If you've been impressed with the recent surge in the number of online courses and degree programs emanating from America's colleges and universities, stand by. You ain't seen nothin' yet. We are on the verge of a positively explosive growth in this area, one that will extend worldwide and involve learners in settings that heretofore have been unimaginable.
The online revolution has the potential to change the face of higher education, one way or the other. For one thing, the Internet has no state or national boundaries; any institution offering instruction can reach any student with Internet access, anywhere in the world, anytime. Second, the immediacy of the Internet means that courseware can be kept current and specific and delivered on a "just in time" basis to those with the greatest need. Third, and by far the most important, if colleges and universities can offer courses in this way, so can our competition. More than a thousand corporations now operate training divisions called colleges, universities, or institutes, including many Fortune 500 companies such as Motorola, Ford, and AT&T. Tradition-bound academe stands the risk of becoming increasingly irrelevant if propriety institutions can do a more effective job of preparing new employees for the work force, or retraining current employees, in a shorter time frame, without being locked into semester schedules or demanding two years of general education credits.
As instructional technology professionals, we should be in the middle of this picture. During the past year, the marketplace has seen a number of new products that enable faculty to develop and manage web-based courses. This column will discuss some of the more prominent and suggest questions to ask when evaluating and selecting systems for adoption.
*Page 15*
Features of Web Course Authoring Systems
Let us clarify first that we are talking neither about groupware, which is software that enables persons to work together in group projects online, nor web conferencing software, a broader term that includes groupware as well as other asynchronous, text-based systems that provide a forum-type discussion format. For information about these tools see:
Most web course authoring and management systems incorporate groupware and conferencing features but are much more comprehensive tools. These are integrated packages that provide content presentation, communication, assignment submission, testing, and management functions in a secure environment, easily accessible via a web browser. They also provide standardized page formats with convenient navigation tools to facilitate student movement around the site. Some include complete course authoring features that require little or no knowledge of HTML.
The bottom line is that the student logs in via the web (courses are invariably password-protected), reads or downloads the current assignment, looks at the visuals, reads and responds to a thread of e-mail messages discussing the topic, performs and submits the lab assignment for that material, takes a quiz or a unit exam, sends a message to the prof about the unfairness of question #8, and logs off so he can surf the MTV web site.
*Page 16*
The prof, on the other hand, can modify the course material at any time to keep it updated, clarify the wording of question #8, read the e-mail messages posted to the course discussion group and send a new message redirecting the train of thought, monitor where each student is at in the course, post an announcement regarding the special guest participant next week, and run an analysis of last week's quiz scores.
The beauty of these systems is that students can participate at any time, from any time zone in the world, and they don't even have to take showers before class. Moreover, universities can collaborate, expanding their course offerings and enhancing their curricula while reaching new student populations. For example, students in one major at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln are now required to take a web-based course from Oklahoma State University. Nebraska has no one qualified to teach that particular course, which is a strength at OSU.
Course Authoring Systems on the Market
Course authoring systems come in several different flavors. In one type of system, the vendor provides both server and client software in a complete course authoring and delivery package, and students must access the server via the client. The most common system now provides server software and the complete course package, but students access the server with a conventional web browser. The third system is kind of a generic "and everything else" category that ranges from sophisticated course management features to templates and authoring tools, but none provide complete, integrated packages for offering web courses.
*Page 17*
Client/Server Systems
Two popular systems follow the client/server model, although both expect to have web browser-accessible packages on the market sometime during the summer of 1997.
Browser-Accessible Web Course Systems
The key feature here is that the course package is accessible via a web browser, and no client software is required. These are complete course packages with standardized page formats for both student and instructor interface. The systems are listed here in alphabetical order. This not an all-inclusive list.
CyberProf (http://cyber.ccsr.uiuc.edu/cyberprof/) is currently in beta-testing. It is one of half a dozen such systems developed at the University of Illinois. CyberProf has an unusual feature in that it uses "fuzzy logic" to evaluate student responses, thus considering a greater range of answers, but the reported disadvantage is that the processing required for fuzzy logic sometimes brings the system to a grinding halt.
