Abstract

Since 3 years the Web is intensively used for a course on Numerical Methods in Physics. All materials are available to students in advance and no paper is delivered. We report our experience, which is not as successful as it could be expected. Moving from old to new technologies does not seem so appealing to students and the transition may take some time.

The context in French universities

The use of Web technology in teaching is advocated everywhere and a number of people have already expressed their view [1]. Use of Information Technology and Communication (ITC) for teaching has been thought as the solution to different problems:

• presence of students in the theaters: more and more students work, at least part time, and cannot attend all the classes
• Active participation of students who, quite often, passively listen to the teacher. Since the notes are available in advance they may arrive, having read the course and asking more questions.
• Need to follow the real life where computers are used everywhere. Young people will have to use the Web and related technologies all along their life and should be accustomed to them very early.
• With the rapid increase in the number of students ITC may solve the permanent problem of the lack of teachers in front of students.

An additional reason is linked to the French Higher Education System. Fees are very low in France and the teaching services do not have the credit to print all papers for the students. By law we are not authorized to sell documents to the students: when they are considered as mandatory they must be delivered for free, otherwise we are not allowed to sell them. Thus each professor is limited in the number of pages, he/she may deliver to the students. Presenting documents on the Web for free is a good means to go around this limitation.

I may also add a more personal note: writing a book is a wonderful means to disseminate a course but the author looses his freedom as soon as the drafts are delivered to the editor. Publishing them on the Web allows to permanently update the contents and the visibility may be better than a specialized book which will never be sold to a large audience, especially when not written in English!

The course

The course is made of:

• General lectures that the students may attend in a theater. The presence is not mandatory. The professor speaks from the bottom of the theater and the interaction is very weak. The course presents mainly the theoretical side of the teaching without computer.
• Applied lectures for small groups of 25 students about, where they must be more active. They must solve a problem to be later written as Fortran program. The class may be very interactive depending upon the audience and the ability of the teacher. The rooms are not equipped with computers, not only because their access is limited due to the large number of students in the university, but also because we do not want them to start the programming. They must work primarily on the theoretical and algorithmic aspects.
• Practical classes where each student seats alone in front of an X-Window terminal. He/she writes his/her code and solves the problem, which has been studied in the applied lecture. The attendance is never larger than 10 students, so that the teacher interacts very closely with the student, following the writing of the code and answering personally to each question.

The use of Web [2] documents has been introduced in 1996. Since 1997 no paper is delivered. The students find the full course, the text of the problems for the small and practical classes as well as a number of other documents, practical information and links to other servers of interest. They decide by themselves when and how to use the documents. We ask them to print the text of the exercises and to prepare them in advance. It means they must establish a strategy in learning.

The content of the course is a classical one. The presentation has been thought for the Web. It means that the document has been divided in numerous pages, each of them presenting a topic and short enough to be loaded in a reasonable time. Frames allow to rapidly move among the chapters and hyperlinks are used to navigate in the course. Very few parts may be used interactively. This is a choice since we wanted to use the course also as a reference document. Our experience of interactive course [3] is that they are very useful for self-teaching but do not replace a reference book. It is also very difficult to integrate them in the classical organization of teaching: main courses and application classes with a limited number of controls.

An interactive course also means that the students have a free access to the terminals. Although true in theory, this is not the case in our university where the ratio of students per computer is still very high. This will change in the near future since we are installing a new computer room for the physicists only. The ratio will be 10 students per computer, which is much better than in many others fields. It must be remembered that Higher Education fees are very low in France (of the order of 200 Euros) and entrance into university granted to any student who has successfully achieved High School. Thus the money is scarce. Although growing rapidly, very few students have an access to Internet from home (10% only the past year, 20% in 1999, 30% expected next year). The price of computers decreases dramatically but access to the Internet is still considered as too expensive. It is a cultural problem: remote services using a Minitel exist since a long time and people do not yet understand the advantage to pay more for services which already exist and they do not yet realize what are the new ones.

