CWS: A Course Web Site Creation and Maintenance Tool for Improving Teaching and Learning Efficiency
Andrew T. Yim, Ph.D.
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Hong Kong SAR, China
Tel: +852 2358 7558, Fax: +852 2358 1693, E-mail: acatyim@ust.hk
Abstract: This paper documents the features of a web-based system, CWS (demo site at http://teaching.ust.hk/~cwsdemo/demo.html), developed in a teaching development project. The system provides a prototype demonstrating how some Internet tools can be applied to improve teaching and learning efficiency by reducing communication barriers between students and instructors, by better usage of typical teaching supplements provided by textbook publishers such as multiple-choice test banks, and by preserving the teaching experience accumulated by individual instructors.
CWS is a system suitable for use by instructors who lack technical expertise to create elegant course web sites but still appreciate the help provided by Internet technology. It can create course web sites that put together a standard set of tools. From instructors' perspective, the system provides a simple interface for daily maintenance of the web sites, e.g., uploading new lecture notes to the web sites for students to download, adding descriptions to download items at the web sites, modifying answers to some frequently asked questions (FAQ), issuing passwords to students for accessing restricted areas of the web sites, adding questions to the multiple-choice test banks at the web sites, altering decorative icons, banners, and wallpapers of the web sites, disabling their individual components, etc. Instructors can also monitor students' progress suggested by performance indices based on their attempts at questions drawn from the multiple-choice test banks.
From students' perspective, the web sites created by the system provide convenient access to course-related materials and information. Latest announcements can be found at the course newsgroups associated with the web sites. Printing of lecture notes is no longer limited by the library opening hours and requires no physical presence at the library. Transportation time and costs are saved when quiz and examination results can be found at the web sites. Practices with randomly selected multiple-choice questions can be done at any time depending on a student's working preference.
From the university's perspective, teaching experience accumulated by individual instructors’ effort can be preserved with the web sites. The new instructor to a course will benefit from the accumulated lecture notes, case study solutions, multiple-choice questions, FAQ items, etc..
1. Introduction: Background and Motivation
The Course Web System (CWS) was originally the prototype product of a teaching development project I undertook in 1996. It is an Internet-based system designed to improve teaching and learning efficiency by making course related materials and self-practice multiple-choice (MC) tests easily accessible to students. Users are expected to have only minimal computer experience, ideally, merely basic knowledge of using a web browser such as Netscape Navigator or MS Internet Explorer and the MS Office suite. In 1997, enhancement work was done to turn the prototype into a usable system.
It is unusual for an assistant professor of accounting to participate in an information technology (IT) project like this. It all started with my sensing the potential to make better use of teaching supplements, e.g., overhead presentation slides, usually provided to professors by textbook publishers. Very often I prefer my own way of organizing the materials of a course, which need not coincide with the flow of the supplied slides. Nonetheless, they provide an alternative treatment to the materials, which may help some students to better understand the subjects. So instead of ignoring them, it makes sense to release them to students, although I will prepare my own for lecture presentation.
The traditional way to let student access the slides is to put the diskettes containing them on reserve. This increases the workload of the library. It also wastes the time of students, as they must wait for their turns to borrow the diskettes. "Is there a simple and economical way to distribute the slides?" I asked. The answer is obvious today: use web pages for downloading. But it was not that trivial in 1995, when the concept of World Wide Web was still new to most Hong Kong people and even to some in universities. However, by mid-1996, web surfing had quickly become a fashionable pastime in Hong Kong. With the growing popularity of fast-speed modems (28.8K), it became clear to me that many university students will soon have access to the Internet at home. Such development motivated me to explore the potential of utilizing the web to make course material distribution an easier task to instructors and a less frustrating experience to students.
Besides allowing for economical simultaneous access to digitized course materials, another key advantage of the web has convinced me of its potential to improve learning efficiency: limitless availability (both in terms of time and distance). Based on my experience, students often encounter a knowledge gap in learning accounting. There are numerous chapter-end problems in textbooks that can be assigned as exercises to students. However, before they can tackle these relatively complicated problems, they need to clear up misunderstandings of fundamental concepts and consolidate their learning. The plenty of multiple-choice (MC) questions in the test banks supplied by publishers can play this role of bridging the knowledge gap. However, they are usually underused and available to students only in the form of tests several times a semester. Increasing the number of tests may help but it also adds test administration costs and takes away some precious class time. Working round the clock and being available anywhere (with Internet connection), the web provides a perfect solution to this dilemma. Imagine that students, up to their working habits and daily schedules, may access MC questions randomly drawn from test banks for self-practice, with no restriction on the time and place. Better yet, the system will grade their answers right away and keep track of their performance records and inform them of their progress. Additionally, the instructor can shortlist those seemingly lagging behind based on the performance records and pay extra attention to help such students to catch up. It was this vision that led me to explore the potential of a "web-aided" teaching approach.
