eBBB

Using computer-mediated communication to support students on course SD206, Biology Brain & Behaviour

Introduction

Over the years, I have supported students on courses SDT286, SD286 and SD206, i.e. Biology Brain & Behaviour and its antecedent courses, by the usual methods of correspondence tuition and face-to-face tutorials, as well as telephone tuition. I have benefited from collaboration with colleagues over the years, especially Dr. Robin Orchardson, running complementary (separate) or joint (teaching together) tutorial sessions and day-schools for our combined student groups - and accumulating many teaching materials along the way.

With encouragement from Dr. Robin Harding, I have undertaken a small project this year to use electronic means of communication to supplement my other teaching approaches. The project coincides with my teaching on SD206 from February to October 2001.

Three initial aims were planned:-

1. improving communication with students by using email;
2. using email attachments to disseminate tutorial materials;
3. evaluating the use of such methods in distance teaching of BBB.

In satisfaction of aim 3 above, this brief report describes the project in two parts:

1. what I did and how I did it, and
2. student reactions to my efforts - was it worth the effort?

 

What I did

The original proposal: My original intention was simply to send emails informing students about proposed tutorial topics, inviting suggestions for discussion and sending tutorial materials as email attachments. What actually happened can be described as three phases.

Phase I: The proposal to send Word documents as attachments to emails was put to students at the first tutorial. Their overall response to the idea was positive.

Fairly soon, two major difficulties emerged:

1. the Word documents were large, even when compressed, and some students' software or hardware could not handle them;
2. a diversity of hardware amongst the students meant that some of them could not read Word document files - e.g. Mac users or students using TV sets with set-top boxes for emails via the Internet.

Phase III: Very quickly, this developed to the provision of a web-site on the World Wide Web. Materials were still sent as email attachments in case students wished to maintain the web-site on their own computer, the advantage of this being the possibility of students modifying their copy of the web-site to personalise it for their own study. This solved the problems associated with diverse hardware and software. It also made the information readily available even to students without their own computers using facilities in public libraries. The only remaining - and insoluble - problem was the occasional student using their TV set to access the Web and being unable to print out the files.

Paper versions of the materials were available at tutorials. For the few students without an email address and not attending tutorials, notes were sent out when returning their TMAs.
 
 
 
 

How I did it

Most of the work was done on an old desktop PC, running slowly with a 100mHz Pentium processor, but with SCSI hardware. The slow processor was, in fact, an advantage as it alerted me to the time taken for web pages to display, especially with graphics, and so helped me to take the possible limitations of students' hardware into consideration. At later stages of the project, the purchase of a faster notebook computer, running at 700mHz, improved productivity, but web pages were copied to the slow PC for testing before transmission to students. The notebook computer was very useful in face-to-face tutorials when the web pages could be used as a teaching aid.

Phase I

FirstClass was used to serve the email activity. Electronic conferencing was not used.

A large number of tutorial documents were already available from previous years. These were either written by myself or Robin Orchardson, sometimes modified from other sources. Some of the documents were ready for use as Word files. Others were only available on paper; these were scanned and OCR software, such as TextBridge, used to generate text files for editing into Word format. Added to these were new files, such as revision exercises and notes of tutorial discussions. Files were compressed with WinZip to form self-extracting archives that students could run to regenerate the files on their own computer.

Phase II

Quite simply, the Word documents were "saved as" HTML files, after editing in suitable hypertext links between the files. The process resulted in two significant benefits:

1. The web pages are very much smaller than the corresponding Word documents. This is because they are simple ASCII text files and the web browser generates all the nice formatting, in contrast to the Word document which contains many characters, hidden from the reader, to generate the formatted effects.
2. By including good links between the files, it is possible to guide the student from one topic to another. The set of linked files forming the web pages comprising the web-site can serve as a powerful teaching and learning opportunity.

As the files were being produced gradually as we worked through the tutorials, there was a phased distribution of material, facilitated by a hierarchical directory structure, i.e. arrangement of folders. A folder called BBBNotes contained within it a set of folders, BBBNote1 - BBBNote7, corresponding to the planned seven tutorials. The students used the WinZip self-extractors to place files in the appropriate folder, within a higher level folder called BBBTuts.

A shortcut and "nicely coloured" icon were also sent out with the files.

Phase III

In addition to sending self-extractors of the HTML files to students, versions of the files were generated to constitute a web-site located at http://www.David.Curtis.care4free.net . The main change required was to "flatten out" the directory structure to ensure compatibility with the computer system of the Internet Service Provider (ISP). There is a distinct possibility that the ISP might be using an operating system (such as UNIX) very different than that on one's home PC (probably Windows). The HTML files were now located within a single folder and, additionally, all filenames were changed to lower case, so the links between the files (web pages) had to be adjusted. At the same time, all graphics files were moved into a folder called images. I made these changes in the light of good advice received at the Staff Development Weekend (6-7 April 2001) on the use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) to support teaching.

At this stage in the project, I also used Word 2000 to generate new web pages. This was fast and effective, generating the HTML file and an associated folder containing the necessary graphics and ancillary files; this folder is named to associate it with the web page file (e.g. visrev.htm and visrev_files). However, this generates very large files. From the original Word file, visrev.doc = 429mb, Word 2000 (using the command "save as web page") gave a web page visrev.htm = 50kb plus visrev_files = 639 kb, total = 689kb. Contrast this with the file-sizes produced by Word95/Internet Assistant and Netscape: visrev.htm = 11kb plus visfigs.gif files = 68kb, total = 79kb.

