July
3-5, 2003. Samos Island, Greece July
3-5, 2003. Samos Island, Greece
THE INTERNET:
CAN IT BE USED AS A BRIDGE BETWEEN
SECONDARY SCHOOL
AND UNIVERSITY?
C. Periago,
X. Bohigas, X. Jaen, M. Novell and A. Diaz-Pinto
Escola Tecnica Superior
d'Enginyeria Industrial de Barcelona
Universitat Politecnica
de Catalunya
Barcelona, Spain
The existing gap between secondary studies and university is common knowledge; it seems as if they are separate worlds, each one with their own rules. Since the seventies and eighties, most countries have been approving laws to ensure a high standard of education for the general population, which has led to the increase in the number of university students. In spite of this, the separation between secondary and university worlds still remains. In general, secondary schools have an ideal vision of university; the reference for secondary students comes from their teachers’ experience, which is how the university was when they were there, instead of how it is now. Besides this, the university turns their back on secondary education; after all, it is a stage already passed.
In our country, the connection between secondary school and university is restricted to two areas:
The compulsory tests required to access any university (Proves d’Accès a la Universitat, PAU). These are organised by the Departament d’Universitats of the Catalan government, in collaboration with the universities (http://dursi.gencat.es). The students’ assessment is carried out by university and secondary teachers together.
The initial and continuing training of secondary teachers. This is the responsibility of University Education Institutes.
Recently the universities have established an “open doors week” once a year. During that week, the secondary schools can visit the campus, classrooms, schools, faculties and laboratories. However, the aim of this is to engage the potential students, therefore students only see the positive aspects of the university; it doesn’t imply any kind of effective collaboration between schools and universities.
The spread of Information Technologies (IT), in particular the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW), provides a network that everybody can use. New ways of connecting people are appearing which affect also teachers, students and educational institutions. Everybody is taking advantage of IT facilities. Firstly, universities’ Web pages allow free access to everything that is related to information about the institution and its courses (http://www.upc.es), but usually access to the course content through the “virtual campus” is restricted. Secondly the institution which is responsible for secondary education (in Catalonia the Departament d’Ensenyament de la Generalitat) has its own Web site and offers a Web space where teachers can publish their materials: the Xarxa Telemàtica Educativa de Catalunya (http://www.xtec.es). This Web site also includes a place where the teachers can get technical support.
Despite these Internet advances, there is still a lack of communication between secondary schools and university. Connecting these two worlds seems overwhelming; however, progress can be achieved if efforts are concentrated on a specific area, such as physics, which is our case.
An Educational Project: la baldufa
The project la baldufa was initiated in 1996 (Bohigas, Jaén, & Novell, 1998) by a team of physics teachers from the Engineering School at the Technical University of Catalonia. The aim was, and still is, to investigate the use of the Internet as an educational tool for physics teaching and learning (http://baldufa.upc.es/recerca/indexen.htm)
The project objectives are:
To design and set up an open environment to promote the collaboration among physics teachers, so that they can use the material available on the Web site. They are also asked to contribute something. The main idea is use and share.
To elaborate physics content materials and organise them in an encyclopaedic format. Students can navigate through the contents following itineraries suggested by their teacher. Specific contents can be found using a local search engine.
The contents include mechanics, optics and electromagnetism. Their levels range from the final years of secondary school until the first few years of science and technical university studies. The Web pages can be classified into:
Content Web pages (including tests, concepts, solved problems and questions).
Java applets related with physics phenomena: Fislets, Spanish word for Physlets (Christian & Belloni, 2001)
Self-assessment activities to enhance the learning.
Management contents tools, like a search engine (Jaen et al., 2002a).
The resources are offered to students and teachers through the Web.
The Bridge between Secondary and University, How is it Built?
