Web Design Portal

Submitted by fred.hofstetter on 18 April 2008 - 9:40pm.

Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award:

2008

Award Status:

Honorable Mention

Course Information

Course Number/ID:

EDUC 639/885

Course Length (number of weeks):

Course Delivery Mode:

Distance

Average Number of Enrolled Students:

Between 10 and 30 students

Course Level:

Graduate

Course Development & Delivery

Course Contributors:

none

Course Development:

The Web Design course portal is a social constructivist framework informed by the learning principles codified by the National Research Council (2000) in their canonical work entitled How People Learn. Chief among these principles is engaging students in a dynamic conversational framework that establishes early in the course a dialog among students and professor. Having students articulate their goals early in the course and hone them dialogically creates a bond that the professor later uses to scaffold students when they begin encountering difficulty. This is when students enter an educational space that the great Russian psychologist Vygotsky (1978) refers to as the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). I refer to it simply as the zone. Coaching students in their zone is the most important principle of e-learning, and I was happy to discover that Sakai supports it extremely well.From a design standpoint, Sakai uses a frameset in which the student’s choice of courses appears across the top, the Sakai tools run down the side, and the course content appears in the large frame along the sidebar. The key to creating a successful course with Sakai is designing the content so it can integrate seamlessly along the sidebar. To accomplish this, I decided to create my course content using our School of Education’s Dreamweaver template. The menus are powered by Spry, which is Adobe’s Ajax framework that plugs in to Dreamweaver. I used the same CSS rules to style my Sakai home page. Thus, when students click an item on the Sakai page, they get a common look and feel that identifies the course as coming from the School of Education.Because my course was part of UD’s evaluation of Sakai, however, I felt an obligation to show how less technically inclined faculty could achieve the same result without needing to understand Dreamweaver, Ajax, and style sheets. So I created another version of the startup page that uses Microsoft Word and Adobe PDF Maker to achieve basically the same result. The key is to organize your course content using Word’s heading styles: H1 for chapter headings, H2 for section headings, H3 for subheads. Then use Adobe Acrobat Pro to convert your Word document into a PDF file. Automatically, Acrobat creates bookmarks that enable students to navigate your course content through its headings. The resulting PDF presents the user with a sidebar that puts the MS Word headings in collapsible menus that work very much like the Spry menus I created with Dreamweaver. A 5-minute movie that is online at http://www.udel.edu/fth/lessons/sakai/SakaiFacultySenateFTH compares the Dreamweaver/Spry approach to MS Word/PDF.ReferencesNational Research Council. (2000). How People Learn (expanded edition edited by J.D. Bransford, A.L. Brown, and R.R. Cocking). Washington, DC: National Academy Press.Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Course Delivery:

Key to the flexibility in Sakai is the manner in which it enables the author to decide which tools will be made available to students. I decided to use a rich array of Sakai tools for two reasons. First, because I developed this course as part of the University of Delaware’s evaluation of Sakai to determine whether UD would adopt Sakai as our campus course management system, I wanted to pilot a broad range of Sakai tools in order to experience how they work. Second, and more importantly, I wanted to use a wide range of instructional strategies in order to meet the diverse needs of my students. The following list itemizes the Sakai tools I selected and identifies the learning principles that informed their selection.1. Home: Collapsible menus differentiate instruction by providing students with access to beginning, intermediate, and advanced materials presented either through text, audio, or video.2. Assignments: My course uses the assignments tool to engage students early in the course and then scaffold them in their zone of proximal development using Sakai’s outstanding feedback protocol that enables the instructor to create a just-in-time dialog to help the student master the assignment.3. Schedule: Enables the students to visualize how the course unfolds over time. 4. Forums: Students interact with classmates and instructor in a socially constructed discussion forum.5. Wiki: A perfect opportunity to use the Wiki is in my “Cool Tool” assignment in which students share their favorite tools with one another and experience communal knowledge building.6. Blogger: My students submit progress reports at three checkpoints spaced equally throughout the course. Students like being able to see each other’s reports, and some of the students turn on the feature that lets other students comment on each other’s blogs.7. Podcasts: Key to my instructional strategy is just-in-time video that students can view to have my lectures onscreen just when you need them. Throughout the course, I make new videos and add them to the online collection. Via Sakai Podcasting, I announce the new titles to my students.8. Chat Room: Students go into the chat room to add a synchronous dimension to their online course.9. Search: The search tool includes chat room transcripts with tags that let you explore other info related to what was found in the search. Students like how the size of the tag represents how frequently it appears in the search results. 10. Roster: Students use the roster to identify their classmates. 11. Resources: I really like how the resources tool notifies the students via e-mail when I add a new resource to the course.12. Tests: I used the Sakai testing tool to administer a survey asking my students what they thought about Sakai. 13. Gradebook: Sakai lets you give students as many extra chances as you want. I used Sakai’s coaching protocol to help all of my students ace the course.

