PEDAGOGICAL ANALYSIS OF OFFERING ONLINE COURSES IN HIGHEREDUCATION – A CASE STUDY

H.M. Saleem, M.I. BuhariCollege of Computer Science and Engineering,

King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran, SaudiArabia

Email: {msaleem, mibuhari}@ccse.kfupm.edu.sa

Abstract

The ever increasing demand for quality education and the overwhelming increase in the population of students’ community turns out the traditional method of face-to-face (FTF) teaching to be an uphill task due to the shortage of qualified and experienced faculty members. This paves way for offering courses online, which is claimed to cater the above-mentioned demand through virtual classrooms. To verifythis claim, the course Data Structures was offered online as anexperiment at our College of Computer Science and Engineering. The course content modeled as multimedia document was developed using Macromedia Authorware 5.0 with integrated text, speech, & animations, which was delivered using a tool called WebCT. The pedagogical analysis (which includes interactivity, self-learning, flexibility, etc.) of this experiment has been presented in this paper. The study uses the data collected from survey conducted with the students and the faculty members involved in the online course.

Keywords: Face-to-Face, Online Education, Pedagogy.

1. Introduction

With the advent of the Internet, the very concept of

education has changed drastically. In developing countries

the number of students who want to do higher education is

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increasing overwhelmingly and the universities would not be

able to cope if it does not adapt the e-learning process due

to the limitation in the number of qualified faculty

members. Nowadays almost all universities started offering

online courses or at least experimenting with it. The

motivation behind this is to verify the claim that online

education serves as a means to handle more number of

students with the existing resources.

1.1 Online Education in King Fahd University

King Fahd University decided to examine the outcome of

online courses during the year 2001 and College of Computer

Science was chosen as the sample piece for experimentation.

We, in the Information and Computer Science department of

the college decided to switch the FTF delivery of the course

“Data Structure and Algorithms (ICS202)” to online e-learning during

the first semester of the academic year 2001/2002. The

effectiveness and success of online course offering in many

ways depend on increased demand for student’s convenience,

including his/her time, pace and place of learning [4]. The

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best evaluators of the online course offering are its

learners. In this paper, we present the case study about the

pedagogical analysis in offering the course ICS202 online at

our university. The kind of study reported in this paper is

necessary to evaluate certain factors like the effectiveness

of e-learning, changes in teacher/student interaction,

students’ convenience, collaboration among students,

improvement of student skills, flexibility of learning,

teaching load of the faculty members involved in e-learning

etc. This will also help us evaluate how good inline

learners our students are [2].To add strength to our

discussion, we would like to present how ICS202 course was

developed and delivered to the students. The rest of the

paper is structured as follows. Sections 2 and 3 outline the

development and delivery methods of the course Data Structures

respectively. Section 5 presents methodology of the survey,

Section 6 analyses the results of our case study and Section

7 concludes the case study with proper remarks.

2. Online Course Content Development

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The development team for the online course Data Structures

consisted of 6 team members who jointly acted as subject

experts, instructional designers, graphic designers and

programmers. Thus the team can be viewed as multi-

disciplinary as advocated by the British Open University

[6]. The development tool was mainly Macromedia Authorware

as it is more suitable for the development of online lecture

slides. We identified the following processes for this

course development [1].

Preparation: In this phase, the development team was

formed and the proposal for the online project was

made.

Analysis and Scheduling: The foundations necessary to

realize the proposal made in preparation phase were

done in this phase. As a first step, the subject

experts developed an outline of the course coverage.

This was followed by a discussion to decide on an

authoring tool that can be used to develop the course

content for presentation to the e-learners. Finally an

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action plan was developed to schedule the tasks

involved in realizing the e-learning in practice.

Course Design: The entire syllabus of ICS202 was

divided into 6 smaller modules of lecture units so that

the development of course content can be carried out

parallel by the team members. The role of the course

content developers is to identify examples, animations,

and the interactive questions for each lecture unit

they are working on.

Course Content Development: After the detailed design,

the actual content was developed. We learned from

experience that writing the narration transcript during

the content development could reduce significant

development time.

