hopper, 1993 [5.3, abstract, overview, toc, switchboard, references]

5.3.4 The Learner Construction Organizational Structure

Leading from the role that the delivery of courseware plays in it's creation, it is also important to go further and recognize the ironic reality of the role of students in the growth of courseware. The motivational and work patterns associated with courseware development that are a problem for faculty because of limited time, skills and tenure success, become the major strength when turned around to learner construction. In cases where materials were constructed by students within the context of a course, or outside the context of the course, but within the bounds of the team, it was clearly both beneficial for the students to be involved and learn from the experience, while it was good for the project.
 
It was particularly interesting to review the structure surrounding Context32. The system actually grew during the use of the system because of this learner constructed approach. The assignment's Landow used were specifically designed to increase both learner and discipline oriented outcomes at the same time, while also contributing to the growth of the project as well:
 
The assignments Landow gives his students are carefully designed to produce short essays that will be valuable additions to the web. For instance, an assignment given very early in the semester asks that the students choose a short passage from two of the novels read in the course, and use these passages to compare some aspect of literary technique. The second part of the assignment is to choose a different passage from a different novel and use it to write an essay on contextual information. (Kahn and Launhardt, 1991, p. 7)

 
The assignment was designed to inspire insight into how the books read related to one another. While these were the discipline oriented goals of the assignment, it was also through the same assignment that deeper learner oriented goals were achieved. The assignment increased learner involvement, and through that involvement, cognitive skills and motivation were also improved (Landow, 1989). Landow's direct supervision of the students was limited to copy-editing their essays and rejecting materials that did not meet basic standards. A large part of the current materials (perhaps 90% of 500 documents) were written by students.
 
Similar benefits appeared to result from student involvement in the construction of TODOR. In the passage below, LaVin (personal interview, October 2, 1992) describes the various issues that were associated with their practice of working with students in the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program at MIT (UROPs).
 
LaVin: I was the student's direct supervisor. We had about 12 students work with us every year. During the term they worked 10 to 15 hours a week. There are no classes during the month of January, so they would sometimes work 40 hours a week. They would also often work 40 hours a week over the summer. We used a fairly rigorous interviewing process, because we wanted to make sure that they had decent programming skills and did all right in their introductory aerodynamics classes. They might not know the exact material that they were writing the program for, but they would have the background to be able to understand it. For them it was extremely valuable, and many of them got a lot out of it. They were very creative and would come up with very interesting solutions for ways of presenting things. We approached it as a learning process for the students. They weren't professional programmers, and they were learning aerodynamics as they were programming it. The students didn't have much in the way of numerical techniques, and so it took a long time to get the code written. Sometimes bugs were introduced because the students weren't that experienced. But at least they knew aerodynamics. A lot of them were in the curriculum that they were writing the software for at the time. Consider the flip side of the coin. Suppose we tried to find professional programmers who were also aero/astro experts. Where do you find them? If you treat it as the learning experience that it was for the students, then that by itself was valuable. For example, one of our best students was finishing up the module he was working on, and he came to me and said, "we just did this topic in lecture, and I think we can write a really good module about it." So he wrote the module in about two months. We did have startling things like that happen.

 
The recognition of the value of the learner constructing their own materials was present in a number of the successful projects studied, and it appears to be a trend that may be supported and encouraged through the selection of particular characteristics of software in the future. For example, CECI also plans that AthenaMuse 2 will be easy enough to use that learners will be able to construct their own material. Thus providing the tools to further this particularly productive approach to the creation of software. (B. Davis, personal interview, December 8, 1992)
 
Davis: The professor is going to do this with his students. There's the complete team. That's what we're interested in. We help the teacher create something, then the students use it, and they change it. They teach the teacher something. This is my model of a good teacher. You learn from your students, and if the students are engaged enough to change the textbook, they're really learning.
 
Hopper: But will that change your role then, if it moves to where the instructor's having the students use it?
 
Davis: Hopefully. We don't want to do the same thing forever.
 
Hopper: So you prepare it for the teachers, and then you start new projects. So you make seed projects then?
 
Davis: Well, in a sense, yes. We can't make everything for everybody. The intention is to get that mechanism moving.
 
Hopper: Will your authoring tools then have a gentle enough slope to help support that kind of activity?
 
Davis: Yes. That's the intention. We try to use that model as a way to construct the authoring language, so it would be easy enough for anybody to use at whatever level. We've designed it so you can use the top level graphical tools, the middle level text, or code C++ , or you can move all the way into UNIX.

 
The activities that learners performed and their relationship to the organizations involved tended to vary according to the type of software function emphasized. When microworlds were constructed, students tended to serve in roles of programming. These tasks tended to bring them in fairly close association with the computing organization that supported the courseware project. On the other hand, when courseware emphasized databases of linked text, graphics, or multimedia, learners tended to fill the role of developers and were more closely associated with the academic organization which supported the courseware project.
© Mary E. Hopper | MEHopper@TheWorld.com [posted 12/04/93 | revised 04/12/13]