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From: "J. Olin Campbell" campbejo@ctrvax.Vanderbilt.Edu Date: Sat, 23 May 1998
There are several items here:
- Learning Styles
- Discerning Learning Styles
- ALN "Custom Delivery" programs

I have found two ways to accommodate different learning styles:
a. include a range of activities that encompass several styles. For example have some projects where folks construct their own problems, and some activities that use direct instruction and practice.
b. Discern or allow the learner to select a style, and provide custom-tailored instruction for that style.

I bid and helped guide a large project where we tried approach b. Not surprisingly it cost about twice what developing for one or a mixture of styles would be. We had to develop the same content in two basically independent modes. The mode we thought would be most engaging (video, including conversations with a cartoon character who knew all about the inner workings of the system that technicians were learning) was dropped by almost every learner after the first five minutes. The "drill and kill" page turner mode was by far the most favored.

My guess as I went through the program is that the technical content was intense, and difficult to get when you had to stop the video and find the correct spot to jump back to. Much easier to just step back a few "pages" to find what you need. One might argue that technicians just want step by step instruction, but in this case the mechanics of managing the video for technical content seemed to be the major factor.

I think it difficult to separate learning styles from the mechanics of a learning system, and also more expensive to duplicate content. Thus I favor approach "a" of including a range of styles that do not duplicate content.

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From: DrBobdove DrBobdove@aol.com Date: Sat, 23 May 1998
Thanks for the link to the ALN. What a great site and organization. You are inspiring me to get my own site up and running.

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From: campbejo@ctrvax.vanderbilt.edu (Olin Campbell) Date: Mon, 25 May 1998
Thanks Dr.Bob Dove for your comment about the ALN Web - The ALN Web is supported by the Sloan Foundation, HP, and Microsoft. Please contribute -- an article for the magazine or journal, comments in ALNTalk, or just a note in the guestbook. We'll all benefit.

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From: elhansen@csulb.edu (Rick Hansen) Date: Mon, 25 May 1998
During the spring semester of 1998, I used a class management website, called CourseInfo, as a teaching/learning tool. My experience with it was very positive, and I wanted to share that and also hear from others about their experiences.

The course that I taught using CourseInfo was an MBA capstone course. I teach this course on campus in a traditional classroom. The class meets once a week, on Tuesday evening, for three hours. There is no distance learning component. It is a traditional seminar, with about twenty students in the class. Students typically organize themselves into about five teams. I do not use a textbook. Instead, the reading consists primarily of journal articles and one or two supplementary books. I make extensive use of Harvard Business School cases, both for discussion and for written assignments.

For each class, all five of the student teams prepare to present the discussion case. Then, in class, I select one team at random to actually present the case, and a second team, also at random, to critique the presentation. There follows a general discussion of the case and the assigned reading material. The mid-term exam is a team take-home case. Also, each student writes a four-part paper, called an Individual Project, during the semester. In this paper, they analyze their current work situation and develop a plan for their company and for themselves.

CourseInfo is a class management set of webpages. It appears to work with any browser, including AOL's, although Netscape communicator and internet explorer 4.0 appeared to be the ones most commonly used by my students. The site consists of a number of different online modules, and I used it in a number of different ways to support the student learning experience. The announcement feature on the homepage was a good place for general information and for an information backup to general email. Of course there's the standard page to set up the syllabus and course description. I noticed practical advantages to being able to communicate with individual students, a group of students, or all of my students at any time, without having to wait for the next class meeting.

I had students upload all of the papers that they submit, and I graded them and sent them back. Because we were not tied to submitting paper, I offered students the option of turning in drafts of their papers early (via CourseInfo) so that I could give them preliminary feedback. For any given assignment, about half of the students took me up on my offer. It definitely improved the quality of their learning experience, judging from the improved quality of the papers. This early feedback also gave them more control over their grades. For me, grading a paper the second time was much faster than grading one from scratch, so I'm not sure that I put in much, if any, extra time doing this for my students.

A related benefit was my ability to manage the students' workload. For example, this class met once a week, on Tuesday nights. But because students were submitting papers by uploading them rather than turning in hardcopy, I wasn't limited to having Tuesday night due dates. Students had the ability to submit papers at any time. In practice, they frequently opted to have papers due on Sunday evenings or first thing Monday morning.
CourseInfo's communication module was probably the most used feature. Each team had a homepage, and they used its chatroom feature to hold online team meetings to work on their case preparations. This was pretty important, since students were all commuting, and arranging off-campus meeting sites was generally inconvenient.

The discussion board was the most active single feature, so far as I could tell. Because there were twenty students in the class, classroom discussions generally left several people out… the shy ones. Initially, I decided to remedy this by using the discussion board as an extension of the classroom discussion. Thus students who were not as extroverted as others were able to participate actively in 'classroom' discussions. To energize the discussion board, I would usually seed it with a few cryptic comments of my own about the next class's reading assignment and what that might have to do with the assigned case. This made the discussion very relevant for the upcoming case presentations. As you can imagine, the discussion board took off. It became the 'hot' spot on CourseInfo. In addition to accomplishing its intended purpose of including shy students in the discussion, it emerged as an ongoing daily dialogue centered around course topics. By the third week of the semester, the quality of the written and oral case presentations shot up, and it stayed higher than I've ever seen it for the next twelve weeks. This, in turn, energized the in-class discussions.

The grading module allowed students to use their password to access their grades at any time. This had a number of advantages over other approaches. First, it kept the students much more informed about where they stood with regard to their grades. This saved me time answering individual questions. Again, it further reduced the amount of paper with which I had to deal. Instead of walking into class carrying thick folders full of student papers and grading materials, I would just bring the night's discussion case… nothing more.

Putting this all together, the total impact of using CourseInfo was greater than the sum of its parts. At least for this class, CourseInfo radically changed the nature of the learning experience. Students were used to having a one-night a week class 'meeting,' with maybe one outside team meeting every two weeks to prepare assignments. The addition of CourseInfo metamorphosed this more traditional experience into an ongoing, interactive community of learners… literally active on a daily basis.

I personally had more fun teaching this course than I've had in a long time. Comments, thoughts?

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From: "J. Olin Campbell" campbejo@ctrvax.Vanderbilt.Edu Date: Wed, 27 May 1998
A strong testimonial and presentation of your methods and learner actions. Thanks for sharing your experiences. Any sense of amount of learner hours spent on the capstone course, in relation to hours spent in the same class in prior years or learners' other classes?

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From: elhansen@csulb.edu (Rick Hansen) Date: Thu, 28 May 1998
Olin, in response to your question, I think the average sudent spent about 2 hours outside of class for every hour in class. That's probably a little more, but not much more, than for the other section of this class, which was taught by another instructor in the more traditional once-a-week seminar format. But I'm also pretty sure the additional time has more to do with me and the way I design a course rather than the format. I almost always get hammered by my students inthe part of the course evaluation that asks about workload.