Web Content Development: The detailed course content,

the outcome of course content development, was

digitized by the implementers or the content developers

using the selected authoring tool. Our experience

revealed us that animations obtained by using the

authoring tool of choice are more convenient than using

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external animation tools. The narration was recorded

using a voice expert or using the text to speech

software. As expected, our students are more

comfortable with the human voice rather than the voice

of text-to-speech software.

Testing and Evaluation: To validate the course content

and the expected perfection in the digitization, the

preview of the e-learning was conducted with team

members being the spectators. The unsatisfactory slides

in the presentation were mostly due to flaws in content

development or in digitization. In any case, the

implementation was modified to get the desired

performance.

Deployment: The last stage of the online course

development process was compiling all the course

contents and making it available to the students

through an appropriate course-delivering tool such as

WebCT.

The development cycle is shown in figure 1.

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Figure 1. Online course development process.The course content was organized into forty lectures for

easy mapping to traditional FTF lectures. Each lecture

takes, on average, 35 minutes to complete.

3. Online Course Delivery

This course Data Structures was delivered in a blended

mode involving FTF and online delivery. The traditional

three weekly meeting was converted to single weekly meeting.

This weekly meeting was utilized for question-and-answer

session as well as for periodical assessments. The

laboratory component was however, conducted in a traditional

manner, with an instructor in charge.

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The reason for this kind of blended method of online

delivery was to keep our online students interested,

involved, reducing their anxiety and increasing their

motivation. This is supported by NYUonline’s research which

shows that providing one hour FTF session for every 4 hours

of self paced study was a highly effective mix [7]. Moreover

the blended method combines the best features of various

learning styles, for example accessibility and multimedia of

the online learning with the best features of the classroom

interaction. Thomson [3] also shows us that the group that

received Blended Learning performed with 30% more accuracy

than the e-Learning alone group.

In order to provide an on-demand access to the online

material at any time and at any place, apart from the course

web server, students were given access to hard copies of the

screen dumps of the Authorware presentation. A CD-ROM is

also provided containing the compiled course material as

posted on the WebCT.

3.1. Online slide layout for the Data Structures course

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Figure 2 shows the screen shot of the online slide of

the Data Structures Course. The slide shown is designed to

address the issues that are not feasible in the FTF delivery

mode. With this design of the online slides a student has

freedom to move across any section of the lecture unit in

case he wants to clarify something. This option is almost

impossible in the FTF delivery. The controls provided for

this purpose are:

1. ‘Top’ button to move to the first slide of the

lecture,

2. ‘Previous’ button to move to the previous slide of

the lecture, and

3. ‘Next’ button to move to the next slide.

Additionally, when the student is using the slides for

revising purpose, the option for disabling the narration

(mute) is provided. Another highlight of the online slide is

the pause button. This feature allows the student to have

enough thinking time before he continues to the next point.

Moreover this helps the students to compute any calculations

if presented in the slide before proceeding with the

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narration. In this particular course, the option for

repeating each slide in the lecture is provided. But from

our experience we found that the students would be more

comfortable if a control is also provided for repeating the

specific bullet of the slide.

Figure 2. Screen shot of the online slide

3.2. WebCT online course delivery tool

In our university, we use the tool WebCT to deliver the

course online to the students. A snapshot of the main page

of the tool is shown in Figure 3. The tool supports the

following features.

Utilization of streaming multimedia

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Use of internet based communication technologies

(chat room, threaded discussion forums, etc)

Support for various online teaching styles

Support for conducting online quizzes

Support for automated grading

Figure 3. Snapshot of the WebCT

4. Pattern of Student/Teacher interaction in traditional

course versus online course

We observed a significant change in the Student/Teacher

interaction mode between FTF and online. The substantial

difference between the two media is in the pattern of

dialog. In FTF the teacher [T] asks a question (sometimes

preceded by a comment), and a student [S] responds. The

alternation of teacher and student is consistent as

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illustrated in Figure 4. Each utterance is a direct response

tightly coupled to the immediate previous utterance. Each

speaker often talks directly to someone – students always

respond to the teacher, teacher often directing a cold-call

question, follow-up question, or feedback to a specific

student. The time gap between utterances is regular and

very short.

