A Web Dream Team: The Seven Principles and WebCT
2004; Rapid Intellect Group; Volume: 8; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1096-1453
Autores Tópico(s)Experimental Learning in Engineering
ResumoAbstract Prompted by a demand for increased efficiency, measurable outcomes, dwindling resources, and changing student demographics, academics worldwide face challenge of meshing teaching and technology. This paper discusses how enhancing traditional face-to-face classrooms with WebCT can help teachers adopt a more effective student-centered perspective. WebCT offers educators not only a way to incorporate into their classrooms and redesign them in challenging ways, but also to advance Chickering and Gamson's Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education. ********** As a professor at a science and engineering university, push to more technology in my classes comes as no big surprise. Academics worldwide face challenge of meshing and teaching to meet demands for increased efficiency, measurable outcomes, dwindling resources, and changing student demographics. Course management systems like WebCT promise to help address many of these challenges, but can WebCT really help students learn? As I developed a series of traditional classes enhanced with online WebCT sites, I answered this nagging question--not by focusing primarily on but by returning to Chickering and Gamson's 1987 classic, Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education. For me, three years and seven hybrid classes later, verdict is in affirming WebCT as an effective way to enhance teaching and learning. For me, WebCT and Seven Principles have become an educational Dream Team. For those new to course management systems, WebCT was created in 1997 and now bills itself as the world's leading provider of e-learning systems for higher education, with member institutions in 70 countries (http://www.webct.com). WebCT can be used to create entire online courses or to supplement existing courses. Students use passwords to login to WebCT site, which provides an online environment for placing course materials and features like a calendar, quizzes, grade book, e-mail, and discussion boards. WebCT does not require extensive HTML skills, and company's web site provides tutorials. However, it does require a strong computer infrastructure and support system to handle technical difficulties that can--and do--pop up. Williams believes that research on using Web in a pedagogical context has so far been limited to description(s) of implementation with little regard to wider issues (41). Although this is a legitimate concern given WebCT's global use, a number of studies do point to WebCT's ease of use, effective range of features, and positive student reception (Clark; Stith; McLean and Murrell). Other research concludes that students learn equally well in web environments despite differences in learning styles, gender, age, or previous web-based learning experiences (Lu, et al.; Morss; Wernet, et al.; Wolfe). These studies helped me get my (web) feet wet and create my first two hybrid classes with WebCT links to Syllabus, Lectures, Research Sites, Quizzes, E-mail, and Grade Book. Although I liked organization WebCT offered and student surveys at end of term were positive, I wondered if this hybrid approach fostered what Marton and Saljo call deep-level learning, as opposed to memorize-and-recall surface-level learning (117). I realized that although I was using new technology, I was entrenched in a pedagogy that was more teacher-centered than student-centered, i.e., students learning as a result of what teacher does, not what student does. I was providing learning resources, not learning activities. According to Biggs, the learning activity, and not or medium in which it is used, is key to improved outcomes (quoted at Housego and Freeman). The only interactive online activities I provided were sporadic quizzes and emails. Simply providing a site that functioned as a repository of knowledge wasn't enough to stimulate deep learning. …
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