Partnerships for Creating An On-line Learning Environment

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Partnerships for Creating An On-line Learning Environment

Prof. Frank K. Lewis, M.A.
Chairman, English Department
Texas State Technical College
Harlingen, Texas

And

Dr. Shahron Williams van Rooij, Ph.D.
Academic Product Manager
Datatel, Inc.
Fairfax, Virginia

Texas State Technical College Harlingen

Texas State Technical College Harlingen is one of three 2-year technical colleges in the state. Located at the southern tip of Texas, TSTC Harlingen enrolls over 3,300 students each Fall in one of 26 associate degree or 22 certificate programs. The college places a heavy emphasis on academic departments that support the technical students, and it has been the English and Social Science departments that have initiated distance education courses. These efforts began with two-way video conferencing in

August 1998, continued with portions of courses using web-based instruction in January 1999, and will finish with entire courses being offered on the Internet in September 1999.

Datatel

Datatel, Inc. delivers integrated, mission-critical Enterprise Resource Management systems and services to the higher education market. Datatelï¿½s commitment to the market, knowledgeable professionals, and delivery of quality systems, on-time and within budget, make it the fastest growing company serving the higher education market.

Abstract

Faculty members are being increasingly challenged by the need to balance pedagogical requirements and goals with their institutionï¿½s need to push forward with technological innovations to gain a competitive edge. IT departments have been looking to administrative software providers like Datatel for integrated, enterprise-wide solutions for the entire campus family ï¿½ administration, faculty, students. This paper describes a pilot project that partnered Datatel with four of its client sites to address the needs of faculty seeking to develop web-based distance education courses without having to learn programming or be dependent on professional programmers and Web developers. The project is divided into five phases: (a) defining faculty workflow: (b) creating course content; (c) interactivity and course management; (d) proof of concept testing. Texas State Technical College, one of the four Datatel client sites participating in the proof of concept test, describes the institutionï¿½s role in the testing process, and experiences to date.

Partnerships for Creating
An On-line Learning Environment

Overview

Faculty members are being increasingly challenged by the need to balance pedagogical requirements and goals with their institutionï¿½s need to push forward with technological innovations to gain a competitive edge. IT staff, particularly the chief academic computing officers, view assisting faculty with integrating technology into instruction as the greatest IT challenge facing their institution (Green, 1997). The growth in the number of institutions offering distance education courses has added to the pressure on faculty to become technology savvy.

IT departments have been looking to administrative software providers like Datatel for integrated, enterprise-wide solutions for the entire campus family -- administration, faculty, students. To facilitate this partnership between teaching and learning on the one hand, and technology on the other, Datatelï¿½s Enterprise Resource Management solutions should help move faculty through each step of its workflow, just as it does for the administration. This paper describes a pilot project that partnered Datatel with four of its client sites to help faculty develop web-based distance education courses without having to learn programming or be dependent upon professional programmers and developers. The project is divided into four phases: (a) defining faculty workflow; (b) creating course content; (c) interactivity and course management; (d) proof of concept testing. Texas State Technical College, one of the four Datatel client sites participating in the proof of concept, describes its experiences in partnering with Datatel to develop an on-line learning environment.

Defining Faculty Workflow

In order to offer solutions, Datatel needed to understand faculty workflow and identify potential problems at each step of that workflow. Figure 1 illustrates faculty workflow based on feedback from Advisory Committees drawn from faculty at Datatel client institutions, as well as discussions on faculty listservs and conference papers. Faculty must first find out from the administration what the teaching load is for the coming semester, then move on to designing the instructional method. Today, the instructional method depends to a great extent on the delivery vehicle -- traditional classroom, with or without web support, partial or total distance education. Nevertheless, the objective is to apply pedagogical best

Figure 1: Faculty Workflow

practices regardless of the method of course delivery (Spear 98a). The next step in the workflow involves actually putting the course together, and it is usually at this point that faculty members developing distance education courses call upon their IT departments for assistance. Once the course is developed, it is taught, and at its conclusion, final grades (or other performance measures) are submitted to the administration.

