainly on their own knowledge because they are called on to do so many things by themselves. Teachers often have to answer questions or deal with problems that are outside their areas of expertise.

As the questions and answers from the Help Desk are not shared among students and teachers, the same questions need to be asked over and over again by different students and the same answers worked out by different teachers over and over. The same problems in assignments or tests are solved over and over again by different teachers often outside their areas of expertise.

The comments on assignments are often where the real subtleties and interesting points about a subject are explored. Teachers put a lot of work into these comments but they are only ever seen by the individual student. It is important to remember that these assignments are not primarily for assessment but are where a very large amount of the teaching takes place.

How to solve these problems

The IT section at OTEN started to put some of these comments into a useful form on the Help Desk by entering each query and its solution into a database, but the real opportunity for this has come with the introduction of an IT Internet campus [HREF4] (pictured below) and the use of the Internet to deliver IT courses. At the IT Internet campus e-mail is used to handle Help Desk queries as well as assignment submission and marking, so that all student and teacher interactions are recorded in electronic form.

The only remaining problem is to find a way of collecting and sharing all these interactions. One option would be to enter them into a database. A database search however is rather a clumsy way of accessing the information. It can take several attempts to find the desired information and many users would give up before they found what they were looking for. Searches would be far too slow to be useful in telephone support on the Help Desk. Searching often requires the user to know exactly what they are looking for and this is difficult for students studying a new subject. These students need the information to be right in front of them. Imagine trying to learn a new subject if everything you wanted to know had to be searched for.

Again the solution to the problem comes from using the Internet to deliver the course. To accomplish this delivery the standard learning materials are loaded onto the Web server as HTML and thus distributed to students in electronic form. These materials are the documentation of the whole distance learning operation. They tell the students everything they need to know about assignments, tests, resources and textbooks. They also document the content of all the subjects: theory; practical activities and sample answers. They document the sum total of everything the students and teachers do in teaching and learning for the course.

Teachers' interactions with students revolve around these materials and every question, answer and comment between students and teachers can be related to some part of the learning materials. Another way to organise all these interactions then, is by relating them to the learning materials. This is exactly what annotations do, they allow a piece of text (an interaction) to be related to an arbitrary position in a HTML document (the learning materials). When viewing the learning materials a user can see each interactions in-place next to the related section of the materials.

This is all very well, however, it would be very time consuming for one person to insert hundreds of comments into correct places in the learning materials. The beauty of this kind of annotations is that they are shared, which means that they can be inserted by many different people or in our case many different teachers.

Each question and answer or comment can be placed into the learning materials as it arises by a teacher. The time it takes to do this should be minimal because the information will already be in electronic form and in answering the question the teacher is probably already looking at the related section of the materials. In this way all the information is structured so that it is readily accessible and is maintained collectively with a minimum of effort.

Benefits of this system

When a student telephones the Help Desk, often the first step for the teacher is to find the section in the learning materials related to the students query. With the annotations in place, when the teacher looks up this section they will immediately see all the questions that have been previously asked about that section. If the student's question is already listed they can just read the answer. If it is not listed the teacher will need to find a solution. After solving the problem they can add their solution as an annotation so that other Help Desk teachers can use it. More importantly, once it is annotated, other students can read it as they are working through the materials and that question need never be asked again. The same method can be applied to student queries that come in via e-mail.

Since queries can be answered more efficiently teachers should be able to encourage more interaction with students. Student-teacher interactions also become part of the development of the learning materials. The materials themselves become more flexible and can adapt to students' needs. Any deficiencies in the materials show up in student queries and are rectified as the query answers are included in the materials. Interactions become not a quick fix for an individual student but a legitimate and substantial part of the teaching process, as they are in face to face teaching.

In IT subjects there is the constant problem of updating materials for new versions of software. In this system materials are automatically updated as students come across differences between the materials and the new version of the software. This may appear to put an extra burden on the students but they will always have access to the Help Desk teachers and a teacher with appropriate experience and access to software would be assigned specifically to deal with these queries.

Another problem with producing learning materials for IT is that they have to be very detailed and absolutely correct. A lot of effort is put into doing this and then when a new version of the software comes out it has to be done all over again. Also it is difficult to write materials for more than one brand of software or hardware platform because the details are always different.

With the annotation system the materials can be more generic and concentrate on the concepts and features that are common across different versions and brands of software. The details can be filled in as students need them depending on what software package they are using. Of course students would be encouraged to use their own manuals first (which is an essential skill in IT) but they would always be able to contact the designated specialist teacher. Through this interaction the materials would develop to show the differences between brands and versions of software and the idiosyncrasies of various software packages.

Since the development of the materials continues after they are initially written the initial writing can be done more quickly and does not have to be tied to a specific brand or version of product.

If learning materials are put together in this way, with emphasis on concepts rather than the details of specific programs and if students learn this way they will more easily be able to adapt to different programs and environments. Concepts generally stay the same but implementation details will inevitably change.

Teachers' comments on assignments could be included in annotations at appropriate places in the lesson materials or in an assignment tips section. Comments that give away the answers too much could be included in a special page that is e-mailed to students after they complete the assignment. By sharing the comments to all students the work that teachers put into writing them is utilised to maximum efficiency.

Annotations could also be used by teachers who are reviewing the work of contract writers to add comments to the materials as they are being written. This would make collaboration between teachers and writers easier and less error prone. It would also decrease the amount of work that needs to be done on materials after the writer has finished.

If there is an area not already covered in the learning materials that people would like to collaborate on - say a discussion between teachers about a particular issue - all that is required is a Web document on the subject. The document then becomes the structure within which this collaboration can take place. Documents are no longer lifeless, static, one way information exchanges but structured meeting places, a focus for interactions between real people.

What happens to the annotations?

If there are however too many annotations in a document there are several options. One is to remove some of the outdated annotations (which might for example refer to an older version of software that no one uses any more) and archive them somewhere. The other option is to revise the original document so that the information in the annotations is included in it. This would involve editing the annotations and rearranging them so that they fit in with the original document. A similar kind of reorganisation could be done more frequently by leaving the annotations as they are and just rearranging the document and the annotations so that they are easier to understand.

Conclusion

Hypertext References

HREF1

http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Collaboration/Overview.html The W3C page on Collaboration, Knowledge Representation and Automatability

HREF2

http://www.sunlabs.com/people/wayne.gramlich/work/w3c/annote/index.html The W3C Annotation Working Group

HREF3

http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/COMMENTOR/index.html The ComMentor system for annotations at Stanford University.

HREF4

http://www.opennet.net.au/partners/oten/ This is the Internet campus for Information Technology students at OTEN.

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