Brad Cox Fall 1998
This is best read online so that the hyperlinks (underlined) will be accessible. Just give http://www.virtualschool.edu/98c/ts.html to any web browser. A MS Word version of this statement is available that is formatted as specified. My resume, professional vita, and biography are at http://www.virtualschool.edu/cox. My teaching vita follows:
Thomasina Borkman and Gail Richter-Nelson are familiar with this course and would be happy to assist in evaluating it. The visitor entrance button at http://www.virtualschool.edu/98c provides access to the course itself.
Taming the Electronic Frontier is a large-enrollment (50-100 students per semester) introductory core course for the MA in Telecom (and other) degree programs. I also teach an advanced course for programmers, Digital Commerce: Objects as Property. I teach three sections of the Taming course and am also assigned half time to lead the Educom/IMS digital commerce project, so this is more than a full teaching load. I will concentrate here on the Taming course since it is larger and thus more thoroughly developed.
I see my role as a teacher as coach, mentor and facilitator, "the guide on the side, not the sage on the stage". The course's objective is to engage novices and experts in a collaborative experience during which computer experts and novices can learn from each other by unlocking the innate ability that every student contains. Both groups tend to have preconceptions about each other so this requires changing ossified habits of thinking on both sides. Since such paradigms tend to be strongly defended, I do this indirectly, by immersing students in situations where they can observe the consequences of their belief-systems on their own.
The course is delivered to local students via cable television, to overseas students via videotape, and some choose to attend in person in the GMU/TV studio. However the primary learning modality is not television but a web-based coordination tool that I supplement with email, chat rooms, web-crossing and telephones according to a "use the right tool for the job" philosophy.
The television component revolves around PowerPoint presentations. I spend every Tuesday bringing last semesters presentations up to date. The web-based component revolves around an inventory of tasks that immerse the student in various learning experiences. Some tasks concentrate on technical skill building so the task involves getting a computer to "do the right thing". Others focus on sociocentric skill building, and involve the student with their teammates; or in the case of their semester projects, with an external customer.
Every task involves quiz questions expressed as web-based forms that amount to several quizzes per week. With automation and perfection-based grading, this isn't as labor-intensive as it may seem so I work grading into my other computer-based activities. The time-consuming part is developing the computer-based tasks, revising them each semester, developing the infrastructure they are based on, and ensuring that the system provides no-excuses reliability and transparency. This is quite time-consuming to develop and refine because they are both technically and pedagogically complex.
Each page of each task is not an ordinary static data file but a computer program that draws upon and updates an object-oriented database. This in turn relies on an underlying infrastructure that I developed from scratch, based on the Linux operating system, Apache web server, and Perl programming language. Developing the infrastructure and the tasks has been a full-time effort for the past five years. I currently spend 2 days out of 7 improving the infrastructure and extending/revising previous semesters' tasks. This means I spend about 3 days/week on teaching and the remainder on Educom/IMS affairs.
It should be clear from the above that it is quite demanding to teach this way. I consider the effort worthwhile because my research goal is demonstrating that it is possible to provide a better learning experience in this way than I could ever do face to face in the classroom. This is described in more detail in Evolving a Distributed Learning Community and Plan for a New University.
I stay current via the internet, by speaking at conferences, and by inviting guest speakers to my courses. Thomasina Borkman generously volunteered to co-teach this course and her skills in sociology and group dynamics nicely compliments my technical skills. Gail Richter-Nelson is also a regular course contributor on graphic design and helped to design the site's overall look and feel. External speakers are too numerous to list completely. Notable examples are Mario Morino (wealthy businessman), the prior GMU provost, and many others.
The grading policy changes each semester, but currently solitary task grades count as 40%, the semester projects as 50%, and my personal assessment of the quality of their work counts as 10%. The emphasis on teamwork reflects its importance in the job market and to accomplish teaching objectives of my own. I find that students respond better to pressure from their peers than from me, so I use this in my teaching. Knowing that their teammates are counting on them to check messages regularly works better than dictating this from on high. Often the tasks create specific interdependencies between team members, for example by preventing anyone from completing a task until all of their teammates have completing earlier parts successfully. The goal is to foster cooperation between teammates, for example by encouraging experts on each team to help their teammates to succeed.