This workflow looks fairly straightforward, but there are potential challenges at each step. Information about workload needs to be obtained in a timely manner, so that faculty can plan their courses as well as their non-teaching commitments for the approaching semester. Timely information is also of importance to non-tenured faculty members who need to fill their course sections in order to prevent section and potential income losses. To provide faculty with this make-or-break information, Datatel developed a Web interface that allows faculty to access the institutionï¿½s back-office administrative system and view selected student and human resources information on-line. Using a standard Web browser, faculty can get answers to the most commonly asked questions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In addition, faculty can also submit final grades via the Web. Figure 2 illustrates the web solution to potential problems in the faculty-administration interaction process

Figure 2: Faculty-Administration Interaction via the Web

Creating Course Content

The next phase of the pilot project involved an in-depth review of the tools currently available for developing web-based education courses. Creating course materials is the most time consuming, resource-intensive portion of faculty workflow and there are a variety of shrink-wrap products for authoring. Director 7 Internet Studio is an example of a software program for digitizing multimedia resources for delivery via the Web. Authorware and ToolBook II are examples of PC-based authoring tools that now have full web capability. However, nearly all of the PC-based authoring programs require a fairly robust technology skill set to get beyond on-line page turning; few provide development assistance and none integrate or interface with the institutionï¿½s back-office administrative information systems. Distance education course management systems such as CourseInfo, WebCT and Learning Space address web-based course administration and communication and have authoring tools that are relatively easy to use. However, they are not nearly as rich in functionality as the PC-based authoring tools.

Does ease of use always mean sacrificing authoring flexibility and functionality? Will web-based courses that are both pedagogically sound and feature-rich be produced only by faculty who are or have access to Web developers and professional programmers? A good authoring tool should provide step-by-step creation methods, templates, sample Web pages that can be adapted for individual use, automatic generation of CGI scripts, and basic instruction for creating standard components [Hansen and Frick, 1997]. But the authoring tool should also be flexible enough to provide the functionality and the benefits of multimedia tools and integrate seamlessly into whichever course management system the institution has selected.

MICROCOSM [HREF1] is an authoring tool that meets all three requirements: ease of use, rich in functionality, seamless integration. Created by a university consortium in the United Kingdom and winner of several international awards, MICROCOSM allows faculty to gather and organize multimedia materials to create courseware for on-line delivery without having to learn programming. What differentiates MICROCOSM from other authoring tools is its open hypertext technology, which allows faculty to link and navigate through resources having a variety of media formats -- text files, graphics, audio files, video, HTML documents -- using a series of built-in viewers. For example, there are viewers for each of the MS Office applications, for AutoCAD, for GIF and JPEG files, etc. When an author creates hypertext links, the links are stored separately from the data in their own link database. This means that the resource materials can remain in their native formats and in their native location. Moreover, the courseware can be created and utilized in a non-linear fashion. Instead of page-turning on-line instruction, the course design is interactive. It is learner-centered, so that the student working through the materials is free to create his/her own glossary and links without disturbing what the instructor has done. Importantly, it is faculty friendly. Task cards and wizards in plain English step the faculty through the creation of the course, with lots of positive reinforcement along the way. Once the course is created, it can simply be "dropped" into the institutionï¿½s course management system via a Publish-&-Go wizard. Course content can be published to CD-ROM for large-scale local data storage as an enhancement to face-to-face instruction, or for static and archived information, to save bandwidth for interactive components on the Web. Microcosm helps the faculty member build a chest of learning resources that is adaptable for various instruction delivery vehicles. Figure 3 illustrates the use of Microcosm for content delivered via the Web.

Figure 3: A Chest of Multimedia Resources with Microcosm

Interactivity and Course Management

The Midwestern Higher Education Commissionï¿½s Interactive Courseware Committee offers the following guidelines for evaluating courseware (HREF2):

Interactive design.: the courseware should provide well-organized and dynamic interactivity between the student and the course content, the student and the teacher, and among students sharing the learning experience.

Sound pedagogical strategy: the courseware should be consistent with current knowledge on learning theories and precepts, and should allow faculty members to use an authoring system to add material to the learning modules in order to individualize the course to their pedagogical approach.

Learner-centered: the courseware should allow asynchronous, non-linear presentation branching in response to interaction with the learner and should enable the learner to move from topic to topic asynchronously, explore independently, and pursue multiple paths through the material.

Faculty-friendly: the courseware should be easy to use, with software technology that is transparent.

Ongoing evaluation and assessment: the courseware should document the achievements by the students as they progress through the learning experience.

In addition, the goal of IMS, an initiative of EDUCAUSE addressing Internet technologies for learning in higher education, training and schools, is to develop open technical standards for instructional systems and content on the Internet. As a member of the IMS Developersï¿½ Network, Datatel seeks to round out its on-line learning environment by linking its back-office system with a course management system that is both IMS-compliant and consistent with the guidelines outlined by MHEC, illustrated in Figure 4.

Figure 4: An IMS-Compliant On-line Learning Environment

Proof-of-Concept Testing

The final phase of the project involved benchmark testing of the components of the on-line learning environment. The objectives of the test were:

Determine if faculty workflow problems are solved
Establish length of faculty learning curve for each solution component
Assess solution flexibility for incorporating pedagogical requirements
Adaptability of the solution to various teaching/learning scenarios
Perceived value/pricing of each solution component

To achieve this, four Datatel client sites were asked to test each of the solution components and provide their assessment. One of the test sites was Texas State Technical College in Harlingen.

