Practical experience leveraging online content in a traditional classroom course Robert Schudy MET Educational Technology Research Seminar Thursday, 4/30/2009, 12:00 PM. MET PC Lab 3

The course CS669 B1 Spring 09 The online course CS669OL Database Design and Implementation for Business Spring 1 09 is the web site for CS669 B1 Spring 09. »No content changes were made, to better support comparisons with online. »Conversion required about an hour of ID time, because the online course was designed to be used in either 7 week or 14 week formats. »There were almost no errors and no QA was performed. »Dao has supported the course very well during execution. We have recorded about thirty hours of lectures and student presentations using Apreso, and linked them from the online course web site. All assignments and assessments are conducted online. I prepared approximately 1000 slides for in-class lectures.

About CS669 Database Design and Implementation for Business During the course students learn data modeling, database design, the Structured Query Language (SQL), and a little database programming; that’s a lot to learn. Entry preparation ranges from database professionals to database and IT novices. The primary pedagogic paradigm is a tutor guiding students as they learn by doing: modeling data, designing databases, and writing and running SQL and database programs.

Challenges in CS669 There is a heavy assignment grading workload. With resubmission there can be more than fifty multi-page assignments per student. »Automatically graded assessments help this. »Will try some automatically graded assignments for Summer 2. The intellectual fabric is cognitively highly interdependent. Diversity of student preparation The students are mainly working in demanding jobs while raising families.

There’s an order of magnitude fewer posts per student than is typical in an online course.

Almost no participation in classroom discussions

There are many assignments and a comprehensive term project.

The are are advanced extra credit assignments for the more advanced students. Multiple term project milestones and submissions. Multiple assignment submissions with no penalty for late or resubmission.

Six tutorial review quizzes Six graded quizzes All questions are released with tutorials. Most quizzes include diagrams.

Students take the review quizzes multiple times until they have learned the material.

The quizzes include many figures both in the questions and in the possible answers.

Course Robustness The combination of a comprehensive course web site and full lecture recording has made the course very robust. One student who has been hospitalized has even been able to keep up and participate. Almost asynchronous quizzes and assignments creates more scheduling flexibility for students. Online submissions and Gradebook brings order to the hundreds of assignments and other graded items. The online infrastructure helps a great deal with course management.

Learning The more advanced and dedicated students are embracing the rich diverse course content as an opportunity to learn all about databases in fourteen weeks; they are doing very well. Weaker students are availing themselves of the many opportunities, including help content and resubmissions, to learn from scratch and keep up surprisingly well.

Lessons Learned about Online courses as Face to Face Web Sites Online courses make great web sites for face to face courses. Students love the review quizzes. Students appreciate the additional asynchrony of online quizzes and reviewing lectures. We love the additional class time that online quizzes enable. It is working very well, and both the students and I want to do it again. There is more faculty workload with both in-class and online preparation and dialog; I’m working on that.

Lessons Learned about Apreso in the Classroom Faculty should learn how to operate the Apreso equipment, because the technicians won’t always be able to help when you need it. It took me about ten hours of lecturing to learn how to attend to both classroom students and video students well. Students became comfortable with video recording after about three classes. Students didn’t come to class when they were ill, because they could watch the lectures on video; this reduced the spread of disease. Handing a mike to most students when they ask a question makes most students uncomfortable. The array of desk mikes works well, enabling interactive lectures. Belt clip mikes don’t work with womens’ clothing. We need better video lighting.

Online Quizzes Saved Class Time I have previously administered weekly in-class quizzes that cover the material covered in lecture the previous week. In this experiment I used the six online quizzes taken outside class on a flexible schedule. Online quizzes saved 30 minutes per week of class time. Online quizzes facilitated online review quizzes. This allowed more time for in-class discussions, several in-class group database design exercises, and two more advanced short lectures on subjects requested by students.

General Observations The richer learning environment provided by an online class enables more dedicated students to learn more. Several students submitted independently-defined term projects of high quality. The ability to review lectures, the online lectures, online discussions, review quizzes and other rich infrastructure helps struggling students to succeed. The online infrastructure facilitated record keeping for grading with resubmissions, which is otherwise difficult. The students have learned a great deal about databases. Many are now designing or redesigning database systems at work.