March 2000 — Features
Print this article | Email this articleClick here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal
Web-Enhanced Lecture Course Scores Big with Students and Faculty
In spring of 1999, I developed a Web site to enhance a lecture course in Biology. The class met twice a week and there were three lecture exams that comprised most of the points for the course. As Developmental Biology is visually intensive, I wanted to utilize the ability of the Web to allow students access to illustrations and movies. The course Web site I developed with WebCT (http://www.webct.com/) had the following features: e-mail (from within the Web site), a bulletin board, chat groups, announcements, direct student access to lecture notes, videos and animation used in lecture or exam keys, monitoring of student grades by students (they can compare their own grades with Web site-generated histograms of all class grades), faculty monitoring of hits and time on the Web site, posting of exam results (especially important now that we cannot legally post grades in hallways), and use of online timed quizzes (with grading by program). With WebCT, or an equivalent package such as Blackboard, teachers are not bogged down in learning HTML language or even learning FTP procedures.
Thus, students could view the course Web site from homes, their jobs, or when on trips across the nation (important for our commuting, urban university students – 75% of our University of Colorado-Denver students have family and jobs). In addition, the professor d'es not have to deliver the key to the library reserve desk or deal with hallway postings that are torn down by students. Animations and video can be viewed outside of the classroom (as opposed to audio-visual aids that are not available outside of the classroom or only available by in-house checkout from the library).
There are a growing number of Web sites that contain videos or animation. I believe that the use of video and animation both in lecture and on the Web is one of the major advantages of computers in teaching. With lecture notes and calendar published on the Web, the instructor can update them during the semester instead of publishing them months ahead of time. The professor can post an answer to a question that one student asked and the answer will reach all students (using the Bulletin Board or e-mail functions). Many students said that they learned valuable computer and Internet skills that have helped them in other courses.
I also attempted to use the Web to mimic the process of research. Later in the semester, the class met in the computer lab to conduct original research using videos posted on the Web (http://www.cudenver.edu/~bstith/resweb.html). We measured and compared the time for a calcium wave to cross various cells (this activity was related to a discussion of the biochemistry of the calcium wave in lecture).
As a measure of its value and its ability to interest and motivate students, 17 out of 25 students continued to visit the Web site in the weeks after the final was given. This was not just to view final grades, as some entered the site up to three weeks later and the average number of hits after the final was 8.2 ± 4.8 s.d. per student (range of 2 to 17 hits).
