Teaching Assistant Portal -- A Web-Based Tool for Enhancing Teaching and Learning of Lecture-Based Modules

D. Girma, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, UK

Abstract

This article describes a web-based teaching assistant tool for providing a gateway or portal for interactive and non-interactive courseware materials. Known as Teaching Assistant Portal (TAP), its intended primary function is to enhance and complement instructional courses, typical of classroom teaching activities in university or college environment. TAP builds upon the well-appreciated attributes of the web for its anywhere anytime information access¹ by (i) facilitating active learning, (ii) automating the management of pedagogic information (both for instructors and students), and (iii) providing a common access point for courseware materials.

Although TAP may be customized for specific online training purposes, the motivation behind its development has been as a supplementary tool. As such it makes no attempt to diminish or supplant the role of instructors, but attempts to exploit the potential of the web for improving the effectiveness teaching with the instructor at the center. TAP is a simple-to-use tool for instructors and students alike. To avoid 'learning yet another tool' its functions are built around a standard web browser. A simple text editing facility is all that is required for creating online quizzes and user configuration files which the instructor needs to upload to the server (from anywhere!). The current implementation of TAP is based on Perl script programming and can be easily set-up to run in conjunction with a web server on a PC or Unix platform. The use of TAP has been piloted successfully over the last two years and offers a scope for added features and capabilities.

1.  Introduction

Over the recent past, the web technology has been of intense interest for online delivery of teaching and training materials of various kinds [1]-[6]. The efforts devoted to web-based training encompass, on one extreme, comprehensive tools intended to supplant the role of instructors, as in on-line distance learning or automated training, for instance [7]-[9], and on the other extreme, simple to moderate tools intended to supplement a typical classroom teaching, for instance [10]-[12]. The tool described here belongs to the latter category, with a specific aim of assisting instructors.

Web-based supplementary teaching tools can go some way in delivering pedagogically optimized teaching materials. In its basic form for information dissemination, the web can be readily used as a medium for course material distribution (based on simple downloading) but with significant benefits of alleviating the constraints of traditional means of distribution. With invariably built-in web server authentication functions, access authorization to online material can also be easily tailored and all under the control of the instructor. In the context of assisting instructors, such a basic but powerful means of information access can be further enhanced by taking advantage of the inherent capabilities of the web technology², for making both teaching and learning more interesting.

A number of teaching-related activities exist that can be better handled or at least assisted by computers. With the development of innovative ideas surrounding new facilities provided by the web, e.g., location and time independent information access, there is even more scope for such computer-assisted tasks. Depending on the nature of the courseware material, the computing power at the web server (and at the client side) can, for instance, be utilized for automating mundane tasks such as quiz marking and progress monitoring, thereby freeing the instructor from time consuming and less productive activities. Likewise, students can benefit from new possibilities. To cite but a few, the immediacy of feedback for assessments carried out online by the web server, and the choice of having to access online courseware (as opposed to the physical presence for conventional classroom tutorials) could make learning enjoyable and therefore more effective. Also, like the progress monitoring carried out by the web server on behalf of the instructors, it should be as straightforward to allow students review their individual progress for some desired pedagogic effect. The teaching assistant tool described in this paper addresses some of these enhancements as well as other complementary functions to teaching activities. The following section provides some overview of the tool.

2.  Overview of the Teaching Assistant Portal

The Teaching Assistant Portal is a web-mediated tool for enhancing teaching and learning. In its current implementation, its main interactive function is to facilitate web-based tutorials intended to complement classroom teaching. It is based entirely on a web browser and built around the web server programming power for executing commands that generate dynamic pages and manage related information.

An instructor typically uploads courseware materials (such as online quiz, assignments, lecture notes, past exam papers, etc), defines access permissions, and monitors progress. Most progress monitoring can be automated with email reminders instead, with such functionality as, 'send me an email reminder when a certain number of students attempt the online quiz'. Students with permission (as authorized by the instructor) can then access the online courseware for interactive learning (quizzes of various types) or for downloading teaching materials such as lecture notes and assignments. All information of interest such as download time, quiz attempt duration, etc can be recorded and organized for presentation to the instructor for monitoring. Interactive questions themselves can be timed, i.e., they should be answered within some time limit as specified by the instructor, or subjected to different modes of assessment, say, negative marking of quizzes in order to force students into thinking a bit more. Interactive questions such as multiple choice questions (MCQ) can be randomized on presentation to students, so that while the content remains the same, the question order and choice sequences can be different -- the benefit of such dynamic presentation being all too obvious in some situations.

The TAP can most easily be described in terms of some distinct functions from instructors' and students' perspectives, as summarized under separate subsections below; other notable features are also included under the last subsection.

