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Background:
Students who enroll in the first
semester non-majors organic chemistry course at the University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign are generally science or pre-professional majors who need
the course to fulfill requirements. Enrollment size is typically 600-800
students in the fall semester and 300-400 students in the spring semester.
Fall Semester 2003 was slightly
unusual from previous semesters. Due to schedule changes and overlap of
times in the required courses of the students enrolled, students were split
into three sections over two different lecture times to accommodate the
overload and the conflicts. Also, two instructors were used for the course:
one instructor at 8:00 AM on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday (Section A)
and one instructor at 9:00 AM on the same days with the students seeing
the lecture face-to-face (Section B) and via simultaneous closed-circuit
live projection in a separate classroom (Section B1).
This was the first time the chemistry
department at UIUC had offered a course via closed-circuit projection.
It was discovered early that many students in the video section had little
to no experience with this type of educational setting, and so students
were treated in this study as distance education students.[1] Predicting
that some students who were forced to register for the video Section B1
might be prime candidates for dropping the course in frustration,[2] the
need existed to redesign the course in two principal ways: 1) the distance
students should have functional connections with the students from face-to-face
sections to avoid feelings of isolation; 2) the distance students needed
a medium by which they could have an elevated amount of access to the instructor
and to other students. Face-to-face students could interact with the instructor
during lecture in real time. Therefore, it was felt that increased instructor
access for the distance education students around the examination times
might restore educational equity in the students’ minds. Discussion
boards offered a technological solution for offering help to students in
a controlled and universally accessible fashion.
In addition to overcoming these
obstacles, the class enrollment at the time of designing the experiment
was 675 students. As of this writing, there is no reported precedent for
online discussion board small group work (4-6 students) as part of a large
enrollment course of this magnitude in any discipline.[3] Effective student
group work means designing the assignment for maximum interaction of the
students, which means instructor facilitation of discussion amongst the
groups.[4] This is multiplied by a factor of 100 in this case. To maximize
the chances for an overall increase in student confidence using the discussion
boards, clear evidence of instructor involvement at each stage of the assignment
is crucial to success.[4] Therefore, the design of the assignment needed
to include automated functions that demanded a minimal consumption and
a maximum efficiency of the use of facilitator time.
Background
Objectives of the Work
The WebCT Assignment
Experimental Design
Facilitation of the Assignment
Grading the Assignment
Results - Student Surveys
Acknowledgements and References
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