Although this was a rather hectic semester, I did have a chance to try out some new ideas. Some of them worked and some did not. Here is a brief summary.
Weekly assignments did provide some interchange and feedback, but it was still not responsive enough for certain key topics. Sometimes, students got on the wrong track, did a lot of work, but got the wrong answer. I feel I need something more immediate and interactive.
Centra review sessions were quite successful. This semester, I use them for orientation and unit reviews. I budgeted 90 minutes per session, but the students held on for two hours or more. What I discovered was that students were asking fundamental questions that they should've asked and had answers to weeks earlier. In most cases, the misunderstanding was so fundamental that either students were not aware that there was a concern or could not verbalize their concern. Therefore, for the next course, I plan to have weekly Centra sessions, during which I can quickly check fundamental assumptions and clear up misconceptions before students end up doing a lot of useless work. I feel weekly sessions will probably be shorter. I collect schedule information from my students at the start of the semester. If I am lucky, there will be a common time block for everyone. If not, I could alternate between two time blocks and see what students prefer. While some students may not be able to participate, because the sessions are recorded they still have access to the review.
There are two related changes. For one, if I'm getting weekly feedback through the Centra sessions, I can reduce the number of assignments. I would want to time them so that students have an opportunity to participate in or playback the relevant Centra session. I feel that if students correctly understand the basic principles, they will tend to be more successful and the time lag will not be so detrimental.
The other change will be to the lectures. My plan is to have one f2f videotaped lecture and one Centra session per week. Essentially, I'm still having two lectures, except that one would be videotaped before a live class and the other conducted through Centra. Both are recorded. The videotaped lecture will be a presentation of ideas in a more or less traditional format. The Centra session on the other hand, will be dealing with specific techniques and operations. Also, through the use of surveys and spot quizzes (one question), I can check to see if the students are on track and, if not, make incremental corrections.
Of course, I will continue to use the self checked exercises. One thing I can do during the Centra session is refer to those exercises that were assigned. This may give me a better read on how well these work and inspire the students to actually do them.
The modeling exercises worked fairly well, but in teaching a small class I discovered something interesting. While industrial engineers spend about 25% of their undergraduate program modeling existing systems, mechanical and electrical engineers focus mainly on designing new ones. Thus, many MEs and EEs have very little experience modeling systems. I had not realized this earlier because there were enough students in the class that I could put an industrial engineer on every team. I am considering a long-term solution to this problem, but in the short run my plan is to introduce modeling concepts from the very start, rather than waiting until halfway through the course. I feel if I introduce these early, check in the Centra sessions, and have early modeling assignments, all students will have some understanding of the problem by the time I give them the first group modeling exercise.
Adobe Acrobat forms work very well for collecting information at the start of the course. They work even better, in version 8 of Acrobat. In that version, students can save a partially filled out form and complete it later. This worked well to check what kind of computers and software students had, individual's relevant experience, and those time blocks in which they were able to attend a synchronous session, as well as their preferred time block for group interactions. In all, the students entered about a hundred separate pieces of data, usually in less than five minutes. Assembling the data and analyzing it is quite simple, so I had useful information I could use for planning groups and Centra sessions. However, students indicated they did not think it's appropriate to use these forms for assignments, because many times they have to enter graphical or computational information.
Almost all students have Microsoft Word, so I plan to continue to use MS Word doc format for assignments. If needed, I can also use the rtf formats. Even though some students have MS Word 2007, I'm sticking with the doc, rather than docx, format, because most of my students are still using earlier versions of Microsoft Word.
HTML files have their uses, but I think in most cases other formats are better. HTML is good for making documents that will have links in them, such is in the self checked exercises. However, it is more difficult to control formatting. In other formats, I can make sure that a figure appears on the same page as the associated text. Also, other formats are easier to work with and are self-contained. Because some available browsers do not implement the full HTML character set, I cannot be sure that all characters will display properly. Finally, I have found that sometimes when an HTML page is printed, the top part of a line of text can be printed on one page and the bottom part on another.
For the most part, I plan to use Adobe Acrobat. Documents produced by this software are highly compatible with screen readers. Also, if you put a set of PDF files in the same directory, you can conduct a search of all those files from any file. Finally, it's relatively easy to convert almost any type of file into a PDF file, or append PDF pages to a document. This gives me a good mix of accessibility and ease of use.
On my webpages, I've adopted a multiple access scheme. On the home page, I have five organizer pages: "Key IExxx Info", "Communications", "IExxx Course Work", "References", adn "How can I ...". Each of these pages opens into another organizer page containing all the information, links, etc. relevant to the topic. These main topic pages are also major headings in the course menu. In addition, links to the items on those pages are shown as subtopics in the course menu. This dual arrangement means that students can access items directly through the course menu, or by clicking on the icons. Because each organizer page represents a collection of related subfunctions, entering into the page puts a student into a focused work environment. This can save time and effort. For example, if a student wants to check if there has been any e-mail or discussion posts before leaving the course WebCT site, he need only click on the communications icon or heading and see a glance if there is anything new.
The How can I ... resource is working very well. If a student has a question that can be answered in a How can I ... document, I give a brief answer and a link to the resource. Students catch on pretty quickly. They may have to wait hours for a reply to an email, but can often find an answer very quickly by going to the How can I page.
Well, those are the main things and I do have to get back to grading. Bye for now,
John Mullen
Friday, May 9, 2008
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