Top Tens

As part of a study of eLearning of CUHK, we interviewed 26 active eTeachers. We discussed with them their most challenging experiences using eLearning for teaching and learning. We also collected information about how they overcame these challenges and developed strategies to reduce their teaching workloads. The following information might provide you with some ideas about how to manage your courses effectively in terms of eLearning.

Preparing learning materials in hardcopy form for students is an extra workload. The copies will almost always be in black and white only. To help you reduce such tedious copying work, the current web-based teaching platforms such as WebCT and Moodle can be of assistance. You just simply upload or update materials such as handouts, notes, PowerPoints or references onto the web at your own convenient time so that students are able to review and replay them at their own pace before and after classes. The use of colour and media files is also possible then. If you find difficulty in using a specific platform, the eLS@CU service will provide you with a demonstration and technical support.

Often students knock on your door asking for explanations even though you have put the assignments or details of the tasks on the web. One way you can avoid this is to help students understand clearly what materials you have posted on the web. A clear inventory of what is on the site can be useful – a ‘table of contents’ for the site. Try to upload additional materials such as technical instructions and course guidance as well.

Marking assignments the traditional way may cost you a great deal of time in the processes of: collecting assignments, redistribution to tutors for marking, collation and recording results, and returning assignments to students. To make the best use of your time you may consider using an assignment drop-box in one of the web platforms such as WebCT or Moodle. This is faster than the traditional way of managing hard copy assignments. And it also ensures that all assignments are submitted before the specified date and time.

Another way to save your time in grading assignments is to make use of the WebCT or Moodle grade book. It is one of the tools in WebCT and Moodle which allows you to enter students’ information and grades online. With the typical settings, students can only access their own grades and teacher feedback, but not the grades and remarks given to others.

To help students maximize their time and learn efficiently in your course you may consider setting up sample online quizzes or self-tests via the web-based platforms WebCT or Moodle. By doing this, students can retake the tests or quizzes and learn from their own mistakes. These can help them understand certain topics before they take the examination. You can use a variety of formats – multiple-choice, short answer, true/false, and matching. Questions and answers for each self-test, and the students’ scores can be instantly tabulated and summarized by the computer. Once the tasks have been scored, the results can be made available for student access (this also saves your time).

Some students take more time to digest the relevant concepts and theories that you have presented in class. To help students understand your course clearly, you can provide analytical or interesting questions (depends on the nature of your course) in the forum, asking students to make analytical and evidence-based comments. Students can be also asked to comment on each others’ ideas. Students’ postings will give you good feedback about how well students understand the material. This will assist you in formulating the best comments to make in class to assist students to clarify relevant theories and concepts.

Students may come to you to acquire additional information about the course such as readings, journals or references. Because students’ learning abilities and background vary a great deal, it is helpful to distribute or introduce extra readings on the web for students’ self-directed study based on their own interest and needs.

Giving direct links to the online articles over the web can save you time and save copyright concerns. It also helps you update any articles for students just by sending an announcement for everyone via the email system in WebCT and Moodle.

Use announcement or the email system in WebCT and Moodle so that you don’t need to type a long list of addresses in emails when a message is for the whole class.

Putting up FAQs on the web can save your time in answering students’ common questions repeatedly. It also helps build your own relevant database for future reference.

Teachers often complain they are inundated by individual email messages from students, many of which contain the same questions. Is this a familiar problem to you? Even when you suggest that students should go to course forums for discussions or for clarification of concepts, they just keep on sending you emails. This continues despite the fact that you keep reminding them about how convenient course forums can be, and how they can provide more opportunities for constructive interactions, given that discussion time in class is necessarily limited. However, there are things you can do to reverse this situation.

Here are ten strategies that are worth trying. These strategies to facilitate online discussion can be quite simple things you can do. They come from the experiences and ideas we have learnt from practicing teachers through our years of supporting eLearning at the University.

Most students are not used to discussing online. So, even though your plan might be to make the online forum an open-ended activity for students to post their ideas freely, it is still a good approach to kick start the course forum with a simple but required discussion activity. Some teachers ask students to introduce themselves on the forum. Some post a simple topic and students are required to post their opinions; teachers can then summarize the most common student opinions in the next class.

If students are not used to the online discussion environment, it is imperative that you demonstrate the forum and its basic functions in class. This may take 15 minutes but it is worth the time. Regular mention of the web activities in your face-to-face classes is another useful thing to try. Many of your students just have not got into the habit of doing learning activities online. They may use the web for social activities but this is somewhat different from course-related learning activities. They may be more motivated to go to the course site if they are reminded about the sorts of learning opportunities that are available on the site.

Teachers’ participation is one key to the success of discussion forums. However, it is unwise for teachers to spend too much time in replying to students’ queries. Encourage students to talk to each other. Join in occasionally to summarize and to correct misconceptions. Getting the balance between showing students that the forum is important and not getting ‘trapped’ into responding to every posting takes a bit of time but is worth the effort.

Avoid answering students’ emails individually if the ideas and questions in the emails are sharable by the rest of the class. Tell students to post the same message on the forum and they will then see your response there, open to the whole class.

You may try to encourage group discussions. Many students enjoy group work and the support they get from working with their peers. The group work in online discussions can be realized in many different ways. One method is to ask each group to post their ideas on a certain topic and then these group responses are used by you in class. Another idea is to create a private sub-forum for each of your student groups. They can discuss a certain topic in the sub-forums until reaching a conclusion; the conclusion can be posted in the open class forum.

