This paper first appeared as an editorial in Education News & Views, a feature of the on-line Staff Resources & Support Services of Leeds Metropolitan University.

TEACHING WITH THE INTERNET - Content versus Structure

D.L.James

Now that most British Universities have a Web Site in operation, it may be useful to take stock and, in particular, to consider how we might progressively develop these in order to best support the teaching function of our institutions. In the early stages of development I believe this question of optimising teaching opportunities was overshadowed by a number of imperatives, including -

  • the need to have something on-line as quickly as possible,
  • a focus on the public relations and institutional information functions of the Site,
  • a tendency for managers/administrators to accept the Internet as a technical issue rather than an academic one,
  • a collegiate ethos (within some universities), allowing the Site to grow by individual contribution or, contrary to this, a managerial ethos assigning Site construction to a central facility concerned mainly with publicity issues.

It seems, as a consequence of these pressures, that content has been regarded as of more immediate relevance than structure. However, since teaching can be described as “the process of managing the learning environment and the learning interaction”, we must expect that tackling the question of educational validity will certainly require us to consider the structure of this “environment”, and to accept that, for many students, the Web Site itself will increasingly become a major part of the general learning context.

FINDING A MODEL

I suggest it may be useful to start this process of designing-in academic structure by classifying the kinds of teaching engagement which we offer our students and this simple scheme may be an adequate starting point:

Administrative:
  • Institutional organisation, campus plans, course details, enrolment procedures etc.
Subject-Related:
  • Free access - Via independent browsing of any/all available resources
  • Referenced - Informed by bibliographies, glossaries etc.
  • Structured study - Shaped by workbooks, study guides etc.
  • Interactive learning - Involvement with tutorials, case studies, simulations etc.

It is possible to provide all these kinds of engagement within the environment offered by Web viewers and a well constructed student interface can allow the controlled forms of engagement (i.e. referenced, structured study and interactive learning) to be tailored to meet the needs of individual students pursuing individual courses. In designing an interface for this purpose , a number of points require consideration:

Administrative information should be on-line, open access. Since most of this will be relevant to potential students or other institutions and only of transient use to current students, it should be separated from the information and resources which are aimed at supporting study activity.

Unstructured free access to world-wide resources will be of value in some teaching contexts. It will be useful, however, to monitor the extent of formless browsing and the degree to which time is wasted on irrelevant but absorbing distractions and to minimise distractions through effective structuring. Referenced material can include tools as well as information sources. Every tutor should be in a position to identify Internet resources useful for his/her subject and should be able to provide the student group with a unique list of these in a manner which will not impact on other users i.e. these URL lists should be accessible during an online session but only to the relevant course participants.

Structured study requires the ability to present students, in a particular subject area, with information about how to use specific resources, with a knowledge of which aspects/components of these are most relevant and with guidance about how to use the resultant information. This is possible with a customised interface, i.e. course-related (local/offline) html pages dedicated to the needs of, and accessible to, specific course participants. Interactive learning, in relation to courses wholly or partly based on individual or distance learning strategies, requires the provision of structured tutorial materials. Since these are invariably separately authored (not part of the site page structure) and often carry with them the necessity to create management and record files for groups and individual students, two conditions must be fulfilled if their provision is to be viable.

(a) A working environment for staff in which effective materials can be created or purchased must be provided.

(b) Efficient delivery to students in a resource centre (learning centre) context and, eventually, in remote locations, must be possible.

These needs can be facilitated if the institution's own network is configured to provide the opportunity for authoring via a “resources server” which would act as a repository for primary resources (text, graphics files etc.) and also act as the platform for dissemination or launching of interactive product (multimedia or whatever) either online or by downloading.

A teaching strategy employing a mixture of these modes of engagement would be best served by compatible development of internal (LAN) network structures and services with Internet access, and by presenting the total complex via an integrated access and menu system. These requirements for a university Web Site may well be able to be met by a number of different structures but, as a basis for discussion, a notional page array is illustrated in Fig.1.

The significant differences between this format and the tree structures commonly adopted are associated mainly with the staff and student areas and the way their use interacts. Essentially academic staff (on a course/programme basis) are provided, via the staff area, with a tool for shaping the interaction of their students with the Web and students are, thereby, offered a structured learning environment and not just a browsing opportunity.

