An on-line course is not simply a traditional course translated into Hyper-Text Markup Language. You need to re-think the content, dialogue, and requirements of your course to respond to both the opportunities and limitations of the Internet. Following is a check-list of elements to consider in designing your course. You could combine some on-line elements with some traditional elements for your course, depending on the level of expertise of your students (and you) in on-line technologies, as well as the particular needs of your course.

Syllabus, course requirements, objectives

The on-line elements of your course might consist only of a Web page with your syllabus, course requirements, and objectives, with the remaining elements taught with traditional methods.

Advantages:

• This is an easy way to start using the WWW before you're ready to try more ambitious on-line course work.
• This is also an effective way to publicize your course to prospective students who are looking at course offerings in your department and on our campus.

Disadvantages:

• If you do not require your students to use the Internet for the course, you will have to provide both an on-line syllabus and print copies of the syllabus -- increasing your work, instead of reducing it, and increasing the possibility of mistake.
• If you require students to use the Internet to get the syllabus, but do not include other on-line elements for your course, you will find yourself making a huge investment of time for training, with minimal benefit for them.
• For prospective students to learn about your course, you will need an effective plan for on-line publicity (e.g., hyperlinks to your course from the department's home page) and print publicity (e.g., the URL in department brochures and newsletters that will reach the target audience). Your on-line syllabus won't be worth the trouble, if nobody knows about it.

If you are planning more ambitious on-line elements for your course, try to include hyperlinks in your on-line syllabus to those materials, to make the Web site as beginner-friendly as possible.

Text

You need to decide whether you will use (a) a print textbook for your course, supplemented by on-line elements, (b) on-line readings in place of a print text, or (c) some combination of print and on-line readings.

A few publishers are now experimenting with Web sites they produce and maintain to supplement widely used textbooks for popular courses. Some publishers have also experimented with CD-ROMs sold with their textbooks. See what's available in your field to determine whether you could use these existing technologies, rather than developing your own from scratch. Unfortunately, these experiments seem to be limited to a few courses with huge enrollments nationwide to support the development costs (e.g., introductory texts in political science and history).

Print textbook:

Advantages:

• The copyright issues have been solved by the author/editor of your print textbook, just as they are in a traditional course.
• Finding and organizing material for the course will be much easier if you continue to use a print text.

Disadvantages:

• Students unfamiliar with the Internet might try to get through the course without learning the on-line skills necessary to use your Internet elements; the print textbook tempts some into thinking it's all they need to learn.
• Print texts rapidly grow out-of-date in some fields and you will forfeit the opportunities of up-to-the-minute course materials possible on the Internet.

On-line reading:

Advantages:

• You can take advantage of the most up-to-the-minute material available in your field and can add/revise your readings during the semester as new materials become available.
• Your students will be forced to master the necessary technical skills to participate in the course.
• You can experiment with the use of hyperlinks between your assigned readings and other materials to take advantage of the WWW, and making reading more interesting and interactive.

Disadvantages:

• Copyright restrictions might make it difficult for you to put appropriate reading on your own site.
• Page numbers for print-outs of on-line readings will vary, depending on the options set by each user for font size, type style, margins, etc. In order to make reference to certain passages in the reading in your class discussions and assignments, you will need to devise an alternative citation system - sections, chapters, and/or paragraphs should be numbered, e.g.
• Although you can set up hyperlinks to assigned reading on other people's sites to include copyrighted material, it might be difficult to construct an entire course syllabus this way. There are still huge gaps in the resources available on the WWW.

E-Mail

E-mail communication among students and between students and you should be one of the easier course elements to include.

Requiring E-mail accounts: Consider requiring each student to get an e-mail account by a certain deadline in the first week or two of the semester and send you an e-mail message to confirm that they have an account. If you make e-mail optional, many students won't participate and you'll have trouble using this course element in significant ways.

Requiring use of e-mail: Consider requiring everyone to check their e-mail at least once a week (or more frequently), so you can rely on this as a method of communication with the class. Put this requirement in writing somewhere if you expect to send out information required to successfully complete the course.