Course Self-Assessment

Communication & Collaboration Self-Assessment:

Excellent

Communication & Collaboration Evidence:

This course is a practicum in which participants form teams to design and develop an advanced Web environment. Each team selects a topic and conducts research on what has been learned by other groups developing applications in the content area. Informed by this research, the team designs a Web-based environment and presents it for critique and discussion by the entire class. Then the team selects an appropriate hardware platform and suite of development software. Participants comment on progress as the environments undergo development on the Web. Each team member logs project contributions into an online reflective blog that is used for grading purposes. In the course wiki, each student contributes to a shared knowledge base of best practices and tools of Web design.Students use both synchronous (Sakai chat room) and asynchronous (Sakai forum, blogger, and wiki) communication to build community, form teams, and reflect on each others’ work. The instructor participates actively in the discussion to create a strong online presence. At three checkpoints distributed evenly throughout the course, the instructor evaluates the blogs and provides constructive feedback about the quality and level of student discussion and reflection.

Learning Material Self-Assessment:

Excellent

Learning Material Evidence:

Collapsible menus powered by Ajax enable students to explore all of the course content and locate material appropriate for their current level of achievement as well as learning style. Key to this instructional strategy is just-in-time video that students can view to have lectures and demonstrations onscreen just when the student needs them. I create these videos with Camtasia Studio. Throughout my course, I make new videos and add them to the online collection. Via Sakai Podcasting, I announce the new titles to my students. Students do not need an iPod, but if they have one, their Sakai professor can be on it.

Learning Outcomes & Assessment Self-Assessment:

Excellent

Learning Outcomes & Assessment Evidence:

This is a project-based course in which students form teams and work together to accomplish goals that they define within the context of the course. At the beginning of the course, the students respond to a Sakai assignment asking them to define these goals. Using the Sakai feedback protocol, the instructor works with the students to refine their goals and formulate a strategy for accomplishing them.After the teams are formed, there are three periodic checkpoints at which each student must use the Sakai blogger to submit project logs to be reviewed by their instructor. In these blogs, each student must write about their individual contributions toward accomplishing the project's goals. Students are also encouraged to blog about problems their project encountered and tell how the team plans to solve them.By the end of the course, each team must mount its portfolios and projects on the Web for their professor to review and grade. Each member of the team receives the grade awarded for the final project, which constitutes one third of the final grade. Individually graded, on the other hand, are the blogs, in which each team member keeps track of their individual contributions toward accomplishing the project’s goals. Thus, at the end of the course, the instructor can assign final grades based on the overall quality of the final project as well as the role each student played.

Course Look & Feel, Web Usability Self-Assessment:

Excellent

Course Look & Feel, Web Usability Evidence:

The course pages passed the World Wide Web Consortium’s WAI checklist and the Section 508 checklist for Web accessibility. Throughout the course, students have their choice of learning from textual, graphical, or video representations of course content. The course instructor is constantly making new videos when students request “show-me” movies to provide instruction in alternate representations.All of the course content is available through collapsible menus created with Dreamweaver and the Adobe “Spry” Ajax framework. Through Dreamweaver templates, the course pages have a common look and feel. By linking the templates to the School of Education’s cascading style sheet, the course pages have the same branding used at the School’s Web site.Because usability is extremely important, we have used the Sakai testing tool to administer a survey asking the students if they have had any trouble navigating the site. The following responses are typical of the feedback we received:“ MyCoursesPlus [i.e., Sakai] in my view is 10 times better than mycourses [i.e., WebCT]. It is more up to date with times and has many more features that were not present in MyCourses.”“ I am very pleased with the new structure for this course. The site is very organized and easy to navigate.”“ This new course management system is very similar to Serf. It is easy to navigate, fun to use, and has a lot of various options for the student to use.”

