1 6. Hp’s Evaluation of Angela’s TopClass Project

6.1 Introduction

TopClass is a Web-Server for educational purposes. I investigated the installation on Angela Merino covering the following subjects.

• Look and feel (page 2)
• Technical Advantages/Disadvantages (page 3)
• Didactical Advantages/Disadvantages (page 4)
• Angela’s Project (page 6)
• Conclusion (page 7)

6.2 Look and Feel of TopClass

Top Class uses well known instruments for navigation:

• A main-navigation-bar to the right. The icons of this bar quiet understandable. The number of icons is small. Therefore the user learns fast how to navigate in TopClass.
• In the coursework you find a file-system like presentation of the material. Folders hold material (text and questionnaires).

It is not easy to find any better navigation system in the Internet. Even on a older screen (640 x 480) most navigation icons, folder or folder contents listing and content section are wide enough. The user can adjust the width of this screen sections easily.

TopClass loads all pages from the server. There is no local page caching. Therefore the system seams to be rather slow. But it seems to me quick enough.

6.3 Technical Advantages/Disadvantages

Hyper-Links are not used in TopClass.

The server provides:

• A framework to hold information or instruction pages and questionnaires. The teacher can correct the answers to the questions manually or provide automated corrections. As Angela mentions the possibilities of setting up questionnaires are rather limited.
• Automated information about students performance to the tutor (teacher).
• Asynchronous communication (messages) between students and tutor (teacher) and within students.

6.4 Didactical Advantages/Disadvantages

TopClass is not a hyper-text administration tool. Basic information should be provided either as printed text or as text for off-line reading and printing (books, photo copies, downloadable html-files, Acrobat files).

TopClass should rather hold instruction for learning activities than exhaustive information about subject content. I agree with Angela that TopClass is not a good instrument to set up exhaustive stand alone summaries like the one she compiled. Information pages about what to learn, prerequisites and short summaries in TopClass make sense. Use TopClass if you want to guide as human tutor your students through a difficult subject. A TopClass learning session could look like this:

1. Information Page on what to learn in the unit
2. Pre-test to the unit. If possible with automated corrections.
3. Information about whether to start this unit now or do some other learning. Instruction for the learning unit (read text, do exercises, etc.). Instruction when to ask for help and to post messages when difficulties arise.
4. Summary what now should have been learned to start post test.
5. Post test. Usually with corrections by a human tutor. The tutor will then contact the student and suggest or ask him for remedial learning activities or congratulate him for his mastery. The tutor will motivate the student to keep on learning.

Distant learning will usually be used in the education of adults. Advantages are to pick the time to learn as you please. To progress in the course at your one pace. Not to loos time by transferring to the School. Still you want to be able to communicate with some fellows. Still you need feed-back by a tutor. I can imagine that even in the field Angela wanted to use TopClass, it is possible to work with it.

6.5 Usage of TopClass by Angela

Usually one has some didactical vision and picks a instrument that is appropriate. Angela obviously had some vision and picked the wrong instrument. She wanted to present the user with a summary of financial formulas and let him test his ability to apply this formulas. It seems Angela did a great job in gathering formulas. The system did not let her construct the question sets she planed to implement. In this short 4 to 5 weeks period she was not able to change her plans and adopt her didactical ideas at the requirements of the system TopClass.

As I run into similar difficulties with my library project on the Moo I understand this completely. I understand that she was therefore very disappointed by TopClass. Nevertheless I do not share her general opinion about TopClass. I got the impression that Angela did not sufficiently exploit TopClass's possibilities of co-operative learning on the web. I guess that she would have done better if she had not worked alone on her project. As in my case with the MOO-library there is a danger that you got stuck in minor difficulties and miss to use the possibilities you would have. Working alone it takes time to change ideas and redo your work.

6.6 Conclusion

TopClass seems to be a good instrument to set up didactical sites without much knowledge of the Internet:

1. There is no knowledge needed to set up a navigation system or to use hyper-text links.
2. Questionnaires can be implemented. Students marks are filed. Manual corrections by teachers and automated corrections are provided.
3. There is a asynchronous communications system between students and teachers and within students.
4. The system is adequate as tutoring system. Instead of artificial intelligence, human intelligence shared by the net is used for tutoring.

The content of courses (the text to read) should be provided outside TopClass. But usually this is quiet easy as there are already books, photo-copies, Word-files, etc. that cover the subject matter.

With today's on-line costs, the rather large amount of time students are on-line may be neglected.