A Flashlight Case Study – Aaron Cohen – Ehrmann annotations
Can Computer Bulletin Boards
Replace Traditional Class Meetings?
A Case Study in Teaching History Online
Aaron J. Cohen, California State University, Sacramento
Report for: CSUS Foundation and The Visible Knowledge Project
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Most teachers of history at the university level are skeptical about the ability of the technology to provide an improved educational experience for the traditional classroom. Many see no problem with the use of presentation software, digital video, and the Internet to provide a more efficient and convenient delivery vehicle for traditional written and visual course material. Yet when the issue moves beyond the supplementation of a lecture class to its replacement with computer technology, benign toleration gives way to skepticism.
I developed a new course, History 130: The Fall of Communism, to investigate how Internet technology might be used to teach history without traditional lectures yet still retain the goals of the traditional pedagogy. History 130 was designed, very simply, to find out how students would react to an online history course. The idea came from my experience teaching lower and upper division classes using WebCT, an online software environment for students provided at my university. For several years I have used WebCT to provide services of convenience and communication for my students: it was a place to post lecture notes, provide bulletin board space, keep an online grade book, and support class email. Once the material for the entire course (except for exams) was posted on the Internet in WebCT, the logical question became: why have a class meeting at all? If the students have received printed lecture material, reading assignments, bulletin board posts, and course handouts all on the web, why do they need to come to class to hear a lecture?
I decided to design a class where students would be responsible for reading material and lecture notes as in a conventional class, yet interact with each other and the instructor on the Internet instead of in the classroom. In other words, I wanted to replicate traditional seminar conditions using the computer bulletin board. It was my hope that through technology I could give forty students a learning experience that they would otherwise find in a small seminar. The bulletin board would be used to answer questions of fact and foster class interaction, and the last link to the real classroom could be broken.
The major question that this investigation was designed to answer was whether bulletin boards could provide a satisfactory way to manage class interaction than the live class. My hope in History 130 was to extend learning in time and space beyond the classroom. Live class discussions are dependant on the physical limitations of the classroom: only one person can speak at a time, only students who attend can participate, and it is difficult to take notes in a rapidly moving discussion (especially if it involves large numbers of people). The traditional classroom also places temporal limits on class discussion: not every person has the opportunity to speak because of the limits on time, many students are unprepared to participate at any given moment for various reasons, and students have little time to react with forethought to comments or ideas of others. Others feel intimidated to speak their minds in the presence of others. With the bulletin board, in contrast, students can read each other’s work and have access to the opinions of all students over a wider period of time. They can have time to think of a reasoned response and post it at their convenience.
As in the regular classroom, I wanted students to answer challenging questions based on the reading, to learn to ask questions they develop themselves, and to interact with others to find solutions to historical questions, but I hoped that with the bulletin board weaker students would be able to see and imitate the work of better students, while stronger students would help, directly or indirectly, weaker students. I also wanted to find out if students would use the technology, be able to make hard assignment deadlines, and, frankly, not hate the unfamiliar format. I expected this experience to be very difficult for students and instructor alike.
Structure of the class
The plan for this class was to have most of the class interaction take place online using WebCT instructional software. The students would use the WebCT environment in two major ways: to receive written “lectures” that were posted weekly and to answer questions, pose questions, and discuss problems on the bulletin board.
WebCT provided several other convenient tools, including email capability, a place to post handouts, room for non-course related discussion forums, and a grade book where they could review and verify their grades, but the main WebCT tool was the bulletin board. I did not intend the bulletin board to be used for lengthy threaded discussions; my idea was to have a place where students would post their ideas, read the ideas of others, and post short replies or questions. In practice there were few “discussions” of any great length, although rare threads extended to three or four levels. Instead, the bulletin board in this class was designed, literally, to make knowledge visible, that is, to allow every student to see the thoughts and ideas of every other student, which in the physical and temporal restraints of the conventional classroom is impossible.
