Just-in-Time-Teaching in the Humanities: Lessons Learned from the Web Cahier

paper
Authorship
  1. 1. Mark Wolff

    Hartwick College

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Just-in-Time-Teaching in the Humanities: Lessons
Learned from the Web Cahier

Mark
Wolff

Hartwick College
wolffmO@hartwick.edu

2002

University of Tübingen

Tübingen

ALLC/ACH 2002

editor

Harald
Fuchs

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

The advent of the Internet has introduced a number of communication technologies
to higher education that have had a significant impact on the ways students and
teachers interact. By now most students use email to communicate with their
professors on a regular basis, and it is common for professors to use online
discussion boards and chat software to reach out to their students beyond the
classroom. Even though these technologies create more opportunities for contact
between students and instructors, they tend to promote uneven interaction
outside the classroom: some students will take advantage of the media, often
dominating the discussion, while other students will feel reluctant to
participate or will allow other students to carry the discussion. Many
educational software companies such as Blackboard offer integrated packages with
assessment tools for class surveys and online tests. As someone who has
experimented with these tools in my courses in language, literature, and
culture, I have searched for a way to interact individually with each student,
addressing his or her particular strengths and weaknesses with content while at
the same time assessing the entire class to identify those areas where they
understand the material and where more guidance on my part is required. The
dissatisfaction with existing courseware prompted me to write my own web-based
program, the Web Cahier. In this paper I will explain the pedagogical philosophy
of the Web Cahier and report on student feedback during the first year of its
implementation at Hartwick College. (I will explain the design of the Web Cahier
and make it available to other scholars as open source software in a separate
poster session.)
The pedagogy which informs the design of the Web Cahier is inspired by
Just-in-Time-Teaching, or JiTT, a teaching strategy developed by Gregor M. Novak
at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and Evelyn T. Patterson at
the United States Air Force Academy for introductory physics classes. JiTT makes
use of web technologies to present warm-up activities that students complete
online shortly before coming to class. Once the deadline for completing the
warm-up has passed, the instructor reviews student answers to focus on the areas
where they need help. Novak and Patterson explain that
"[t]hese answers are used as talking points for the instructor later
that morning, while the issue is still fresh in the students' minds. By
doing this, the instructor "individualizes" the lecture. Students in the
classroom recognize their own wording, both correct and incorrect, and
thus become engaged as part of the feedback loop. It is quite common for
the classroom discussion to continue via email between the instructor
and particular students. Paradoxically, technology used this way
encourages a more personal and intimate bond between instructors and
students. It is clear from course evaluations that students feel part of
a team working on a common project."

By surveying student performance before meeting them in the classroom, the
instructor has an idea of how well each student is learning and can prepare a
targeted lesson plan for the entire class. It is the balance between individual
attention and group dynamics that makes JiTT a promising component to electronic
pedagogy, particularly in the Humanities where students must learn how to engage
texts and ask their own questions.
Through my use of the Web Cahier I have adapted JiTT to courses I teach in French
language, literature, and culture at Hartwick College. The Web Cahier leverages
the ease of accessibility offered by computer networks and holds each student
accountable for completing assignments. In my language courses, students watch
digitized audio and video clips on their laptops as they complete their homework
online. In my literature and culture courses, I give students warm-up questions
to guide their thinking as they make their way through assigned readings. In all
the courses where I use the Web Cahier, every student must complete an
assignment one or two hours before class. He or she can work incrementally on
the assignment, entering text into a web form, saving it, and returning to edit
what they have typed as often as they wish before the assignment deadline. After
a deadline has passed, students are unable to modify what they have done but
they can review their work and read instructor comments. When I evaluate a
student's work in the Web Cahier, I can give specific feedback for each
question. As a result, I come to class with a lesson plan adapted to the
specific needs of the students who I know have already engaged the material.
Preliminary evaluations from students indicate that the Web Cahier has helped
improve their learning by encouraging timely completion of assignments which are
assessed before they meet with their instructor. Students feel they have a
greater stake in what goes on in the classroom because they know that the
instructor will use their work on the Web cahier to address their interests and
difficulties. Students, however, feel isolated when working with the Web Cahier:
they prefer the interaction that email, discussion boards, and chat rooms
afford. Some complain they are overworked in completing assignments, and they
resent the automatically enforced deadline which often causes them to feel
anxious about their work. As for the instructor, the amount of labor required to
prepare a lesson increases geometrically with every question posed to students.
The instructor may also feel overwhelmed in reviewing student work within a
narrow timeframe before class. The precision the Web Cahier offers in assessing
individual performance comes at the cost of a more directive and labor-intensive
pedagogy. In the paper I will present more definitive results from surveys of
students and other faculty who have used the Web Cahier. At this time it seems
evident that the Web Cahier can only provide one way to interact with students
outside the classroom. While it is important to guide and assess how students
are learning in a humanities course, there must be opportunities for discovery
and free play beyond the control of the instructor.

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Conference Info

In review

ACH/ALLC / ACH/ICCH / ALLC/EADH - 2002
"New Directions in Humanities Computing"

Hosted at Universität Tübingen (University of Tubingen / Tuebingen)

Tübingen, Germany

July 23, 2002 - July 28, 2008

72 works by 136 authors indexed

Affiliations need to be double-checked.

Conference website: http://web.archive.org/web/20041117094331/http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/allcach2002/

Series: ALLC/EADH (29), ACH/ICCH (22), ACH/ALLC (14)

Organizers: ACH, ALLC

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  • Language: English
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