2.1  TAP Functions from Instructors' Perspective

2.2  TAP Functions from Students' Perspective

2.3  Some Other Notable Features of TAP

One of the major considerations of the TAP development has been its simplicity with as much automation as possible for minimal user effort. For instance, on uploading quiz files, instructors can set when the quiz should be activated and deactivated thereby leaving the courseware file management to the server. An instructor, for instance, can upload six online tutorial quizzes for a whole semester by defining activation/deactivation times such that only one of the tutorials be enabled in synchronization with lecture coverage. Similar settings can be defined for downloadable course materials as well as users for access expiration. Beyond the initial uploading, such tasks are managed directly by the web server without any involvement by instructors. As a gateway to various online classes, the TAP also has various ancillary functions such as teaching related bulletin boards; announcements customized by instructors; and automated reminders on login (for instance, for assignment submission deadline).

It is also worth commenting that TAP has robust security in place: (i) for access authentication based on Apache server software and (ii) for secure 'session interactivity' based on Data Encryption Standard (DES). The latter is part of the TAP software and is necessitated by the fact that the HTTP protocol used by the World Wide Web is inherently 'stateless' ³. One way of re-instating memory (hence negate stateless) into an interactive session is by embedding 'current state information' into HTML pages transmitted to users. Although such embedded information⁴ is hidden in HTML format, it can be viewed in source or text format. The need for encryption arises since a robust operation of interactive sessions generally dictate for embedded information to be totally concealed.

3. Live Demo and Source Code for TAP

Demonstration of the TAP is available over the web and more information on this is provided at http://www.eee.strath.ac.uk/tap/. If you encounter problems accessing the online demonstration, please email to tap-admin@eee.strath.ac.uk with the subject field of the email set to 'TAP demo'.

The PERL scripting language relies on access authentication provided by the Apache server software which has been tested both on a PC (Windows 95 and Windows 98) and Unix. No operational tests have been carried out under alternative server software. The Apache server software can be downloaded from www.apache.org.

4. Further Development

TAP will be enhanced with features and capabilities through incremental development of version releases. The following are some of the items under consideration.

5. Conclusions

The Teaching Assistant Portal described represents an easy interface between instructors and students, and yet powerful in making teaching and learning more effective. It can be configured to provide a common gateway for online teaching assistantship within a department or over wider coverage. It can stimulate active learning with the potential of offloading routine tasks from instructors. New techniques that can harness the benefits of the web technology, as demonstrated here by the TAP, can indeed make contributions toward a continuing shift that could be described as a location-independent and student-centered learning system. TAP is now into its third year of trial with more comprehensive user survey planned in this academic year.

Footnotes

¹ Of course, communications infrastructure and computing resources permitting!

² The major benefits of the web technology lie in its ability of disseminating hypermedia information to many people without distance and time constraints. The hypermedia information itself allows navigation to any other related information. These a together with the computing power for manipulating and managing information for some desired functions create unlimited possibilities for interactive remote processing as being witnessed for Internet based applications in various fields. In this regard, educational applications for achieving more innovative teaching and learning are no exceptions.

3 A stateless protocol like HTTP has no memory and it only understands the current command. To implement an interactive session, one way of doing this is to save current state as hidden information into a page sent to the user which will then be returned to the server on user's interaction of some kind. The hidden information can be more secure by encrypting it at the server before embedding.

4  This could be privileged information such user identification details, or answers to interactive questions to be extracted by server on user's re-posting of the quiz page.

References

1. Too many to list the relevant references on this general topic! The reader interested in the background of this general topic may wish to browse through the annual NAWeb Conference Proceedings, which has been in existence since 1995. More information on this is available at the International WWW Courseware Developers Site at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. Annual conference by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) also devotes sessions to web-based education, the details of which may be found at the ASEE site, http://www.asee.org/.
2. D. J. McArthur and M. W. Lewis, "Untangling the Web: Applications of the Internet and Other Information Technologies to Higher Learning", RAND Publication MR-975-EDU, 1998.
3. D. W. Brooks: Web-Teaching : A Guide to Designing Interactive Teaching for the World Wide Web, Plenum Pub. Corp., 1997.
4. C. McCormack, D. Jones (Contributor), Building a Web-Based Education System, John Wiley & Sons, 1997.
5. R. M. Palloff and K. Pratt, Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace : Effective Strategies for the Online Classroom, Jossey-Bass, 1999.
6. L. R. Porter, Creating the Virtual Classroom: Distance Learning with the Internet, John Wiley & Sons, 1997.
7. The Open University Distance Learning, UK (details at http://www.open.ac.uk/).
8. Distance Learning and Independent Study, The University of Tennessee CyberClass Technology, (details at http://www.outreach.utk.edu/cyberclass/).
9. Lifelong Learning on the World Wide Web, The Central Institute of Technology, Wellington, New Zealand (see also their list of courses).
10.  Database Courseware at Dublin City University, Ireland, (details at http://www.compapp.dcu.ie/databases/welcome.html).
11. Tze-Leong Yew , Kurt Gramoll, "Teaching Multimedia Development to Engineering Students through Web-based Modules", ASEE2000 conference proceeding (see also http://eml.ou.edu/papers2000/julian.pdf)
12. Q. Sun, K. Gramoll, M. Mooney, "Self-Paced Instruction to Introduce Traffic Engineering in Virtual City (Sooner City)", ASEE'99 Conference (see also http://eml.ou.edu/papers/Sun/Pres/home.htm)