Unfortunately, after an extensive search over the Internet, I did not discover any readily available tools in the public domain for realizing such a teaching approach. While there are many web sites distributing low-cost shareware with professional quality, the only relevant tool I found was a commercial product called WebCT developed by a UBC computer science professor. After trying the demo, it seems too costly given what it offers. WebCT, and other similar products such as TopClass, have the advantage of unifying the access of its functions via the web. This includes functions like sending private email and posting messages to an open discussion area. However, newsgroup has long been a standard, readily available, and free tool for open forum discussion in the Internet culture. Building such a function from scratch seems somewhat redundant in effort. Similarly, the emailing functions in these products are often much restrictive than those offered by popular free email clients such as Eudora. For the remaining functions that are unique to these products, they seem too much for ordinary users. I believe that the basic and major need of ordinary users is just to have a web site to put class announcements and store lecture notes for distribution and do these regularly with little effort. If this indeed is the only purpose, it is not worth paying for such products that have functions rarely used or otherwise freely available elsewhere. For slightly more demanding users like me, who also want to make better use of textbooks’ MC test banks, these products do not provide such a function. Some allow an instructor to prepare quizzes in advance for later practice by students. But then, it requires the instructor’s attention in order to increase the number of tests students can use to check their understanding. This consideration led me to the development of the CWS, which is a streamlined course web site creation and maintenance tool that links up freely-available tools such as email client and newsgroup reader and provides a module that randomly generates MC tests for self-practice by students without the instructor’s attention.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Main features and advantages of the CWS are discussed in the next section. Then I will explain what technical knowledge is expected from users of the CWS in Section 3. The reasons behind our choices of the development tools and implementation platforms are reviewed in Section 4. Section 5 discusses some development problems encountered in the project. Section 6 compares the CWS to some commercial and free alternatives currently available. Conclusions are given in Section 7.
Through a web interface, the CWS integrates a variety of Internet tools and ideas such as electronic mail (email), newsgroups, frequently asked questions (FAQ), file transfer protocol (FTP), hyperlinks, and common gateway interface (CGI). The system provides a central place for the students to
These functions of the CWS can improve the efficiency of running a course. In particular, the instructor can utilize the CWS for the following purposes, besides those already mentioned in the Introduction:
From students' perspective, the CWS has the following advantages:
The CWS demands only minimal computer experience from users. For student users, they are expected to know merely basic knowledge of using Netscape Navigator 3.0 or above. For example, even the knowledge of using popular software such as PowerPoint is NOT needed. PowerPoint presentations can be viewed inside Netscape Navigator running under Windows 95 in any machine with PowerPoint 97 installed (or with the freeware PowerPoint Animation Player installed for systems with only the earlier version, PowerPoint 95).
Instructor users are expected to know basic
knowledge of using Netscape Navigator 3.0 and some simple web
authoring tools, such as the web editing functions of MS Office
97 or MS FrontPage Express that comes freely with MS Internet
Explorer. Working like simple word processors, these tools can be
used to create HTML files without first learning the HTML tags.
The CWS provides a system management function to upload these
files to the system. They will be kept in a designated area or
even with designated names and appear in the CWS as web pages for
the course outline, course-related Internet links recommended by
the instructor, and a listing of all course materials available
for browsing/downloading. Besides uploading, the CWS also
provides other system management functions such as resetting
account passwords for accessing the MC Testing Module with
notification messages automatically sent to the students involved
and an FAQ editor for adding and editing FAQ items with
hyperlinks. These functions are accessed via web pages without
requiring the instructor users to interact with FTP, email, or
web authoring applications directly.
Because the CWS, particularly the MC Testing Module and various system management functions, involves a lot of interaction between the system and users, we need to choose a development tool that supports dynamic web pages. In choosing the tool, a major concern is the independence of the implementation platform of the CWS. To ensure the greatest flexibility of accessing the system, we insist on cross-platform support. This rules out the use of tools like ActiveX, which requires Microsoft Windows. Dynamic HTML was not yet standardized at the time when the CWS project started. Even today, the actual implementations of Dynamic HTML by MS Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator are not totally identical.
Java is an ideal tool in terms of platform independence and flexibility of the programming language. Unfortunately, its run-time performance was quite slow then and is barely acceptable even by today’s standard. Our final pick was the CGI coupled with Javascript supported by Netscape Navigator 3.0. CGI is browser-independent and accepts programs written in a variety of languages such as C and Perl. This increases the flexibility of system development. Since MS Internet Explorer also supports Javascript, the CWS developed with CGI and Javascript will support a wide range of platforms, from MS Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator on PC to those on Mac and UNIX.