By the fifth week of the course, I have provided basic skills training in html markup plus several tasks that build cohesive teams from strangers (introductory essay, desert crash simulation, and several web-based sociometric assessments). The projects begin with a web-based project-planning task that requires each member to document their team's norms and goals, and to provide a week-by-week rapid prototyping schedule. The task requires three interim deliverables to their customer (demo, pilot and final). The task then presents each student's answer to their teammates, and asks each one to comment on any discrepancies.
Grades for the team projects are determined by a customer that each team chooses and specifies during this task. The project requirements are completely open-ended: "Use what you've learned to make the world a better place". Projects have ranged from building web pages for various GMU internal functions (Career Center, etc) to non-profits (Pet Centers) to government (Dept of Agriculture, U.S. Marine Corps) to industry. The spring semesters' projects are available online.
Grades for individual team members are determined by flowing the team's grade to each member in proportion to the team's assessment of each member's contribution. This assessment is gathered during a project delivery task in which each member pulls down a menu to specify the contribution made by each teammate plus a narrative comment on their contribution. A custom end-of-semester grade reporting task provides this information to each student along with weekly averages, exam grades (if any), and so forth, including comments Thomasina and I make about their performance.
Grades on most tasks are determined by perfection-based grading, an innovation that I've never seen anywhere else. I realized that when tasks are submitted electronically, it costs students nothing to revise and resubmit imperfect work. Likewise the effort on my end is lessened by not having to type detailed feedback about the imperfections in a traditional paper. Perfection-based grading means that I only accept perfect work. I return imperfect submissions with a click of the mouse and text describing how to fix the imperfection. For deeper problems my comment might simply be "call me on the phone". My phone hours are 10am-10pm 7 days a week. If a task is perfect by the deadline, regardless of how many revisions are required, students receive a perfect grade, declining by 10 points each week the work is late.
Since the electronic nature of this course allows students to participate in the class from anyplace on the globe, and since the penalties for late work are understood and limited, no exceptions are allowed for travel or minor illnesses.
The one exception to perfection-based grading is that the grade on one task (out of about 20) is determined by a market-based peer assessment.
Although most students perceive the course to be a technical course on web publishing, they soon realize that web publishing involves both technocentric and sociocentric skills. Each student produces a web-based portfolio on any topic they please. This serves as a vehicle for exploring the philosophical question "What is Quality", which with group dynamics and superdistribution, receives as much attention as technical skill development. The textbook for the philosophical component is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert Pirsig.
Quality of student portfolios is determined by peer assessment. This is done with a simulated market exercise which is repeated twice, once for practice and the next time for a small percentage of the overall grade (2%). Each student "inherits" a sum that can only be "spent" on portfolios of the other students in their "market". This was my response to one of the challenges of this topic; of convincing students that it is content that matters, not glitzy graphics and fancy coding tricks. Nothing I do or say seems convince students that fancy animated graphics typically reduce quality as well as hearing this from their classmates.
Evaluation Methods Used in Web-based Instruction and the Online Course, Taming the Electronic Frontier was written by an education major who was interested in the assessment methods I use.
Briefly, I rely primarily on experiential learning (action learning). I designed the web-based task infrastructure to create a structured communication channel between the class as whole, but supplement this high-tech channel with high-touch channels (telephone conversations or in-person meetings) as needed.
Each task presents instruction, invites the student to put it into practice and report the results in the context of the material that preceded this task. Some tasks have students read web-based or paper-based material, summarize what it says, and demonstrate that they have applied each lesson to their web-based portfolio. Other tasks, such as the desert crash simulation, portfolio peer assessment, and web-based sociometric tasks, take a more quantitative approach.
Each student produces a web-based portfolio and participates in a semester project. These provide considerable insight into how well the student is doing, both by me and by the student's peers. The portfolios, projects and course evaluations from the spring 1998 session are online.
