Network Based Delivery and Automated Management of Virtual University Courses V. Wade, Department of Computer Science, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland.
[email protected] C. Power, Department of Computer Science, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland.
[email protected]
Abstract: Factors such as increasing class sizes, expanding curriculum, added time pressure on students and lecturing staff, contention for library resources and study space as well as the cost of educational administration have prompted the application of advanced technology to both enhance the pedagogical aspects of teaching and relieve administration and management resources. However, no single technology is appropriate to support both the pedagogical requirements and administrative imperatives required for course delivery in a virtual educational environment. This paper identifies student and course delivery management requirements and describes the seamless integration of appropriate multimedia and groupware technologies to support course delivery within a virtual student desktop. The paper presents the resulting experiences and lessons learned in delivering educational services using virtual environments based on the execution of three trials involving over 300 students in Trinity College Dublin.
1. Pedagogical and Administrative Requirements for Course Delivery A University setting where class sizes are large and schedules are tight provides a unique opportunity for developing courses using a range of advanced information technology. Yet such a scenario places many requirements on the administrative, pedagogical and support services in order to successfully execute technology based courses. There have been many experiments of tele-education in the US and in Europe [Schank 93][Soloway 93] and many institutions have developed IT based educational material e.g WWW educational sites and multimedia materials [WLH 97]. The growing availability of authoring tools e.g. [WBT 97][Learn 97] should increase the number of such educational resources; however, these facilities are seldom part of an integrated educational system where the education is formally managed and administered. For the educators or tutors, participation of class members should be manageable e.g. course registration, controlling access to class discussions, automatic collection/distribution of assignments and projects should all be functionally accessible to the tutor. Computer facilities for courses should also provide a means of monitoring each students usage of the educational resources and comprehension of the content. Educators and course administrators need well defined systems for the certification and assessment of a students progress [Hamalainen et al. 96][Carroll et al 95]. Techniques for ensuring that only students who participate in the course for its duration and achieve the desired results have yet to be properly defined and accepted. New ways of stimulating and motivating course participants are required which make use of these ‘teletechnologies’ [Tuckey 92] and early experiments have proved that course composition, presentation and assessment have to be redesigned in order to produce effective courses [Turoff 95]. Tests carried out between two groups of students participating in a traditional educational course have shown that the students who had access to supplemental multimedia (e.g. video, audio and animation) and simulation environments [UTOR 95], did significantly better than the students who did not have access to such material [Kaplan 97]. Students require flexibility in the timing of course delivery and desire the opportunity to participate in the course away from the university campus [Prospect 95]. Existing courses try to reduce the users requirements on hardware and software and allow them choose the time and place more freely [ELMA 96]. Thus course delivery must be configurable to a wide range of computing environments which offer both a uniform interface and the option of personal
mobility [Trollip 96]. An on-line support service is beneficial from an educational and technical point of view [Fitzgerald et al. 95][Sherry et al. 96] as this allows any difficulties or problems that arise during delivery of the course to be easily notified and efficiently handled. Technical support staff in educational institutions identify reliability, configurability and administration as vital elements in course delivery [Prospect 95]. Both educational and technical support must be successfully integrated into the university organisation for any large scale implementations of Internet based education.
