On-line GIS Education: Adding on-line materials and assignments to your courses while keeping course maintenance to a minimum

The BCIT GIS Department is now providing an on-line component to the GIS Advanced Diploma courses. This paper focuses on how to develop and maintain on-line courses while continuing to offer courses in the traditional classroom format, and yet keep the faculty workload increase to a minimum. WebCT is used as the "courseware" software delivery tool. All course material is developed independently of the courseware product. Three types of courses have been developed. The most simple on-line course just provides lecture notes, lab modules and self-test quizzes. The intermediate on-line courses include assignments and marking. The third type of course is full distance-education with no campus attendance required.

1.0 Introduction

The British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) offers a nine month Advanced Diploma Program in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. (Esri) software is used extensively throughout this program to demonstrate GIS concepts, to teach GIS methodology and to develop technical skills. Students use NT and UNIX workstations, have their own user-ids and Internet access. BCIT GIS decided in early 1997 to create an on-line component for all courses. The first step was to find a suitable course delivery software and to investigate efficient methods of converting and placing course content on-line. The second step was to enhance GIS student learning by providing: lecture, lab and quiz material on-line, links to relevant web sites, a group discussion area, student-to-student and student-to-instructor communication.

2.0 The Web Server and Courseware Software

BCIT did not have a standard courseware product selected as of January 1,1997. Investigations on the Internet showed that a product named "WebCT " was available and provided the required functionality (see Table 1). WebCT was developed by the University of British Columbia and seems particularly suited to educators (probably because instructors helped design the product)

Table 1. Why WebCT courseware was selected

2.1 Web Server and Courseware Installation

The software can be downloaded anytime from www.webct.com. The product was initially installed on a SGI INDY UNIX workstation, but is now installed on an NT workstation. The web server is hosted by an IBM Infinity workstation with a 100Mbs network connection and 384MB RAM. Performance has never been a problem (with around fifteen to thirty simultaneous users).

2.2 Courseware Administration

WebCT proved easy to learn once the WebCT tutorial was completed. The on-line help and separate help files are very useful.

The courseware has three basic levels of users: The Administrator, The Course Designer, and the Students. The administrator user account is used to setup the empty GIS course and the course designer user account.

3.0 Adding the Existing Course Content

The GIS department offers many of the GIS courses via different delivery modes. For example, the Arc/Info GIS 1 course was already offered in full-time day school, and part-time over 12 evenings, 6 Saturdays or 5 days. A typical GIS software course is updated or completely re-written every 6 months or less, as new software versions and technology appear frequently. Clearly the main problem is to keep only one version of a course, but to be able to use the course in all the different modes (overhead transparencies, photocopied notes, on-line notes). The primary goal was to find the best technique to develop and maintain course materials in Microsoft WORD, but to be able to use the materials in WebCT as well as in conventional lectures and lab assignments.

3.1 Technique to maintain course materials.

WebCT delivers materials as separate pages. This is good for the students as they can use page forward, page back and re-trace icons. This causes the course developer some problems. Each �lecture� must be broken out into many files - one file for each page of notes if true" page forward/ page backward functions are required. The best solution to this problem was to break the WORD files into files of single pages and to re-structure the WORD directories and file naming conventions (see figure 1).

The other solution is to provide each lecture" or lab" as one page. This means the student must use the browser scroll up/down functions to see a whole lecture, and that, for example, the page-forward" icon will load the next document in the list, not the next page in the current document.

HTML does not support TABS and some of the various style or layout options that might be used in a typical lecture overhead or lab assignment. There is a pre-formatted text option in HTML, but this tends to create text that extends past the screen page width - and Web pages are very irritating if the text is too long (making a user scroll left or right). The solution is to format all text sections into WORD tables (using no visible grid lines). This will ensure that the pages can print, create overhead transparencies, and still look good when saved to HTML and linked in a tool page in WebCT .

Diagrams are created in Word, PowerPoint or other software package and saved as a file in the course module directory. Each diagram is also screen captured intro a .GIF or .jpg file. The diagrams are inserted as images into the course module Word document.

This re-formatting of all the courses notes is labour intensive, but once done the single course version can be maintained easily for all course delivery modes. Lecture or lab modules are printed from the Word documents with no sign of the invisible table, but the formatting remains in the WebCT on-line document. Note that WORD 97 includes a "save as HTML" option and a software upgrade to provide the older WORD 95 product with the "save as HTML" option can be downloaded from the Microsoft site.

3.2 Course Content

The HTML versions of the Word documents and all image files are simply copied into the WebCT course directory. WebCT must be used to insert the file into the course content. Quizzes or assignment questions can be generated using WebCT or from ASCII files using specific WebCT key words. The questions can be multiple choice, matching, short or long answer. Short and long answer require interactive instructor marking. Each answer has a instructor feedback area which means the instructor can write one detailed feedback which goes to every student. There are many other features to the WebCT software such as discussion groups, timed exams etc.

4.0 Results to date (May 1999)

Fifteen on-line courses are available in various formats (table 2). The web browser view of on-line course selection page in shown in figure 2. Course access always requires user names and passwords which are managed by the course designer.

Table 2. The selection of BCIT GIS on-line courses

Each course has a main page with links to modules, assignments, self-test quizzes, glossary, references etc (figure 3). Glossaries and quizzes can be created in MS Word using a defined layout, saved as plain ASCII files and then imported into the course. Each course has a general page to access the course contents in a sequential manner (figure 4).

5.0 Student Response and Reviews

The student feedback has been very positive, especially in the area of on-line assessment (see table 3). Quick self-test questions are very popular (figure 5). Students now expect and assume that their courses will have a minimum of all written materials on-line so, for example, they can bring pre-printed lecture notes to class. The only complaint has been poor formatting when printing on-line. This has been resolved by using HTML tables (see section 3.0 above). There is a useful web printing product HP Web Print Smart" available at no cost from Hewlett Packard.

Table 3. A summary of Student comments

6.0 Instructor Response and Reviews

The course instructors comment that the WebCT course design is easy, but generating and maintaining an 'html version' of the course materials is extra work. Some of the extra work can be reduced by using the on-line assignments and semi-automatic marking. Writing feedback" for each incorrect answer is less work as the feedback is sent to all students, but creating the on-line assignments or quick quizzes is very time consuming. Students skip lecture classes more than before the on-line notes were available and complain when the notes do not print out cleanly.

7.0 Conclusions

The BCIT GIS program course resources are now available on-line. The course notes, assignments, quizzes, glossary and other content are being maintained using Microsoft WORD. One soft copy of the course is used to update the on-line version as well as to print out hardcopy for traditional course notes and modules. Course softcopy management must be very organized and methodical so that drawings, diagrams and text all combine to create a course module that can be printed, delivered as a lecture or as a section of an on-line course. The on-line courses are delivered using WebCT software. Feedback from students indicates that self-test quizzes are the most popular item, but being able to print and review material is also very useful.

8.0 Web Site References