Learner Support Self-Assessment:

Excellent

Learner Support Evidence:

Learner support guided the design of the course portal, which clearly presents the course requirements (http://www.udel.edu/fth/webdesign/assignments.html) and explains how easily students can obtain assistance logging on, resolving any user name or password issues, or contacting their course instructor (http://www.udel.edu/fth/webdesign/sakai.html). At the bottom of each screen in Sakai, students have links to the UD home page, campus news, technology helpdesk, UD web mail, P.O. Box, and the student information system (UDSIS).One of the students’ favorite supports is just-in-time video that learners can view to have my lectures and demonstrations onscreen just when you need them. I create these videos with Camtasia Studio. Throughout my course, I make new videos and add them to the online collection. Via Sakai Podcasting, I announce the new titles to my students. To accommodate the needs of adult learners, we offer the course in three formats. Students can (1) enroll in a classroom version that meets weekly on Monday nights at 7 PM during the Fall and Spring semesters, (2) take the course totally online in a virtual classroom format, or (3) take the course in a hybrid format during the five-week Winter session that mixes face-to-face meetings on Tuesday and Thursday evenings with online instruction during the rest of the week. See http://www.udel.edu/fth/webdesign/formats.html.

Teaching Innovation

Teaching Innovation:

At the turn of the century, the National Research Council (2000) published a landmark book entitled How People Learn. It is a wonderfully written synthesis of developments in the science of learning, from which three primary principles have emerged. These principles are:1. People learn by connecting new information to concepts already learned.2. To learn how to reason, solve problems, and augment knowledge in a field of inquiry, people need to understand facts and ideas in the context of a conceptual framework that facilitates application to real-world problem solving.3. People are motivated to learn when they can set their own goals, reflect on their progress, and feel in control of their learning.From these principles, it follows that instructional designs should:1. take into account the learner’s preexisting understandings and correct any faulty preconceptions in order to prevent future misunderstandings;2. enable students to study multiple examples of the concept at work in order to learn it in depth in authentic contexts; and3. include metacognitive supports that make visible the learner’s reflections and enable an instructor to provide scaffolding and guide revisions to improve student learning and reasoning.This is the kind of environment I created with Sakai, and I believe it has been successful. I base this belief on the following evidence:1. Student achievement: All of my students aced the course. I attribute this to the Sakai assignment tool’s coaching protocol, which I used to help each student master the course content instead of pass them on with mediocre grades.2. Course evaluations: In the Winter of 2008, students completed a rigorous evaluation of the course administered independently through the University of Delaware course evaluation process. In the doctoral course offering, on a scale of 1 to 5, the Instructor rating was a perfect 5.0 (excellent), and likewise, the overall evaluation of the course was 5.0 (excellent). At the master’s level, the Instructor rating was 4.75, and the evaluation of the course was 4.67 (4 = very good, 5 = excellent).3. Survey results: I used the Sakai testing tool to administer a survey about my students’ reactions to Sakai. The following responses are typical of the feedback I received: (a) MyCoursesPlus [i.e., Sakai] in my view is 10 times better than mycourses [i.e., WebCT]. It is more up to date with times and has many more features that were not present in MyCourses. (b) I am very pleased with the new structure for this course. The site is very organized and easy to navigate. (c) This new course management system is very similar to Serf. It is easy to navigate, fun to use, and has a lot of various options for the student to use.Online is a movie containing a 26-minute demo of my experience with Sakai. The movie is freely available atwww.udel.edu/fth/sakai.

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