Information • Textbooks • Media • Resources edited by
Teaching with Technology
James P. Birk Arizona State University Tempe, AZ 85287
Delivering a Chemistry Course over the Internet Daonian Liu, L. James Walter, and David W. Brooks Center for Curriculum and Instruction, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588-0355 Access to professional development opportunities for in-service high school chemistry teachers remains a problem. In December 1993 we decided to try an Internet-based approach to explore one way to increase teacher access. At that time we had what we thought to be effective materials for teaching. Experience with the use of email on the Internet suggested that using a list server together with email between students and instructor and among students would afford adequate communication. In 1994, a new cross-listed course, Chemistry 869/Curriculum and Instruction 869, was planned and created at the University of Nebraska to be offered via the Internet. The course dealt with using smallscale chemistry in high school laboratory teaching. CDROM materials were available to support instruction about small scale (1). The course was offered during the period of January through July 1995. We hoped that the lack of direct contact including instruction related to hands-on work would be offset by ease of access and the ability to try out new ideas directly with high school students in the teacher’s ongoing classes. Course Content and Objectives Although small-scale laboratory activities had begun to emerge in 1985, by late 1993 there still was a great need for teacher training in these techniques. The course was divided into seven modules, and two weeks were set aside for catch-up and completion. All in all, 23 weeks were scheduled. The module topics were Stoichiometry and Solution Stoichiometry; Gas Laws; Descriptive Chemistry; Mass Measurements/Interfacing; A Quantitative or Qualitative Problem; Interdisciplinary Efforts; and Summary of Experiments. Each module had a general assignment and two specific, substantial assignments, one for chemistry and one for education. Everyone was to complete the general assignment and contribute to discussions. Students enrolled for chemistry would complete two substantial chemistry assignments and one substantial education assignment. Education enrollees were to complete two substantial education assignments and one chemistry assignment. The first module assignments are described below. When spreadsheets were developed and discussed,
Module 1. Stoichiometry and Solution Stoichiometry (3 weeks) Review of currently available activities. Teachers are assigned one experiment to test and perform, and to gather classroom data. The data from classes are shared in the course. The related teaching strategy is using a computer spreadsheet to record data from student groups. Assignment 1 Chemistry. Develop and test a new or alternative procedure for a stoichiometry activity. This new activity must address some specific problem not otherwise addressed by existing experiments, or must yield either much cleaner
data or much better results (less costly, quicker, etc.) Education. Use the spreadsheet data to have a class (or classes) analyze the results of a class experiment. Teacher prepares a report on this analysis, and leads an Internet discussion about it. Describing the Course The course was advertised on the Internet through the ChemEd list server (Chemistry Education Discussion List, 1994). The following requirements were stated: • • • •
access to a color Macintosh with a CD-ROM drive and a hard drive the ability to send/receive email via Internet, at least twice weekly and the ability to accomplish FTPs, and access to a lab with small scale lab hardware. (Equipment kits, not included in tuition/fees, will be available for purchase from a commercial supplier.)
The course also was described at two national meetings. As it turned out, the ACS-sponsored newsletter ChemUnity was devoting an entire issue to small-scale chemistry, and the issue editor asked for a descriptive article about the electronic course (2). There were more than 40 inquiries about the course, and ultimately more than 20 persons enrolled. Every enrollee received syllabi and other materials by email. There was one each from Lincoln, Nebraska; New Delhi, India; and Honolulu, Hawaii. The other students came from the contiguous United States other than Nebraska. It was somewhat of a surprise that many enrollees were teaching at two-year colleges. Quantity and Quality of the Work The assignments for the electronic course were modeled after a summer workshop. The senior author has always been very satisfied with the quantity and quality of student work in these workshops. For the electronic course, the quantity and quality of work were very mixed. Some of the best work ever presented to the instructor on small-scale was submitted during this course. Indeed, some very innovative experiments were developed for which independent publication has been encouraged. On the other hand, some work never quite got up to speed. The Technology The technology proved to be a severe limitation. At the one extreme, the technologically well-endowed were able to handle anything that came their way. In fact, they created a few problems. At one time a file was received from a student which the instructor had no means of using until he obtained a copy of suitable software on a computer at a university technology facility. However, this was not a really big problem.
