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Epi Wit & Wisdom Resources
Teaching
Graduate Level Epidemiology on the Internet – Lessons Learned
The emergence of the Internet
represents “the death of distance.” That’s how one observer at SER
boldly described the significance of the Internet. This “death” is
likely to have far reaching consequences in business, education and
other fields.
Tom Songer,
University of Pittsburgh Assistant Professor of Epidemiology, predicts
there will be a strong emphasis on continuing education in the next
century with less emphasis on degree programs. And, continuing
education students are different from traditional students in wanting
to study in their own time, according to Songer. Consequently,
Internet-based training is preferable over other forms of distance
education formats. Songer believes epidemiologists located in academic
settings will likely be approached to teach their course(s) in a
distance education format in the near future—if they have not been
approached already.
Songer has something to offer
his colleagues since he has been teaching epidemiology on the Internet
for four years now, including courses on injury and chronic disease
epidemiology. Speaking at a special evening session on the Future of
the Internet at the recent SER meeting, Songer described what it is
like to teach on the Internet and shared some of the conclusions he
has reached. These have been summarized on his website at: http://www.pitt.edu/~tjs/teaching/internet/index.htm
How do you use the Internet for
teaching?
Songer finds four existing
models but adds that there is no best model and teachers can be
creative. The models are:
1) Courses given only through
the Internet, i.e. There is very little face-to-face contact between
the teacher and student. Some have little or no teacher contact with
the student while others have active teacher to student communication
via the net.
2) Courses heavily focused on
the Internet but including face-to-face contact between the teacher
and student in the classroom. This contact supplements the Internet
and is used to review key discussion items.
3) Courses that rely primarily
on the classroom but include the Internet to supplement the
instruction. This includes giving students web sites to visit and/or
providing the lecture materials on the Internet for later reference.
4) Courses that use the Internet
sparingly, i.e. putting the class syllabus online.
Assuming you choose a model
which is based mostly on the Internet, what kind of materials do you
need?
Songer advises creating lectures
using Microsoft Powerpoint which consist of a series of slides each
with an icon or graphical image and a short narrative which states the
key points to be made from that slide. Powerpoint has a feature which
can convert slides into a HTML presentation suitable for the web and
each slide constitutes a different HTML page on which students can
point and click. Alternatively, teachers can place all of their
lecture materials on one homepage. This makes the lecture easier to
print. Adding hypertext links in the narrative is also recommended as
is using other features of the Internet such as email, discussion
groups, listservs, and file transfer capabilities. For example, some
statistics courses use file transfer functions to obtain databases for
use in class.
Songer believes that teachers,
as in the regular classroom, must be equally if not more attentive to
whether or not the students are understanding the material being
presented. This cannot be known immediately as in a regular classroom,
but teachers need to build in some interaction to make this
assessment. To probe the students, Songer has used exercises at the
end of the lectures such as multiple choice or essay questions and
web-based assignments (his preference) which require a student to
obtain information from another site on the Internet and answer
questions on it in the context of the lecture. Interactive discussion
groups are another means of probing the students as are listservs
which allow all of the students to see and read the questions and
responses from faculty and students.
As in regular teaching, lectures
must be updated each year. On the Internet, this means checking that
any hypertext links used in the past are still active and that the
pages referred to are still suitable in scope and content. In fact,
information technology continues to change at a rapid pace and
teachers have to be alert to the possibility that what works today may
be outdated tomorrow because of new methods and capabilities being
introduced.
Overall, Songer seems upbeat
about teaching on the Internet and sees advantages in students being
able to learn from other students in far away places who do not always
do things the same way. Students grow and you see that, he says. On
the downside, face-to-face contact is lost in an all Internet course
and it is more difficult to determine if students are really
understanding the material, according to Songer. Also, there is not
the “high” from delivering a good lecture, and the investment of time
is different. You must invest more in preparation of the structure and
narrative for your slides than in a regular classroom situation.
“Having a helper would be very useful,” says Songer.
Other special problems which may
come up when teaching on the Internet have to do with procedures for
verifying that an assignment was submitted on time. Also, making sure
that student identities are not being faked may be important.
Published July 1998
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