Teaching With Web 2.0 Tools: An Experience

Periodically, technological advances have changed the pace, scope and shape of every human endeavor. Education is no exception. In this essay we report a real world experience in harnessing web resources for enhancing teaching process in an engineering college environment. SDMCET is an engineering college under VTU and offers both UG and PG courses in engineering. The author is a faculty in the department of computer science and engineering. He exploring web resources that can be used in conjunction with teaching and has been adopting them ever since.

Starting in 2000, from email usage for exchanging questions and answers with a class of students, I conducted a couple of experiments and currently using assorted set of web tools to conduct class delivery entirely on the web. I used search engine to discover sources of curriculum design and a custom search engine to pin point course resources. Used Alert services to get updates and Blogs to publish class notes, question bank . We used online docs to prepare and publish learning resources such as presentations and additional reference materials. I also used groups to create a community for class and used it to communicate and make course related announcements. All these resources are joined together at course home page. Recently I also used quiz tools as part of evaluation process and recently discovered lesson plan tools.

Experiment 2: Using Web Tools for conducting Seminar on Project

Background

Seminar on Project or simply Seminar is an integral part of VIII semester engineering course of VTU. The idea behind this academic activity is to encourage student to come up with an interesting topic connected to academics and make a presentation to the entire class. The entire process of seminar is expected to help student on how to choose a topic; research references to prepare the content for presentation and finally help him get rid of "stage freight" by making presentation to the class.Choosing a topic is one of the most defining moments of seminar process. It is so because there are too many topics to choose from. Additionally for a faculty to see that there is no overlap or duplication of topics is a daunting task. Just imagine class strength of 120 and the process of checking for duplication and even after choosing a topic each student has to come out with an "abstract" of his seminar topic to be approved by the concerned faculty. A seminar abstract to be approved must indicate two or more references consulted during the preparation of the abstract. Until now students were asked to submit the seminar abstract on paper and it was very difficult for a faculty to check all reference.

Our Experiment: For the year 2007-08 we adopted a web-based approach to conduct the entire process of seminar. We asked students to submit seminar abstract along with references via email. We insisted that references must be URL's so that we can verify them at once. Submitted abstracts were read in email form only and references were checked by clicking through them. Duplicate Seminar topics were detected using "search within mail" feature thus reducing the drudgery usually associated with paper based abstract submission. Once the seminar abstracts were accepted students were asked to prepare up to 15 slides using freely available online presentation tool and submit. Faculty went through the presentation and made suggestion if any and asked students to make the final presentation in the class. Thus paper work was eliminated to 100%.

Outcomes: While our approach simplified our work, it also gave our students to learn using email as means of submitting academic work and also learning using presentation software. The database of all such seminar is maintained is the next batch students are using it as reference. see here for detailed student response