March 2000 — Features
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Web-Enhanced Lecture Course Scores Big with Students and Faculty
Disadvantages students noted included slow computers at home (or even in university computer labs), or slow modem connections to the university computer from home. There were student concerns about “getting dumped offline.” Other disadvantages for the instructor include the time required for learning WebCT and setting up the Web site, difficulties in digitizing video and making the animations, lack of technical help, and, sometimes, the lack of reward for integrating technology in teaching.
Online Quizzes
Perhaps one of the biggest advantages of the use of WebCT was that I could set the time allowed for the online quizzes and the number of times that students could take each quiz (http://www.cudenver.edu/~bstith/quinstr.html). As a starting point, I would suggest allowing three attempts. WebCT would then keep only the highest grade among the attempts (the score that is kept could be the result of other options). More than one student told me that being able to repeat quizzes encouraged them to study the material over and over again between attempts.
Placing a time limit on the quiz prevents a student from simply looking up every answer and taking the exam over a period of days. I would suggest starting out allowing two minutes per question (I had 10 to 30 questions per quiz). There were many student concerns about fill-in-the-blank questions, so I used few or none of this type. In the matching type of question, if there are two different statements to be matched up with one answer, there could be problems in computer grading.
I generated about 80-100 questions per quiz and allowed WebCT to pick a random group of 20 questions for each student. This random selection of questions means that students will be less likely to simply memorize answers and retake the quiz immediately. This brought up the question of whether the quizzes were of equal difficulty. After a quiz had been taken, I could identify especially difficult questions, remove them and give students who had the question extra points.
One must assume that the 20 questions the student sees on the online quiz are going to be printed out (I know of no easy way of preventing this), or that a group of students could be taking a quiz for an individual student. To offset these possibilities, I chose to make the in-class exams worth significantly more points.
Detailed "To Do" List for the Teacher
1) As Developmental Biology was a lecture course, at the first lecture I “warned” students about the Web enhancement aspects of the course. During the second and third lecture periods, I met with the students in the University of Colorado-Denver computer lab to introduce the use of the Web. The computer lab had about 35 computers, of which half were Macintosh. Instructors should be prepared to know both IBM and Mac systems. In this first lecture, I also provided students with a map to the computer lab, the computer lab hours, and student passwords and their user names.
