It is easy to put lecture notes on the web. You can even ask students to read them, and some do. This does nothing to guarantee that any learning takes place. The most we can hope for is surface learning, skimming through the material to regurgitate it at the exam.
Or you can use systems like WEST to deliver assignments, which individual students submit, and the teacher then has to mark. Given good marking, the students may be challenged to think more about their work and the subject, and start to deepen their learning. But it takes a lot of work to give such detailed feedback, and shorter courses give less time to run through cycles of improvement. [local info on WEST]
What does promote deep learning, where students try to really understand a subject, is group learning: through group projects, discussions, brainstorming, dividing large classes into smaller groups, pyramiding, and so on. This can be done crudely by using computer conferencing or real-time chat. But we need to change the teaching to fit in with the ways programmers have designed the systems. It would be better to design the tools to support the best educational techniques.
Why not try adding a bit of structure to your on-line discussions? Questions, answers, agreements, contradictions and creative ideas are all different, so make them explicit, so that the computer and readers understand what you intended.
There are a number of example forms linked to this page. If you actually use them, they will post to a debugging script which merely returns the names and values filled in the form, since I have not written any scripts to deal with them. If you write one, let me know.
These are a type of Group Decision Support System, in which we distinguish between issues, positions people take up on the issues (or problems and alternative answers), and arguments for and against each issue. So there are always issue, position and argument links.
Some have some optional other links, such as question (asking for clarification), note (expanding on an exisiting posting), ...
The static example shows how the argument outline might be displayed. If your browser supports a bug-free Javascript (Netscape 2.0 beta on Macintosh, 3 under Windows) have a look at a dynamic example.
There are a number of face-to-face techniques to stimulate creative problem-solving, including variations on brainstorming. These are often used to generate a wider range of ideas, before a group picks a particular problem to solve. I will illustrate these using techniques developed by the Synectics Corporation. NB: I have a licence to use these techniques with my students. If you want to do the same, email me, and I'll put you in touch with the licensors.
One technique is to set up a table of words unrelated to the problem itself. Then the problem-solving resource people try to think up ideas connected to these words, in the problem context.
Another technique is to get them to role play, and respond in their roles.
In either case, these are responses to a problem statement from a problem owner, who then goes and chooses/merges/modifies their suggestions to solve the problem.
See the example of how one set of techniques could be supported on the WWW.
A more formal kind of discussion is based upon a draft document. The aim is to collect opinions and suggestions to develop a final version. Obvious examples include the framework documents.
Although there are similarities with group editing (e.g. of student projects), this differs in that there is only one editor who produces new versions from everyone's comments and suggestions.
Back to top. Send any comments to David Newman