Recent Steven In Computing Education

Designing an online coursework environment for distance and mobile learning

Citation: Choy, S O (2004) ‘Designing an online course work environment for distance and mobile learning’ in Murphy, D etal (ed.) Distance Education and Technology: Issues and Practice, Hong Kong: Open University of Hong Kong Press, 188-196.

Introduction

Coursework, including any non-assessed exercises and tutor-marked assignments, is an important element in a distance learning system. It provides timely and meaningful feedback on student progress, and can motivate learners and influence their performance. Poor management of assignments can lead to a decrease in the quality of the feedback provided to students (Oliver and Mitchell 1996). However, in a distance education setting where courses often have high student numbers, managing assignments is a complex and resource-intensive process for both academics and administrators.

Due to recent advances in computing and networking technologies, there has been a widespread interest in the use of the Internet and other electronic means to address the problems associated with assignment management (Jones and Behrens 2003). However, most of the proposed solutions and systems for electronic and online assignment management have focused mainly on administrative efficiency in collection and distribution, as well as on student flexibility in submission and receipt. Very limited attention has been given to how to support students in working on their assignments and other non-assessed activities. This paper proposes an application of technology to enhance student support in these aspects of their coursework.

Problems with conventional methods

The conventional method of assignment management is mainly paper-based. The assignments are sent to students by traditional surface mail or the Internet. Students do their assignments electronically using their computers, but they have to print them and then submit them to their tutors. Students have to pay for printing or, for some assignments involving, for example, programming or multimedia authoring, they have to send a soft copy to tutors on a floppy disk or CD-ROM. Tutors mark and comment on the assignments received, fill in a control form and then send the assignments to the university. After monitoring and recording of the results, the marked assignments are finally sent back to students.

There are a number of problems associated with this conventional approach to assignment handling (Jones and Jamieson 1997). For a distance education institution, the major difficulties include:

• Cost For example, the selection, photocopying and sending of assignments to the course coordinator for monitoring purposes, and the frequent mailings (to students, from students to tutors, from tutors to the university, and from the university to students) clearly have financial implications.
• Storage and retrieval After an assignment has been returned to a student, the only record the course team and tutor have is the marks for each question. In both cases, therefore, it is difficult for them to answer, at a distance, students’ queries about an assignment.
• Handling softcopy A floppy disk or CD-ROM that contains assignment work ( such as programs and multimedia work) may be corrupted or cannot be read by the tutor’s computer. It is also a time-consuming process for the tutor to unpack and pack a large number of floppy disks or CD-ROMs.

Previous work

To address such problems associated with conventional assignment handling in a distance education environment, research and implementation studies have been carried out on electronic and online assignment submission and management (Jones and Behrens 2003). Essentially, this involves the use of the Internet, the Web and computers to improve each step in assignment handling.

After several years of evolution, automated and web-based systems have been found useful and effective in handling assignments electronically (Jones and Jamieson 1997; Boone 1999; Darbyshire 2000). Basically, a web-based assignment management system involves the following steps:

1. After connecting to and logging on to specific website, students choose the assignment to submit and specify the location of the assignment file on their local computer for uploading.
2. The assignment file is uploaded and saved on to a particular online file server.
3. Tutors connect to a specified and secure website for downloading student assignments to their local computer for assessment.
4. Tutors submit assignments, with marks and comments, by filling in a Web form.
5. Students can then view their results via the website.

Web-based assignment management systems are now common in many conventional and distance education universities. Also, popular courseware such as WebCT (www.webct.com) and Blackboard (www.blackboard.com) have built in functionality for electronic assignment submission and management. These systems are able to provide flexibility to students and tutors, and reduce the time spent on administering assignments. Normally, assignment marking is done separately, with tutor having to download assignments to their local computers and mark them offline.

The Open University of the United Kingdom (UKOU) has been studying and experimenting with electronic means of handling student assignments for several years (Thomas et al. 1996; Thomas 1998; Petre et al. 1998); and in 2000, the UKOU at large adopted an electronic assignment handling system (Thomas and Carswell 2000) which includes electronic assignment submission, an electronic marking tool, and automatic verification and record-keeping. The system has led to many process improvements to the conventional paper-based system, and has benefited students in terms of the quality of the services offered.

Design requirements

Using the Internet, the Web and current computing technology to handle assignments electronically has addressed a number of problems associated with conventional assignment management schemes. The observed gains include (Petre et al. 1998):

• a reduced assignment turn-around time and more rapid feedback for students.
• an increase in administrative efficiency; and
• a reduction in administrative costs and errors.