Encouraging use of e-mail: E-mail is a good way for you to get in touch with students with problems, absences, missing work, etc. As the semester progresses, many will see e-mail as an opportunity to communicate with you in ways they hadn't considered before during traditional office hours. Another way to get students to see the usefulness of e-mail is to send out a "mass e-mail" a few days before class with reminders about plans for the class, corrections and updates in your assignments, etc.

Training: Even e-mail requires training for the technology beginners in your class. Either arrange a class in a campus lab or see if the library's training workshop schedule would meet your needs. Then require students to attend the appropriate training.

Class e-mail list: Consider putting your class e-mail list on-line on your web page, so students can easily find each other's addresses. You can also set up the list with a hyperlink on each name/address for "mail to:…", so all they have to do is click on the link and they will be put into a netscape mail screen. (Anything you can do to make this beginner-friendly will help.)

Also consider setting up a "mass e-mail" hyperlink, for a pre-addressed mail screen for all the students in your class. (This is essentially a home-made list-serv set up for the class by you.)

Students change e-mail frequently during the semester as they subscribe to various commercial services or change services. By putting the class list on your Web page you can continually update the list, without the expense of typing and xeroxing the list. Also, by putting the list only on-line, you force beginners to look at the class web site.

On-Line Discussion

On-Line Discussion can complement your in-class discussions in various ways. It can provide an opportunity for students to engage with each other in considering issues in the reading, both before and after you have considered it in class. It can provide a way for you to raise additional questions that you don't have time to cover in class. It also can provide a way for students who are shy in in-person discussions to get involved.

Optional discussions:

You could set up an on-line discussion group that is available to students, but not required.

Advantages:

• This provides an outlet for additional discussion needs for the course that some students will appreciate.
• By making this optional, you will not overwhelm beginners with the technology demanded of the course, nor will you absolutely have to train them in whatever discussion format you use.

Disadvantages:

• If this is not required, you might end up with a very small group of "regulars" and limited value to the discussion.
• If students are not required to participate with some regularity, you will be unable to use the discussion group to post information to the class or raise extra questions about the course material.

Required discussions:

Consider requiring that students participate at least once a week in the on-line discussion to ensure that this is a vital part of your course. You might assign some points for participation to provide the necessary incentive.

Advantages:

• Reluctant students will be nudged to try this form of communication. Especially for students who are shy about in-class participation, this will lead them to discover other ways of participating.
• You will be able to take advantage of this added dimension for your class's interaction.

Disadvantages:

• As no training is provided on-campus, you will need to arrange a training session in one of the campus labs.
• Some students will come to resent this extra workload, and you might need to make adjustments in the other expectations for the course.
• Flaming can get out of control quickly, requiring that you monitor the discussions closely throughout the semester.
• You will need to devise some method for tracking participation to see that the course requirements are met.

UseNet or Conference-on-the-Web?

At present, you can choose from two approaches to on-line discussion:

UseNet: This is the newsgroup software under "Netscape News," included on the Netscape Web browsers of 2.0 and higher. You can have an account set up for your class through Academic Computing Services.

Advantages:

• As many others classes use UseNet, more of your students are likely to know the software.
• UseNet messages can be "threaded" by topic, date or recipient, so you can see a series of related conversations.
• The software allows you to send an e-mail response to an individual person who posted a message or post a follow-up comment to that specific comment on the news group.
• The newer versions of Netscape (anything from 2.0 up) include a newsreader which makes this easier to use than it used to be.

Disadvantages:

• There is no formal training on campus for students, so you will need to arrange for a training session that you conduct in one of the campus labs. For beginners, UseNet is no more self-evident than e-mail.
• Students working from home on commercial ISPs often have trouble using this. You can have a password added to your group, which you then give to your students so they can access the group from another ISP. But some ISPs do not have software on their programs which is easy to configure for access to your group, and you will find it nearly impossible to help them in the abstract without using that particular ISP yourself.
• The discussion groups seem prone to being unavailable (off-line or overloaded) much more frequently than any other element of the Internet on our campus. This problem occurs whether you use them on-campus or off-campus.