2. Motivation and Objectives In the TCD computer science department, there are several taught courses in database technologies given as part of the daytime and evening Computer Science, Maths, & Computer Engineering degree programmes. Several of these courses cover similar material, namely an introduction to SQL (relational database query language). Therefore in order to reduce the time pressure in lectures, reduce redundancy in preparation/delivery of lectures, ‘improve’ interaction with and dissemination of educational material, and provide more in-depth exposure to subject material, a ‘self learning’ student-centered course was developed for delivery in a virtual learning environment. Other motivations were to reduce the contention on library resources, automate the process of tracking, monitoring and testing/evaluating student knowledge and to provide a basis for course development across the different degree programmes. The course was designed as a ‘Self Learning’ course concerned with the theories & practical skills (application) of relational database management systems. The Self Learning course was run in parallel to lectures (over a 5 week period) and sought to: • • • • •
Provide good overview of subject which can be integrated into different degree courses Provide persistent access to educational material Stimulate student ‘innovation’ and ‘discovery’ Capture requirements for tools needed to support such courses Integrate educational and communication paradigms into a single virtual environment
• • • • • •
Extend classroom learning paradigm Stimulate student experimentation Provide greater time flexibility Provide a ‘Living’ course content Capture student usage & student feedback Provide online management of students work and course delivery
3. Virtual Educational Environment One of the key requirements for delivery of the course is the ability for students to easily access and load a virtual student environment without needing to install customised or specialised software or hardware. For this reason the Virtual Student Desktop (VSD) was developed to provide a single environment from which a range of courses could be delivered and within which the various technologies needed to support pedagogic paradigms and administrative systems are seamlessly integrated. The VSD is accessible using standard WWW browsers e.g. Netscape 3.x (or higher), HotJava browser or Internet Explorer. By accessing a particular WWW site, the VSD is automatically launched on the students machine. This enables the course to be delivered and auxiliary administrative/management systems to be initiated at the remote (educational provider’s) site. All pedagogical and administrative systems (on the educational provider site) are executed transparently via the VSD, giving a single ‘look and feel’ to the virtual environment. All student interaction is facilitated via the VSD. The VSD is rendered (by the student WWW browser on the student’s machine) as a set of WWW windows, frames, tool bar and icons. All native WWW browser buttons are suppressed (hidden) so as not to distract the user from the main goal of education. A tool bar specially designed for educational use is provided by the VSD at the bottom of the screen and provides an interface to the administrative systems. From this tool bar the student is able to contact tutors or fellow students, access external systems, as well as navigate and interact with the educational course material.
Figure 1: Virtual Student Desktop 3.1 Virtual Course Content & Student administration The course content comprises of text, graphics, and animation and is divided into sections, with each section consisting of a small number of modules (a module typically being 1 - 5 pages). The virtual course trialled is concerned with the understanding of Relational Databases and the usage of Relational Database Language (SQL). On accessing the course for the first time, a student is asked to authenticate themselves using a unique user id and password (distributed previously). Then the administrative systems are engaged and the student is subscribed to a course and the appropriate student monitoring systems are loaded. Each student must authenticate herself/himself each time s/he logs onto the course. This allows a log of each students interaction with the educational material to be automatically maintained by the system for later analysis (in conjunction with tutorial results and evaluation forms). This information can be analysed for various pedagogic reasons (student usage, pattern analysis) and administrative motives (accounting for usage of course content and auxiliary systems). Overall the course comprised five different types of information: Administrative (i.e. how to use the course etc.); A database of (self contained) modules; Indexes or Roadmaps of specific courses through various modules; Project Assignment specifications & Evaluation Forms; Case Study. The roadmaps were important as the modules can be combined in several ways to satisfy the different requirements for different degree courses (e.g. business students, computer science students etc.). Each roadmap corresponds to a different learning objective of the RDBMS course. Thus the roadmaps provide a means of reusing existing modules with as little redundancy as possible of educational material and administrative overhead. A significant feature of the system was to provide direct access to a real ‘commercial’ RDBMS via the same interface as the educational course. As with the administrative services, the relational DBMS is seamlessly integrated into the student educational desktop. Thus the tool bar offered by the student educational desktop contains an icon which allows students to issue SQL queries on a live database. The idea of this is to deliberately blur the distinction between the educational environment and the ‘target’ systems. This encourages students to ‘try out’ various parts of the course before attempting a larger project. Another feature of the virtual educational environment is the ability of the student to store references to distinct locations in the course material (bookmarks). Traditionally these are stored locally on the student’s machine. However this has disadvantages as students rarely use the same machine all the time. The VSD allows such bookmarks to be stored within the educational service and are thus (privately) accessible to an individual student at any time. Also if the student has logged off the course and logs back on, the VSD allows him/her the ability to resume at his/her most recent position or restart at the beginning.