The experience we present is based on la baldufa project and includes activities taking place over the last six years, directly involving both secondary teachers and students. We offer educational material, support and tools for the teachers, so they can elaborate their own teaching material using a virtual library. As well as this, the students can find a learning space with useful material. However allowing access to the Web site does not imply the use of its contents, therefore it is necessary to promote their use, but in an effective way. That is, we hope teachers and students see our proposal as a real offer to collaborate rather than an intrusion from the “upper” studies.
The framework we have chosen to construct the bridge is based on activities related to the daily priorities of secondary school. These activities are discussed below.
Access
University Tests (Proves d'Acces a la Universitat: PAU)
The
PAU takes place twice a year, in June and September. It is necessary to pass
this exam to get into any university. In Catalonia, each year 30,000 students
do the exam, which includes a test for each subject. The physics’ test
is compulsory for science-technics students.
Our project Web site offers a PAU section. There, students and teachers can find the physics tests from 1995 and their solutions in the case of a problem, or suggested answer in the case of a question. Because many secondary students have to pass the physics exam (9,000 of the total 30,000), the PAU section has been one of the most visited sections of our Web site. During the navigation the user is helped by a head toolbar, which allows a shortcut to the answer or solution, and offers the possibility to use some tools, like a calculator, or a local search engine (Jaen et al., 2002b)
Free
Access to Our University Physics Contents
The
access to the server is free. In some sense, our function is to be a sort of
Web site editing board and perform the referee process to allow the publication
of material. Secondary teachers can use and manage the contents available to
design and elaborate their own Web pages, which can be used to scaffold the
student in their learning process. We encourage the teachers to use the contents
available and share with other users their material and navigation itineraries.
Workshops
with Secondary Teachers
As
well as online resources to establish the collaboration with secondary teachers,
we also organise face-to-face activities. One of them is a workshop, Physics
with Internet, which is included in the permanent teachers training offered
by the Teaching Department of Catalan government. The workshop’s aims
are:
To let the teachers know of resources available on the Internet that are useful for physics teaching.
To acquire skills for finding, selecting and managing information from the WWW that is suitable to be used for learners, either in the classroom or at home.
To design and construct learning activities using the Internet.
To achieve these the participants, who are all secondary teachers, work in small groups on the elaboration of a Web page corresponding to a basic physics unit. They elaborate new material, so that they acquire editing hypertext skills and learn to use equation editors, but mostly they explore the possibilities that the WWW offers to use contents freely available through the Web. The workshop takes 30 hours and is distributed into 8 sessions of 3 hours in the computer classroom. It is assumed they use the remaining time to work on their own.
In general, the students/teachers participate actively in the workshop and at the end they finish by telling us of their intentions to use the things they have learnt with their students. They ask to be linked with la baldufa project, but when the workshop has finished and the face-to- face contact disappears, even the online contact is hard to maintain. Nevertheless, when the contact remains, it is important to take care of new collaborators because they are a direct bypass to the secondary physics classroom. The following activity is an example of this type of collaboration.
Physics
Working Group: Grup de Fisica del Bages
This
group is formed by secondary physics teachers. They teach in public schools
located in a geographical area 60 km from Barcelona. The Teaching Department
accepted a two-year project that they proposed in 2001 to be included into the
Area Plan for secondary teachers. The aim of the project is to perform activities
directed at improving their teaching practice. They asked la
baldufa
for advice on how to use the Internet as an educational resource. Since then,
the relationship between us has turned into a real collaboration continuing
to work with our basic principle: use and share. They have provided us new material
to design one hundred quizzes that are now available through the la
baldufa
Web site. Now we are working together to design learning activities to be used
by their classroom students as supplementary material.
Physics
Teachers Meeting Point
The
project also offers a meeting point where the users can communicate amongst
each other. We started four years ago with a forum space, where the teachers
could discuss aspects related to their physics teachers’ activities. The
participation was very low, less than we expected. Nowadays, there are so many
different discussion forums being offered that the users weave through them
and they only participate when the discussion is about something that really
has interest. We have learnt that communication tools, synchronous or asynchronous,
have no value in themselves; the important thing is how they are used.