THE STAFF AREA

The staff area has three main functions. To provide staff with information about internal sources of organised support for the teaching process i.e. educational development services, media services, computing services and others; to provide an arena for staff to interact with colleagues from around the world, publish ideas and debate issues; to supply actual URLs (addresses), and information about, Internet resources which may be explored and could then be copied to the relevant students pages (in the subject area for which the staff member is responsible). Clearly, though central staff who create this overall structure will be able to set up a shell for these subject resource pages, it will be essential for the subect lecturers themselves to (gradually) assemble all the required URL references and to be responsible for continuous updating. Page forms will be different for each of these functions and may be organised in four sections:

  • A staff support services section detailing institutional support for staff in their teaching role. These would be best expressed as functional services i.e. as things staff may need to do or have done for them, not a hierarchical list of departments or other organisational structures.
  • An outreach section, possibly in magazine form, carrying comment, articles, conference advertising etc. This content would be relatively ephemeral and the section will need a regular updating cycle i.e. a regular routine for publishing issues.
  • A general resources section with pages which refer to (i.e. are actively linked to) those search engines and Internet services which are considered to be useful for staff working in any subject area. Most will be of use to students and may also be listed in the student area.
  • A subject specific resources section, many of which should be able to be identified by library staff and assembled here ready for direct use by lecturers or for lecturers to transfer to the relevant student pages. Others will be chosen by academic staff themselves.

THE STUDENT AREA

The purpose of the student area is to allow students a working environment appropriate to their own needs and not encumbered with irrelevant or distracting options. It can do this by offering pages tailored to present information sources useful to specific study programmes, by including information on those sources and how to use them, and by offering exercises or practise in that use. It is also possible to include subject teaching input directly or to interface the Web browser with locally resident interactive teaching materials.

Though most staff will have their own machines and can customise their viewers (e.g. bookmark lists), students will usually need to use shared laboratory-based workstations and will have to be able to save any output or any individually relevant URL lists to floppies.

The model illustrated shows a student area which may be isolated from the rest of the Web Site with the students entering a “designed learning environment”. Access to other patrs of the site, if required, could be provided by conditional links or by using cloned pages, or by allowing entry via the external route. It is also possible to have the student area isolated from external entry or to make it conditionally accessible (say for extramural students). Specific academic programmes in each institution will have to take responsibility for deciding what is appropriate for their students and how the options of efficiently structured teaching versus immediate free access to the global Internet are to be balanced.

It is expected that the student area will have a number of sections with different types of page:

  • An entry section with the option to select or log-in to a specific subject/course section or to view an array of non-subject specific resources.
  • A general resource section not related to a specific course/subject. In addition to URL lists, these pages may include comment on the URL and how best to use it.
  • A number of subject resource sections dedicated to specific programmes of study. These may include URL lists with comment on their content and how to use them. There may be exercises prescribed in relation to using specific URLs or types of resource. Within these sections there could be exercise/assignment pages. These may include specifications for assignments which make use of Internet resources and/or refer to other resource areas relevant to the particular course of study. These pages could be relatively ephemeral and would be updated in parallel with related courses.

SUMMARY

This is an argument for us to recognise the World Wide Web, not as an external entity useful for retrieving information but as a powerful teaching resource resident within our own institutions and under our control. I suggest an urgent need for university academics to take active responsibility for the way in which students are supported by the World Wide Web (via their local interface), by constructing the Web Site as a positive learning environment, integrated with other aspects of the institutional provision, and particularly with other networked services. There are many possibilities in this respect and they need to be debated on an academic level as well as a technical one.

D.James

email: )

Learning Systems Consultant

Leeds Metropolitan University

Leeds, LS1 3HE

November 23rd 1995

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Holyfield, S. & Liber, O. (1995) Using the World Wide Web for the management of online learning resources, Active Learning 2, pp30-33, CTISS Publications.

Laurillard D. (1993) Rethinking University Teaching: A Framework for the Effective Use of Educational Technology. London, Routledge,

Whalley, W.B. (1995) Teaching and learning on the Internet, Active Learning 2, pp25-29, CTISS Publications.