Each year, the students are asked to fill a questionnaire. Filling the questionnaire is not mandatory, however the return level is of the order of 60%.

Practical experience

Most students (95%) are very happy to be taught about the use of the Internet and the Web. However when asked about its use for others courses, a minority only (15%) has been using the Web. In most cases the Web has been used for fun and looking for information not related to their study. They seldom use documents not written in French; it must be emphasized that the language is a strong barrier to access foreign documents.

E-mail is seldom used to exchange with the teachers (5%). They use it among them, mostly for fun and very few have correspondents outside the campus. It seems that the interest is growing rapidly the following year when they are starting to look for a position in a laboratory for practical experience.

The criticism about the use of ITC for education is more severe and clearly shows the limitation in their use nowadays.

It must be remembered that the grant per student is rather small, compared to the number of students, and the ownership of a microcomputer cannot be made mandatory. The students complain about the difficulty to access a terminal or a PC on the campus and about the limitation for printing. However this is often more a pretext than a real reason: during the practical courses where they sit alone in front of a terminal they very seldom start a browser to find an explanation in the course on line. This explains why complementary documents are seldom opened: they are thought to be read mostly when programming and students seldom open a browser at that time.

All students have read and printed the texts of the problems because they must have them at hand for practical classes. But 60% only have looked at all the chapters of the course! Many other are often ignored: most students never look at the texts of the examinations from the preceding years or additional information such as time schedule, history of computing...

The students primarily want to print all the information and do not yet have the habit to browse from a screen and to select the most useful documents. They are still paper addicts. When asked, at the beginning of the present year what would be their choice, 80% answered that they prefer a course delivered on paper. This figure does not change significantly at the end of the year.

Near future

Our primary idea was to develop a series of control exercises and to give access to a chapter of the course only if the understanding of a preceding one had been tested successfully. A number of packages, such as Lotus notes, allow to include such a control and to dynamically follow the progress of a student.

Although the number of terminals available next year would be sufficient to allow such a strategy we will not start this move. A new technology does not mean that the students are ready to change the way they learn. They are accustomed, in the French education system, to listen to teachers, from time to time to solve exercises when requested and to read back their notes rapidly at home, going into details often only a few week before the examination. Using the Web means to be more reactive, to lurk into the course each time a question is not answered.

For the teacher, the Web would be a real support if the students read the contents of the lecture in advance, so that he/she only has to comment the topics of the day and to answer to questions. It means a complete change in the way young people are taught and this is clearly another challenge!

Conclusion

Our conclusion is not pessimistic. The revolution in the use of new technologies is not only the problem of access: it is more a cultural problem moving from a client attitude where the student receives the information to an active one where the student is really engaged in his/her study. In a few years the majority of students will have access to the web from home. However this will not make them enthusiastic supporters of ITC. They will continue to favor the classical approach as long as the methods of teaching remain the same.

The future is more in permanent education. Professionals seek desperately all kind of information, which may be of help at any time anywhere. We have received a number of messages from people inside or outside the University, already engaged in their professional life, who use this course in other contexts. For people who cannot attend a course there is a great future in these new methods. It is believed [4] that as soon as 2002, more than 60% of students in American Universities will belong to this category. We should keep in mind, that, for many years, the main use of ITC would be for permanent education, at least in countries with classical education, such as France.

Using ITC is more a long-term investment preparing new methods of teaching for tomorrow than a method to solve rapidly today problems.

Bibliography

[1] For instance the papers presented at EUNIS 97: http://www.eunis.org/congres.html

[2] See URL: http://www.lmcp.jussieu.fr/enseignement/ye/licence/

[3] See for instance the interactive course on "Symmetry in Crystallography" URL: http://www.lmcp.jussieu.fr/enseignement/ye/cristallographie/cristal.html

[4] J. Bielec, Drexel University, USA, conference at the General Assembly of Universities Presidents in France, Paris, February 1999

 
Address

LMCP, case 115, 75252 Paris Cedex 05, France, e-mail: Yves.Epelboin@lmcp.jussieu.fr