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Information • Textbooks • Media • Resources many teachers were software challenged. Indeed, some had only occasional access to a computer with a suitable CDROM player. It was clear that some students either were awful email editors or had very poor software. Finally, some students even had limited access to email! One complained about being denied access to the Internet by the provider three times in one month. Although the course descriptions contained information about the technology that would be required, in retrospect we should have insisted upon some demonstration of performance before registration. Mismatching Schedules Impaired a Major Goal While it was a noble goal to have teachers use materials with their students, the failure of the curriculum for this course to match the various curricula in use by the teachers proved problematic. Sometimes the fits were very poor. For this reason, there was much less work with students than we had hoped would be undertaken. Completion Rate The completion rate was a major disappointment to the instructor; about half of the students completed the course. Because of the course structure (three-week windows), it received a relatively low priority among many participants. It was perhaps the easiest thing in everyone’s schedule to put off during periods when time became constrained. More than 12 months after the course ended, two students were still making some effort to complete the work. Several students indicated during telephone interviews that they took the course just to see what it was like, and they really had no intention of completing it. Holistic Evaluation The instructor is committed to high completion rates; the low completion rate was a disappointment. With one exception, the students judged the course in a very favorable light. Some were interested in just seeing what it would be like to take a course this way. Several indicated that the course helped them to learn a great deal. There were several spinoffs: for example, opportunities to have peer reviews for grant proposals prepared by the teachers for their schools. It is clear that we had some success, and that more attention to admitting only those with good electronic access and applying selected academic pressures to keep performance rates higher would have led to greater success. The Personal Touch The instructor usually teaches this material in a highly collaborative environment where there is nearly continuous face-to-face exchange and hands-on activity. He definitely missed this. As the course began, he asked several faculty at other institutions to sign onto the list server and note the exchanges. They were to be silent participants. After about three weeks of watching email exchanges, one of these persons asked to be dropped from the list server, complaining about the impersonal nature of the course. The instructor has met only four of the students face-to-face, and has seen one other from her Web page. On the other hand, one student dropped the course because very serious illness befell a close relative of hers. The instructor contacted her frequently about the relative’s progress, and even encouraged her to continue the course at whatever time worked for her. In a course like this, personal contact is diminished but it cer124
tainly is not zero. Several students’ work was such that they have been used as paid reviewers in other activities undertaken from our center. Students’ Rights As we began the course, a very controversial topic arose on the ChemEd list server. This, together with urging from the student member of this team (DL), led to the appointment of an ombudsperson, a prospective student who chose to “sit in” rather than register. The ombudsperson never reported a complaint. In fact, a few students thought the appointment was much ado about nothing. Other Results We initiated this course at a time when such courses and technologies were a novelty. A substantial and consistent body of evidence is emerging related to Internet-based instruction. Distance education has been reviewed in the context of one of the most comprehensive programs ever established, the British Open University (3). Internet-based discussion is as effective as face-to-face classroom discussion in many situations; sometimes it is more effective (4). Tinker and Haavind recently “reviewed in detail all netcourses for teachers in mathematics and science” (5). Individual studies are emerging that concern student reactions to electronic discussion, and early results are favorable (6). Web-teaching has been reviewed by Brooks (7). He offers both a basis in instructional theory and many practical suggestions for those interested in starting Web-teaching. At the time we undertook this work, there was a sense that email contact and list server discussion groups could support important parts of a graduate course. We used a CDROM as a course text and laboratory manual (1), a procedure up until that time not described in the literature. Liu’s work remains the only study of CD-ROM use in chemistry that we know of (8). The Future Were this to be undertaken today, the instructor would make several substantial changes. We would be Web-based and thereby avoid several hardware and software problems. We would continue CD-ROM use to minimize Web connect time. ROM materials would be playable using standard Web software. Every student would be expected to have videoconferencing TV capability such as CU-SeeMe (9). There would be a technology pretest; students would need to demonstrate an ability to use all of the technologies we plan for course use. (It’s not that hard to do; also, we could and probably would supply prospective students with videotapes of how to accomplish these technologies.) The list server would be replaced with some kind of Web page discussion system. We’d archive some student results, and post text and images of ongoing work. Finally, whenever work progress slowed, there would be a scheduled time during which the videoconferencing system would be used for a teacher–student conference. It is very clear that some participants would have been excluded by these added requirements. As time goes on, teachers are getting access to more powerful equipment, better software, faster networks, small TV cameras, etc. In this context, increased up-front enrollment restrictions seem ever less severe.
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Information • Textbooks • Media • Resources Research: More Detail Many of the details of this experience have been described engagingly in a thick description case study presented as a doctoral dissertation (9). Copies of all electronic transactions in the course were preserved. Students completed questionnaires three times during the course. Finally, about three months after the course ended, an independent interviewer contacted 11 of the students for a structured interview. The appendices of this dissertation offer interested readers great detail for review and analysis. This research involved human subjects and was conducted with the approval of the University of Nebraska Institutional Review Board, IRB # 95-03-207 EX. Literature Cited 1. Brooks, H. B.; Brooks, D. W.; Epp, D.; Curtright, R. D.; Lyons, E. J.; Brooks, G. D. SmallScale; Synaps Chem Tools: Lincoln , NE, 1994. 2. Brooks, D. W. Chemunity, 1994, 4(3), 21. 3. Bates, A. W. Technology, Open Learning and Distance Education; Routledge: London, 1995. 4. Harasim, L.; Hiltz, S. R.; Teles, L.; Turoff, M. Learning Networks; MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1995. 5. Tinker, R.; Haavind, S. J. Sci. Ed. Technol. 1996, 5(3), 217. 6. Karayan, S. S.; Crowe, J. R. T. H. E. Journal 1997, 24(9), 69. 7. Brooks, D. W. Web-Teaching; Plenum: New York, 1997. 8. Liu, D. Ph. D. Dissertation. Available online: http://www.cci. unl.edu/CVs/Dissertations/LiuDiss.html; August 1996. 9. For example, see http://www.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/ Multimedia/Videoconferencing/CU_SeeMe/.
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