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Undergraduate Educational Technology Course Development

Jon Basden
August 17, 2001

Background Information

McKendree College requires all students to complete three credit hours of Computer Science credit (CSI). Most non-CSI majors currently complete the requirement by enrolling in two or three short courses in basic productivity applications, each of which are worth one or two credit hours. In the summer of 2000, the Education and Computer Science divisions began to explore the idea of offering a 3-hour CSI course for educators that would fulfill the college’s computer science requirement, introduce some basic computing skills to the students, and expose them to some of the concepts related to integrating technology into regular K-12 instruction. It was decided that the course would be called CSI 109: Special Topics in Computer Use: Computer Technology in the Classroom. In order to determine what a curriculum would look like for a course whose goals were as diverse as these, several models were considered including those in place at SIUE, UMSL, Southwestern Illinois College, and Lincoln Land Community College. The final set of objectives met the approval of the Chairs of both the Education and Computer Science divisions.

Course Objectives

The objectives of the course were many and may have been more than could be accomplished in a course of this scope during its first semester of being offered. The broad goal stated in the syllabus was for students to “master basic technology competencies that will enable preservice teachers to successfully use technology to support their instructional goals and prepare them for further developing skills that will allow for meaningful, appropriate integration of technology into the K-12 classroom environment.” More specifically, the syllabus stated that the course activities would “be partially defined by the abilities of the users, but will include work towards a portfolio of technology skills. Items that will be included in the portfolio will include, but are not limited to examples of work demonstrating competencies with standard productivity (word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation) and communication (email usage and web publishing) software.” It was also understood that the use of such software and the acquisition of such skills would take place in the context of modeling ways that such information can be transferred to the daily K-12 classroom environment. Since this article does not lend itself to discussing specific class activities of the course, the specifics of the syllabus are available on the course web site at http://www.blackboard.com/courses/CSI109/.

Planning and Execution

The enrollment of the spring 2001 CSI 109 course was 25. Of the 25 students, one was majoring in secondary social studies education, one was majoring in art education, one was majoring in music education, two were PE majors, and one was a computer science major, and the remaining 19 were elementary education majors. Also, there were seven freshmen, nine sophomores, six juniors, and three seniors. The large number of elementary education students influenced the content of the course in that they would eventually need to have some experience in all subject areas. Also, since most of the class was freshmen and sophomores, the students’ experience with teaching methodology was limited. Therefore, efforts were made to ensure that a variety of instructional activities were presented without using jargon that would confuse students who had not taken the college’s methods classes yet.

In planning the course, the semester was loosely divided into three phases:

• Skill acquisition
• Content-area instructional examples
• Instructional activity production

The information delivered in each of the three phases was intended to build on that of the previous phase. The first week of the course, each student completed a self-assessment of his or her skills, which helped to determine the degree to which the various topics would need to be covered. The second week of the course the students were grouped according to three criteria. Students of similar academic major and geographic location were grouped together, but groups were assigned in a manner that they would have a heterogeneous composition with regard to skill level. The purpose of the groups was to enable students to have students with which to work closely during the semester, and there were plans to have each group produce a web-based instructional resource.

The first phase, the one in which students were exposed to basic applications (Internet, word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and web publishing software) was one in which the students were given the most direct instruction on the skills associated with each piece of software. Each week of class was conducted in a workshop-style format, and students were given a follow-up performance-based assignment on the software application discussed in class each week. There was also some vocabulary introduced, and students completed some online instructional activities (webquests, etc.) in order to expose them to some of the instructional resources available to them on the web.

The second phase of the course, content-area instructional examples, allowed students to experience some of the technology-rich learning activities that some area inservice teachers use in their classrooms. There were three subject areas presented: math, social studies, and science. These three areas were chosen because of the difficulty that elementary teachers often have in finding quality technology-based activities to use within the confines of their curricula. Rather than just listen to presentations about the activities, this phase allowed the students to experience how such activities might actually be used in a classroom.

The course’s third phase, which did not fall into place quite as well as was planned, was one in which the intent was to have the students incorporate the information introduced up until that point in the course, make some decisions about what academic objectives, subject areas, and software interested them, and produce three products:

• An individually created technology-based activity for students and its accompanying instructional resources
• A web portfolio of his or her work in the course (which they could add to throughout their college careers)
• As a group, a web resource of educational web links

There was also a vocabulary quiz and a final exam that were given online. In addition to filling an assessment need, the exercises were given online to show students some of the free resources that are available to teachers.

Results & Conclusions

Overall, the course did well in its initial semester. There were a few technical problems that were beyond the control of the instructor or the students. In some ways, the technical hurdles that were presented gave the students a preview of some of the issues that arise when working in a school or any other institution. Had the technical difficulties not arisen, it would have been very possible that all of the courses activities be achieved. However, there were a few of the course requirements at the end of the semester that were modified or eliminated. Unfortunately, the group web project was among those to be eliminated. In the future, the group web project could be among the most valuable because it can serve as a model for what a classroom activity that engages students in producing a product that others can use might look like.

Although no formal data analysis was conducted on the class’s effectiveness, there were two informal questionnaires distributed. One was anonymous. It asked for students to rank the ten or so major learning components of the course from one to ten, where one represented the activity that the student thought was most important and ten represented the one that the student felt was least important. The average scores of the ten activities were:

Of interest is the fact that the students felt like the most valuable parts of the class were the content-area activities. As expected, students did not feel as if the subject-specific software (Inspiration, PowerPoint, Excel) were as valuable as the universal ones (Word, Internet). Surprisingly, students did not indicate that they found value in using the web editor that they used (Microsoft FrontPage). However, this could be attributed to the technical problems that using FrontPage presented in the latter part of the course.

The second survey, a self-assessment of skills, was not an anonymous one. The reason that students were asked to use their names was so that their responses could be compared to their original ones that were given the first night of class. The survey asked the students to rate their skills on a scale of zero to three, where zero was no knowledge, and three meant that they felt they could instruct a group of people on the application or concept. Although there were some open-ended questions on the survey, the data that could be mathematically analyzed yielded the following results.

Perhaps most important is not the actual scores (either original or final) but the average increase in scores per student. Students indicated that they felt they grew most in the categories of presentation software, spreadsheets, web publishing, and interactive subject-specific software. It is ironic that the areas in which the students appeared to show the most grow are some of the same areas in which the students indicated that they did not value those class activities as much. All three surveys (the original and final self-assessments and the course content feedback survey) are available on the course web site, and they are included with this document.

Overall, collecting the feedback, closely monitoring the progress of the course, and reflecting on the semester allowed several decisions to be made with regard to the course’s future. The course will be offered again in the fall of 2001, but it will be limited to 17 students due to a change in labs. The smaller class will allow for better personal exchange of ideas, and eventually the course should find its niche in the teacher education program at McKendree. After the course finds a place that most students choose to take it, it will be easier to have the course composition be homogenously grouped. Until then the curriculum will remain essentially the same. However, I would like to include more of an online component into the course, but not necessarily one between the instructor and students. I am looking more towards incorporating some collaboration between students in the course and students in similar courses elsewhere for some dialogue on various educational technology readings and topics. In addition, as incoming students become more and more proficient with computing basics, the course’s shift can move towards exposing students to more educational technology practices while still including enough basic computing information to retain its CSI department affiliation.