What can teachers and students of Physics do with WWW: sink or surf? M. Novell, X. Bohigas, X. Jaén. Departament de Física i Enginyeria Nuclear Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Barcelona. Spain. montse.novell@upc.es
Introduction	Proposal	Students response	Concluding remarks	References

Abstract

The use of the Internet has been extremely popular over the last few years, especially the WWW. It is not possible to determine if this fact represents a positive change or is nothing but a complication of our lives, but it exists. It has invaded all aspects of our daily routine and it also affects teachers, students, and their educational context.
There was a period of time when the changes were led by technicians and multimedia developers, now it's the teachers’ turn; they need to begin to incorporate these technologies in their teaching strategies. By using activities the students are guided through the WWW, surfing over physics contents, avoiding shipwreck, it is a way to contribute to their knowledge construction.
We present a proposal for a semi-distance science course, based on our experience as physics teachers, and our research on the use of the Internet as a teaching-learning resource.

1. Introduction

A great many learning environments based on information and communication technologies (ICTs) have appeared in the past few years with the aim of incorporating the use of these technologies in an educational context, and most of them are based on Internet and the WWW.
On other occasions, when new technologies were introduced in the educational environment (videos, educational software, microcomputer-based laboratory..) the users, students or teachers, needed specific skills to work with them. This is not the situation in respect to the Internet and the WWW. The daily use of new web-based environments offers a great advantage compared to the previous introduction of technologies. The spread of ICTs has invaded most people’s way of life affecting relationships, personal communications, free time, work, etc. Everybody is acquiring technological literacy [1], learning new communication tools and skills, which basically are used to search and obtain any kind of information: sports, culture, travel, etc. The evolution has been so quick that each one has developed their own strategies and skills to be a WWW-surfer, like a sort of personal navigation guide.
If one wants to use these technologies in learning-teaching environments, more than navigation skills are needed. At this point the teacher intervention appears, but, what should teachers do? They just have to do their job: to guide students through the learning process, which means to know the contents and organise them in order to attain specific educational objectives, in a way that allows the student to construct their knowledge.
The starting point is to take advantage of the Internet and the WWW, in the sense of use and share. There is no need to use sophisticated software other than knowing the contents of the WWW and selecting them to be used as an educational resource. By using Internet and the WWW in this way the technology becomes a partner for both, teacher and learner, rather than a teacher substitute. The main idea would be "it is not necessary that everybody does everything" [2][3].
In this paper, an example of the use of ICT as a teaching tool is presented. It is a piece of work done by a team of Physics teachers at the Technical University in Barcelona. They, besides their usual activity as classroom teachers, investigate how Internet and the WWW can be used as an educational resource for teaching and learning Physics [4].

2. A proposal: semi-distance web-based physics course

In this section, we will present an example of how the ICT can be used, taking into account the considerations outlined above. This work has been done in the framework of la baldufa project (http://baldufa.upc.es), initiated in 1995 [5][6], with the aim of investigating how Internet can foster learning and teaching Physics strategies and help the users to convert information into knowledge.
The study presented here has been based on a course focused on learning basic Optics, which is offered to the students at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya as a non-compulsory subject. The experiment was initiated in 1996, when the subject was offered for the first time in the engineering degree, which implies that one had the opportunity to plan the course structure without having to carry the baggage of a well established unit. The course has been done by the team of physics teachers eight times since 1996.

2.1. Evolution

The evolution of the course is presented in relation to different aspects such as organisation, contents' variety, students' response and ICT-resources. There are two phases the first from 1996 to 1999 and the second from 2000 to 2002.

2.1.1. From 1996 to 1999

The course had basically a traditional chalk-and-talk structure but, in addition, some hypertext contents elaborated by the teachers were available on the web. During this period of time, the students’ role did not change too much compared to the traditional one. The learning process was essentially by transmission in a chalk-and-talk way [7].
In 1998, there was a sharp increase in the use of Internet. Taking advantage of the situation, the teachers decided to test strategies for distance learning and teaching in which students were actively involved. They decided to divide the contents into units, to put forward a set of activities for each one using Internet as the main source of information. The communication between students and teacher was by e-mail. This learning strategy was optional for the students and 10% participated, the rest of whom continued attending classroom lectures. However the students doing the on-line activities had to do some compulsory laboratory sessions, together with the students who preferred the classroom lectures.

Figure 1. Important items in the course organisation referring to Internet use during the period 1996-1999

2.1.2. From 2000 to 2002

After the experience in the former phase, it was clear that the ICT usage meant a substantial investment of time and resources before becomming educationally benefitial. However, as the only way to advance is walking, and with the aim of being used in real teaching situations, the research team then constructed different types of Internet tools: Java simulations, short on-line questions to enable a sort of self-assessment, interfaces to contents management, a local searcher, navigation aid toolbars, etc. [8][9][10]
During this period of time there was an increase of Internet accessibility from home as well as school terminals, students preferred to go to the contents through Internet and print them to study instead of attending chalk-and-talk lectures, this led to a low level of classroom attendance. It seemed that was the time to stress the web-based resources, as well as the face to face contact. That contact remains an essential element, at least in the context of scientific and experimental subjects where laboratory experiences are needed.
Taking into account all of those considerations, the course was proposed to consist of face to face sessions along with a web-based learning process [11]. This hybrid solution, which can be named "semi-distance", has been the basis of the course since 2000. Next, the evolution over these three years is presented.

