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

rschudy@bu.edu

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 magnitudefewer posts per student than istypical in an online course.

Almost no participation inclassroom discussions

There are many assignments and acomprehensive term project.

The are are advanced extracredit assignments for the moreadvanced students.

Multiple term project milestonesand submissions.

Multiple assignment submissions withno penalty for late or resubmission.

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

Students takethe reviewquizzesmultipletimes untilthey havelearnedthematerial.

The quizzes include manyfigures both in thequestions and in thepossible answers.

Course RobustnessCourse 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.