According to the course evaluations student relationships are outstanding. Many say this is the most difficult course they've ever experienced in terms of workload and the mental strain of paradigm shifting. Yet they regularly describe it as worth every moment, often describing it as a life-changing experience.
Busy students like receiving the lectures in their homes and offices, the ability to catch lectures they missed on videotape, and the ability to submit homework over the web. They particularly like perfection-based grading because it gives them a chance to learn from mistakes without penalty and because of the flexibility in time and locale. They value the strong relationships that develop during the team projects. Students regularly maintain contact with their teammates and me after they graduate and regularly seek my advice via email. They like the coordination technology upon which this course is based because it tells them precisely what they need to do each week to succeed, rather than simply providing a exploration-style interface to a domain without boundaries or guidelines.
Coordination technology nearly guarantees that even "poor" students will do well because it shows them exactly what they must do to succeed. Grades are almost all A's with a few B's with very few C's and below. Considering the "Why can't Johnny learn" angst in the media, an approach that keeps even marginal students on track deserves very close scrutiny indeed.
Each task includes a "Talk to me" box for feedback on a week-by-week basis, and the course concludes with a comprehensive appreciative inquiry into the course as a whole. This is partially a web-based version of GMU's official form reoriented to the nonresident demands of this course.
The assessment information is too voluminous to detail here but are generally complimentary. I regularly post them on the web to let incoming students know what to expect (for example, see http://www.virtualschool.edu/98a). The most consistent negative feedback is that the workload is too much for a 3-credit course, while usually adding that the effort was worth while. I use the weekly and semester-end feedback forms to guide each semester's enhancements.
My primary external assessment was winning the Paul Allen Foundation's $25,000 prize for the best distance learning course. I've invested part of this into better computers and in a graphic make over for the site. Pedagogical initiatives such as perfection-based grading and market-based peer assessment have been widely commented on in educational conferences and the internet.
My role tends to be as a guide and coach, not as director. This is best typified by the semester projects which are specifically designed to empower students as active change agents (e.g. "make the world a better place") instead of as passive vessels (e.g. complainers).
Using coordination technology to education is entirely original and unique. Most web-based education provides exploration-style interfaces; typically a syllabus, web-based readings, and a chat or discussion tool. I tried this early in this course and discovered that busy students do not have the time for unstructured exploration and reading what other students have to say about a topic. This led to the far more structured approach that I use now. The coordination technology simply compares what each student has accomplished with the course agenda and presents only they must do next to succeed.
On the pedagogical side, perfection-based grading and market-based peer assessment also seem to be original and unique, at least within academia.
Finally, the interdisciplinary emphasis of this course seems to be completely original. This is based on my personal conviction that the ongoing disputes between "academic rigor" versus "relevance to industry" factions are fundamentally misguided and wrong. I've tried to show that both training and education can be delivered in a single course without diminishing either. For example, most students sign up expecting a course in html coding tricks. But they soon discover that the course spends as much time on philosophy (what is quality?) and on interpersonal relationships (group dynamics). Based on student feedback, this seems to be a winning formula that I'd love to see more widely adopted, both within academia and within industry.
My greatest challenge isn't students at all. It is the resistance this approach has triggered among GMU faculty and administration. I've never understood why an approach that is so successful with students hasn't received more encouragement and support at GMU. The result is that I've resigned from GMU in order to develop this approach within industry, with students who were inspired by this approach.
There have also been challenges with occasional students. These tend to be one or two students each semester that don't give the course enough priority and are surprised by poor grades at the end. At least one pursued her complaint through GMU's appeals process. This was unsuccessful since my assessment of her was corroborated her peer assessment information.
The area I wanted to work on next is reducing the attrition rate at the beginning of each semester. Attrition of lazy students isn't surprising because they quickly realize that this isn't an easy course. But I suspect that some is from good students who are just unfamiliar with and intimidated by computers. Losing them is unnecessary because I provide all the computer skills they'll need, and computer novices regularly outperform the experts on the portfolio peer assessments (note the skills column). But there is more I could do to make the prospect less intimidating at the beginning.