October 1996 € Volume 23 € Number 5

Integration of the World Wide Web and Teaching: A Work in Progress

By Michael Bartolacci

The enormous explosion in popularity of the World Wide Web among users of the Internet has created an ever-growing interest in the academic community. This interest includes the opportunities for the incorporation of the Web into existing courses without placing additional burdens on faculty or students. The Web has myriad uses in teaching, from the ability to post class notes and assignments on a class Web page for ease of student access to conducting online research. This article will briefly describe some of the opportunities and problems encountered while integrating the use of the World Wide Web into existing and new courses at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) in Newark, N.J., and more specifically, the School of Industrial Management.

NJIT is a public, four-year technological university with a variety of undergraduate and graduate programs in engineering, social sciences/liberal arts, business and architecture. NJIT, being located in a major urban area, has a large percentage of students who commute or live off campus. Additionally, graduate courses are offered at several sites throughout New Jersey. These facts combine to allow use of the Web to have a great potential impact in teaching.

The School of Industrial Management (SIM) of NJIT, the focus of this article, is a technology-centered business school within the university. For SIM, the inclusion of the Web in courses represented a natural step in the evolution of teaching from traditional faculty-centered, on-campus lectures to a more distributed, but integrated, learning experience. This approach comes in response to real threats from industry taking over the education of its employees.

Ives and Jarvenpaa recently wrote in Sloan Management Review that "Private sector intrusion is a real risk for business schools. Cable operators and telecommunications companies are aggressively developing virtual classrooms, often without university involvement. Publishers and software houses are developing multimedia products that will substitute for, rather than complement, traditional classroom education." [Ives and Jarvenpaa, p. 33]

As a result of this competition, NJIT and SIM, along with other institutions throughout the country, have had to tailor their approach to education. Traditional classroom-based education may not suit working professionals who must drive a significant amount of time from their places of work to attend class and then drive home. Employers are no longer as willing to allow employees to leave work early to attend classes or to reimburse employees for classes that are not directly related to their job function. The use of the Web has allowed SIM to create innovative alternatives and hybrids to traditional education at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.


Distance learning
This new approach includes concepts such as "distance learning" for graduate students that require more responsibility and input from students and new skills from faculty. Distance learning includes the ability to offer courses to remote sites, through live audio/video connections, and to adapt courses which can be conducted via videotape and the Internet. Market demand for graduate courses at remote sites throughout New Jersey partially drove the need to offer more courses that utilized the Web and related technologies.

Graduate courses throughout NJIT have started to utilize Web pages for posting assignments, projects, exams, etc. An advantage of conducting graduate courses using the Web as a focal point is that working students who sometimes miss class due to job-related activities can still get assignments and notes. This does require a concerted effort on both the professor and the students' parts to use a Web page as a vehicle for communication and not as a substitute for any interaction between them. A faculty member must take the time to post notes, exams, etc. on a Web page and carefully develop the page in such a way that it complements the actual class, be it live or on videotape.

The utilization of the Web for undergraduate SIM courses is not as extensive at present, but is an area ripe for the implementation of new ideas. Currently, the use of Web pages is limited only to supplementing standard classroom education with a place to gather information from the instructor. The posting of notes, exams and supplemental course materials can have a potential drawback with undergraduates in particular. The more information provided online via a Web page, the less incentive a student has in attending class.

Prior to 1996, the utilization of the Web by NJIT SIM faculty was primarily for personal and research purposes. Web sites could be visited by SIM faculty only in monochrome text mode from SIM's facilities through NJIT's campus network. Faculty infrequently utilized outside Internet services and other computing facilities across campus to access the Web in its full color graphical form. This brings to light a prerequisite for utilizing the Web in teaching: giving both students and faculty convenient and constant access with modern computing equipment.

SIM professors had little incentive to create Web pages for their courses or utilize the resources available on the Web for teaching prior to the upgrade of computing facilities in SIM itself. The creation of a student laboratory with graphical Internet connectivity in early 1996 and ongoing upgrades of faculty office computers has spurred interest across all specializations. Once basic connectivity is established for both faculty and students, a secondary problem arises: training both faculty and students on how to create and access information for teaching purposes.