Figure 4. FTF delivery

Whereas in online offering of the course, the teacher

initiates discussion in the discussion forum of the online

delivery tool WebCT. A number of students respond, sometimes

simultaneously, and often with no reference to other student

responses. As the discussion keeps going, many students

might respond to a provocative comment by another student.

The teacher occasionally responds to student comments, but

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mainly summarizes the discussion and lead transitions into

appropriate discussion areas. A point worth noting here is

that a number of student comments and several teacher

comments generated no explicit response. It is possible for

several discussion threads to run simultaneously. Several

students observed in a follow up survey had “no time” to

read other students’ comments before posting their own

comment, and others complained about duplicated postings.

The alternation of the response of teacher and student was

not consistent as illustrated in Figure 4 but changes as

shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5. Online delivery

5. Methodology of survey conducted

As discussed in the section 4, the activities of both

students and the faculty members changes considerably in

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online course offering compared to that of FTF. To study the

impact of these changes both the students and the

instructors involved in the online offering were surveyed.

5.1 Details of the survey conducted with the students

The students’ survey questionnaire consists of four

major categories. The first category of questions addressed

the students’ convenience in online education, the second

set of questions traps the flexibility of students’ learning

in online education, the third group of questions addressed

the students’ collaboration with other students and their

instructors and the last category of questions examined the

development of students’ skills in online education. A total

of 64 students who took this ICS202 course online were

surveyed. The details of these questions are stated below.

5.1.1 Students’ convenience in online education:

1. Online offering has helped me to have self paced

learning.

2. Online course offering helps me to make my schedule

flexible.

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3. Online course offering has on-demand access to learning

material.

5.1.2 Students’ flexibility in online education:

1. Online course offering assists me in choosing the

topics of study at my own interests.

2. Online course offering assists me to study the course

at my preferred location.

5.1.3 Students’ collaboration in online education:

1. My interactions with other students have increased due

to online offering of this course.

2. My interaction with my instructor has increased due to

online offering of this course.

5.1.4 Development of students’ skills in online education:

1. I manage my time properly for this online course.

2. My time management skill has increased by taking this

course online.

3. My self learning capability has increased by taking

this course online.

4. My retention rate has improved by taking this online

course.

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5.2 Details of the survey conducted with the Instructors

In this part of the study, our focus was to compare the

amount of time it takes to teach an online offering of a

course vs. the FTF offering of the same course. The

instructors who took part in this study had already taught

this course “ICS202” in traditional FTF mode before they

switched to the online mode of teaching. This makes these

instructors an appropriate sample for the subject of our

study.

Instructional time of any instructor in higher education can

be categorized as follows [5].

1. Administration of the course

2. Discussion [Online discussion via WebCT].

3. E-mail [Email to/from students]

4. Grading [ online/offline grading]

5. FTF meetings

6. Preparation [Preparing for the class, modifying the

course material, etc.]

7. Phone calls with students

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8. Technology [technical problems with the specific online

tool or learning about the online environment]

A questionnaire was prepared considering the most

appropriate points in the above-mentioned categories which

suited our environment and the details of questions are as

follows.

1. Does online offering need more administration than FTF

offering?

2. Do you have more email discussion with students in

online offering than FTF offering?

3. Do you take more time for grading in online offering

than the FTF offering?

4. Is your preparation time for the course more in online

offering than in FTF offering?

5. Do you have more online discussion with the students in

online offering than FTF offering?

6. Do you have more phone calls with the student in online

offering than FTF offering?

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Each of the above mentioned questions including the

questions in the students’ survey had five options [1 to 5]

as shown in Table 1.

