Robby Robson, Undergraduate Academic Programs,
Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA 97331-1635.
Email: robby@orst.edu. Phone: 541-737-5171. Fax: 541-737-8232
Abstract. This article gives an overview of the first generation of course-support systems designed to support WWW-based learning. It starts with a perspective in terms of pedagogic and technological time scales, traces their origin, discusses their features, reports on their numbers, elucidates their architecture, and talks about the potential for the next generation.
Keywords: Course-support system, WWW-based instruction, databases, virtual classroom, course management.
This article is about the first generation of comprehensive software packages that support WWW-based courses, meaning courses that depend on the WWW for some combination of delivery, testing, simulation, discussion, or other significant aspect. These packages will be called course-support systems. Commercial examples common in the academic world include WebCT, TopClass, CourseInfo, Lotus Learning Space, Toolbook Librarian, and many others.
The purpose of this article is to give an overview of how these systems developed, what they do, how they work, and where they are going. Also of interest is what they don't do and what they might do. This will be discussed at the end. But first it is helpful to put course-support systems in perspective.
Course-support systems merge two worlds, the pedagogical and technological. These worlds operate on different time scales. Technology is typified by Moore's Law, the observation that the capacity of computer chips doubles every 18 months (Intel, 1999). This rate of growth extends to almost every aspect of technology associated with the Internet. Examples relevant to WWW-based instruction are:
In contrast to technology, changes in educational theory move at a leisurely pace. For example, the issues raised by Knapper (1980) in his book on evaluating instructional technology and the papers presented at a 1986 conference on "the campus of the future" (OCLC, 1987) are not significantly different than the issues being raised by instructional technologists and educational policy makers today. In the context of the WWW, Laurie Radford's paper (1995) on interactivity remains one of the most complete despite the many "interactive" WWW technologies that have come (and gone) since it was written.
In addition to differences in time scales, course-support systems are affected by the relative ease of technological innovation in comparison to educational innovation. This is evidenced by the large number of software products that support electronic versions of paper and pencil assessment techniques (Looms, 1999). In general, innovative technology has been applied to traditional classroom pedagogy, but there are also examples of pedagogically innovative applications of simple technology.
One such example is Murder on the Internet. This course uses nothing more than a mailing list and a straightforward graphically oriented WWW site (Nelson & Oliver, 1997). The site is designed as a role-playing game for groups of seven to twelve third-term French or Spanish students. Each student is assigned a character with secrets to guard and clues to ferret out. All exchanges are done in the target language. The WWW site contributes authentic cultural experiences as well as clues. The asynchronous communication environment permits students to stop to look up words, ask questions of the teacher, and formulate language in a way not possible in the classroom, while retaining an immersion-like approach to language learning
What seems very hard to find are truly new ways of teaching and learning that exploit leading edge technology. This theme will reappear at the end of this paper.
In the early days of the WWW, before 1996 or 1997, WWW-based learning environments were built using little or no pre-existing technology (McCormack, 1996; Kahn, 1997; Bogley, Dorbolo, Robson & Sechrest., 1998). This method is still recommended at many institutions, for example (ASU, 1999). Would-be authors or instructors needed not only to develop the pedagogy and content of a course but also the supporting technology for rendering it on the WWW. The first attempts quite naturally concentrated on transferring familiar aspects of the classroom experience to the Internet. These included the basics: communicating with students, giving tests, keeping records, and even recognizing that a student is indeed a student. Course developers built new Internet tools, such as WWW-based quizzes with immediate feedback, and re-purposed old ones, such as email and chat. This was often done on an ad-hoc basis, but some developers realized that by packaging a set of tools they could save future work for themselves and perhaps make a little money. Out of these efforts grew a number of products, both academic and commercial, known as instructional-management systems, course-management systems, integrated distributed-learning environments, course tools, WWW-based training systems, or, as they are called here, course-support systems.
The actual form of course-support systems seems to have been dictated by two existing technologies. First, computer-mediated communication had already migrated from text-based chat rooms and bulletin boards to WWW-based systems with graphical user interfaces. Programs such as HyperNews (http://www.hypernews.org) and FirstClass (http://www.softarc.com/homepage.shtml) brought with them navigation tools and "containers" for on-line discussions. These grew into containers for courses. Second, on-line quizzes, which had previously been implemented on local-area networks or on single machines, created the need to keep records. This contributed to the development of user management and necessitated integrating learning environments with databases. Everyone designing course-support systems faced the same problems and came up similar solutions.
