CD-ROM- Delivered Tutorials and Web- Delivered Quizzes
Vaughan Voller, a professor from the Department of Civil Engineering, Institute of Technology, is developing quiz materials and a Web-based quiz-design protocol to accompany his engineering fluid mechanics CD-ROM. Students can obtain fixed course content on the CD-ROM and access benchmarking quizzes that can be readily manipulated to meet more local educational requirements online. Voller states, "The aim is to develop an HTML boilerplate for generating quizzes that:
- support CD materials,
- provide a flexible delivery system,
- are conceptual in nature, and
- provide self grading with a high level of learning feedback."
Instructional Problem
Q. Please describe the instructional problem you were attempting to address. Who was the intended audience? What solutions had been tried in the past? What did you hope to improve?
A. Dr. Voller has used CD-based interactive modules in his Engineering Fluid Mechanics course since 1993 (for samples of the tutorial content delivered on the Engineering Fluid Mechanics CD-ROM, check out clickstreams 1 and 2). The course is a basic requirement for many undergraduate engineering students at the University of Minnesota. Voller states that in recent years, many students felt that some type of testing activity, "could be used to check their understanding of the material (and) would add great value to the existing CD-ROM." The instructional strategy of providing students with ungraded quiz questions, which encouraged them to view both correct and incorrect answers, had not been previously used in the class.
An important challenge to Dr. Voller was to structure the quiz question format in such a way that University of Minnesota students, as well as engineering faculty from other institutions around the world, could easily create their own quiz questions. Asking students to create their own questions might encourage them to examine the underlying concepts that are involved in the 'correctness' of an answer. Allowing engineering faculty from other institutions to create their own questions is an important strategy to encourage others to build on Dr. Voller's efforts. "Faculty members are reluctant to adopt someone else's materials wholesale." They are more likely to use selected, discrete modules of content, and develop quiz questions of their own if they have control over the quantity, order, and selection of materials.
TEL Strategy
Q. What technology enhanced learning (TEL) strategies did you adopt to complete this project? Was the content presented differently to your students than in past (non-TEL) applications?
A. The quiz questions that Dr. Voller has created are always available for students to use at http://www.ce.umn.edu/~voller/ce-tel/. A table of contents allows student to select the questions that they need to review. The quizzes are not graded, and no results are sent to Dr. Voller.
The question format is an elegant combination of text, illustrations, supporting formulae, a simple calculator, and of course the question itself (see clickstream #3 for a sample quiz from Dr. Voller's Engineering Fluid Mechanics course). Students have all of the tools and information that they need to answer the question, provided they have learned the necessary content. If a student gives an incorrect answer, adaptive feedback provides them with additional information, and encourages them to try to answer the question again. If the student answers the question correctly, they are urged to try some of the wrong answers to get a better understanding of common misconceptions related to that concept. This specific method of broadening and deepening conceptual understanding has not been previously used in the class.
Hardware and Software
Q. What hardware or software did you use to produce your project? Did you have to do anything unusual to make the software work for your specific applications?
A. An average desktop PC was used to develop the quiz template.
Even though JavaScript was used to create the calculator, simple HTML was employed to make all of the other quiz-related pages. As a rule, Dr. Voller eschews HTML editors like Dreamweaver or FrontPage, in favor of hand-coding HTML in a text editor. "Creating HTML is fairly easy, once you know the basics." Dr. Voller adds that, "There is a resistance in most people to get into something new." But he thinks that most faculty would be encouraged by the relative simplicity in learning HTML if they gave it a try.
Initially, Dr. Voller used a frame-based approach to organizing the various quiz question components. He eventually became dissatisfied with this method, because it seemed too complex to allow other faculty members to easily utilize the template to generate their own questions(see clickstream #4 for a sample quiz from Dr. Voller's Engineering Fluid Mechanics course in the frame-based format).
Dr. Voller has turned to a two step, graphic-based, process that he hopes will facilitate the creation of questions. First, a preexisting HTML structure of pages and folders is copied as the basis of a new question. Second, PowerPoint is used to create the new question stem, as well as the negative and positive feedback. After the question is completely written it is saved, not as a PowerPoint file, but as an animated GIF, a graphic format that is commonly used on the Internet. This approach generates customized question and answer screens that are automatically incorporated into the template structure. It is Dr. Voller's hope that enough faculty members are familiar with the basic use of PowerPoint to be able to create their own customized questions (again, see clickstream #3 for a sample quiz from Dr. Voller's Engineering Fluid Mechanics course in the graphic-based format).
Project Team
Q. How many people worked on the project? What were their roles? Did you work with any central support units?
A. Dr. Voller's teaching assistant, Casey Fines, made some important contributions in the early phases of template development. Other than Casey's assistance, Dr. Voller has been developing materials more or less on his own.
Instructional Outcome
Q. What was the instructional outcome of your project? Did you achieve your goals? Why or why not? Do you intend to make any revisions to your project?
A. Fall semester of 1999 was the first time that the Web-based questions were available to students. Dr. Voller has a stack of written student evaluations, and is in the process of analyzing the results. He is hesitant to make any anecdotal observations about the effectiveness of the Web-based quizzing activity until the results of the written evaluations have been ascertained.
Moving from a frame-based to a graphic-based template structure—utilizing PowerPoint—is a major change in the developmental approach to quiz question generation. More quiz questions will have to be created using this approach, hopefully by other interested faculty, before the effectiveness of this change of methodology can be known.
Innovative Feature
Q. Please describe the most innovative aspects of your project.
A. Using PowerPoint as a tool to generate GIF images, which are then automatically incorporated into the question structure, is an exciting approach to custom content generation. It will be interesting to see if faculty members who already use PowerPoint will utilize the software in this novel manner.
Advice
Q. Do you have any planning, design, or development advice for other instructional multimedia developers contemplating a project like yours?
A. Dr. Voller strongly encourages other faculty members to learn HTML. He thinks that others will find it to be a relatively simple, and forgiving, programming language that is worth the effort to master.
He believes that the Internet is an effective venue to utilize when faculty want to deliver time- itive content to students. He also thinks that an integrated teaching strategy that employees traditional classroom activities, combined with CD and Web delivered materials, helps students to better grasp the complexities and nuance of fundamental concepts within the field of Fluid Mechanics.
Examples
In addition to tutorial content and self-tests, Dr. Voller includes a great deal of supplementary content on the Engineering Fluid Mechanics CD-ROM, such as these text and visual representations used to define key terms
Dr. Voller's CD-ROM-delivered tutorials walk students through the same problem-solving process they'll use in the quizzes by building equations and problem solutions step by step, using color, animations, and descriptive text to explain concepts and illustrate examples. In the left hand image, we find an example of a 'gloss' or note concerning some facet of the equation under construction -- in this case a note reminding us that elevation effects are negligible when considering gas flows using this equation. The image on the right illustrates the step-by-step nature of equation-contruction as described on the Engineering Fluid Mechanics CD-ROM; here the symbolic equation is decontructed and the equation for each element is provided to help students understand the math involved in calculating -- in this case -- power.
