Web Page And List Serve Utilization To Approach 24/7 Student Faculty Communication

As a general trend, 24/7 is becoming an industry standard for information availability. Students are no different in demanding 100% “up time” of communication with the professor and demanding quicker feedback to their non-lecture-time questions, quizzes, exams, homework, and lab reports. In a nutshell, students desire office hours on a 24/7 basis. This paper details the establishment and testing of a part-public, part-private course web page and a course email list serve including all registered students. This technology implementation has been tested for a sophomore-level strength of materials class for the purpose of improving the communications loop times between the students and professor and improving student satisfaction. The public portion of the web page includes a course outline, lecture and laboratory syllabi, daily homework assignments, examination schedules, and email access to the professor. The private portion of the web page (available to only registered students with valid computer accounts) includes homework problem solutions, examination solutions, common laboratory data, and other potentially copyrightable course material. Hyperlinks are liberally provided on the web page to support ease of navigation (including return paths) to course material and the professor. One feature that has proven extremely useful to the utility of this technology has been the implementation of a revision page, which allows tracking of modifications to the web page. This paper describes utilization of technology to successfully improve student-faculty communication and in the process has improved student satisfaction with the course. INTRODUCTION: The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) 2000 Report, "National Benchmarks of Effective Educational Practice” points out that student engagement is enhanced by contact between students and faculty members. The study concludes that the more contact the student has with the faculty member, the better in terms of improved student engagement. The author has observed that students, in general, have developed study habits that lead them to expect to obtain faculty input at non-standard hours; basically students are now desiring 24/7 uptime of faculty. Since no faculty member can provide this access, the methods described in this paper have allowed the author to effectively produce a faculty-student communication environment that approaches 24/7 with little additional effort on the faculty member’s part. It is the intention of the author to help other faculty members increase their faculty-student communication through utilization of similar methods of utilizing the described Web Page Approach and List Serve Approach. P ge 6.151.1 Proceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright 2001, American Society for Engineering Education WEB PAGE APPROACH A course information webpage with multiple hyper-links to other pertinent course information is posted before the first class meeting. This structure allows students to view the webpage through their browsers and find out important information on textbooks to procure and other courserelated materials in advance of the first lecture. The top portion of the course information webpage for Applied Strength of Materials, MET 211, for the Fall 2000 semester is shown in the screen capture shown below in Figure 1 . This website is continually updated during the semester and gives the student an up-to-date course guide. It is important to test all of the hyperlinks to make sure they are operational before “going live” with the course web page. All students should be able to access the course web page from the departmental webpage through hyperlinks and/or directly after receiving the course’s hyperlink from the course instructor. The time currency of the website is crucial to keeping student attention to the website. Updates should be incorporated as they are finalized and the students should be flagged that an update has been posted. One innovative feature of the course’s website is the clarity with which it conveys information about course updates, modifications, or changes to the students. A revision date is shown near the upper right hand corner of the course home page with a hyperlink to a revision file. This revision date is hyper-linked to a revision file that provides the student a summary overview of what has changed on the course site, saving the student search time. This revision file contains information about time-stamping the date of changes and providing a brief summary of the modifications. A screenshot of the format and content of the revision file is shown below in Figure 2. Relative to faculty-student communication, this feature is of huge benefit. The faculty member can post information to the website and flag it by rolling the date on the hyperlink to the revision.htm file. Students have commented in student rating sheets that they appreciate the time-savings this feature affords them. WebCT 3 provides similar functionality of flagging the students when new information is placed into the course folder. WebCT is being explored for future incorporation.