“The Web Cahier: A Tool For Implementing
Just-in-Time-Teaching In the Humanities”
Mark
Wolff
Hartwick College
wolffmanO@hartwick.edu
The Web Cahier is a web-based server application that allows instructors to
assess individual student performance and to prepare targeted lectures and
discussions according to the needs and interests of students. The pedagogy which
informs the design of the Web Cahier is Just-in-Time-Teaching, or JiTT, a
teaching strategy developed by Gregor M. Novak at Indiana University-Purdue
University Indianapolis and Evelyn T. Patterson at the United States Air Force
Academy for introductory physics classes (I will discuss the effectiveness of
this pedagogy in a separate paper). During this poster session I will explain
the design of the Web Cahier, sollicit comments and suggestions on ways to
improve it, and make the application available to other scholars as open source
software.
The Web Cahier uses MySQL as its back-end database and PHP as its dynamic HTML
interface. I will demonstate the program on a computer running the Linux
operating system, but the Web Cahier can be implemented on multiple platforms.
The Web Cahier has an instructor interface and a student interface. For a given
course the instructor creates cahiers, or sets of questions for assignments to
be completed before students come to class. A cahier consists of web objects,
such as text, images, short answer text fields, essay question text areas, and
multiple choice questions using radio buttons. The instructor can build cahiers
by creating and arranging web objects. No experience with HTML is required,
although the appearance of a cahier is improved with basic HTML for which brief
documentation is provided online. The instructor can determine how she wants to
respond to each answer a student gives in a cahier: a pulldown list of
predetermined values (excellent, good, adequate, poor, unacceptable, etc.),
short answer, or detailed comments. The instructor can set a deadline for when
students must complete a cahier. Once a deadline has passed, students will not
be able to modify their answers for the cahier. The instructor can evaluate
student work easily and assign grades that students can see when they return to
a cahier. The instructor can also manage course enrollment and easily add and
drop students.
Students can access cahiers from any networked computer. They can work on an
assignment intermittently, saving their work and returning to it as often as
they like before the deadline. Once a deadline has passed they can return to a
cahier to review their work and to receive instructor comments, but they cannot
make any changes.
The Web Cahier is available for peer evaluation at http://bumppo.hartwick.edu/web_cahier. The instructor user id is
"ALLC" and the password is "ACH". The student user id is "student" and the
password is "student". This demonstration is based on the Online History Lab
which was designed by the staff at Hartwick College's Stevens-German Library to
teach students basic skills in working with historical documents. Evaluators
should feel free to create their own courses and enroll the student "ALLC_ACH,
student" to test the software.
I hope others will find the Web Cahier interesting and useful for their own
teaching, and I welcome requests to test the software at other institutions. I
would also welcome offers to help develop the Web Cahier which I make available
according to the GNU Public Licence.
References
Gregor M. Novak Evelyn T. Patterson. “Just-in-Time-Teaching: Active Learner Pedagogy with
WWW.” Paper presented at IASTED International Conference on Computers and Advanced Technology in Education, May 27-30, 1998 in Cancun, Mexico. : , 1998.