Using Web-Based Course to Enhance Educational ...

Using Web-Based Course to Enhance Educational Process in Qatar – A Case Study *

Mahmoud M. El-Khouly

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and

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Samir Abou El-Seoud

* Mathematics Dept., Faculty of Science, Helwan University, Egypt Princess Sumaya University for Technology (PSUT), Amman-Jordan

In the following section, background and web-based system used will be presented. Then the section contains initial survey and the discussion will take place. Finally, conclusion and future work will be given.

Abstract- The parallel education program in Qatar University faces a lot of problems due to lack of academic staff. To avoid continues decay, we thought that using one of asynchronous distance education delivery systems could be helpful. Among various possibilities for implementing asynchronous distance education delivery computer supported ones had been used. The evaluation showed that the web-based course is very promising not only for parallel education program, but also for traditional learning.

II. BACKGROUND The World Wide Web (WWW) provides an opportune media for education. It provides many, if not all, of the potentialities required in the course of education from the simple display of materials for presentation to interaction among the students and instructors and simulations of systems and environments. Some of the benefits of the Web are: • Ideal to link/integrate a university community. • Lesson materials can use color, sound and animation and can include the instructor’s voice as in the lessons the authors have developed. • E-mail is offered to all students and enhances communication between teacher and student. Especially for female, who shy to ask teacher face to face. • Bulletin boards/campus notices that are computerbased enhance the flow of information [1].

I. INTRODUCTION In Qatar, there is only one national university named “University of Qatar”. It is established in 1977, and concerned with all aspects of academic education and research intended for the preparation of professionals and specialists who will enrich the development of Qatari society. The university has ultra modern facilities on two separate campuses (male and female). The current number of students in the university is about 9000 with a ratio of female to male around two. The university offers a parallel education program to allow students who could not attend lectures at the morning due to several reasons, to continue their studies. Table (1) shows the number of students whom accepted from 1998 to 2002. It is very clear from the data of faculty of Science for example, that the faculty begin to reduce the number of students who can register in this program due to the lack of academic staff. While other faculty, e.g. Engineering faculty couldn’t open this program for female, and it is almost closed for male.

Why use Web-based learning? - Use the Web as a “mega” library: no local library may now compete with the Web as an information source, at least regarding the quantity of information available.

TABLE I Number of Male/Female students at continuing education program Faculty Humanities & societies sciences Science Islamic Studies Economics Engineering Basic Program Unit Not Specialist Total

1998 M. 31 20 37 99 9 39 91 326

1999 F. 20 6 20 31 0 6 5 88

M. 29 24 26 79 2 21 28 209

2000 F. 19 4 19 30 0 14 2 88

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M. 104 50 93 147 0 4 7 405

2001 F. 38 15 46 92 0 8 0 199

M. 124 1 153 3 0 80 0 361

2002 F. 97 9 89 0 0 6 0 201

M. 51 5 127 0 0 46 0 229

Total F. 127 6 104 0 0 17 0 254

640 140 714 481 11 241 133 2360

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Use IT to learn about IT: many students have poor skills on the technical side of IT. One of the objectives of the course is to get them to the point where they will be able to make efficient decisions about IT implementation. They are encouraged to search for this information on the Web, and then to join them to the models developed in the local course. Better understand the problematic of document information management Increase the part dedicated to auto-training [2].

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Almost half of U.S. University and colleges provide some form of education online. About 44 percent of college courses already use e-mail, while 33 percent of college courses use the Internet and 23 percent use the Web as part of the course itself. By 2007 almost half of all university and college students will take some courses through distance education technologies [3].

Stimulate recall of prerequisite learning. Present the required stimulus material. Provide learning guidance. Enhance retention and transfer. The material must be user friendly, academically respectable, able to be used by the average student. Learning materials and peripheral media must be easily available to students. Tutors and students need to be familiar with distance learning methodology and practice. The whole system must be managed effectively. Monitoring, evaluation, and feedback must be administration rather than the educational issues or hardware requirements [4,5]. III. THE WEB SITE

The introductory page of the course provides the student with the required information about the course, e.g., text book used, time and place to contact the teacher, and teacher’s email, etc. (see Figure 1). The Web site was developed around an on-line syllabus (see Figure 2). This syllabus provides a link to the module for each topic, details about each topic, and assignments needed. When a student clicks a link, it goes to required home page of this topic, which contains the material (text, graphics, audio, video) describing the topic.

Issues considered for the system to be effective educationally 1- Be designed to allow students to advance in simple steps. 2- Be capable of displaying text, charts, graphs, pictures, models, and possibly auditory information. 3- Gain attention of the learner. 4- Inform the learner of the course objects.

Fig. 1. The introductory page of the database course

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addresses. Use is as simple as sending e-mail. Archives of messages can be accessed through the WWW and users may subscribe from a Web page or by sending email to a server.

