An Internet-based Teaching Portfolio for:
John C. Butler
Department of Geosciences
Department of Geosciences
Since 1995 I have been experimenting with the Internet and multimedia technologies as ways to modify the learning environment(s) of my students. Given these interests, it seemed appropriate to prepare an Internet-based Teaching Portfolio. In the following sections brief descriptions will be given that highlight my involvement and links are provided to specific resources that have been prepared.
Since 1995 my interests in "teaching" and "research" are indistinguishable. A summary is given in my Curriculum Vitae
Internet-Based Course Resources
I began experimenting with the Internet in the summer of 1995. The initial fascination was with the technology and I was curious as to how other geosciences faculty around the world were using the medium in their courses. What began as a sampling of course specific Internet resources at a few universities has grown like topsy into a rather large set of resources (probably more than 2,500 individual links). The site is updated on a weekly to quarterly schedule and has been reasonably active.
During this quarter the "number of hits" (a measure of something) has averaged about 600 per week. The total number of "hits" is now about 31,000 over about two and a half years. Of personal satisfaction is the fact that several physical geology texts are linking to this site in the Internet-based Course Resources that they are developing.
The personal investment of time and energy has paid off in a number of grants to support these and other projects, four special issues of the Journal of Computers&Geosciences, more than 24 monthly columns in Another Node on the Internet - ANON - in Computers&Geosciences and 12 publications during the past four years.
In the summer of 1995 I began to create a "web-page" for my section of Geology 1330. This is technically an Honors course but I have never had more than 4 honors students in a class of 50 (on average). Typically, there will be one or two "science majors". The remainder of the students come from all of the colleges awarding undergraduate degrees and their distribution by major is in proportion to the distribution by majors at UH. What began as an idea to put some homework exercises and some chapter outlines on the Internet has evolved into a fairly substantial set of complimentary an supplementary resources. Each year since then (fall 1996, 1997, and 1999) have seen additions and modifications and I have begun modifications for fall 1999. All course materials are posted; no handouts are distributed in the class.
My Expectations, Course Resources, and the Reading List are published and readily available. All of the lectures are power point presentations and all are available via the Internet while the course is being presented. These are being revised at this time but the lecture for geologic structures can be reviewed. The presentations are pass word protected in compliance with the guidelines from the text publishers. Students report that they routinely reviewed the presentations. In addition, students can download the text from the presentations as a Microsoft Word document, print it out, bring it to class and take notes. Few students did this consistently throughout the semester.
I am a firm believer in assessment .... but not just at the end of the course. I use Internet-based surveys, as a way to learn something about the geoscience backgrounds of the class at the beginning of the class and to sample attitudes and expectations about four weeks into the semester in addition to the traditional assessment at the end of the semester. I get about 80% return and the comments have proven to be quite revealing. Responses are e-mailed to me and are manually entered into a grade sheet. Rates of response over the past three years average about 85%. At the end of the semester I can compare responses as a function of final grade as I keep track of individual responses -- the students are aware that I am keeping that information and it does not appear to bias the results. Several national talks have been given in which data obtained from these surveys have been the basis for the presentations; of course, the identity of the individuals is known only to me.
In 1995 I had a series of 11 independent home work exercises posted on the course page. Student responses and suggestions have led to a substantial modification. Now there are two exercises.
Each exercise lasts about 5 to 6 weeks. Each has a "data gathering and manipulation component" and each concludes with a written essay of the "role-playing variety". The response to the two long projects was very positive. Students were allowed to work together (up to 3 per group) but most chose to be "independents". As noted in the expectations, the projects accounted for 40% of the total grade. Only two students (out of 48 who started) handed in a project after the published deadline. I was impressed with both the quality of the writing and the mechanics of preparation exhibited by the students. All submitted word processed documents and about half had learned how to do multiple column layout, image processing and other techniques which enhanced the appearance of their document.
Each chapter concludes with a "self quiz". I am in the process of adding more multiple choice and fill-in-the-blanks with a goal of 60 to 75 questions per chapter. A colleague in Germany has allowed me to use his Java Script code which drives the response evaluation. Although a separate response can be built into the system for each possible response to a multiple choice question, I have not taken advantage of that capability. See question 15 as a example of the full use of the script. No provision has been made to provide "rights versus wrongs" as I view this part of the resource as something the student may elect to do and not something that I will evaluate.
This course is designed to be taken in the second semester of the sophomore year in the Geology or Geophysics program. Students will have completed physical geology, mineralogy and most are taking field methods concurrently. This resource is not as rich as is the GEOL 1330 set of Internet-based resources but the overall design and content is quite similar.
I view GEOL 1330 and 3235 as course resources and not courses. I have been told that the 1330 resources could, with a few additions, be delivered as a distance education course. I have had no real interest in doing that. I do believe, however, that learning can be facilitated and possibly enhanced with these and related resources. I do not believe, however, that the average student that I have in these courses possesses sufficient discipline to take these kinds of courses in a distance mode.
For graduate students, however, the situation is different. The following two courses have been offered in what I would call a transition mode which is described for each course.
I first taught this course as a special problems course in 1975. The medium of choice was punch cards and access to a Univac 1108. Throughout the years the course has evolved but the emphasis remains on an introduction to the use of statistical and pseudostatistical models in the analysis of geologic data.
Geologic Analysis was last taught in the fall of 1998 and the spring of 1996 and a similar format was used in both instances. The class met approximately 10 times during the semester at the regularly scheduled time. A stipulation was that any student could call for an additional lecture when they felt the need for a fact-to-face discussion. E-mail was the preferred means of communication including the distribution and collection of unannounced quizzes and home work exercises.
The course home page, which continues to evolve, contains links to an introductory statistics course at Rice University (which the instructor kindly gave our students permission to use), java applets to illustrate principles and home work problems which were to be done independently. The last time the course was offered the program data desk was used for all of the analyses. The publisher granted our students an attractive discount and 5 of the 8 students purchase the application so that they could work at their homes or offices. Licencees were purchased for three of the machines in the geosciences cluster.
The nature of the course (problem solving and experimentation with applications) and the relative maturity of the students suggested that the course could be offered in what I would call a transition mode -- some lectures and lots of independent work. Each student completed a special project using a data set of their choosing and presented their results orally during the final class meeting.
The reviews were mixed. The reviews were mixed when the course was offered in the traditional, lecture-based mode. Some students do not like problem solving courses regardless of the format.
Perhaps the course could be offered in a totally distance mode. I think it would work best if the students taking the course were "forced" to communicate with each other. I would be uncomfortable with this course if students were allowed to take it when they wanted to and never had the opportunity to work together.
Geochemistry was taught in the spring semester of 1998 in a transitional mode. This course probably was not as successful as the Geological Analysis course described above. There were about 15 class meetings with the rest of the time spent on homework exercises. Several of the students were not comfortable with using computers in general or with the Internet in particular. Each student contributed to an Internet-Based Annotated Geochemistry Bibliography which will be expanded by future classes.
I believe that the experiments described above have proven useful. I do not believe that the integrity of any of the courses was compromised by using (to varying degrees) Internet-based resources.
I remain convinced that during the next 20 years, for better or worse, that an increasing amount of the delivery of academic courses will take place outside of a formal classroom. I am comfortable with the transition model for graduate students but uncomfortable with this mode for a freshman-level course.
Given my choice, I would prefer to use the Internet as a resource rather than the sole distribution method regardless of level of course or level of student.