Transcript 2009 MET Research Seminar 4 - Educational Technology Research

Practical experience leveraging online
content in a traditional classroom course
Robert Schudy
MET Educational Technology Research Seminar
Thursday, 4/30/2009, 12:00 PM. MET PC Lab 3
[email protected]
The course CS669 B1 Spring 09
• The online course CS669OL Database Design and Implementation for
Business Spring 1 09 is the web site for CS669 B1 Spring 09.
» No content changes were made, to better support comparisons with online.
» Conversion required about an hour of ID time, because the online course
was designed to be used in either 7 week or 14 week formats.
» There were almost no errors and no QA was performed.
» Dao has supported the course very well during execution.
• We have recorded about thirty hours of lectures and student
presentations using Apreso, and linked them from the online course
web site.
• All assignments and assessments are conducted online.
• I prepared approximately 1000 slides for in-class lectures.
About CS669 Database Design and
Implementation for Business
• During the course students learn data modeling, database
design, the Structured Query Language (SQL), and a little
database programming; that’s a lot to learn.
• Entry preparation ranges from database professionals to
database and IT novices.
• The primary pedagogic paradigm is a tutor guiding students
as they learn by doing: modeling data, designing
databases, and writing and running SQL and database
programs.
Challenges in CS669
• There is a heavy assignment grading workload. With resubmission
there can be more than fifty multi-page assignments per student.
» Automatically graded assessments help this.
» Will try some automatically graded assignments for Summer 2.
• The intellectual fabric is cognitively highly interdependent.
•
Diversity of student preparation
• The students are mainly working in demanding jobs while raising
families.
There’s an order of magnitude
fewer posts per student than is
typical in an online course.
Almost no participation in
classroom discussions
There are many assignments and a
comprehensive term project.
The are are advanced extra
credit assignments for the more
advanced students.
Multiple assignment submissions with
no penalty for late or resubmission.
Multiple term project milestones
and submissions.
•Six tutorial review quizzes
•Six graded quizzes
•All questions are released with tutorials.
•Most quizzes include diagrams.
Students take
the review
quizzes
multiple
times until
they have
learned
the
material.
The quizzes include many
figures both in the
questions and in the
possible answers.
Course Robustness
• The combination of a comprehensive course web site and full lecture
recording has made the course very robust.
• One student who has been hospitalized has even been able to keep up
and participate.
• Almost asynchronous quizzes and assignments creates more
scheduling flexibility for students.
• Online submissions and Gradebook brings order to the hundreds of
assignments and other graded items.
• The online infrastructure helps a great deal with course management.
Learning
• The more advanced and dedicated students are embracing
the rich diverse course content as an opportunity to learn all
about databases in fourteen weeks; they are doing very
well.
• Weaker students are availing themselves of the many
opportunities, including help content and resubmissions, to
learn from scratch and keep up surprisingly well.
Lessons Learned about Online courses
as Face to Face Web Sites
• Online courses make great web sites for face to face courses.
• Students love the review quizzes.
• Students appreciate the additional asynchrony of online quizzes and
reviewing lectures.
• We love the additional class time that online quizzes enable.
• It is working very well, and both the students and I want to do it again.
• There is more faculty workload with both in-class and online
preparation and dialog; I’m working on that.
Lessons Learned about Apreso in the Classroom
•
Faculty should learn how to operate the Apreso equipment, because the
technicians won’t always be able to help when you need it.
•
It took me about ten hours of lecturing to learn how to attend to both classroom
students and video students well.
•
Students became comfortable with video recording after about three classes.
•
Students didn’t come to class when they were ill, because they could watch the
lectures on video; this reduced the spread of disease.
•
Handing a mike to most students when they ask a question makes most
students uncomfortable.
•
The array of desk mikes works well, enabling interactive lectures.
•
Belt clip mikes don’t work with womens’ clothing.
•
We need better video lighting.
Online Quizzes Saved Class Time
• I have previously administered weekly in-class quizzes that cover
the material covered in lecture the previous week.
• In this experiment I used the six online quizzes taken outside class
on a flexible schedule.
• Online quizzes saved 30 minutes per week of class time.
• Online quizzes facilitated online review quizzes.
• This allowed more time for in-class discussions, several in-class
group database design exercises, and two more advanced short
lectures on subjects requested by students.
General Observations
• The richer learning environment provided by an online class enables
more dedicated students to learn more. Several students submitted
independently-defined term projects of high quality.
• The ability to review lectures, the online lectures, online discussions,
review quizzes and other rich infrastructure helps struggling students to
succeed.
• The online infrastructure facilitated record keeping for grading with
resubmissions, which is otherwise difficult.
• The students have learned a great deal about databases. Many are
now designing or redesigning database systems at work.