In broad terms, the common features offered by course-support systems include:
It is natural to ask how many courses support systems have been built and how they differ. The short answers to these questions are "lots" and "not much." New Brunswick TeleEducation maintains a database of what they call integrated distributed learning environments (McGreal, 1999a). As of June, 1999, it contained 62 entries. Some of these are fairly limited and do not really qualify as course-support systems, but as yet unreleased data collected by the Digital Learning Environments Research and Development group at Brigham Young University indicate that many American universities are building proprietary systems that do not appear on the list. A comprehensive survey of systems that support WWW-based assessment is being undertaken by Dr. Thelma Looms (1999) at George Washington University. As of June 6, 1999, 110 systems were surveyed, not all of which qualify as course-support systems. It seems reasonable to estimate the number of course-support at between 50 and 100 with an increasing number being developed world-wide.
There are a number of studies that compare the technological features of a few of the market leaders, e.g., (BOAK, 1999; PC Week, 1997; U. Manitoba, 1997; U. C. Berkeley, 1998). The most interesting of these is a WWW site by Landon (1999). The differences among course-support systems reported on theses sites are significant only within the confines of the general sets of features listed above. With regard to on-line quizzes, for example, there are differences in support for fill-in-the-blank questions, in the ability to randomize and group quiz questions, in how questions are put together to form a quiz, and in the kind of item analysis given to the instructor. But the notion of assessment closely parallels that found in a traditional classroom. One can find structural differences as well; it is an interesting exercise to compare the percentage of the default screens devoted to navigation versus content. But the sum total of differences that clearly might affect pedagogic capabilities is relatively small and, judging from reading in-house reports on the WWW and from feedback obtained at conferences, plays only a minor role in purchasing decisions. As is the case with most consumer products, perceptions about ease of use, appearance of the interface, recommendations from peers, marketing strategies, and positioning in the market seem far more decisive.
Studies of the relative pedagogic merits or educational effectiveness of course-support systems are less common. There are at least three good reasons for this. One is that the various commercial products all support more or less the same pedagogy, which in fact is quite traditional. A second is the general difficulty of measuring the impact of any educational approach. For example, there is an extensive literature on the effectiveness of distance education that comprises what is known as the "no significant difference" phenomenon (Russel1, 1999), but at the same time, there are well-respected sources that question the quality of this literature (Phipps & Merisotis, 1999).
A third reason is that studies evaluating computers in education, going back to the computer-aided instruction literature, for example (Knapper, 1980), tend to measure the effectiveness of a single computer program or a suite of technologies aimed at a single course of study. The notion of a pre-WWW instructional system is quite different from that of a course-support systems. The traditional instructional system was generally tied to a particular grade level, a particular subject, and/or a particular type of instruction. Course-support systems, like computers themselves, should be thought of as general tools which can be used for a variety of purposes, in a variety of educational contexts, and for multiple academic disciplines. Evaluating a general tool requires new approaches and new measures which have yet to be developed.
In its original conception, the WWW was a one-way street designed for retrieving documents from computers called servers. A server could send a document to the user's computer using a specified protocol, hypertext transfer protocol (http), or some other Internet protocol such as file transfer protocol (ftp). A program called a browser could display certain types of documents on the user's screen. The most common types were plain text documents and documents encoded using hypertext markup language (HTML).
The user, in turn, could request documents from a server by clicking on a link that appeared in a displayed HTML page. The browser could append additional information to these requests, but any such information had to be pre-programmed into the HTML code itself.
The link as a means of navigation was a simple but powerful metaphor. Yet it took more to turn the WWW into what it is today. First and most important to the growth of the WWW was the inclusion of graphics and other multimedia. As data became accessible at faster rates, (see the section on time scales) the WWW gradually became the universal graphical user interface. Added to this were sound files, moving images, video clips, and other formats that were not part of the original model of a WWW document but could be added through the use of auxiliary programs running on the user's machine. Finally, Java, Javascript, and what is now called dynamic HTML were developed two to three years after the WWW first went public. These allowed WWW documents to change their appearance in response to a wide variety of user input and to more fully interact with the user's computer, significantly altering the user experience.