Now, we are working on a forum-chat tool with the aim to encourage the users to participate actively in specific discussion themes. The teachers will be asked to propose what they want to discuss and to participate as online moderators. Meanwhile we communicate with our users via e-mail. We have a mail list of 500 physics teachers who have visited la baldufa and are registered as users. Since last September they have been receiving periodical e-mails regarding information related with news on our Web site facilities. In these e-mails, they are also invited to participate.
For instance, recently we have placed a section devoted to what we name Fislets (physics Applets). These are small programs that attempt to present some physical phenomena by means of graphical representations and simulations. There is a sample Web page available to assist the teachers in the Fislets use. When the section was ready, we sent an e-mail to our teachers’ mail list to explain the new material we were offering. We asked them if this kind of material or another similar was known and requested them to send more Fislets to enlarge the collection that is available to users. The response was very significant: we received only one reply that told us about two Fislets’ sites. However the weeks after the e-mail sending, when we had been waiting for replies we observed that although there were few responses, the Fislets section was the one most visited. This fact shows that our information was useful, and probably the teachers started to use the Fislets or maybe they recommended them to their students.
The e-mail communication is just at the beginning and the rules are unknown because they do not exist yet. To make up for this lack of rules we are tempted to use the listen and talk ones: we expect somebody talks after they listen to what we say, but this does not occur. As shown above, the real situation is that after sending the same e-mail to 500 users, probably only 3 or 4 of them are likely to reply (that is less than 1%) which gives rise to a strange sensation because it seems that there is no feedback. However, we have found that feedback takes place not via e-mail but by looking at the user’s behavior when navigating through the contents. Using this periodical communication, we also encourage the teachers to send us their suggestions. Some of them talked about their difficulty in designing easy classroom experiences, and asked us for a sort of lab section. We do not have this kind of material, but the meeting point can be useful to put the teachers interested in touch with each other to share their experiences.
University and secondary schools have been separated for years. Despite all social transformations directed at supposedly avoiding the university elitist character, higher education continues looking at secondary education from an upper level, as if it is a stage already passed. We believe that the communication between those two educational stages is needed, especially nowadays, when everybody agrees that education has to be conceived as a knowledge construction that continues throughout life, from teenage years and continuing during adult life. In secondary school, as well as learning contents, the students start to learn how to learn, and this activity will continue at university. IT resources that have been introduced in the educational context over the last years do not imply any change in students’ and teachers’ attitudes, but if we explore their possibilities we will certainly discover new ways to communicate and collaborate.
To summarize we believe that with our experience in a restricted area, physics teaching and learning, the answer to the question posed in the title of this paper is yes, it is possible to use the Internet as a real bridge between secondary and university education. As we have been explaining, our experience is ‘fresh’, that is, we do not have enough information for a quantitative evaluation of the feasibility of the bridge that we are building. At the moment, we plan to continue with the activities presented in this paper, and also extend the conference spaces to enhance the online interaction among teachers and students.
Bohigas, X., Jaén, X., & Novell, M. (1998). Teaching and learning physics using the Internet: la baldufa project. Higher Education in Europe, 23 (2), 233–240.
Christian, W., & Belloni, M. (2001). Physlets: Teaching physics with interactive curricular material. Saddle Hills, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Jaén, X., Blanco, J. D., Bohigas, X., & Novell, M. (2002a). A Web-based educational library. In I. Rudas, J. Paralic, & A. Szakál (Eds.), 3rd IEEE International Conference on Information Technology Based Higher Education and Training (pp. 113–116). Budapest, Hungary: Budapest Polytechnic.
Jaén, X., Bohigas, X., & Novell, M. (2002b). Web page infrastructure on a physics educational Web site. In I. Rudas, J. Paralic, & A. Szakál (Eds.), 3rd IEEE International Conference on Information Technology Based Higher Education and Training (pp 127–130). Budapest, Hungary: Budapest Polytechnic.
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