A Report on the Initial Use of TextWeaver in Online Classes

 

Online courses overview

A total of five courses were taught with TextWeaver (TW). Three were in the U.S., one was in Canada, and one was for students in China. The subjects taught include educational technology, instructional design and second language acquisition, semantics, anthropology, and teacher professional development. Table 1 summarizes the course information. There were also a number of testing spaces set up for faculty at several universities including Georgetown University, Arizona State University, and Our Lady of the Lake University. Internally, the TW project team also has been using the software to manage its design, development, and evaluation activities.

 

Table 1: Course Summary

Course Subject	Institution	Instructor	Time Offered	Number of Students	Number of messages
Instructional Design and Second Language Acquisition	Brigham Young University	Michael Bush (Michael_bush@byu.edu) Victor Bunderson (vic_bunderson@byu.edu)	Fall, 2002	15	482
Anthropology	SUNY Institute of Technology	David Hakken (hakken@sunyit.edu)	Fall, 2002	6	300
Educational Technology	University of Montreal	Milton Campos (Milton.campos@umontreal.ca)	Winter, 2003	5	80
Designing Professional Development for Teachers	Our Lady of the Lake University	Scott Walker (walks@lake.ollusa.edu)	Winter, 2003	7	188
Linguistic Semantics	Xi’an International Studies University, P.R.China	Ping Zeng (zengp2003@yahoo.com)	Winter, 2003	28	1127

 

Technology

The initial use of TW in online courses at different international locations has uncovered no significant problems with the program. The download of the software is smooth especially for North American locations. To better accommodate those with telephone connections and those in developing countries, such as China, where the Internet speed is low, we have created an upgrade procedure that allows a user to download a small file instead of the complete package with each new version. The installation of the software so far has been trouble free.

 

Support

The project team provides free server support to enable tests to run without negotiating the installation of server software at each campus. Upon request, a course can be set up on our server. A course account with user name and password are provided to the instructor and the students. We have done this for the five courses mentioned above. This is a simple procedure for the support personnel, and has proven effective in getting trial classes started. Those who wish to set up and run their own server can download and install a free NNTP newsgroup server.

 

Student satisfaction and software usefulness

We have conducted questionnaire surveys and unstructured interviews with students and teachers to gauge their satisfaction with TW and their perception of how it affected their overall learning/teaching experience. From these sources, we have learned that the majority of the respondents consider the software easy to use and that it helps them to interact with others better. They particularly like the Outlook or Eudora look and feel of the application. They find the software interface intuitive and easy to navigate.

 

Examination of the course transcripts shows that besides the email-like reply function, the Copy Quote and Paste Quote are commonly used features. These allow users to copy and paste passages of text from previous messages when composing a new message. The software automatically hyperlinks the composed message to the original messages through the quoted passages.  Other commonly used features include the standard email client-like sorting of messages in multiple ways and flagging messages. The instructors thought the Create Seminar feature was particularly useful in helping them organize discussion under different topics or for different study groups. In general the respondents believe that the software is useful, has a lot of potential, and they want to continue using it.

 

Pedagogical effects

One of the classes made use of most of the functions of the software and even revealed some unexpected pedagogical potential. We designed a keyword function with which the instructor can label students’ messages under different keywords, review the keyworded messages, and write a weaving message to summarize student comments. These weaving messages help the students to build understanding of the course content and launch the discussion into a new phase on the basis of what has been achieved. Keywording proved valuable in the linguistics class for writing such weaving messages.

 

In this case, the instructor also made an innovative use of the keyword function. The instructor, who resides in the U.S., taught a graduate-level of 59 students participating from China. Many of them had little knowledge of computer conferencing and some of them had never even used email. Students asked many similar questions about the technology. Instead of writing and copying/pasting the same replies over and over, the instructor used the keyword function to organize her answers under different topics and simply pointed the students to the messages relating to their questions. The instructor also used the keyword function to build Q&A messages for content-related topics.

 

The instructor also used the file cabinet function to save and store certain messages from the class for future reference, either later within the class or for future iterations of it. We are hoping more and more online instructors will take advantage of these innovative features to conduct effective online discussion. In addition, the offline function was crucial for this class since the students are allowed only two hours Internet access at a scheduled time each week in a university lab. The students are able to work on the discussion through downloading the last week’s discussion, working on their responses offline, and uploading the composed messages the following week when they are in the lab.

 

This class has accumulated by far the largest number of messages in any of our test classes. We are working with the instructor to arrange a repeat class on the same material so as to be able to report on the instructor’s learning curve with TW.

 

Outstanding issues

Some users were not able to access TextWeaver from work due to the strict security filtering policy at some institutions. However, they were able to do so from home.  An eventual web service version of the software will solve this problem. 

 

We have been asked about file attachments many times. A new version of the software was released in April 2003. It now supports file attachments.

 

There are many Mac users in academe. Due to limited resources we were not able to develop a Mac version when the class trial started. Many people who were interested in using the software decided to reserve their participation until a Mac version became available. We should be able to enlist them soon. A Mac version of the software has been completed and released in July of 2003.  

We have learned that instructors need strong pedagogical support to take advantage of the most innovative features of the software. Even though a manual for online moderators and various recourses are available at our Website, instructors need direct, in-process, and just-in-time instructional support as well as technical support.

 

Some instructors have requested for the development of scaffolding tools for structuring conference contributions and graphical representation of the links created among messages.  We agree on the pedagogical value of these tool. Further funding is needed for their implementation.

 

Future plans and directions

Plans have been made to develop a .Net version of the software which will provide a full-featured web application. Further open source development for added features is also being explored at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada. We are also in discussion with another FIPSE project on the development of a Linux version of a web service based on our design.

 

We are attempting to get Canadian funding to develop a web service version. Ideally, it would synchronize user profiles with the existing local client so that users could work from anywhere on the web and also work offline on their home computer.

 

Efforts will be made to continue recruiting new users especially for the new Mac version of the software. More vigorous pedagogical support will be provided to future instructors to realize the full potential of the software.