9/25/2002
Lehigh University has embarked on an exciting project to
provide pre-admitted freshmen the opportunity to take first year, introductory
web-based courses in the second half of their senior year of high school. This project, started three years ago with a
planning grant from the Mellon Foundation, investigates the feasibility of
enhancing the freshmen learning experience. The Clipper Project takes its name
from the inaugural address of Lehigh’s president:
Let’s suppose for a moment
that it’s the 1930’s. You’re the captain of the luxury liner, the Queen Mary,
steaming across the Atlantic to New York. Suddenly, you hear a low drone. You
look up and see a Pan Am Clipper, winging its way from London to New York.
Would you realize that the age of steamships is about to end? Would the
steamship company understand that its business actually is transportation, not
ships? Would the passengers guess that seats at the captain’s table, strolls on
the deck, steamship trunks, and days at sea are about to become a six
hour-flight in row 17 – a window or aisle please, but not the middle?
-- April 9, 1999, President
Gregory C. Farrington's inaugural address, Lehigh University
Farrington suggests that technology may be the catalyst for entirely new and better learning opportunities for students; and that educational institutions must realize that learning, not teaching, is the business of education. Will the transformation to these better learning opportunities be comfortable? Probably not, but education needs to examine the business at hand and develop mechanisms to enhance the learning process. The use of technology and web-based instruction may be introducing a new way of thinking about how we provide basic learning opportunities to students.
The Clipper Project’s goal is to enhance the collegiate experience of Lehigh freshmen by accelerating their entry into advanced studies and to research the overall development and delivery of these on-line courses. The project has developed web-based instruction for introductory-level courses taken by first-year students. The first two courses developed were Calculus I and Economics I, which went live in January 2001. Three other courses, English Composition, Chemistry I, and Engineering I, went live January 2002. The project has also developed a quasi-experimental research study utilizing both on and off-campus students with both qualitative and quantitative measures to determine the behaviors of students, the extent to which this instruction has prepared them for advanced instruction, the amount of time taken to produce the courses, and the effects of such a project on the faculty involved.
Faculty from the College of Education initiated the project, designing longitudinal research models and recruiting faculty from Lehigh’s four colleges to participate in the project. The enthusiasm of the recruited faculty members is one of the most important features of the project. The faculty members have been very receptive to modifying their teaching methods to utilize the best features of on-line learning. A year-long planning grant phase of the project explored the mechanisms for delivery the courses. The grant planning process also encompassed a survey of existing students to identify the types of courses they would have liked to take in the spring or summer of their senior year in high school. More than half of those surveyed indicated that they would have taken at least one web-based course during the first or second semester of their senior year. Early on, researchers also decided to partner with Lehigh’s Library and Technology Services (LTS) department to provide the necessary instructional design and infrastructure support for these courses. LTS at Lehigh is a merged computing and library organization, which uses a team-based approach for providing services and computing infrastructure to the campus. Other Lehigh staff that have been involved in the Clipper Project include the admissions and the registrar’s office.
Because Clipper courses are outside of the mold of everyday courses at the university, the university had to look at these courses in a different light from traditional courses that measure credit hours in seat time. In a totally on-line environment measures such as number of hours that a student is in class need to be replace with competency based objectives rather than the traditional hours per week in class. The Clipper courses were totally asynchronous, with no scheduled class times. There were scheduled office hours and real–time communication through text chats, but in general most of the communication came by way of content presentation either through streaming video or interactive simulations, and through assigned projects, email and threaded discussion groups. Tests and quizzes were done on-line; in some cases exams were proctored at local high schools. The three courses that went live in January 2002 followed this model but added more asynchronous tools to the mix; most notably the use of a program called Camtasia to record and produce streaming video lectures and the integration of a synchronous communications tool called HorizonLive for live voice over IP sessions which were also archived for later review.
The development and implementation of Clipper courses brought together faculty and LTS instructional technology consultants to explore the pedagogical issues relating to the delivery of web based course materials. Even though the faculty members involved in the Clipper courses were highly computer literate and very comfortable in a web-based learning environment, they worked closely with the instructional designers to create a course that was more than an on-line textbook or a series of PowerPoint presentations. The instructional technology consultants used the following eight learning principles to guide the redesign of these courses.
The first two courses, Calculus I and Economics I, went live in the spring of 2001. The Calculus course employed flash animations along with assigned readings and on-line exercises to deliver interactive content with some minimal streaming media. The Economics course utilized streaming media files that synchronized the faculty member’s voice with PowerPoint slides. This content can be controlled and reviewed by the students at their leisure within the time schedule constraints set by the professor. The Economics course also had assigned readings and on-line discussion and chat room activities. This course eventually moved to using the Camtasia software to allow applications to be synchronized with the instructors voice and streamed over the web. In the spring of 2002, the additional three courses (English I, Chemistry I, and Engineering I) were rolled out. The English course was the largest user of a variety of on-line synchronous communications tools; most notably NetMeeting and HorizonLive. Engineering I utilized many streaming videos to illustrate concepts that would have been typically been demonstrated during class and employed a variety of different instructors, Teaching Assistants, and experts to incorporate variety into the course. Chemistry I made heavy use of streaming video and also used Camtasia and to present chemistry concepts. Note that all courses used the Blackboard course management system as a framework for presenting their materials.
The Education faculty planned the research design, and is monitoring the progress of the entire project. A database is used to track the amount of time spent by each developer. A team approach for content development has been adopted for the courses. Each team consisted of and Instructional Technology Consultant and the faculty member involved. A web/graphics designer was also hired by the Clipper staff to add an additional support component and LTS also provide the needed infrastructure support for streaming and database servers.