The smaller files confer two distinct advantages: (i) they use less storage space on both local and remote computer systems and (ii) upload and download times are much shorter, especially if using a slow modem.

The web-site was tested on my desktop PC and then the published site at care4free.net maintained using Terrapin FTP software.

Part b:

Student feedback

Students were pleased with this provision of electronic material. Using a modified version of the "Mid-course Evaluation" document provided by the Open Teaching Toolkit Tutoring online: using CMC to support learning, a form requesting feedback was sent out electronically, made available at tutorials, and appended to TMA comments. To facilitate evaluation of the computer-mediated approach, this form also asked about the traditional approaches of face-to-face tutorials and TMA comments. A summary of the returns is shown in Appendix I.  Space was provided on the feedback form and students invited to write comments. As shown in Appendix II, these were both constructive and very encouraging.

Students clearly gave a 'thumbs-up' to this teaching approach.
 
 

The effectiveness of the three approaches in helping students understand the course and helping them with queries is best shown graphically:-
 
 

While all three approaches appear to work, it would seem that for the students, face-to-face tutorials have the edge.
 
 
 
 
 
 

There is a certain investment required for this use of computer technology to support distance teaching. As well as the effort required to generate the intellectual and factual content, i.e. write the notes in the first place, there are costs associated with the medium:-

• Appropriate hardware is required, including connection to the Internet, with associated financial implications. A related aspect is the use of web space, often limited e.g. to 30mb, for files on the ISP's computer system.
• Effective software is essential. This is not necessarily the most up-to-date; as indicated above, Word 95 with Internet Assistant produced more efficient web pages than the more modern Word 2000. The full version of WinZip was purchased, by download from www.winzip.com, so that self-extracting archives could be distributed to students, removing the need for students to have the specialised software. Additionally, for efficient uploading of web pages and web-site maintenance, ftp software was purchased from www.terrapin.com.
• Time is an important consideration. In the early stages of the project, I would spend up to 24 hours per week converting files from paper via OCR to Word documents and to hypertext. On top of this was time needed to send emails to students and replying to their messages, to a total commitment of around 30 hours per week. Once the bulk of the files had been converted, after about one month, weekly time on writing notes for specific tutorials, updating the web-site and email maintenance would occupy about eight hours on average. A significant amount of time was needed for preparation of graphics images for web pages.

The combined use of email and the web-site was certainly beneficial in at least three ways:-

• Asynchronous communication with students. In other words, an email could be received from a students, its contents thought over without having to give an instant response (as in a telephone conversation) but yet still sending an early reply which the students can read at a time convenient to them
• The web-site provides constantly available support material for students. No matter what technology they use to access the World Wide Web, they can use the tutorial materials whenever they wish.
• In face-to-face tutorials, the web pages can be used on a notebook computer to aid in the presentation of facts and ideas, as well as to answer students' questions and stimulate discussion.

The main end-product of the project was the web-site, pulling together my tutorial materials supplemented by notes generated at the tutorials themselves. The arrangement of web pages was deliberately kept simple - no high powered GIF-animations, no fancy multimedia extravaganza - just an attempt to present clear information. The primary aim was to present course topics to students in a slightly different way and to help students develop their understanding of the subject.

So was it worth all the effort? The answer is a definite "Yes!".

Postscript:

The Word document is quite large at  236 kb. The equivalent web page comprises a text file of only 22 kb and associated gif file of just 12 kb.
These were compressed into a zip file (38kb) used to make a self-extracting archive of  66 kb and emailed to the office.
The printed-out paper version was sent in to the office by first class post.
 

Appendix 1: Feedback from students on course SD206:

2. Have you attended face-to-face tutorials? (Please be honest!)

	Yes, regularly			Just a little		No
Glasgow & Paisley	4			3		1
Edinburgh	2			3		2
How helpful are the tutorials in following areas?		Very helpful	OK		Not very helpful		Not at all helpful
Getting help with queries about the course		8	2
Understanding the course material		8	2

3. Have you read my comments on your TMA? (Please be honest!)

	Yes 11		Just a little			No
If yes, how well did I do the following?		Very well		OK	Not very well		Not at all well
Help you understand the key concepts tested in the TMA		7		4
Help you organise the content of the answer		8		2	1
Give a clear explanation of where things went wrong and why		10		1
Help you appreciate the areas needing expansion and / or clarification.		8		3
Give you guidance as to how to improve in future		6		4	1

 

No. of replies = 11 , at 3 July 2001. Not all students completed all sections.

Appendix II

Student comments from the feedback form.

"I don't have access to a computer, but would use email and web-site all the time if I did."

"I have not been able to attend tutorials regularly this year and so really appreciate the tutorial notes sent back with the TMA. The Revision questions are a great help too."

"The email and website were very helpful when I was unable to attend tutorials. It was also a way of understanding and pulling together some threads."

"I am an old hand, and frankly no tutor ever looked after his students as you do!"

"I have access via work to the email but not web based material. Paper copy is very useful. I have difficulty in going to the tutorials. I find the comments very helpful and point towards what areas I need guidance on."

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