ResponseTag Response

1 StronglyAgree

2 Agree3 Neutral4 Deny

5 Stronglydeny

Table 1. Responses along with their Tags

6. Analysis of survey results

6.1 Student feedback analysis

First we will present the analysis of the students’

feedback. Although, we had eleven questions on the

questionnaire we show only the survey result of one question

in each category of the questionnaire for the sake of

briefness. The rest of the analysis is summarized in the

table 2 shown below.

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0510152025303540

Number o

f Students

StronglyAgree

Agree Neutral deny Stronglydeny

10. M y self learning capability has increasedby taking this course online?

Chart 1

0

5

10

15

20

25

Number o

f Students

StronglyAgree

Agree Neutral deny Stronglydeny

5. Online course offering assists m e to studythe course at m y preferred location?

Chart 2

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

Number o

f Students

StronglyAgree

Agree Neutral deny Stronglydeny

6. M y interactions with other studentshave increased due to online offering of

this course?

Chart 3

05

10152025

3035

Number o

f Students

StronglyAgree

Agree Neutral deny Stronglydeny

1. Online offering has helped m e to have selfpaced learning.

Chart 4Charts 1 to 4. Students’ Feedback

It is obvious from chart 1 that the online course

offering has improved students’ self-learning capability

compared to Face-to-face offering. This is due to the habit

that is nurtured in the minds of the students through the

mode of online course delivery that he learns for himself

and instructors are there to guide them through. For this

the students involved in the online courses have to be

instructor independent to a certain extent. From our

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experience we found that students find it very difficult to

adapt to this mode of instructor-independent learning at the

transitional phase to online delivery. But later they got

accustomed to the online delivery and got huge benefit out

of it. One more factor which improves the students’ self-

learning in online learning is that the students can learn

the course at their own pace which is not feasible in the

FTF delivery mode. Chart 4 confirms the above-mentioned

point about the self paced learning.

Chart 2 clearly displays the flexibility of taking the

course by the students from any desired location of their

choice. They don’t have to be physically present in the

class room in order to listen to a lecture. Students learn

best in a friendly, comfortable, socially interactive, and

diverse environment. This kind of learning environment truly

supports the self-esteem of the student, which is obtained

only by online education.

Chart 3 shows another important factor, which is the

interaction among students. Interaction among students has

increased drastically in online offering. This is due to the

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fact that students use the online discussion forum to

clarify their doubts on the subject. Online discussion forum

provides room even for the introvert students to post

question on the discussion forum. It is not always the

instructor who answers the question on the discussion forum,

other students who know the answer to a specific question

can also respond. The role of the instructor in the forum is

to act as a moderator. Most of the times the instructor,

start the discussion by posting questions on the subject and

allows the students to interact. The instructor after giving

enough time for the discussion summarizes the discussion

including the correct answer for the question he posted

earlier.

In the FTF offering there is a chance that some

students miss the answers given by the teacher in the

classroom session. But in the case of online delivery mode

the answers provided by the teacher on the discussion forum

are recorded and the students have the choice of viewing it

at any time. There is also option for searching the

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discussion archives on a specific topic. This is an added

advantage in the online offering over FTF.

A short summary of the student feedback including the

result of the other questions in the questionnaire is given

in Table 2.

Online learning is self paced, and thus, very convenient

for students. The course fits the students schedule which enables

greater number of students to take the course. On demand access to the course material, both from the

web server and the CD-ROMs is very convenient for the

students. Online education is self directed by the fact that

students can choose any section of the course content

while studying. Online education reduces the travel time and the

associated cost by taking the course at their preferred

location. Online education fosters more student interaction and

collaboration. Online education also fosters self learning capability of

students. Time management skill and retention rate of students have

also improved in online education.