Conference-on-the-Web: This software, developed at San Francisco State, is now available at CSULB. It is a Web page that shows threaded discussion comments in the order posted. To see the entry site: COW

Advantages:

• The software is much easier to use than UseNet, especially for beginners. It is also much easier for off-campus users, as they do not need to configure any special software on their commercial ISP - they only need to access a regular Web page.
• The "help" materials included on the COW site are reasonably helpful.
• To enter the COW for your class, a student only needs a regular CSULB computer account. (Off-campus users who are registered students should be encouraged to get a CSULB account for easy access.) There is also a way for non-CSULB users to be admitted.
• You can set up a series of topics for the course, to give some structure to the discussion. For example, you might set up a topic for each of the topics on your syllabus, so the conversation is not quite as chaotic as it can be on a UseNet discussion group.

Disadvantages:

• The COW software has no easy way to enter an e-mail response to an individual posting. Each registered user is asked to complete a "user profile" that includes their e-mail address, but many forget, and you still have to address the e-mail manually.
• Within a particular topic, each new posting is added at the end. There is no way to intervene mid-way to respond to a particular comment that appears earlier, so the threads are less well-organized than one might wish.
• There is no formal training for COW, so you need to schedule a session in the labs to teach this. Many of the lab attendants are unfamiliar with it and few classes have used it so far.

On-Line Assignments

You can post your assignments for the course on-line throughout the semester, especially writing assignments. You can also require students to send you their papers as attachments to e-mail messages.

Advantages:

• Your department will save on xeroxing expenses for traditional assignments.
• If the assignments are available only on your class web site, students will be forced to work with the technology.
• Assignments can be creative in requiring students to look at various Web sites and other on-line resources and learn more about your field.
• Requiring that students send papers as e-mail attachments will teach them a skill they will no doubt find priceless in future courses and employment.

Disadvantages:

• You might find that you need to write entirely new assignments each time you offer the course, as everyone with access to the Web (including the fraternities and sororities) now has access to your course materials.
• You need to allow plenty of lead time in case there is a problem with the technology - e.g., the CSULB server off-line for any reason. (It has been off-line for as long as 48 hours this semester). Warn students to start working on assignments early and not wait until the last minute.
• Hyperlinks you set up to other sites for the assignment can go off-line just as unpredictably. You will need to check to see that everything students need to do the assignment remains available while they're working on it.
• You will need to train your students on e-mail attachments, either in the lab or with an on-line set of instructions.

Exams and Quizes

Exams and quizes which are posted on-line (either on your Web page or through a mass e-mail distribution) will be, in effect, open-book tests. And you will never know for sure who else might be sitting in front of the computer screen writing the answers. If closed-book exams and quizes are essential, you will need to do those in a traditional classroom setting.

On-Line Projects

In addition to writing assignments, you might develop projects for individuals or groups which involve research on the Web and dissemination via their own Web pages.

Advantages:

• Asking students to create their own Web page will immerse them in thinking about how to organize and present their project using this new technology - a skill that will benefit most in their first jobs and provide priceless experience for job-hunting in a few years.
• The dissemination to the rest of the class on the Web will be an effective way to involve all students in learning about the content of those other projects and actively discussing them with each other, in-person and on-line.

Disadvantages:

• No student workshops are available on our campus to teach students web-authoring. Although some for-credit courses are offered on web-authoring (especially in the College of Engineering), you will not be able to count on many knowing how to author a web page.
• Undertaking to train students yourself on web-authoring would be a daunting task and might engulf you for the semester.

On-Line Resources

Existing resources: Another element of your course could be introduction to on-line resources in your discipline. You might set up a page with a few hyperlinks to the leading resources in the field or on the material covered in your course. Numerous pages of hyperlinks on almost every topic under the sun are available on the Web, of course, but you could provide one edited specifically for the needs and interests of your class to get them started.

New resources: You might also contribute new resources in your field of use to your class, as well as others in your field. For example, you might put on-line some public domain texts which are not available elsewhere on the Web. You might put on-line a shortened version of a complete public domain text available on-line elsewhere, in length and form suitable for undergraduates. You might include public domain images or images you created, which are useful to supplement on-line courses and which are not available elsewhere.

Return to the home page for the Workshop Series

This page prepared and maintained by Julie Van Camp, Associate Professor of Philosophy, California State University, Long Beach

Copyright Julie C. Van Camp 1997. This Web page may be freely reproduced in any medium, so long as this complete copyright and permission notice is included with any such reproductions.

E-mail: jvancamp@csulb.edu

Last updated: April 16, 1997