Basic Internet Tools for University Lecture Courses

This is a list of some basic Internet tools that can help teach university courses. The tools are arranged in order of decreasing benefit/cost ratio.

Basic course home page

A World-Wide Web course home page provides prospective and current students with basic information about a course. It also serves as the first point of contact between students and instructor by providing the names of lecturers and TAs, lecture and lab times, contact information, textbook details, etc. Unlike printed information, a Web page can be updated during the course so that it remains up-to-date.

The course home page is also an entry point to the other on-line resources described below by means of ``clickable'' links.

Links to many examples of course Web pages are available at The World Lecture Hall.

E-mail

E-mail provides non-real-time one-to-one written communication. E-mail allows students to ask questions and raise issues in private without having to wait for office hours and visit the lecturer. In addition, asking students to write down their questions often helps them clarify the problem.

However, not everyone is comfortable using e-mail and alternative contact methods should also be provided.

On-line discussion groups

Discussion groups allow one-to-many communication. These have been implemented in many ways: as e-mail mailing lists (e.g. Majordomo), local newsgroups, and web-based discussion software (e.g. Hypernews). These can all be ``gatewayed'' to each other so that students can use whichever access method is most convenient for them. These forums usually follow various ``threads'' (discussions) that begin with a student posting a question followed by subsequent responses from other students, TAs or the lecturer.

Discussion groups allow students to get faster responses to their problems since all other students may contribute answers. However, some students may feel intimidated by the public nature of discussion groups and may prefer to use e-mail.

There are several examples of Hypernews course discussion groups at California State University, Northridge.

On-line documents

On-line documents can be made available through the web (using either FTP or HTTP protocols). Documents may include lecture notes, assignments, laboratory material, past exams, and solutions.

The documents can be made prepared by scanning hand-written notes or by conversion of machine-readable formats such as ``Power-Point'' slides or word processor documents.

Material should only be made available in a widely-supported format such as text, HTML or PDF format to make sure it can be accessed by as many students as possible. Most programs will create files in these formats.

For lecture-based courses there may not be much advantage over providing photocopies. However, if the material is already in machine-readable form very little additional effort will be required to put the material on-line (simply ``printing'' the document to a file in a special directory may be sufficient).

Adobe has collected some examples of on-line educational PDF documents. PDF documents can be generated with Adobe Acrobat or the free Ghostscript software.

Other uses

More extensive use of the internet is rarely worthwhile for a typical lecture course that already allows for personal interaction between students and the lecturer, opportunities for group discussion and hands-on laboratory work. However, there are more sophisticated tools that may be useful for very large classes, for distance education, or where the costs of developing the required materials can be recovered through fees or royalties. Some of these uses include:

UBC Applied Science Teaching Technology Committee / Ed Casas / edc@ece.ubc.ca