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Table 2. A summary of student feedback on ICS202 onlinecourse

6.2 Faculty feedback analysis

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

3

Number o

f faculty m

embers

StronglyAgree

Agree Neutral Deny Stronglydeny

1. Does OL offering need m ore adm inistration than FTF

Chart 5

00.51

1.52

2.53

3.54

4.55

Number o

f faculty m

embers

StronglyAgree

Agree Neutral Deny Stronglydeny

2. Do you have m ore em ail discussion with students inOL offering than FTF offering?

Chart 6

00.51

1.52

2.53

3.54

Number o

f faculty m

embers

StronglyAgree

Agree Neutral Deny Stronglydeny

3. Do you take m ore tim e in grading for OL offering thanthe FTF offering?

Chart 7

00.51

1.52

2.53

3.54

Number o

f faculty m

embers

StronglyAgree

Agree Neutral Deny Stronglydeny

5. Do you have m ore online discussion with thestudents in O L offering than FTF offering?

Chart 8Charts 5 to 8. Faculty Feedback

Out of 6 questions in the faculty survey questionnaire

only 4 of them are shown above in the charts for the sake of

briefness again. Considering the feedback from faculty

members who were involved in teaching online courses, we

observed from chart 5 that the administrative work remains

almost same irrespective of the nature of teaching

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methodology. Chart 6 shows that e-mail discussion with the

students has reduced considerably. This point is supported

again by chart 8 that the faculty member does most of the

discussion with the students through online discussion forum

provided by the content delivery tool like WebCT. Chart 7

implies that the grading time has considerably decreased in

online offering. The reason behind this is that the quizzes

conducted online with the help of the content delivery tool,

WebCT has the automated grading facility. So the faculty

members are left only with grading the major exams.

Considering all the feedback cumulatively from the faculty

members, we can infer that online offering reduces slightly

the load on the faculty members, which is not in favor of

the claim that more students can be handled by the

university with the same amount of resources. The reason

behind this is that faculty members spend considerable

amount of time in discussion forums answering the students’

questions. Table 3 summarizes the feedback from the faculty

members.

Administration of the online course takes almost the same

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time as the FTF offering.

Email discussion with the students has reduced

considerably.

Grading time of online offering is less than the FTF

offering.

Preparation time is almost the same in online offering as

well as the FTF offering.

Online discussion through the online discussion forum is

more in online offering than the FTF offering.

Table 3. Summary of the faculty feedback

7. Conclusion

Traditional teaching is now being slowly complemented

with online teaching. The results shown in this paper are

the outcome of the survey conducted for the course Data

Structures (ICS202) offered in the College of Computer Science and

Engineering at our university. Thorough study has been made on

the results and a comparative analysis between delivering a

course online and FTF was done. After careful analysis we

have found that delivering a course online in blended mode

with one FTF meeting with the instructor per week has proved

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to be very effective in higher education over the

traditional FTF classroom session. As far as the load of the

faculty members teaching online courses are concerned only a

small percentage of it has been reduced. Our opinion is that

these results would not be in favor of online delivery if

the courses were offered without any meeting with the

instructor. From our experience and thorough analysis of the

results of the case study we conclude that any course can be

better delivered online with one FTF meeting with the

instructor, provided the students who are involved in the

online courses are trained to be instructor-independent at

least to a certain extent.

8. Reference:

1. Sahalu Junaidu. “Use of Internet for online Course Delivery: A Case Study”, The International Conference on Information and Computer Science. King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Saudi Arabia, November, 2004.

2. University College, Berkeley, Extension Online, 2003. “What Makes a Good Online Student?” Downloaded from: http://learn.berkeley.edu/sampleclass/u01/u1note03.html

3. THOMSON Job Impact Study: “The next Generation of Corporate Study”, at http://traininginfo.be/stat/Thomson_report/php

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4. Vladimir Uskov, “Student-Centered learning in Online and Blended Education on Computer Information Systems”, 33rd ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, November 5-8, 2003.

5. Gregory W. Hislop. “Does Teaching Online Take More Time?”31st ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, October 10-13, 2001.

6. Care, W.D., & Scanlan, J.M. “Planning and Managing the development of the courses for the distance delivery: Results from a qualitative study”. The Online Journal of DistanceLearning Administration, 4(2), April 2001. Retrieved from http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/summer42/care42.html

7. Frankola, K. “Tips for Increasing E-Learning Completion rates”. Workforce Magazine at URL: http://www.workforce.com/archive/feature/22/26/22/

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