“Using Collaborative Hypermedia to Replace Lectures in
University Teaching.”
David
Skillicorn
Queen's University
skill@qucis.queensu.ca
Introduction
Web-based hypermedia and related technologies have attracted great attention, because they have obvious potential to improve the quality of teaching and learning at universities. The potential benefits include:- Increased access for non-traditional students, for whom the traditional university format is impractical;
- Availability of material at all times and in all places;
- Responsiveness to students' learning styles by providing material in different ways and at different levels;
- Incentive to `ratchet up' by capturing the best presentations, the best interactions, the best questions, and preserving them;
- Student-directed learning rather than professor-directed teaching;
- Community and interaction based on ideas rather than physical presence.
- The on-line course material is very often 'extra' material, increasing the demands on students;
- On-line courseware typically costs more, both to develop and to deliver to students;
- Material is not access-protected, causing loss of revenue for institutions and copyright problems for developers;
- The use of multiple tools requires students to learn many different interfaces, increasingly the cognitive overhead of the material that they want to learn.
An Introductory Computing Course
We illustrate the use of the system using CISC104, an introductory programming and computing science background course, taken by students in all years, and from all departments of the Faculty of Arts and Science. The approach has also been used in 3rd and 4th year courses in Computing Science. Students interact with the course material using an ordinary web browser, such as Netscape. Pages delivered by the Hyperwave server are enhanced with a standard set of buttons that allow users to identify themselves to the system, to create new documents, or to annotate existing documents. Hyperwave hypermedia is organised in two ways: the standard link paradigm is supplemented by a hierarchical collection paradigm. This provides extra context which helps users to avoid the feeling of not knowing where they are. The top level of the course material consists of the following collections:- Introductory material about the course,
- Course home page,
- Core course material,
- Announcements,
- Questions and Answers,
- Assignments,
- Exercises,
- Social Area.
Why Hyperwave?
In the introduction, we indicated several deficiencies of the majority of hypermedia courseware approaches. We summarize how the Hyperwave system, and our incremental approach to development, avoid them. There are three essential aspects to making hypermedia courseware development cost-effective:- Courseware must save money somewhere else. It is therefore critical that such courseware replace other teaching, rather than supplement it.
- Courseware must be developed incrementally, allowing savings from the very first delivery to be used to fund the next round of development. This makes it possible to start from modest amounts of seed money. Our initial offering of CISC104 required about four months of full-time work by a hypermedia development staff member. Upper-year and seminar courses are much cheaper to develop, since courseware provides perspective rather than content.
- Courseware does not have to be up to Hollywood standards to be effective, and does not all have to be developed by instructors. Students can make their own contributions to courseware, and such contributions are arguably more useful and impressive to other students. Seminar courses, in particular, can start from a list of the issues, the content being created by the discussions of the participants (which can then be preserved as starting points for subsequent offerings).