Vol. 5. No. 1 — April 2001
Interview with an Online Instructor (Part 3)
Jim Duber
duber dot com
<jim@duber.com>
JD: So it sounds like your students needed either to be fairly
tech-savvy to begin with, or by the end they were certainly
tech-savvy. Did they have a requirement of, for example, knowing how
to make a web page, or knowing how to scan a document, or knowing how
to use concordance software?
MS: I was told when the course began, or before the course began,
that all of the instructors were tech-savvy and would have the
ability to create simple web pages, for example. This turned out not
to be exactly true. But it was primarily true, and most were capable
of doing not only basic web pages, but in some cases, some fairly
sophisticated web pages. In terms of the concordancer, none of them
had had a lot of experience with that and I found that I had to, in
fact, write some supporting documents sort of midstream to put on the
course website to help them kind of wade through what a concordancer
does and what the output means and ways in which that could be used.
But, I think it was the most popular part of the course because most
of them had heard about concordancing, or maybe had read an article
or talked to a colleague about it, but really hadn’t had hands-on
experience. And, I think they were kind of both surprised and amazed
at the output that these databases can give for authentic language.
JD: That’s great. You mentioned the course website–can you talk
about that, especially issues that you faced in developing the
course?
MS: We used the WebCT platform, which UC Berkeley sort of donated
for the cause, or at least gave space to us to run the course for
free, and this classware, or courseware, whatever you want to call
it, software integrates quiz, bulletin board, chat, and all kinds of
other web functions into one package, as well as the ability to keep
track, of not only quiz scores but also how often students are
logging in, if they’re reading the bulletin board postings, how many
times they responded, and so forth. So it creates a nice integrated
package so you don’t have to gather together little bits and pieces
on your own to make your own web site. The other thing that was nice
about it is it’s very flexible and so when I needed to add additional
material, I could do so really quickly and easily as the table of contents
structure in WebCT is flexible enough to allow for quick insertions
and reorganization really on the fly so all I would need to do is send
a notice out to students that something had been added and they could
go and look at new material there.
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