DEVELOPMENT OF AN INTEGRATED COURSE PROTOTYPE FOR DISTANCE LEARNING IN WIND POWER PROJECT MANAGEMENT:

METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK AND CASE-STUDY

Andrew Barney, Heracles Polatidis Uppsala University, Campus Gotland, Dept. of Earth Sciences (SWEDEN)

Abstract Distance learning is becoming an increasingly important part of university agendas. For Bachelor programs, in particular, a number of universities around the world are developing and running distance learning tracks. Recent technological developments, like educational platforms (Web-Vista, Moodle, etc.), video conferences, interactive distance learning, online web-communication and virtual rooms have not only facilitated efficient distance education, but also created new opportunities for teachers and students. It is the case, however, that this expanding field will benefit from a more integrated approach for course structure and development. Distance courses exhibit a number of particularities that are not apparent during traditional teaching i.e. the need for managing sometimes complex online software, an increased level of student isolation from instructors and classmates, unconventional structures for everyday class routines, difficulties in simulating lab work, etc. A necessity, therefore, emerges for a more integrated organization and homogenization of distance e-learning courses in the same track in order for those particularities to be most effectively addressed. By those means, the student can gain a better understanding and become more easily familiarized with a course’s content, requirements and virtual environment and the teachers are better able to organize course material, support a greater number of students and utilize e-learning time more efficiently.

In this paper a methodological framework for an integrated course prototype for distance learning is developed and applied. In the context of the proposed framework, a number of criteria for homogeneous course organization are initially established. These criteria may include course structure, appearance, coherence, visual context, student guidance, level of communication permitted, etc. These criteria are then utilized to develop a course prototype. The prototype is applied to the courses of the distance learning track ‘Wind Power Project Development’, at Uppsala University, Campus Gotland. Subsequently, the framework is tested using a trial run to ensure the quality of the resulting course. This process is currently underway at the Uppsala University, Dept. of Earth Sciences and the new courses’ structure and overall performance will be evaluated for first time with the students of the autumn 2014 term. Results of the evaluation will be used to discover potential inconsistencies and provide useful feedback for prospective improvements.

Keywords: Web platform, student interaction, course structure, Moodle.

1 INTRODUCTION E-learning could be generally defined as including all contexts in which teachers' and students' use of digital resources is an integral part of teaching, whether it takes place via the Internet or in classrooms on campus. This includes both Internet-based teaching environments and services (such as Student Portal, learning management systems, Dropbox, Google Drive, journal databases, etc.), and the use of software and hardware solutions such as interactive whiteboards, audience response systems, etc.

E-learning is currently climbing higher up the agenda of universities. Starr, 1998 provided a review of some basic educational practices, trends and possible future directions for use of e-learning in higher education. In the same paper, it is claimed that Internet courses have conveyed new elements to virtual education and raised a number of both philosophical and practical issues. These novel issues are related to new ways of delivery, interaction and administration of online education and mentoring.

Furthermore, Mavrommatis, 2008 accounted for a depiction and analysis of apparent forthcoming challenges in order to fully integrate online learning to contemporary educational systems. One of these challenges is the design of appropriate program/course architecture. The creation of such an online environment is an open question. Particularly for programs in the field of engineering, e-teaching can be an even more challenging task than in a classical face-to-face classroom environment (Brault et al, 2007).

Proceedings of ICERI2014 Conference 17th-19th November 2014, Seville, Spain

ISBN: 978-84-617-2484-04244

Other scholars have tried to find some research evidence for the support of Web-based instruction or the use of multimedia learning environments, and deliberate on the advantages and disadvantages of Internet-based education used alone or versus traditional face-to-face teaching. These studies do not always result in conclusive findings on the effectiveness of Web-based platforms for improving student learning experiences, but rather provide general advice on good practices and present evidence from a number of case studies in different countries and cultures (Chu, 1999; Dutton et al, 2001; Jolliffe et al. 2001; Dym et al, 2005).