Various forms of on-line tutorials are embedded into the course. ‘True or False’ and ‘Multiple Choice Questions’ are supported, with automatic correction and notification of marks to the student. Form based (short unstructured text style) answers are also facilitated in some tutorials. In these cases the student answers are automatically delivered to course tutors for subsequent correction. Also integrated into the course are evaluation forms which, when completed, are automatically submitted and stored for later analysis by course tutors. The VSD provides buttons to contact other class members or to seek tutor assistance. Again, this is offered via WWW forms and integrated transparently with an email delivery system. The course also provides several larger project specifications one of which each student is required to implement. The implementation of the projects could also be done via the educational interface, providing better pedagogical support for the project implementation.
4. Implementing the Student Virtual Desktop As described earlier, the course is delivered using WWW technologies. The WWW is based on a client server architecture. Requests are made by the client side (student) browser to the initial VSD engine which sets up the functionality of the student desktop. The server delivers this in the form of HTML, CGI and JavaScript. From this point on, all other requests are made by the client and returned by the VSD server. The tutor(s) are always directly accessible from within the VSD. Scripting in the client side monitors the users progress through the course material and stores user preferences for each user. At the start and end of each session the user information is retrieved and stored respectively at the server side for future use. In this way the educational environment fully supports the mobility of users between locations. The advantage of client side scripting being the reduction in network bandwidth due to the avoidance of continuous client server communications. The individualised usage data provided by the client side monitoring system enables the tutor to check on each students progress in the course. Information that is stored are user bookmarks, last page visited by the user so that they can return directly to this page at the start of the next session, total time spent on each module which is useful in determining any specific problem modules and the number of times each module was accessed by each student. A simulation environment is also enabled by providing a gateway between the educational student desk and a real life commercial database. This was achieved using the VSD engine combined with CGI scripting as the middleware between the desktop and the database. Students could query an example database straight from the educational environment thus blurring the distinction between theory and practice. Tutorial questions, project assignments and an evaluation form were also handled online via CGI scripting with feedback to the students and correction by the course engine. Off site access to the virtual desktop (and hence course delivery) was facilitated by ISDN or dial-up modem access to the campus network on which the educational site was available.
Figure 2: System Architecture
5. Trial Execution and Evaluation The RDBMS course is currently in it’s third year of academic trials involving a total of 300 students. The first trial (performed in 1995) used a basic text/graphic WWW interface. Having captured and evaluated feedback on the first trial, a second trial was performed in 1996. A third trial has been completed in December 1997. [Table 1] provides a summary of the objectives and an assessment of these objectives based on the experience of those sitting the course (harvested via evaluation forms and student interviews). Original Objective Topic Covered Comprehensively
Extend Classroom Learning Paradigm
Provide greater time flexibility Persistence of Educational Material ‘Living’ course content Stimulate student innovation discovery and experimentation Online management of course delivery and students work
Integrate educational and communication paradigms into a single virtual environment Capture requirements for tools to support WWW based educational courses
Assessment Students were able to complete, competently, a medium sized project with little further background reading other than a RDBMS systems User Manual (available on line). Also students undertook an oral exam to evaluate the effectiveness of the course. However, there are always a few topics which could be added! It considerably improved the original method which consisted of several tutorials (paper based) and a couple of unsupervised labs. It generated much greater usage, understanding and questioning of the course as the students knew their work was being automatically monitored and assistance was ‘virtually’ close at hand. Most students appreciated this, especially as the term during which the course was taken was heavily timetabled with other lecture courses and project deadlines. However a few students indicated a preference to have their day scheduled for them! The educational course was available (and was used!) 24 hours a day, and was still available in the run up to end of year exams. Thus the course also served a purpose as revision material This was surprisingly useful as new information became available during the course execution. Also any ‘errors’ in the material could be corrected and advertised immediately (unlike the old situation which relied on printed handouts) This can be achieved (to a degree) via on line tutorials (with immediate feedback), access to external resources e.g. access to ‘case studies’ of real-life situations (commercial DB with application data and example usages). The blurring of the division between the ‘real world systems and information’ and the educational material is particularly important in this regard. On-line subscription to the VSD and account/usage monitoring of the VSD and course material were the main administrative system implemented and reduced greatly the time overhead in concurrently delivering the course to in excess of 100 students. However full integration of these administrative systems with college wide administration systems has not yet been perform although this can be done. By keeping the same ‘look and feel’ to the educational environment, whether sending notices to tutors or colleagues, communicating with external systems, or interacting with course material, the student is not burdened with multiple program interfaces or interaction paradigms. This was reflected in the student responses and questionnaires which complemented the easy to use/no manual needed approach to using the VSD. These requirements were captured from students taking the course using evaluation forms and interviews. The results can be tabulated and stored in databases to facilitate subsequent statistical analysis. Also during development of the course several useful tools became apparent e.g. automatic tutorial builder, road map generator etc.
