Additionally, continuous research will take place.
The drafts for the courses are below:
FIM-project 1: A co-operative Internet course
FIM-project 1: A co-operative Internet course
Title of the course:
Comparative review of personal homepages, homepages of educational institutions and self-employed people.
Target group:
The target group of the course consists of three categories: a class of an AHS (Academic secondary school/upper level), a group of students at the local PADB (Federal pedagogic academy) and a group of students of information science at the university. The course will be held jointly with the teachers of the PADB and of the AHS and the FIM. The following diagram shall illustrate the connections between the three groups:
Communication:
All communication between the participants (between the pupils), between the different groups (pupils and students) and between the directors (teachers and university personnel) will be conducted by electronic means alone, i. e. there will be no personal meeting of the participants. This cannot be ensured between the pupils, as they are from the same class, but nevertheless they shall be enforced to do electronic communication at least to some extent. As an incentive the three groups shall work against each other in a sense of competition. This shall be moderated by the obligation to publish (via World-Wide-Web-pages) provisional multimedia-enhanced results at regular intervals.
Means of communication:
The means of communication shall be provided and serviced by the FIM. If necessary there will be an introduction to the different forms for the groups. This will be likely the case for the AHS-teachers, but definitely not for the university students. The necessity for an introduction for teachers and students at the PADB is to be determined when the actual participating groups are fixed.
In detail the communication will flow through the following channels:
- The WWW as a means for one-way communication to several persons.
- E-Mail as a means for communication between two participants or small subsets.
- Private discussion-groups (Usenet-News) for discussions between all participants in an unordered manner, especially for brainstorming and newly found aspects of general interest.
- To a slightly reduced extent videoconferences between members of the three groups and between the directors of the course.
General topics:
- Finding homepages of persons and schools in the Internet with the main area of elementary and secondary schools, additionally of higher schools and universities.
- Distinguish common aspects of these homepages and the essential differences with respect to the type of the school / profession of the person and the general aim of the page.
- Creating a homepage for the school/PADB/university, containing and, if possible, adhering to the aspects from the previous step.
- Find criteria for and differences between the assessment of homepages by the different groups.
Aim and expected results:
The aim of the seminar is to find out in each group, how pupils and educational institutions can present themselves in a high quality in the WWW and how pupils can communicate effectively over the Internet. The results shall enable them to create and successfully carry through projects with other institutions, in this way enhancing the computer-literacy of the participants and adding to their social competence by showing them the possibilities of co-operative and collaborative learning and working together with distant people. As there are three different groups of different educational level and interests, there will be the chance of finding out, which group focuses the attention on which of the many possible aspects.
The main target is to teach the teachers by distance learning how to use modern communication methods and how to structure the communication carried out through them (training on the job), enabling them to transfer this knowledge to the students at the PADL and the pupils at the AHS respectively. So joint projects between groups of the same level (even at a greater distance) will be possible in the future because of this working experience.
Tasks of the FIM:
- Provide scientific observation and create a final report on findings, the areas of success and the problems encountered, so future extensions or similar projects can profit from the experiences.
- Co-ordinate the activities of the three groups so that the common goal doesn’t disappear and that nobody gets demotivated by slower progress than other groups.
- Set up, configure and service the technical environment necessary for the course (WWW-server, mail-server, newsgroup, video-conferencing equipment, ...). This includes providing the hardware, installing the software and configuring them.
- Advise the teachers about the necessary technical aspects and how to use the software (very basic concepts personally, all further teaching will be done by electronic means), so they can give this knowledge to the pupils, enabling them to do the requested work.
- Hold introductions to the new communication technologies by ODL (AHS and possibly PADB) via WWW and/or videoconference.
- Act as a trouble-shooter for the problems that will eventually arise.
- Directly lead the group of university students, organised as a seminar.
Visions for future extensions:
As this is a local project in a sense that all participants are from Austria, there will be no language problems. For a following project it will be of interest to multiply the participants by incorporation of other European countries. In this way it will be possible to not only compare the different views of three levels of educational institutions but also between a number of countries. As this will be followed by at least one other language, the selection of the participants from lower educational levels will be of more importance because of linguistic barriers. This work will be founded on the results and findings of this course, so a further element of distance learning will be included in addition to the continued empowerment of teachers in new media.
FIM-project 2: ODL / CBT course
Title of the course:
Computer-based Training / Computer-based Education
Partners:
There are four partners involved in the course:
- The Department of Computer Science (IFI) at the University of Zurich (CH)
- The University of Umea located in northern Sweden (proposed)
- The FIM at the Johannes Kepler University (AUT)
- The Federal pedagogic academy (PADB) in Upper Austria
General topics:
The main topic of the course is Computer-based Training and Computer-based Education. Individual topics for the teams proposed by the FIM are:
- Evaluation of Computer Based Training (CBT) software
- Compile assessment-criteria for CBT software
- Comparison between common textbooks and CBT
- Advantages and field of CBT
At the end of the course experienced and well-versed teachers from the PADB will review, compare and rank the assessment-criteria found by the different working groups. This will lead to new insights concerning the production of CBT-materials and the concept and the contents of the course in Multimedia-Pedagogic (MMP) at the PADB, which is currently under development.
Course rules:
- Each University should form several teams of three or four students.
- There will be incentives to build international teams. This will involve collaborating and communicating via the Net not only between but also within the groups.
- The communication language will be English because of our foreign partners.
- Each team has to prepare HTML documents using an appropriate tool covering a chosen topic. This will include an introduction to the topic and the results.
- The teams will search the Web for examples, literature, citations etc. in order to prepare a final report on the chosen topic.
- Each team will author intermediate versions of their growing papers and publish them on a dedicated WWW-server to give other teams the opportunity to comment on their work. The aim of this procedure is to become familiar with communicating with other people across the net and to get a feeling how global teams can co-operate.
Expected results:
Know-how about how to organise distributed courses using the Internet. Special points of interest are:
- What is important in the beginning to find participants and to get the work started on schedule and carried out adhering to a timetable?
- How can a co-ordinator stimulate discussions within and between the groups?
- What are the differences between the CBT-courses with respect to their origin and to the reviewers?
Tasks of the FIM:
- We will bring in our experiences from two previous international courses, which were also held via Internet. For reference see http://www.fim.uni-linz.ac.at/lva/rus/ (Sorry, only available in German) and http://www.fim.uni-linz.ac.at/telework/seminar/seminar.html (English).
- The FIM is responsible for providing all communication resources on the server side (WWW, FTP, newsgroup, E-Mail, mailing list, fileserver).
- The necessary software for authoring and accessing the communication-repositories (WWW-Browser, FTP-client, Newsreader, ...) will be made available for downloading.
- Provide scientific observation and create a final report on findings, the areas of success and the problems encountered, so that future extensions or similar projects can profit from the experiences.
- Directly lead the course with the students from the University of Linz.