Texas State Technical College: A Case Study

One of three state-supported technical colleges, Texas State Technical College (TSTC) Harlingen serves the traditionally rural but rapidly growing and urbanizing community of deep-South Texas. The area is home to many migrant workers who will move northward during the summer crop season and Winter Texans who have come southward to avoid the harsh winter weather of the Midwest. With a major service area that is composed of two metropolitan statistical areas, there is no one central major city as is found in most metropolitan areas. What the Rio Grande Valley area has is a four county area that has a series of communities of almost one million permanent residents spread over an area one hundred miles, long with most of the residents within ten miles of the central corridor through the region. With the great distances involved in the primary target area and even more residents in the surrounding rural areas, TSTC Harlingen began actively seeking to implement some form of distance education. As a technical college, TSTC Harlingen has many faculty members who were interested in developing computer-based supplements to their classes.

Working with area high schools and other education leadership groups, the college developed a number of distance education initiatives while individual faculty members began efforts to add supplementary instructional materials to their own courses. The administration wanted ideally a system of development and delivery found that could support both supplemental course materials and whole course delivery.

Several instructors were sent to various distance education and web-based educational programs offered by Texas A&M University in College Station. Faculty members in these courses worked on instructional design and development issues along with acquiring an understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the different types of technologies. Distance and course costs would prohibit the 140 full-time faculty from all going to attend the classes. Two-way video conferencing courses were begun; however, some program was needed to easily develop courses for computers, both as supplemental and as web-based. After a review of options, Datatel’s Microcosm was one of several programs that the college agreed to study.

Three TSTC faculty members were selected to work on Microcosm projects. Two of the faculty intended to use the instruction developed to take the place of instructor-led units in English composition and technical training, and one of the instructors was developing supplemental instruction that would eventually become a portion of a web-based distance education course in sociology. Faculty capabilities ranged from very proficient with computers to very proficient with application programs such as Microsoft Word and PowerPoint to minimally capable of using email and word processing. Faculty had course loads reduced by one section in order to work on this course development. However, all agreed that more release time was needed.

The usual problems with Beta software were encountered with incomplete directions, strange errors, and undocumented consequences. However, all problems were solved as they were identified. Finding and linking to sources proved to be the most difficult task. All agreed that extensive planning was necessary before beginning the actual construction of the computer-based materials and instruction.

Over four months, the faculty members were able to develop the courses of instruction that they had planned.

In Sociology (SOCI 1301), the instructor developed a master table of contents for the class and two chapters of stand alone material. These involved over 35 sections of discussions and explanations, 12 graphic files, and 1 video file. Additional material will be added later.
In English (ENGL 1301), the instructor developed three explanatory units involving different types of essays and one literature unit on Romeo and Juliet. These involved over 15 sections of discussion and explanation, 3 graphic files, and extensive links to sites on the Internet that offered additional material including both text and graphic files.
In Training Techniques (TCM 150), the instructor developed a master table of contents along with converting to computer-based instruction 6 previous PowerPoint lectures and developing links to outside sources of additional material previously only referenced during lecture. By Fall, student projects will begin to further develop these materials to add audio and video along with additional graphic files.

Students have not yet been able to work on the materials in their final forms. Instructional revisions will be expected after student tryouts. Insertion of the course materials into a delivery system is behind schedule but should be accomplished by Summer 1999.

Plans to use Microcosm are evolving. Development in all three courses continues with full implementation expected in Fall 1999. Additionally, plans are for some computer literate instructors to begin course development as early as Summer 1999. Other faculty members will probably not begin work until 2000. Curriculum changes will make the Training Techniques course into an instructional development course within one year. Instead of the current emphasis on face to face or platform instruction, students in computer programs at the college will begin to develop computer-based instructional materials.

References

(Green 1997) Green, Kenneth C. (1997). 1997 National Survey of Information Technology in Higher Education, The Campus Computing Project 2.

(Spear 98a) Spear, Mary Helen (1998). Pedagogical Standards of Good Practice in Distance Education, Proceedings of the 9^th International Conference on College Teach and Learning, Jacksonville.

(Hansen and Frick, 1997) Hansen, L. & Frick, T.W. (1997). Evaluation Guidelines for Web-Based Course Authoring Systems. Web-Based Instruction. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications Inc.

(HREF1) MICROCOSM PRO Home Page

URL: http://www.multicosm.com/microcosm/index.html

(HREF2) MHEC Interactive Courseware Initiative Framework Home Page

URL: http://www.umn.edu/mhec/ici/framework.html