Table 1 Assessment of Objectives The overall reaction by the students to the ‘Self Learning’ mechanism employed by the RDBMS course was very favorable. It succeeded in many of its objectives and provides a firm basis for future development.
6. Associated Trial of Educational Service The work already described to implement a campus-based educational service has been extended to play a role in a wider project which is concerned with commercial applications of tele-education in a pan-European context. The Prospect project [Wade 96] has been examining the issues which would be involved in realising an open service market place where various value added service providers may offer a customised educational service
implemented on top of network connectivity services (usually offered by public network operators or enterprise network providers). The Prospect consortium implemented a Tele-Educational environment which provides educational services across pan-broadband networks. This Tele-educational environment provides features to support group lectures using video and audio conferencing, a slide presentation mechanism and also group projects which additionally used a shared whiteboard [Riordan et al. 97]. The VSD has been successfully integrated as part of this Tele-Educational Environment without requiring any re-implementation. On entering the system a student is presented with a floorplan which shows a lecture hall, a self-study room, a group exercise room and a set of tutors offices. On entering a particular room an appropriate set of support applications were launched to allow the desired interaction to take place. For example, on entering a group exercise room, audio and video conferences are started between the people in the room. A shared whiteboard application is also launched showing the exercise to be completed. The students can then communicate in a whole set of modalities while attempting to solve the exercise.
Figure 2 Prospect’s Tele-Educational Environment
7. Conclusions and Future Work Our experience has shown significant benefits in using WWW technologies in supporting a virtual educational environment. The virtual environment facilitates the seamless integration of many different technologies to support both pedagogical and administrative systems in a university environment. The success of the trials have shown that network centered virtual educational environments can have a major impact on reducing the pressures of increasing class sizes, time pressure on students and lecturing staff, contention for library resources as well as the cost of educational administration. The trial based experience has also shown that an iterative approach to course design, feedback and then redesign/extension is very important. It is simply too expensive, in terms of development time to attempt the development of sophisticated virtual environments in the first year. A more practical and less risky approach is the iterative, cyclic approach which although facilitating only modest pedagogic benefits in the early years gradually provides a platform and expertise for more rapid growth in later years. The development of several other virtual courses in currently underway, and it is expected that the development time for these courses would be much shorter as the VSD is already implemented and templates and expertise exist for the development of subsequent course materials. A third conclusion was the significance of the linkage between the educational system and adequate administrative systems e.g. student monitoring, project/tutorial correction, course subscription. This is especially true for large size classes and for ‘off campus’ students. Our future research will involve enhancing the existing course including some adaptivity features and the development of appropriate tools to aid the development of such virtual courses. This would include tools for the auto generation of roadmaps for different applications of the course material. The overall aim of this is to
remove much of the manual work from the educator, thereby freeing them to concentrate on the more important pedagogical aspects.
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Acknowledgments The authors gratefully acknowledge that the research described in this paper has been partly funded by the European Union under the ACTS programme. The authors would like to thank the Prospect team for their support and encouragement during the corporate trials.