Once graphical user interfaces were established, the most important event for course-support systems was the advent of the fill-out form. Forms were not supported by the first publicly available browser, Mosaic, released in November, 1993 by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Forms are familiar to WWW users as buttons, check boxes, pull-down menus, and areas of WWW pages into which users can type their own text. With forms, the WWW becomes a two-way street. User-generated data can be sent back to the server. This data can then interact with other programs running on the server and, as was soon realized, be stored in a database. Behind almost every major course-support system is a database that stores quiz results, user information, information needed to organize content, and often much more.
A suitably configured WWW server can both insert and retrieve data from a database. It can assemble the retrieved data into an HTML page before the page is delivered to the requesting computer. To illustrate this process, suppose it is desired that a school logo appear on every page in a WWW site. One choice would be to store the logo as a graphics file on the school's WWW server and to then insert code into every one of the school's pages instructing the user's browser to display the logo. This code would tell the browser where to retrieve the graphic, the size of the graphic, and where to place the graphic in the document displayed on the screen.
The alternative is to create a record in a database that contains the information necessary to write the above code, but not to store the code or the logo itself. Each time a page is requested from the school's site, the server would
This may seem much more complicated than simply putting the needed code directly into every page, but it has three important advantages:
Interfacing databases with WWW servers allows sites to be managed via the WWW itself. This is the essence of existing course-support systems. The components of a course, including the content of pages, the appearance of buttons, user information, assessment records, questions and answers for quizzes, and potentially much more are stored in a database. An intermediate piece of software creates a WWW-based interface to this database (Greenspun, 1997). The software can display different interfaces for different types of users; it might provide authoring and management tools to instructors but not to students.
Note, however, that not all course-support systems store course content in a database. A secondary option is to store pointers to content, and another option is to require the author to place links back to the course-support system directly in the content pages themselves. This latter solution is often used by products that offer some features, for example threaded discussions or on-line quizzes, but are not fully featured course-support systems. Over half of the WWW-based assessment systems surveyed in the Looms (1999) study are classified as standalone tools of this nature.
At this point the difference in time scales between pedagogy and technology comes into play. There are many exciting things that course-support systems could do. Once the content of WWW pages can interact with other types of records, it is possible to design systems in which content and even the functionality of the interface adapt to the record and preferences of the user and can be easily edited by an instructor or author.
Communication could be managed in new and interesting ways not widely used in the university classroom. Authentic scenarios, role playing, virtual realities . . . all of these could supported and could interact with other parts of the on-line learning environment. But in the minds of many users and developers, course-support systems are limited to playing traditional roles borrowed from classical classroom instruction. They provide:
First generation course-support systems appear meant to deliver human-machine interactivity that authors or others have created in the form of external applets or programs. No tools are provided for creating or managing interactive experiences. Similarly, first generation course-support systems appear meant to facilitate human-human interactivity, not to manage it. They are, for the most part, tied to a fixed model of assessment.
Course-support systems have been a great boon to the industry of producing WWW-based courses. They are the equivalent of word processors. Course-support systems can be used to create courses in the same way that word processors can be used to create documents. As such they may or may not increase efficiency or save money but they have the virtue of making it easier to produce a more aesthetically pleasing and high-quality product than was previously possible. Course-support systems have defined what is acceptable in terms of WWW-based education.
But course-support systems should not be only like word processors. As was pointed out earlier, they are much closer to the computers on which word processors run. Unfortunately, the majority of existing course-support systems are not programmable. They should be. Realizing that pedagogy will move more slowly than technology, designers of course-support systems should not cut off the possibilities of higher levels of adaptivity and management simply because they do not see a use for them now. Above all, course-support systems should be built so that they are flexible enough to allow teachers to experiment with new ideas and not be required to build their own systems in order to do so.
The goal of this paper was to give an overview of existing first-generation course-support systems and to create a context for understanding the finer points of current and future technology. There are many aspects which have been left untouched. Among these are infrastructure developments that will enable the components of different systems, down to the level of individual quiz questions, to "plug and play" with each other. With the exception of a single example this article has also not detailed the creative ways in which existing technology has been used to achieve effective pedagogic goals. These topics are covered in other papers in this special issue.
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