Much like a "field of dreams" with the motto that "if we build it, they will come," a network and computer laboratory with the goal of utilizing Internet resources for teaching has little value if it is not utilized. The key to utilization for teaching lies initially with faculty. More established faculty have little incentive to rearrange their class syllabi, notes, course content and teaching style to incorporate the World Wide Web. A general observation is that the more technical (or mathematically based) the course, the less inclined a faculty member is to incorporate graphically based information, such as is the case on a Web page, into the course. Creating special characters and Greek letters is sometimes burdensome with standard word processors, and can appear impossible to the faculty member unfamiliar with HTML (Hypertext Markup Language, the most common language utilized for creating Web pages).

Training is the key to establishing faculty confidence with the Web and its role in the classroom. Initially, this training at SIM occurred as faculty skilled in "surfing the net" taught small groups of other faculty members on an ad hoc basis. Knowledge of how to navigate among URLs is essential for faculty intending to integrate outside online databases and other sources of information into a class. I believe that having a few key knowledgeable faculty champions of the Web as a teaching tool is necessary for the ultimate integration and use by all faculty members. Informal, ad hoc training creates interest and allows eventual formal training to be more productive.

SIM faculty are currently slated for formal training in large groups at times when most or all members will be present (before scheduled full departmental meetings). The home page creation process is a vital element of this process which must be emphasized for ultimate integration into all courses. NJIT currently allows faculty members to create home pages for courses on its UNIX system entitled Hertz. Faculty members must be taught rudimentary UNIX commands and be given Hertz accounts in order to create pages. NJIT also provides training in both the classroom environment and via videotape on the Web page creation process.

Requiring faculty members to learn HTML is not a good policy; and institutions should provide tools for converting word processed documents into Web pages. A critical success factor for the integration of teaching and the Web is the ease with which faculty members can convert existing teaching material into online documents. Even the most enthusiastic proponent of Web-based teaching information will not spend hours retyping material that can photocopied and handed out during a class. Proper utilization of online documents has the potential to save SIM resources associated with photocopying, but only time will tell if such side benefits will be fully realized. Assuming faculty are properly trained and that they begin to substitute Web pages in teaching for in-class materials, the goal of full integration will still not be realized if students do not have the requisite knowledge and training as well.


Student training
Training for students is becoming less of a problem due to the proliferation of home computers connected in one way or another to the Internet. Most SIM undergraduate students have some experience with Web browsers gained from the use of other computing facilities across campus or at home. Due to the previously mentioned fact that most NJIT students do not live on campus, a great majority of them have Internet connectivity from their homes. This may not be the case for many institutions where a high percentage of students reside on campus, but Internet connectivity in dormitories and other such housing is becoming more the rule than the exception.

NJIT does offer students training on the Internet, and many SIM faculty members who teach introductory Management Information Systems courses have made some form of this training a part of their course material. Faculty in other areas such as Finance and Economics are being encouraged to introduce online materials as well. Students should be exposed to the use of online material, especially outside online reference sources, as soon as possible in their academic careers. This knowledge will soon become a prerequisite for taking most SIM courses. Encouragement through specific online research assignments and similar requirements will build student confidence in using the Internet. It will also allow faculty in subsequent higher level courses to concentrate on course theory as opposed to computer training.

A fact of life in higher education is that the number of periodicals and reference materials available in tangible form in libraries is dwindling due to resource constraints. Students who are taught to access online reference sources, of which the Web provides countless sites, are not limited by library availability. I have personally encouraged both undergraduate and graduate students to utilize online reference sources, and have been pleasantly surprised with the vast amount of material some students were able to find and use. Students gave positive feedback on the opportunity to conduct research from their home personal computers rather than making the obligatory trip to the university library.

In summary, the School of Industrial Management at NJIT has made the utilization of technology-based education a primary objective. The integration of World Wide Web pages, both as an alternative or complement to traditional class materials and classroom instruction and as a valuable source for reference material, is the goal. Training for both faculty and students is a key requirement for the ultimate achievement of this objective. Although integration into computer-related MIS courses has already been undertaken, the use of Web pages in other areas such as economics and human resource management is an ongoing activity for which much work remains to be done.


Reference
1. B. Ives and S.L. Jarvenpaa, "Will the Internet Revolutionize Business Education and Research," Sloan Management Review, Spring 1996.

Michael Bartolacci is an assistant professor of management information systems in the School of Industrial Management at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, N.J. He was instrumental is setting up the school's computer laboratory which is the key for Web use in teaching. He teaches a course in management information systems that focuses on systems.

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