Students had the same tasks to complete for every weekly topic. Each week I posted two pages on WebCT, a “content” page and an “assignment” page. The “content” page held the learning objectives for that week and the instructor’s content narrative, i.e. the lecture that I would give if I were live in the classroom. The “assignment” page repeated the learning objectives, contained the reading assignment and links to web readings, and had a set of three to five study questions. Students had to complete three bulletin board assignments each week. First, they were to answer one study question of their choice for that week in at least 250 words and post it on the bulletin board. This assignment was due by midnight every Wednesday. Second, they had to post one question related to anything related to the reading or another student’s post for that week. This assignment was also due midnight Wednesday. The third bulletin board assignment was to answer any question or comment on any student’s post. This assignment was due by midnight Saturday. Since the computer logged all posting, I made deadlines “hard”: late posts or failure to post resulted in grade penalties on email evaluations.
From the outset I decided not to make the class 100% online. I did, however, reduce the amount of seat time from two class meetings to one. My hope was to reserve Wednesday for an optional class meeting. The idea was to make this meeting a “recitation” where students who did not understand the online material or wanted to ask questions could come and discuss any subject that interested them. I did not prepare any lecture or discussion points for these sessions. I retained the class meeting mostly because I knew that many students often feel isolated in an online environment, and I wanted to give those students a forum where they could have a face-to-face contact with the instructor and other students. Since I set up the course so that all the content, assignments, and contact with the instructor could take place online, I considered the class meeting as a supplement, not a core aspect of the course.
The course in practice
The class generally went smoother than I expected. There were no serious disruptions to the flow of the course except for September 11, which caused Week 3 to be cancelled and became an obvious distraction throughout the term. Student attrition rate was higher than a normal lecture class. The first day there were 63 students who were registered for the class, but ten very quickly went away and never came back. The course stabilized with a formal registration of 53 students, but only about 38 were active participants in the course. I was unable to interview or survey students who dropped the course, so I do not know what exactly caused them to do so (although I have been told by colleagues that a high drop rate and failure rate is common in online courses). WebCT is not the easiest software environment to use, but students who took the exit survey reported that they had little difficulty mastering the technology. Twenty one students claimed that it took them less that a week to learn how to use the bulletin board properly, sixteen said one to three weeks, but only one more than three weeks. According to my observation, two students never learned to use the bulletin board property (they did not take the survey). The biggest impediment to student learning in online courses is probably not learning to use technology but other factors such as course design, content, and student study habits, problems that are common in traditional classrooms.
The major problem that emerged was the nature of the class meeting. It soon became apparent that most students did not understand the concept of the “recitation.” They were confused about the purpose of a question and answer session. Many students still expected that the class meeting would be structured in a formal lecture or discussion format, that is, the instructor would lead/explain/cover the material for that week. I, on the other hand, viewed the class meeting as a minor get-together for those students who needed personal contact and did not insist on discussing a particular topic in any predetermined format. Most students, however, did not seem to understand this informal classroom arrangement. Some felt frustrated that I did not prepare structured exercises, that other students went off on tangents (from their point of view), and that material did not always relate directly to the readings or topics. I was at first puzzled by this attitude, since I had explained the purpose of the class meeting on several occasions. On reflection I realized that many students simply could not understand a type of university learning that did not involve the instructor defining that material that “had” to be learned to get the “right” answer, nor did they really understand the concept of an optional meeting. For most students learn that the only relevant material in a university class is material that relates to their success on a test; the notion of “optional” knowledge or unstructured learning is foreign and confusing. The failure of the class meeting therefore came from two sources: my failure to communicate to students that they should expect to learn differently in this class (and that they did not have to come to the class meeting) and the failure of some students, even late in the course, to understand a style of instruction that did not fit their conception of university education.
I responded by changing the format of the class meeting. I explicitly told students that the class meeting was optional and that they should, if they wanted, experience the class 100% online. I then conducted the class meeting as a more traditional discussion section. I began to prepare for the class meeting so that we could cover questions related to the readings and the issues for each week’s topics. Finally, I began to introduce more material in readings and discussion about … the purpose and value of a liberal arts education, and why it is important to learn to become autonomous learners. Some students, in the end, still did not understand these ideas, but as the class meeting took on a more recognizable format, they were willing to accept them. These changes led to a significant improvement in student satisfaction with class meetings, although I was disappointed that only a minority were able to understand or comprehend the original intent of the “recitation.” The next time I teach the course I will be clear to advertise it as 100% online with a weekly live supplement, and I will be sure to build discussion of learning into the course from the outset.