All the proposed or implemented online assignment management systems focus mainly on the following processes:

1. Delivery The course team or administrators and use electronic means and the Web to deliver assignments to distance education students.
2. Submission Students are allowed to submit assignments via any Web connection, with flexibility in time and location for submission and return.
3. Administration An electronic assignment management system provides an opportunity for implementing automation in several aspects of administering assignments, such as event notification, file-checking and verification, and record-keeping. The system is also efficient in the distribution and collection of assignments to and from tutors.
4. Marking Handling assignments electronically implies that tutors have to use some electronic means to mark and comment on assignments on screen. Therefore, much effort has been put into the investigation and development of electronic marking tools (Jones and Behrens 2003).

However, there are other issues involved in the design of an online coursework environment for distance education students:

• How can support be provided to students while they are working on their assignments (in the period between their receiving and submitting them)?
• How can they be helping with the non-assessed activities contained in the course materials? Can students be provided with an online coursework environment?

In a world where computers are essential in many aspects of life, it is not problematic to require the use of computers for carrying out assignments or other coursework. For many typical assignments, such as writing essays, it is commonplace for students to wordprocess their work. For some types of assignment, such as programming and multimedia authoring, students are required to use some designated computer application; and, in some cases, they are also given a working template and asked to use it to do their assignments.

Distance education students often do not complete an assignment in a single period of time. Indeed, many of them may have to switch from one computer to another while working on an assignment, particularly those who need to travel on business trips.

This paper, therefore, proposes that distance education students should be provided with an online and integrated environment for doing their coursework. Such a system would provide them with a sense of workplace, and enable them to do coursework at any time, anywhere, and using any computing device. Students need no longer worry about the location of their work in progress or about whether the computing devices they are using are capable of doing the coursework when they have to switch computers. Providing students with an online environment for coursework also offers an opportunity to implement some new ways of enhancing student support – such as monitoring their progress in coursework, and providing timely and useful feedback to them. In addition, with all the progress data recorded on a central server, it is possible to perform various types of analysis to identify trends, learning patterns and student performance.

System architecture

The main design requirement proposed for an online coursework environment is to give students anywhere, at any time and using any platform free computing for doing their coursework. Figure 1 illustrates a proposed system architecture that implements this requirement.

Figure 1 System architecture

From a student’s perspective, he/she can access the online coursework environment via any Web connection. The student logs on to the system and selects the assignment, and a corresponding application program is then launched on his/her local computer; and he/she then uses this application to work on the assignment. Since there is an online workplace for storing the student’s work, he/she can use the application to retrieve previous work or save unfinished work on the assignment.

To realize the proposed online coursework environment, the system has a file server for storing students’ work, and an application server for delivering the assignment applications. All the applications that students need to use are stored in the application server and launched from a Web browser. If it is the first time the local computer has been used to access the system, the required assignment application is installed on this local computer by downloading the appropriate files. After that, when the student uses the same computer to access the system, downloading and installation of the application are not required as it is already cached in the local computer. Since an assignment application will not be modified frequently, caching is a good solution to increasing the efficiency of application launching. The cached application needs to be updated when it is modified or upgraded in the server side – in which case, the system will perform an update automatically when the student accesses the application concerned. However, all the deployment, launching and updates of the assignment application are transparent to students. They only need to ensure that the desired assignment application is always launched and proceed normally with any computer they are going to use.

The idea of launching user applications at any time and anywhere, with any computing platform, is not new in the computing field. However, the idea is not commonly used in the student support area of distance education. One reason for this is the extra cost for the development and deployment of coursework applications for students. For many types of coursework, students normally use some popular wordprocessing application to write up their work. In particular types of coursework, such as computer programming, multimedia authoring and mathematical analysis, they are asked to use specific applications to do the coursework. Some distance education institutions buy the required applications for students, while others require them to purchase the applications themselves. However, the provision of coursework applications via an application server offers a new benefit in student technology support: it gives easy access to the latest versions of applications, and easy management and deployment of applications for distance education students.

A new technology that assists the development of the proposed coursework environment is Java Web Start. This is a software technology that enables remote and platform-independent user applications to be launched from a standard Web server (Java Web Start Architecture 2002). With the Java Web Start installed on a web-connected computer, a remote application can be launched on demand as easily as a local application. Moreover, this technology provides an encompassing deployment scheme that allows the Web server to automatically update client applications when necessary. The Java Web Start technology provides an efficient means to deploy, upgrade, maintain and manage client-side applications with the support of any Web server.

Conclusion

Current technologies of Internet and mobile computing are becoming increasingly capable of supporting large-scale distance education. The use of electronic assignment submission, marking and management has been an important advance in distance education. This paper has proposed a way to enhance the technology support offered to distance and mobile learners for doing their coursework. It has described the rationale for, and design of, an online coursework environment that allows users access to a workplace for coursework anywhere, at any time and using any computer. New opportunities are also seen in providing distance learners with an integrated and centralized environment to deal with coursework.

References

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Darbyshire, P (2000) ‘Distributed web-based assignment management’ in Aggarwal, A (ed.) Web-based Learning and Teaching Technologies: Opportunities and Challenges, Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing, 198-205.

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