Security is the biggest problem in developing the CWS. To keep track of students' MC test performances and to later integrate them into a spreadsheet for keeping overall course performances, we need to store personal data such as student ID's in the CWS. Owing to the file service system used for UNIX machines at HKUST, when CGI programs are submitted to the CGI servers for processing, the password of the UNIX account for storing the CWS has to be temporarily disclosed in an area accessible by any users in the UNIX system. This posts a security risk to the CWS. To prevent invasion to the account, much effort of the early development is devoted to exploring possible solutions to this security problem.
Another problem concerns the limitations on the kind of interaction created with CGI and Javascript. Although CGI supports interaction between the system and users, its underlying nature is more like batch processing than the kind of interactive processing in software like Microsoft Windows. Javascript can make the interaction a bit more lively but users accustomed to highly interactive software will find some handling of the CWS awkward.
In the two to three years since the CWS project started, there are free and commercial tools available that serve similar purposes of the CWS. QuizMaker is a commercial product first became available in May 1997. It can do nearly every function of the CWS’s MC Testing Module, including, for example, timing a test, and it even allows graphics, sound, animations, and 3-D content in an MC question. Like the CWS, it analyzes student users’ test scores and keeps track of their performance histories for instructors to pinpoint students in different score brackets.
CasTLe is a free MC test generation tool developed by Leicester University in the UK since October 1996. It was first proposed in November 1995 by the Joint Information Systems Committee of the University, six months before my proposal of the CWS project. Unfortunately, I was not aware of its existence until several months after it was publicized in a conference in October 1997. The functionality of CasTLe is impressive even by commercial standards. However, because it does not assume a steady group of registered student users like CWS and QuickMaker do, CasTLe does not keep track of student users’ performance histories.
Web Course in a Box (WCB), a commercial course web site creation and management tool, has been around since June 1996. However, its Drill and Practice/Testing function was not added until September 1997, and the capability of this function is not as good as the other two products mentioned above. In terms of web site creation and management functions, WCB and CWS are comparable. But an in-house product like CWS would allow an institution to control its further development and ensure its perfect compatibility with the local computing environment.
To my knowledge, none of the products mentioned above generate tests randomly as triggered by students’ requests to do tests. Instructors have to prepare a given number of tests in advance. By contrast, the CWS has a Formal Test mode that lets the instructor select questions for inclusion in a test, similar to the other products’ implementation.
The CWS project represents one of the pioneering efforts to pursue "web-aided" teaching in Hong Kong. It was initiated in May 1996 and the prototype was finished a year later. This first phase of the project was supported by a departmental teaching development grant of $50,000 allocated from the School of Business & Management. It was concluded with a public seminar introducing the prototype to the HKUST community.
In June 1997, additional funding of $50,000 was obtained from the School of Business & Management to improve the system’s stability and its compatibility with HKUST’s computing environment and also to polish the interface to make it user-friendlier. The enhanced system allows users to choose the wall paper, the dot leader icon, the style of the page header banner, the icon for the page footer links, whether these icons are animated, the title of each page, and which modules of the system are active and thus accessible to students.
In the Spring of 1998, the enhanced CWS was released for trial by all UST faculty members. There were about twenty professors registered for trial. About ten of them have continued to use it since then. Most of them are colleagues from my department with a couple from the Humanities and Social Sciences division. Those who tried the system without eventually adopting it are mostly professors in science and engineering areas. This suggests the system may be helpful to layman instructor users but can hardly meet the needs of technically capable instructor users.