*Page 18*
Internet Classroom Assistant (ICA) (http://www.nicenet.org/ica/ica_info.cfm) comes from an group called Nicenet, self-billed as "a volunteer organization of Internet professionals." ICA is free and apparently available to about anyone, but it appears to have limited content presentation capabilities. We have not done a careful assessment of ICA, but the price is right, and the people who provide it seem very nice.
Mallard (http://www.cen.uiuc.edu/Mallard/) is another University of Illinois product currently in beta-testing. Mallard seems very strong in the area of course management and content presentation but has limited conferencing capabilities. Mallard does provide extensive training opportunities to universities that adopt it.
QuestWriter (http://iq.orst.edu/meta/) is being developed at Oregon State University and is also in beta-testing. It seems to have fairly sophisticated capabilities but is not as far along in development as some of the other systems listed here, and we have not done a careful evaluation of it.
TopClass (http://www.wbtsystems.com/) is a product of WBT Systems in Ireland. TopClass seems to be an extremely advanced system with sophisticated capabilities in content presentation, communications, and management. It also has extensive documentation, which is a big plus. WBT Systems is in the process of establishing a U.S. presence to support TopClass.
Virtual Classroom Interface (VCI) (http://ampere.scale.uiuc.edu/aim/vci2.5/) is another University of Illinois system, this time from the Sloan Center for Asynchronous Learning Environments (SCALE), certainly a leader in this area. The VCI web site offers no information regarding off-campus availability but the system is used extensively within the University of Illinois.
*Page 19*
Web Course in a Box (WCB) (http://www.madduck.com/wcbinfo/info.html) was developed at Virginia Commonwealth University and is now marketed by madDuck Technologies of Richmond. (What is it with ducks and mallards, anyway? Ahhh yes, the "webbed" feet...) WCB appears to be a fairly sophisticated package that has been adopted by an impressive list of U.S. universities.
World Wide Web Course Tools (WebCT) (http://homebrew.cs.ubc.ca/webct/) comes from the University of British Columbia. It is in beta-testing during the summer of 1997 but is expected to be widely available by August. WebCT is an extremely comprehensive system with excellent course development tools and documentation.
Other Course Development and Management Tools
This is a catch-all category for web course tools that are not marketed as integrated development, presentation, and management systems. In this group are components of systems and tools and templates for faculty use in web courses created in plain old HTML.
ClassNet (http://classnet.cc.iastate.edu/) is a course management system developed at Iowa State University. ClassNet would have been listed with the group above, but it does not provide the course development and presentation package the others do. It does offer communication tools (e-mail, discussion forums, and chat rooms), assignment and exam submission capabilities, and a nice grade book maintenance feature, all maintained on an ISU server and linked to from course web pages. It is only available for use in Iowa State courses but is worth a look.
*Page 20*
Simple Start (http://www.unc.edu/courses/ssp/Simple.html) is a web page maintained by the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill to enable UNC-CH faculty to get started with Internet-based course tools. These features apparently are restricted to that campus but provide good examples of what can be done. The Tools for WWW Development section offers a course home page builder tool, form-building tools, and a tool for creating discussion forums.
WWW Tools for Instructors (http://wwwtools.cityu.edu.hk/) comes from the City University of Hong Kong. It provides infrastructure tools that faculty users download and install on their own servers. The tools seem to be available to anyone and include Quizzes Online, a quiz development feature, Photo Album, for creating student information pages, and Assignment Collector, which organizes the electronic submission of assignments.
Questions to Ask in Selecting a System
*Page 21*
*Page 22*
Conclusions
Web-based courses using systems like those described above epitomize the trend toward student-centered, active learning. We are finding them in disciplines ranging from electrical engineering and agronomy to English composition and economics. As with conventional face-to-face courses, the effectiveness of web courses is dependent upon the ability of the instructors to plan and organize them and then manage them effectively, and we'll see good ones and not-so-good ones. Regardless, we are going to see lots of them. As slowly as higher education has been to embrace change over the years, it is quite unlikely that instruction in the year 2050 will look much like it has for the past 300 years. Online courses may be the beginning of that transition.
Michael J. Albright is an Instructional Development Specialist in the Instructional Technology Center, Iowa State University.
This article is copyright (c) by Michael J. Albright. All Rights Reserved. All commercial use requires the permission of the author and the ditors of this journal.
*Page 23*
Back to v5#1
Back to MC Journal Homepage