It is effective to integrate some ‘competition’ into your forum discussion. For example, some teachers successfully hold online debates; these can work very well indeed.

Relate the forums to the things students care about. Topical matters which are currently in the news can be useful here. One sure way to get students’ attention is to have some forum topics which are related to examinations; for example, saying that some of the topics will appear later on as open-ended questions in the examinations. This should encourage participation.

It is also possible to assign marks to students’ online participation. WebCT, Moodle and other learning platforms provide good log records that track the number of visits students pay to the site, and the postings they have read or have written. These can be used as the basis for a participation grade.

The online forums can be more than places for academic discussions. You may want to create sub-forums for discussions of course arrangements, career decisions, and other interests of the students. This will facilitate the building of an online learning community in the long term.

One final way to motivate students to join the online discussion in the forum is to arrange for discussion topics which were unfinished during the class session to be continued online. This can build up a nice sense of continuity between the class session and online activities.

ELearning tools can be used to facilitate both formative and summative assessment. Under some situations, technology may provide an approach to assessment that outperforms a paper-based counterpart. However, there are potential problems and challenges in running computer-based assessments. Based on local experiences at CUHK, we have come up with the ten ideas below which you should find useful in overcoming these challenges.

It is always wise to give students a reason for doing an online quiz. This can motivate students to do the task as well as informing them about what they can learn from completing these exercises which are additional work. So, when creating online quizzes, the subject teacher should make the purpose of each quiz clear. You could ask yourself questions: Is the quiz designed to help students develop more efficient and effective learning processes? Does it focus on revision of terms? Is it to give students practice in the application of concepts to new contexts? State these objectives somewhere at the beginning of each quizz so that students understand the relationship of the tasks to the course, and to learning.

Remember to think about how readable the items will be onscreen. There are a few elements for you to consider in the design process such as front size, graphic size and resolution, and color schemes. The general rule is to make the questions easily and clearly visible: use fonts that are large enough or are resizable; ensure that pictures and graphs show enough detail or can be further enlarged, and make sure that the text has an appropriate contrast with the background so that reading does not strain the eyes.

A strong advantage of online quizzes is that you can incorporate colored images and a range of media, including video and sound files. The use of multimedia tasks can have many potential benefits.
* Multimedia tasks can be more interesting and hence motivating
* Students are also more likely retain concepts/ knowledge as they have the added visual stimulus of the multimedia items.
* The questions might be clearer as the media files can provide rich and realistic information.
* Online quizzes thus are particularly suitable for case-based or problem-based learning which require students to tackle complex situations which are difficult to explain in a traditional pen-and-paper format.
* Multimedia can improve the quality of feedback as well. Media-enabled feedback can often be more effective in explaining difficult concepts.

When students face new concepts or challenges in their online quizzes, they sometimes become 'stuck' or get frustrated when working alone online. Thus, it is a good idea to monitor students' progress on these online activities regularly and provide timely assistance. For example, the quiz site can be used in class as well as having it as an optional activity outside class. A few quiz items can be run in class to show students how useful the resource can be. It is also helpful if you can spot the common problems or misconceptions that students have, mention them in face-to-face classes, and provide further explanations.

Competition can be fun. If you want to encourage more students to participate in the online activities or quizzes, you could set a 'prize' for the best performance. Even just a mention in class or a posting on the class forum can be a good incentive. It will help if the details of the competition are announced at the very beginning of the online exercises, and steps are taken to ensure that the competition is fair.

Keep the quiz section of the course website active. Students stay away from static resources. Keep updating new exercises to the section regularly. Mention the new additions in class or announce them to students through emails, forums or by SMS.

The feedback you provide for each item is essential to making quizzes into learning experiences. You should provide constructive feedback on each item so as to help students to understand the specific areas where they have indicated some weaknesses. You can also provide targeted additional learning materials for further enhancement.

Good items evolve over time. Questions are not good enough if they do not align with the intended objectives of the quizzes. Some items may be poor, perhaps because the wordings are ambiguous, or they are either too difficult or easy. The weaker questions should be identified. They can be rewritten or replaced by better ones. Ask a colleague to review question items for you, or give them to a few previous students or higher degree students. It is much easier to spot errors, confusions, inconsistencies, typos, etc. in other people's work than it is in one's own. Another method is to use the item analysis function commonly available in many online learning platforms such as Moodle or WebCT. It allows you to view the students' performance on each of the items in the quizzes, thus allowing you to spot the questions that seem to be too difficult and/or too easy.

If you are using multiple-choice (MC) items, the item analysis also tells you much about students' learning through the choices they pick. Ask yourself three questions:

1. Which alternatives were popular?
2. Which were not at all appealing, and hence need to be replaced?
3. How difficult was each item?
The information allows you to identify common problems that students have. It also assists you in further revising the question items. Over a few terms you can build up a set of well-constructed and effective quiz items from which you can either select random or specific questions for quizzes. You can, of course, use the quiz questions from the pool in other courses as well.

Setting online quizzes require many skills. For example, you have to learn how to write unambiguous MC questions, questions that foster higher level of learning, clear instructions and helpful feedback on the question items. There are many sites which provide technical rules for writing good items. Some useful URLs are:

* Faculty Resources Quick tips, Park University
http://www.park.edu/cetl/quicktips/writingtest.html

* Guide for Authors of Interactive Multimedia Instruction, Air Force Institute for Advanced Distributed Learning (AFIADL) (formerly ECI), Maxwell Air Force Base, Gunter Annex, Alabama
http://www.au.af.mil/au/afiadl/curriculum/icwguide/unit_2.htm