Nonetheless, many authors agree that transfer of knowledge is not secured merely by the application of technology to information delivery methods. It is, therefore, imperative that sound pedagogy and coherent course organization are also present in a good educational plan. To this end, Savenye et al 2001 offered an introduction to the theoretical aspects of instructional design that forms the foundation of supporting effective student learning. They presented a series of guidelines that e-learning teachers may use to design, develop and deliver online distance courses. These guidelines may include an evaluation of the appropriateness of a course for online delivery, an analysis of the learners, pedagogical concerns, and estimations of needed resources. There exist a considerable number of authors that have worked on developing prototypes, rules and procedures for the development of instructional material (Lilley et al, 2001; Dick et al, 2001).

In all cases, however, instructors need to be far more organized and far clearer when teaching online compared to normal teaching and mentoring. That is because distance learning courses exhibit a number of particularities that are not apparent during traditional teaching i.e. the need for managing sometimes complex online software, an increased level of student isolation from instructors and classmates, unconventional structures for everyday class routines, difficulties in simulating lab work, etc. A necessity, therefore, emerges for a more integrated organization and homogenization of distance e-learning courses in the same track in order for those particularities to be most effectively addressed. By those means the student can gain a better understanding and become more easily familiarized with a course’s content, requirements and virtual environment and the teachers are better able to organize course material, support a greater number of students and utilize e-learning time more efficiently.

In this paper a methodological framework for an integrated course prototype for distance learning is developed and applied. In the context of the proposed framework, a number of criteria for homogeneous course organization are initially established. These criteria may include course structure, appearance, coherence, visual context, student guidance, level of communication permitted, etc. These criteria are then utilized to develop a course prototype. The prototype is applied to the courses of the distance learning track ‘Wind Power Project Development’, at Uppsala University Campus Gotland. Subsequently the framework is tested using a trial run to ensure the quality of the resulting course. This process is currently underway at the Uppsala University, Dept. of Earth Sciences and the new courses’ structure and overall performance will be evaluated for the first time with the students of the autumn 2014 term. Results of the evaluation will be used to discover potential inconsistencies and provide useful feedback for prospective improvements.

2 MATERIALS AND METHODS Campus Gotland’s first wind power distance course began in 1998 and since then several new courses have been developed. Today, ten (10) out of the twelve (12) distance courses offered are in both Swedish and English. The remaining two courses are offered either in English or Swedish. Through the years, these courses have been largely developed independently and often have different designs as there was no clear or needed agreement on reference for appearance, structure and lesson plans. Subsequently, the different wind power distances course have been gathered into the Wind Power Development bachelors track which contains all 12 courses relating to wind power.

The entirety of the bachelors track is run on the Moodle learning platform. Moodle is a free distance learning program first released in 2002 that allows teachers to present course material in a number of different ways depending on their needs. The system allows for teachers to upload content for students to review, to create forums and quizzes and to send feedback to students (www.moodle.org). Courses from the track have been using Moodle since 2004.

The goal of this project will be to develop an integrated course prototype in order to standardize the courses in the track using the existing Moodle learning platform’s IT-infrastructure. In doing so, a homogenization of how material in every course will be presented and how the courses are designed

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is achieved. This means that all courses will be presented in same way which will allow them to better impart course information to the students.

Fig. 1 presents the process of developing the course prototype that includes the course review and update procedure. The methodology consists of six (6) discrete steps.

• Step 1: Review of each of the courses

• Step 2: Establish criteria for the creation of the prototype course page

• Step 3: Create the course page prototype, including revisions

• Step 4: Apply accepted prototype criteria to all other courses in the track

• Step 5: Test the courses and final quality review

• Step 6: Running of courses in the track

Figure 1: Course review and update procedure.

Each of the courses in the track will be reviewed for a better understanding of the exact scale of deviation between them. This first step will also allow the project responsible to formulate a series of suggestions on possible changes that can be integrated into Step 2.

Criteria establishing the structure and appearance for all courses in the track will be determined by the distance track review board in consultation with the project leader. In deciding the structure and appearance, special care will be taken to ensure an overall coherence to the track’s underlying interconnected nature, as well to establishing a visual impression in the courses which guides and supports student learning. Students should be able to access any course in the track and be able to learn the basic details of the course and navigate without searching. For instance, the elements common to all courses in the track should always be presented in the same order, location and font.

