McGraw-Hill/Dushkin: Using Online Materials

The Pedagogy of Web Site Design

The Online Lecture

The Study Unit

Administrative Pages

"Learning happens best when there is a community of scholars: a teacher and a fairly small group of students gathered to study a set body of information."¹ E.L.Skip Knox believed this implicitly until he attempted to set up an online course and found he wasn’t being very successful in getting his students to use the material online. He finally discovered that what was missing in the equation was the "set body of information" that each student needed to have at a specified point in time, since everyone was free to read all the material on his or her own time. Hence, he set up online:

a class schedule
a syllabus with a list of topics for a given week
a list of readings

When students knew what was expected of them week by week they were more comfortable in using the online materials and the class became a community of learners. For this instructor, the discussion method is key and he uses the listserv as his primary method of communication among students. The tips excerpted from his essay, however, can be adapted to almost any form of instruction using online materials.

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The Online Lecture

Knox continues to use the lecture as the basis for his online material since he is familiar with it and it suits his course. He calls the Web lecture a third rhetorical style, as opposed to the formal academic paper or the traditional informal lecture.

Web Rhetoric

In preparing the Web lecture he suggests:

be precise in your language
write in complete sentences
insert a bit of humor or personal comment if appropriate
each lecture is presented as a series of pages rather than one file
each Web page presents a thought, a concept, a scene in a narrative
the end of each Web page, like the end of a chapter, should lead the reader forward to the next page (if possible)

Linearity

Knox believes online lecture should be a known quantity taking a specified amount of the student's time. Therefore, he:

has no external links within the lecture format
links only to previous page, next page, and table of contents
puts external links on a separate page called Supplemental Readings

An Experiment

The form of any lesson works best with a conscious pedagogy underpinning it. That form should reflect several variables:

the personality and tastes of the teacher
the constraints of the discipline and subject matter
the technology itself
the type of student who will use the material

In an attempt to try another approach to the linear lecture, Knox organized a lecture on Medieval society with:

hypertext links to the various subject areas
a series of questions to be answered for each topic area before students entered the linked site—this gives students limits on how far they need to surf and how much they need to read in accessing linked pages. Knox found that, again, with clear direction and limits, students found the links to other information, photographs, and details of Medieval living enlightening and interesting.

The Basics: Consistency, Clarity, Navigability, Speed

Using fundamental design goals in all online material aids in student comprehension. Knox suggests the following strategies to keep students focused and the material on you site easily accessed:
- each page should have consistent layout elements- background, placement of buttons, titles and content, page count—this lets the student know he is still in the same lesson or lecture
- lecture title is always at the top of the page
- title for a particular page is underneath the lecture title
- clearly indicate that this is page x of y
- embed subheads if the page is more than three paragraphs in length to break up the text a bit
- navigation buttons: place TOC, Previous, Next buttons consistently on each page
- TOC button takes student to the Home Page where he can then navigate to the Syllabus or Readings page
- on the last page, put an End button in place of Next—gives student clear direction that the lecture is finished
- at the bottom of the page, put a horizontal rule to let reader know the basic course information is finished, and then put an e-mail link so that students can easily reach the instructor if necessary
- use different backgrounds to identify main areas of the site: one for the Home Page, one for all lectures, another for administrative pages, and another for supplemental readings, etc. This gives the student visual clues as to where he is within the site
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The Study Unit

The study unit is a higher level of abstraction. The study page organizes the sequence of lectures, and shows the relationship of study questions, exams, assignments, to the larger structure of the course.
- organize the material on the study page in chronological units or study units
- make the unit a link that corresponds to a page where all the pertinent study information can be found: assignments, study questions, etc.
- numbering and heading each page helps students in referring to those pages when they have a question about them
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Administrative Pages

Students unfamiliar with taking a course online, or even with incorporating online material into the usual classroom structure, need lots of guidance and reassurance.

The administrative pages need to inform students of the mundane yet necessary tasks of taking a course, registration, test taking, etc.
- provide common rules of netiquette for students who are new to surfing and using the Internet for communicating
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Footnotes
1. http://www.aln.org/alnweb/magazine/issue2/knox.htm