In April 1998, an open letter was sent to all UST students to invite them to visit the demo site of the system and provide comments on its usefulness. While the response rate was low, the feedback received was quite promising. A few of the typical feedback are excerpted below:
"I took a look at your course web sites and I think they are very useful. In this and last semester, I've taken some courses which require us to use the homepage to download lecture notes and other lecture information. … I think that yours provide some functions similar to these course web pages and also provide some extra services to both students and lecturers. That's really nice. Students can obtain updated info about their courses e.g. lecture material, exam time, marks etc and do not only rely on e-mail. I hope you can really implement this system in all the courses in UST in the future. " (Comment by an undergraduate Industrial Engineering student)
"In response to your earlier mail concerning the CWS, I would like to say it definitely helps a lot in distributing course materials to students. In fact, much more effective than solely depending on the library reserve system perhaps. … I really hope there would be more professors using the CWS, so that we no longer need to spend time queuing for the imaging database, or the subject folders. The only thing about the CWS that's a bit frustrating is that sometimes it takes a bit long to download the materials, and there is the risk of server failure, such as last night. But I believe it works excellent with the library imaging database as supplement, and it is still the more preferable choice." (Comment by an undergraduate Accounting student in my class)
"This system is the future - the leading edge. I encourage as much promotion of this as possible. For one, it reduces unnecessary paper (environmentally friendly). It is accessible 24 hours a day. Also, professors from around the world can see what you are teaching, and likewise, you can see what they are teaching. This will provide a better understanding of the qualities of instruction throughout the world and will greatly benefit the academic community. With this type of system, there is no excuse for a student to be not aware of course changes or improvements. Students who should happen to be abroad can also keep up with their course work - an enticing option for part-time students who travel for work." (Comment by an MBA student)
In November 1997, I presented features of the enhanced system in a seminar series organized by the newly found Center of Enhanced Learning Technologies (CELT) of the School of Engineering at HKUST. The audience had come to a conclusion that the Center should promote "web-aided" teaching demonstrated by the CWS by developing a similar generic course web site creation system widely available to the HKUST faculty. Such a system was rolled out by the Center recently. It is called the Generic Course Web Site System (GCWSS) and was presented in this conference. It includes all but the MC test generation function of the CWS. The response from the HKUST faculty seems quite promising. Increasingly more faculty members are using the system to create and manage web sites for their courses. Up to here, the CWS has finished its mission to arouse the interest of pursuing "web-aided" teaching in HKUST.
A participant in the conference asked me "How is the CWS different from the GCWSS?" This is a good question. Is there any difference at all between these two extremely similar systems? At this moment, the GCWSS lacks an MC test generation function. But backed by the technical expertise of the CELT, such a function can be easily added to the GCWSS. So it is not really a crucial difference. The only fundamental difference I notice is about the relationship between such a system and the instructor users. The CWS is like open source software installed in an instructor user’s UNIX account. The instructor may be web-illiterate in the beginning and needs the help of the CWS to start a simple, usable course web site quickly. But if the instructor ever becomes interested in developing a fancier course web site and has the ability to do so, s/he can modify the components of the web site generated by the CWS without starting everything from scratch again.
By contrast, the GCWSS is a totally different concept. It is like Tripod that provides space to host your web pages. But more limited to that, an instructor user does not have direct control of the web site territory assigned by the GCWSS. The structures of the course web sites hosted by the GCWSS have to be in a standard format supported by the system. An instructor user, being the site "owner," can only modify the site within the scope allowed by the system. Therefore, each course "web site" is actually a collection of web pages under a centrally administered web site managed by the GCWSS. This approach simplifies the administration tremendously because those instructor users, being IT laymen, might damage their course web sites unintentionally if they are permitted to alter things directly at a low level without going through the system as a middleman. On the other hand, if an instructor user ever gets mature in her/his IT skills and wants a more sophisticated site beyond what is supported by the system, s/he must start her/his own and transfer all the materials to the new site.
CWS is a project done by an IT layman and for other IT laymen. It is a tool for beginners to start with. Yet it leaves open whether one day a beginner will turn into an IT-literate. Allowing the sophistication of a course web site to grow with the IT-capability of an instructor user is thus important. Just like how important it is for a small company to have a scalable computer system that can grow with the company. It would be painfully costly to transfer all the data from a non-scalable old system to a new system matching the current size of the company as it grows large. So if an instructor is quite sure that s/he will never go beyond the capacity offered by the GCWSS, which itself will definitely grow over time, then it is a better choice as the CWS is a completed project with no further development. Despite that, it may not be a bad idea to choose the CWS given its flexibility to grow with the IT-capability of an instructor user.
Whether the CWS is completely replaceable by the GCWSS is not important. What deserves attention and recognition is that the CWS has fulfilled its historical role of demonstrating the benefits and potential of "web-aided" teaching. And because of this, HKUST now has the CELT to promote "web-aided" teaching by making the GCWSS available to all faculty members. As this system becomes mature, I believe that HKUST will definitely share it with other institutions in Hong Kong. After all, what matters most is prospering together, and I believe this is also what the QT&L conference is all about.
The CWS project was funded by a teaching development grant of the School of Business & Management (SBM) at HKUST. I would like to thank Yuk-Shee Chan, Dean of SBM, for approving the grant. I am grateful to the Internet Program Office of the CCST, especially Peter Y.W. Chang and Ban Y.P. Szeto, for providing the help to supervise the enhanced work that turns the prototype into a usable system. Chun-Fai Chan and Albert Tai-Ka Lok have provided excellent programming support to make this possible. I also want to thank Chun-Fai Chan again, Ting-Pong Ip, and Ming-Fun Lo for equally excellent programming support to the development of the CWS prototype. Thanks also go to the SBM Technical Team, in particular, Paul W. H. Kwan, Senior Computer Officer, and Max C. Duong, Assistant Computer Officer, for their cooperation and help.