Web Forms and Teaching
(Tech Fair 2004)
I use web pages to motivate my students to read and think about course material before lecture and to give me feedback on lectures afterward. Some call this a Just In Time Teaching method. For me, it just makes good sense. The web assignments I give are short, and they don't ask the students to do much more than what good students should be doing anyway. What's more, students seem to enjoy them!
On this page, I have some links to web forms that will operate in much the way a web assignment would in one of my classes. Feel free to pilfer my code!
- Basic Reading Assignment
- When assigning a reading for the next class, I will ask students to fill out a web form much like this one. I would make the web form due by 6am of the day of the next class. This would give me ample time to read and think about their reponses to the questions. It also forces them to do the work before the last minute!
- Co-curricular activity
- Sometimes there is a co-curricular activity that I think will have value to the students. Sometimes the activity might realte to the course material, the major, or sometimes it might be a high quality "liberal arts" experiences. Attendance usually results in an award of extra credit for the course.
- Activity Feedback
- I am involved in several programs for students, and I use these web forms to gather feedback on the programs that my colleagues and I develop and run.
- Assessment
- Web forms are a great way to conduct basic assessment activities, such as giving first day and midterm surveys oru course reviews.
Technical Aspects
If you want to adopt this approach, there are some technical things to overcome, but Truman has the resources in place to get you going with this quickly. Technicall issues (and their solutions) include the task of creating and editing these web forms (you can use FrontPage or Dreamweaver), hosting these web pages on a web server that supports the PHP programming language (ITS's web server, Argon, allows this), and the optional setting up of your email client to filter email sent to you by these web pages (Eudora and OS X's Mail can do this, easily).
Talk to your friendly, divisional, TLTC representative or Tech Champ to get your hands on these resources and somebody who can tutor you in their use.
I learned how to do this by reading an article "Using PHP for Interactive Web Pages" by Andrew G. Bennett (Kansas State University).