Figure 2. Important items referring to the course planning, content elaboration and management during the semi-distance phase.

2.2. Web course structure

The teaching and learning processes are based on activities constructed to attain each unit's objectives. They can be done face to face or by distance. Those activities are of two types, learning activities (LA), and assessment activities (AA). The LAs are proposed to the student to guide them in their learning process and pursue to foster meaningful learning. The AAs are proposed with the purpose of monitoring and to acertain degree testing the students learning. It is important to note that the web-based assessment activities become learning activities when the tutor makes web-available the corresponding answer or resolution.

Figure 3. Summary of activities proposed. FF means face to face and DL means distance learning.

The contents are available through Internet and the students’ access to them is guided through proposed activities.

Figure 4. Diagram showing the connection between contents and objectives. The items contained in the grey box are those the teachers can control. External links are the contents WWW available.Tthe website map is shown when clicking on the picture.

At this moment, after three years of trial and error, a web-based course structure has been achieved and it will be tested in the following semesters.

3. What is the students’ response?

Since 1996, the Basic Optics students’ attitude towards the ICTs in general, and Internet in particular, has been changing, mostly due to the improvement of resources and computing facilities. The first time we did the course the e-mail facilities were not available for all the students, and the use of internet was not as common as today. There has been a sharp evolution of ICT resources accessibility, which has enabled the gradual introduction of WWW-based activities.
The number of students involved was 21 in 2000, 22 in 2001 and 11 in 2002. These numbers are not very high and had the inconvenience of lower statistical meaning of the survey. However, it had the advantage that a reduced team of teachers could plan the experience without requiring special attention from administrative staff.
A thorough analysis of this experience would have to cover different aspects of the teaching and learning process, which would involve teachers, learners, partnerships, ICT tools, contents elaboration, teaching strategies, learning strategies, knowledge construction, etc. Keeping in mind that these items will be addressed, at this moment the analysis has been reduced to explore the students’ impressions about the Basic Optic course, in general, the semi-distance way of learning, and the learning and assessment activities. The low number of students to monitor allowed the teachers' team to set up a sort of course prototype.
The procedure of collecting this information was by means of a questionnaire. The results of these last three years are those that are represented in the previous bar-graphics. The questions corresponding to each item are contained inside the box of the graphic corresponding to 2000. The students have used a mark for each question going from A (very much) to D (nothing). Loking at the results, there are some aspects to consider:

General impression about this Basic Optics course. The course is in general well accepted by the students, even those who marked C in regards to recommending the course to a friend admit that the reason was not because they didn’t like it, but because they thought it represents too much work.
Opinion about the semi-distance method of learning. Referring to the semi-distance learning method, it seems that in general they like it. In respect to whether this way of teaching can be applied in other subjects, there is not a general agreement about the answer. In comparison with the workload of a face to face course, it seems that with each year they had to work less in the semi-distance course. It is possible that the interpretation of this answer has to do more with the technical skills that everybody has been improving in the use of Internet, than with the complexity of contents or activities. In addition, for thr last two courses the students felt that they have learnt more than in a face to face situation.
Opinion about learning and assessment activities. In the section of questions devoted to their opinion about the activities, generally the graphic changes from an irregular shape in 2000 to a more regular one in the following years. The mark for most questions are A or B. One answer to this change can be attributed to the structural changes from 2000 on. Since 2001, the course main webpage incorporates more ways of obtaining information about course structure. Moreover, the fact that the activities were web available from the corresponding unit webpage, where the learning objectives are also specified, probably makes it clearer for the students what is expected from them.

4. Concluding remarks

This section, rather than focusing on concluding remarks, is being devoted to recapitulating some reflections and ideas that have been outlined in this paper. The incorporation of ICTs in education does not imply necessarily any change, but it is a motivation to raise again the role of teachers, students and institutions involved in the teaching and learning process. Now is the time to investigate and consider carefully the pedagogical issues surrounding the processes when the ICTs are used as educational resources, and to evaluate their suitability for attaining the corresponding learning objectives.
The passage from the old chalk-and-talk delivery methods to the ICT-based ones are not automatic, but the period of time when the changes were led mostly by technicians and multimedia developers has finished, and among the cast the main character is the teacher. They should be actively involved in this transformation beginning to incorporate these technologies in their teaching strategies, making the technology a new partner rather than a substitute of teachers' work.
Reading the former paragraph it sounds like the same song whenever new technologies have been in education. The difference now is that neither the students nor the teachers need specific skills to work with the ICTs. The technical literacy everybody uses in their daily life has to be used for the teacher to teach and for the students to learn. The main point when using them as an educational resource is that they have to be used in a way that fosters the development of learning strategies and helps the users to convert information into meaningful knowledge.
Finally, it is important to note that in the context of teaching scientific and experimental subjects where laboratory experiences are required, face to face contact remains an essential element.

5. References

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11. Ko, Susan and Rossen, Steve (2001). Teaching on Line. A Practice Guide, Noughton Mifflin Company.