As word of the Clipper Project spread, the big question on everyone’s mind was the number of students that would be potentially interested in taking these courses. Before students could be solicited, a number of issues associated with admitting “non-traditional” students to this program emerged. The Principal Investigators at the time (Steve Bronack and Jim DiPerna) worked with many different parts of the University before the invitation letters could be sent. They had to make sure that the Registrar could admit these students for credit and place them in our administrative software system. This system had just gone live with the motto of “plain vanilla” which basically meant few exceptions would be implemented in the standard software and this type of student had no category in our systems. The Admissions Office was concerned that the pre-admitted students have an equal chance at the limited number of available slots in the program. With these initial problems worked out the first mailing elicited a very positive response from Lehigh’s pre-admitted freshmen. Participants were chosen from a random drawing and other participants were placed on a waiting list. In the spring of 2002 when all five courses were made available for students to enroll in, Lehigh was able to accommodate all student requests and was able to augment some of the courses with traditional Lehigh students.
The experimental design to evaluate the Clipper project is focusing on finding answers to the following questions:
General Questions:
1. What are the implementation considerations (e.g., institutional, practical) when offering college courses to high school students via the Web?
2. How do faculty transform “traditional” on-campus introductory courses from a variety of disciplines to effective Web-based courses?
3. What are the costs (including time and financial resources) associated with developing and implementing a Web-based introductory course for high school students?
4. What are the short and long-term outcomes for students who participate in Web-based courses?
5. What are the short and long-term outcomes for faculty who develop and teach Web-based courses?
Institutional Throughput Questions:
1. To what extent do Clipper courses increase the number of students who ultimately complete their Lehigh University degree?
2. How might we further enhance interpersonal interactions among students and instructors in Clipper courses?
3. What effect might Clipper courses have on the rate of students’ progress through their academic programs? Can students who take Clipper courses finish their undergraduate education any sooner (and less expensively) than those who do not?
4. What
effect might Clipper courses have on the “density” of higher education? Could Clipper courses help alleviate the
intensity of the undergraduate experience among Lehigh University students by
reducing their course load?
Educational Quality Questions:
1. Are Clipper courses effective? Are all undergraduate courses equally suited to the Clipper model for online delivery? How do we evaluate “success” and compare Clipper courses to their more-traditional, face-to-face counterparts? What assessment methodologies are best suited to discovering these answers?
2. To what extent can Clipper courses change the “tradition of teaching” and impact the traditional roles of instructor and student? Are Clipper courses helping participants move away from teacher-centered instruction toward a student-centered model? Does this paradigm shift extend into other classes that Clipper faculty teach?
3. Are there educational quality gains in terms of faculty time and expended resources in subsequent offerings of online courses? With materials archived, is faculty time reduced to allow them to move away from the “content delivery” process and pursue ways to facilitate students’ acquisition of content more effectively?
4. Based on Clipper results, can we devise a more systematic procedure and set of guidelines for the development of online courses? While there is no “generic” formula for the design and development of online courses, has Clipper I revealed certain procedures and timelines that can be further developed into a systematic design model and used in other situations?
To answer these questions, the following research design is being implemented:
Clipper is designed to allow
within- and between-group comparisons across time. The project also uses replication
to test for cohort effects. Two instructional conditions are being implemented
within each of the five academic courses (English I, Calculus1, Engineering I,
Chemistry I, and Economics I). The
first instructional condition reflects a “traditional” model of instructional
delivery: on-campus, face-to-face instruction. The second instructional
condition is web-based instruction for a “class” comprised of roughly equal
numbers of high school seniors and first year students at Lehigh University. This
latter condition provides an opportunity to assess web-based instruction for
students on-campus, as well as to evaluate an instructional delivery model
likely to be implemented in practice.
This instructional condition also allows for the exploration of possible
academic and non-academic outcomes, such as adjustment to college, which may
result from high school seniors having the opportunity to interact with actual
college students.
The instructional conditions
provide for between-group comparisons of student achievement, satisfaction,
learning behavior, and long-term outcomes (such as course of study, cumulative
GPA, and retention). Also, the design
allows for the assessment of the impact of web-based course development as
compared to instruction provided via the “traditional” method of face-to-face
contact. Quantitative and qualitative methods will be used to analyze project
data. Quantitative analyses will include Multivariate Analysis of Variance with
repeated measures. Students’ grades,
questionnaire responses, learning behaviors, and course evaluations will be the
dependent variables.
Qualitative methods will be
used to analyze data collected via faculty and student journals, access logs
from the online environment, classroom observations, and transcripts from
meetings. Grounded theory will be used to identify themes from the data, to
produce rich descriptions, and to categorize concepts for theory that emerges
from the data. In addition, a case
study methodology will be used to explore emerging concepts and processes
relevant to the study, and to assess the overall costs and benefits of each
course individually and the Clipper Project as a whole.
Another unique evaluative component of the project is the call
for external review, once prior to launching the project and in the future by a
second external evaluator. For example,
a counterpart in Information Technology was brought in to review the current
status of the project and to make recommendation for improving the project
before it got off the ground. In the
second part of the project an external evaluator will examine the materials and prepare an evaluation plan to
assess what has been done throughout the project. This external evaluator will evaluate the data already collected
and determine if any additional instruments need to be designed or additional
data needs to be collected.
The last three
years of the Clipper Project have highlighted the following major issues that
need to be considered when undertaking this type of project.
Mary J. Bishop, Assistant Professor, College of Education, Clipper Co-Principal Investigator, mjba@lehigh.edu
Timothy Foley, Director of Client Computing and Library Services, tim.foley@lehigh.edu
Sally White, Dean of College of Education, Clipper Co-Principal Investigator, saw8@lehigh.edu
Sherri Yerk-Zwickl, Instructional Technology Consultant and Team Leader College of Business, shy2@lehigh.edu