Once the criteria for course structure and appearance have been established the project responsible will create a prototype using them. The prototype will be tested and reviewed by the distance track review board to ensure all criteria have been applied and that the results are as expected. Should one of the established criteria not provide the desired result, or if additional criteria are needed, the prototype will be amended. Once the prototype performs as expected, the criteria used to create it will be approved for wider application.

All courses in the distance track will have the same homogenization criteria applied to them as were applied to the prototype. Due to differences in course content and course size the criteria may not be fully suited to all courses in the track and some adaptation may be required. Any adaptation to the standard criteria will be approved by the distance track review board.

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Once the course pages have been updated, students will be introduced to them on trial basis in a rolling fashion. The feedback from the students and the teacher’s experiences from these trial runs will be used to fine tune the established criteria in an attempt to best reach the goals set for the project. The prototype will be updated to correspond to any new, amended or removed criteria.

After all course pages have been updated and been through a trial run they will be put into general operation. The criteria created will additionally be applied to any future courses created in the track and the experience gained will be shared with teachers both inside and outside of the Department of Earth Sciences at Uppsala University to facilitate the updating of course appearance and structure.

3 CASE-STUDY The bachelors distance track in Wind Power Project Development consists of 12 individual courses. These courses are presented along with their relevant information in Table 1 below. All courses listed below are also given in both English and Swedish with the exception of Wind power grid integration, which is only offered in Swedish and Decision analysis in renewable energy planning, which is only offered in English.

Table 1: Distance track courses.

These courses together combine to reach a total of 97.5 university points and can be combined with another 82.5 points to receive a bachelor’s degree. All but three of the courses in the track require a prerequisite to begin. All but one version of the introduction course runs for 10 weeks and each course except the Thesis course is considered to be less than a full time class load. The expected flow of student’s studies is noted below in Fig.2.

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Figure 2: Wind Power Project Development course flow chart.

Furthermore, Fig. 3 below shows an example page from the original course before any of the criteria described in Step 2 have been applied. This course has 11 assignments of varying types and an exam split into three different modules. The first module contains 7 assignments and the second module contains 4. The exam is given its own module.

Figure 3: Original course webpage.

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Fig. 4 below shows an example page from the first version of the prototype course. The initial criteria established by the distance track board has been applied here. The criteria established set sizes and locations for the images, types of font used, how course reading should be presented, structure and order of the course menu and so on. The criteria also implemented the track wide use of event notifications. Perhaps the most notable change when looking from Fig. 3 to Fig. 4 is the creation of additional modules so that there are no more than 2 assignments per module.

Figure 4: Prototype version 1 course webpage.

Fig. 5 below shows the same example page as seen in Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 but with revised critiera applied to it. The calender was deemed unnessary and a menu allowing students to see all assignments of a certain type was added. For example, the forum link will show all forum assignments in the course. Other significant changes included the creation of a stand alone ‘About us’ information module and that each module can only cover one topic, in addition to only being allowed to contain two assignments.

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Figure 5: Prototype version 2 course webpage.

The structure seen in Fig. 5 will be generally applied to all of the other courses in the track as outlined in Section 3. There will be some slight aesthethic variation between the courses but in all major structural respects they will be the same.

4 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS As this project is ongoing, certain steps outlined in the methodology have not yet been taken. The project is currently at Step 3 (see Fig. 1) and the prototype has been created and is in the process of being tested. Once testing of the prototype class page has been completed, the project will proceed to Step 4 where the criteria created will be applied to every course in the track and if needed adapted. Once the courses become ready, they will be released to the trial class of students for testing and feedback. The feedback obtained from these trial classes will be used to update the prototype and criteria. Once all courses have received feedback from their trial classes and have been updated as needed they will be put into general operation.

During the establishment of the criteria used to create the prototype there was some disagreement as to how to create the best uniform course structure/appearance across the track to reduce the amount of time a student needs to learn it. The disagreements largely revolved around how assignments were presented. The dispute was resolved by allowing the teachers responsible for a course to decide the matter themselves on a case by case basis so long as they were consistent within the course. Other matters of disagreement were resolved in a similar manner, but with the prototype criteria establishing the overarching guidelines for the teachers.

The general reception from the teachers of the prototype course has been positive and teachers of other courses have expressed interest in applying the criteria to their courses also.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This paper is partially financed by Uppsala University, Project on developing e-learning and experience sharing. The usual compliments apply.

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