Web-Enabled Databases to Support Teaching
At the 1999 inception of course management at MU, a mere spreadsheet was adequate
to keep track of the few dozen instructors who were early adopters of WebCT. As
the popularity and sophistication of CMS usage increased and as Blackboard was
added to the mix, the campus needed an adaptable system to (1) streamline the
process for faculty signing-up to use BlackBoard or WebCT, (2) keep track of which
faculty members were teaching which courses in the two systems, (3) manage courses
over time so that an accurate historical record could be kept, and (4) facilitate
the course creation, backup and copying processes from semester to semester. Although
both BlackBoard and WebCT have a variety of internal tools designed to aid teaching
and learning in online environments, neither system has what MU's ET@MO staff
needed to manage and integrate the information that the two course management
systems contained separately. As the number of support staff grew and the computing
environment became more heterogeneous, an easy-to-use, cross-platform solution
was needed so that multiple staff members could access and compare information.
Using FileMaker Pro, ET@MO staff created online course site request Web forms
that feed directly into a database that contains information about the WebCT
and BlackBoard courses offered in the current semester. Staff verify the information
that faculty provide, making corrections as needed. Staff also import data from
the university's distance learning administrative unit thereby eliminating the
need for those faculty members to request a course site. Once data are verified,
the five-member course management team can access the data simultaneously and
"divide up" the creation of new courses based on platform, originating
department, and several other criteria. This shared process helps balance the
workload among staff at crunch times, especially at the beginning of the semester.
To ensure that there is a historical record containing both faculty- and course-specific
information, staff members use embedded macros to "push" final data
from the short-term database to a permanent database. Having accurate historical
records has enabled better planning for course management system growth, and
also has helped various departments, schools, and colleges identify new possible
degree programs from coherent groups of courses already using online technologies
in significant ways. In Fall 2004, more than 60,000 students enrolled in approximately
1,200 WebCT and BlackBoard courses across the entire university curriculum--including
face-to-face courses as well as courses offered completely online.
Facilitating Mid-Semester Course Evaluations
The University of Missouri has offered pencil-and-paper mid-semester evaluations
for many years, but it has been a time-intensive task. First, faculty members
needed to carve out at least 15 minutes of class time to conduct the evaluation.
Next, university staff had to collect, tabulate, summarize (often re-typing
hand-written comments to protect student anonymity), and then return paper summaries
to faculty members. This process could literally take weeks, wasting valuable
time when teaching improvements could have been implemented. Further, students
felt that their comments were too late to bring about beneficial changes while
they were taking the class.
To address the challenge of providing timely feedback, ET@MO collaborated with
MU's Program for Excellence in Teaching (PET) to create an online "Early
Feedback" teaching evaluation system. First, staff from these two units
adapted the paper-and-pencil course assessment to an online format for faculty
members who voluntarily requested the service. Next, Filemaker Pro automatically
sends students in each course an e-mail message linking to the online course
evaluation form which, when submitted, feeds into a database. With FileMaker
Pro driving the system, staff are able to quickly generate feedback reports
for each faculty member's course, save these summaries in PDF format, and e-mail
them to faculty as soon as their students are done providing feedback. This
tabulation process--which literally takes only a few seconds of staff time per
course--gives faculty members access to timely information with which to improve
teaching before the semester is finished. The time savings also frees staff
for increased consultation with faculty who want to discuss new teaching strategies.
In the past two years, this service has grown tremendously, and is now used
by more than 500 courses each semester.On Likert scale questions, results from
the 33 percent online response rate were found to be statistically similar to
the 81 percent paper-and-pencil response rate. On open-ended questions, students
were found to comment on twice as many different components of the course, and
to provide twice as much description about each component when compared to the
face-to-face version. Because of FileMaker Pro's easy-to-use interface and cross-platform
compatibility, office staff and graduate student assistants from both support
units can easily serve faculty from any FileMaker-equipped computer on the Internet.
Version 2 of this system, which will allow faculty to use default questions
or create their own, is under development and will be deployed in Spring 2005.
Like many other universities, the University of Missouri-Columbia has experienced
rapid growth in the number of information technologies and systems serving its
educational mission. FileMaker Pro has been an indispensable tool for allowing
the staff that serves the campus to coordinate and innovate their services in
this complex learning environment.
