A Flashlight Case Study

Problem Statement

In the following text, Prof. Aaron Cohen of CSU Sacramento describes a history course he has just taught for the first time, mostly online using WebCT. He describes his need gather data from his students that would be useful in helping him understand whether and how the course is taking advantage of WebCT.

Our task in this workshop: to design a survey that Prof. Cohen could use the next time he teaches this course. If we complete one or more designs, I will send them to Aaron.

[This material is excerpted from a longer draft report submitted by Prof. Cohen to the Visible Knowledge Project, a national initiative to foster an inquiry-based approach to teaching and learning with technology in the humanities: http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/vkp/. Flashlight has deleted those portions of the report dealing with the surveys that Prof. Cohen actually used (one of which was developed with Flashlight tools); his full report is available on request.]

What I’d like you to do BEFORE coming to the workshop

Imagine that Aaron is a friend of yours who has asked for you to draft a survey of his students. “I’ve got certain ideas about how technology use ought to be helping my students learn in this course. I would like to get student feedback about half way through the course that will let me know if my “theory” is working. But I’m not sure what to ask my students, or how. I know you’re not an expert in this area, but I’d like to compare someone else’s thinking with mine. As your way of advising me what to do, would you please draft a survey so we can compare thinking? Just write 5 questions (though you can write more if you like.)”

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.