January 21, 2002

Designer of Free Course-Management Software Asks, What Makes a Good Web Site?
By JEFFREY R. YOUNG

What makes a good course Web site? That's one of the questions facing Charles F. Kerns, education-technology manager for academic computing at Stanford University, as he helps design a new course-management system that will be free for any college to use.

The effort to create the course-management system, called the Open Knowledge Initiative, is led by Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and also involves several other colleges. The group plans to release a series of software modules to help professors teach both classroom and online courses, as well as a set of technical specifications that will let programmers at other colleges develop compatible software.

Before working on the Open Knowledge project, Mr. Kerns led the Stanford Learning Lab, a division of the university that does research and development into using technology in education.

Q. What makes a good course Web site?

A. There's a lot of activities that you can engage in on the computer, but if you just slap them together as an add-on to a course without really thinking about how it fits in with all the other things in the course, it doesn't make much sense. So I don't really like to think about a course Web site; I like to think about all the learning activities and how they work together. I'd say a good Web site is one that doesn't just sort of hang out there as an independent entity, but is an important part of teaching for the course. Let me give you an example of one. When I was in the Learning Lab, we worked for several years with the human-biology program here at Stanford, and one of the issues that we had was how to get an understanding of the misconceptions and the knowledge of the students by using weekly assignments -- and how to grade them with limited resources. So the research team at the Learning Lab developed a system where we have multiple-choice questions, and then the multiple-choice questions also have a free-text entry area for putting in a rationale for the answer. Pedagogically, this is sound ... and it also helps in time management, because you can sort the questions for the most frequently missed questions. So you can be very efficient in loO.K.I.ng at where students have problems, and then you can look at their answers in the rationales and find out what the misconceptions are.

Q. What are some misconceptions about designing course Web sites?

A. One of the big problems is if you think the instructor has to do an upfront information-design task that might take six months. Then it's such a high barrier to using technology and multimedia. But if you let the students, as part of their research, post the material on the site ... then you don't have to go through this long authoring process ahead of time, and you can take the role you normally do as a professor -- critique student work. You probably don't write a textbook the first time you start teaching the class. ... Making an engaging Web site with all of the content is not the really important part of course Web sites -- it's the communication aspect [that's important].

Q. What are the biggest challenges for designing the Open Knowledge Initiative?

A. One is the wide range of skill levels of our faculty. We have many faculty who could write this [software], and we have many faculty who use e-mail and the Web, and that's about it. We have this wide range of skill levels, so how do we support across this?
We also have different practices in different disciplines. ... We have a lot of peer-reviewed writing assignments in our writing courses, but we have nothing quite like that in our engineering and science courses. There's lots of variants for different departments, so how do we accommodate all this, and these different skill levels, and have something for the student that looks coherent?

Q. So is one of the unique aspects of the Open Knowledge Initiative the attempt to accommodate the teaching needs of different disciplines?

A. The idea is that in this open-source system, you can make modules, and they will work [together]. For instance, if I got a grant to build something, then I could build a module that was focused on my problem -- let's say in product design, or mechanical engineering, or English. Then I could use the other tools that were already there for gradebooks and announcements and that sort of thing, but I'd have my module that focused on my specific needs. That's Step 2 for us right now, though. Step 1 is to have a basic system that covers things like posting documents, making announcements, giving quizzes, having a home page. That's a star we can almost reach. We're getting close.

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Copyright 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

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