Faculty and student reaction Student reaction to Web-based teaching has been extremely positive. It is also an opportunity for students to acquire specific computer skills that they see as making them very marketable. In particular, computer science department students have reacted very positively and are encouraged by the higher status they feel by participating in this new system. One serious problem that needs addressing is: students without the pre-requisite computer skills face difficulties concerning dealing with Acrobat Reader Program and download procedure.

Chat Chat is text-based synchronous communication. Some richness is provided by the immediacy of communication where another person’s words appear on the screen line-by – line or character-by-character. Many Web sites offer a free chat service for their customers. Some community building services also provide a list of community members who are currently online and available for chat.

Communication services used in the system Electronic mail Electronic mail is the most used asynchronous communication medium. It has long been possible to attach objects of any kind (from documents to multimedia enriched files) to e-mail. Recent enhancements make it possible to enrich the message itself by inserting HTML code in the body of the mail. It is possible to add different styles and colors to the text, to embed images or to reproduce full HTML pages. [6].

Audio and video tools Asynchronous audio and video have a long history as educational media for presentations and for interactive activities. A growing Internet telephony market, free software and the adoption of standards has now made synchronous desktop audio video communications both accessible and affordable. For difficult lectures, the teacher record what are going on screen both audio and video and save it as media player file format, to allow students to see exactly how he managed difficult problems on the computer. The addressed problem is that, the file must be broken down to small pieces to be easy for download.

Distribution lists Distribution lists are systems where e-mail messages are sent to a centralized server, and from there distributed to a list of

Fig. 2. Web-based syllabus

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100 80 Agree

40

Not Agree

%

60

20 0 Group I Group II Group III Group IV Fig. 3. Learners’ View on Web-based courses

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IV. THE INITIAL SURVEY In order to determine if students would use the Web site and if the site would help in the learning process a survey was developed. Students were surveyed at the time of the second mid-term exam. A total of 135 students in two course sections; named (“Advanced programming using C++” and “Fundamentals of database”), participated in the survey as follow: - Group I : 64 female - normal education Fundamentals of database course - Group II : 22 female - parallel education Fundamentals of database course - Group III: 21 female - normal education - Advanced programming using C++ course - Group IV : 28 male - parallel education - Advanced programming using C++ course. 95% of students indicated they had visited the class Web site. When students were asked if they felt the Web site had helped them learn the course material, 89% indicated it had, while 11% indicated it hadn’t, as shown in figure (3).

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There is no Internet connection in their home. Only Internet available at the library (for female, not for male) rather than the computer laboratories. Elapsed time to download the material from the web site. V. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK

In this paper, we presented the need for web-based course in Qatar University and our steps toward building the whole elearning system. We implemented two courses as a first step for computer science students. A questioner had been made for 135 students, and the result was very promising, since 89% agreed to use the system, while the problems faced the other 11% can be solved by completing the system. Our future work is to assign a good sever to hold all the courses and to complete the system such that it can be used to check the students performance. REFERENCES [1] Dushyanthi Hoole & S. Ratnajeevan H. Hoole, “Web-based Teaching: Infrastructure Issues in the Third World”.In Anil Aggarwal (Ed.), “WebBased Learning and Teaching Technologies: Opportunities and Challenges”, Idea Group Pub., 2000. [2] Liliane Esnault & Romain Zeiliger, “Web Learning with Nestor: The Building of a New Pedagogical Process”. In Anil Aggarwal (Ed.), “WebBased Learning and Teaching Technologies: Opportunities and Challenges”, Idea Group Pub., 2000. [3] William Horton, “Designing Web-Based Training: How to Teach Anyone Anything Anywhere Anytime”, John Wiley & Sons, 2000. [4] Aronson, D. T., & Briggs, L. J., “Contributions of Gagne and Briggs to a prescriptive model of instruction. In C.M. Reigeluth (Ed.), “Instructionaldesign theories and models: An overview of their current status”. NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 75-100, 1983. [5] Overbaugh, R. C., “Research-based guidelines for computer-based instruction development”. Journal of Research on Computing in Education, 27(1), 29-47, 1994. [6] Jane Klobas & Stefano Renzi, “Selecting Software and Services for WebBased Teaching and Learning”. In Anil Aggarwal (Ed.), “Web-Based Learning and Teaching Technologies: Opportunities and Challenges”, Idea Group Pub., 2000.

Discussion The satisfactory percent for Group II and Group IV, which represent the students in parallel education program, are 100% and 96% respectively. While for Group I and Group III, which represent the students in normal education program are 84% and 81% respectively, as shown in figure (3). Students who indicated that the Web site course helped them explained the reasons behind that, which are: 1. Reading material before the lecture help to build an idea about the lecture topic. 2. During lecture, the student can concentrate only for understanding rather for writing what the instructor speak about. Students who indicated that the Web site course didn’t help them explained the reasons behind that, which are:

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