| Web-based Instruction - Annotations |
Robby Robson, Oregon State University
This "article" is the text portion of a workshop given at Ed-Media 98, a conference sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education. It represents a bit of an experiment for the author.
The format of the workshop is that of a 3 hour long presentation. The visual portion of the presentation consists of a set of slides in HTML format with live links to demonstration sites. The slides themselves contain mostly bullet points, links, and graphics. Although it is possible to surmise much of the content of typical such presentations from the slides, the things that the speaker says are not recorded.
To
remedy this defect, I have supplied a concurrent set of pages (these) in the
form of a standard hyper-article. The slides in the presentation are linked
to appropriate places in the text, and the projector icon at the right links
these pages back to the slide presentation.
One note: There are some links in this article which go to URL's outside of the workshop site. They tend to pop-up in a window called "infowindow", so if you don't see them in this browser window, look for them in another.
The issues covered are the design, authoring, delivery, and management of Web-based instructional material. The goal is to better understand how Web courses work, what it means to create and/or teach a Web course, how pedagogy can drive Web technology, what is offered by course management systems, and how to plan for the future. The topics covered in this article are:
|
The context in which we find ourselves a discussion of media, education, and the Internet |
|
Trends and data concerning Web-based pedagogy |
|
Various forms of on-line assessment from multiple choice to pattern matching to portfolios |
|
The use and management of asynchronous and quasi-synchronous communication as a pedagogic tool |
|
The Web as an interactive medium - client side, server side, and the far side |
|
Integrated course management (or instructional management) systems. Choosing the right tools and methodologies |
|
Metadata, database-backed Web sites, and the IMS project |
The material here consists of these notes and the associated presentation plus a self-study portion. The presentation pages are organized as a hub with loops: The home page connects to the slides, this document, and other documents described in the next few paragraphs. The slides have a hub that is listed as "topics" or "presentation topics". From there you can go to sequential sets of pages that end by taking you back to the topics page.
The self-study portion has two parts: A self-contained demonstration course and a webliography. The demonstration course was first written in January, 1997, and uses the QuestWriter course management system developed at Oregon State University.
At the time of the course was written, very few instructors had ever had the opportunity to use Web-based instructional material as a student. Perhaps the opportunity has increased, but it is still not clear that many instructors go through this exercise before diving into a development project. This is a valuable experience. This particular demo class was designed to be short and to illustrate a variety of design principles in just a few pages. Of course, it is done largely in the style of the author and does not illustrate some technology (e.g. Java) which has only become stable since the course was written.
The demo course has a second part that allows the reader to go behind the scenes and play with the course management system that runs the course. The point is to illustrate both the complexity and power of the tool sets that are now available for course management.
The webliography is a loosely organized set of links including all the links from the on-site presentation and some other links of interest. There are no claims of consistency or completeness in the selection, but it does offer a decent place to start browsing and studying on one's own.
Home
| Presentation Topics | Next
Annotation Page