Eric Johnson
Dakota State University, Madison, SD, USA

Abstract

As a professor who has taught courses via the Internet, I naturally prepare online materials for my on-campus classes. The last few semesters, I have extended the online aspect another step--I ask on-campus students to prepare their assignments online. Previously, I had required students in my literature classes to write term papers. I now ask them to create web pages. Some of my colleagues seem to think that students learn less in a course in which they "play around" making web pages, but I am convinced that just the opposite is true -- students learn more. There are a number of advantages to having students do online work. First, students clearly enjoy the web assignments far more than paper assignments. Second, probably because they are enjoying themselves, students go into more detail and spend more time on web projects than on standard written papers, and thus they learn more. Moreover, frankly, I enjoy viewing the web pages much more than reading term papers.

Background

Starting in 1990, I have taught online courses. I have published articles about my online teaching, and two of these articles are on the Web:

• "The World Wide Web, Computers, and Teaching Literature"
  http://www.unix.dsu.edu/~johnsone/webprof.html

• "Teaching on International Computer Networks"
  http://www.unix.dsu.edu/~johnsone/teaching.html

Recently, however, most of my teaching has been in a traditional classroom -- courses in British literature as well as text processing. Those who are interested in my research in text processing may want to read articles that I have published that are on the web:

• http://www.unix.dsu.edu/~johnsone/ericpubs.html

Student Web Pages

Probably because I enjoy making web pages, I got the idea that my students would prefer creating web pages rather than writing papers for a literature course. In some ways, the process of making a web page for a course is similar to writing a research paper -- in both cases research must be done, and the content (introduction, supporting examples, conclusion) must be organized and well written. They differ in that footnotes are usually replaced by links to websites, and a copy of a photo of, say, Robert Browning stapled to the end of a paper is replaced with a JPG file.

It is obvious that my students enjoy making web pages. They are eager to work on their pages, and they frequently want to show me half-finished pages -- students never want to show me half-finished research papers.

I can show students how to make a simple page in a single class period, and I have created directions explaining how to make a (simple) web page:

http://unix.dsu.edu/~johnsone/howto.html

However, students at my university usually know how to create a web page by the time they enroll in literature courses since web page creation is covered in Introduction to Computers. My students do not merely give me a disk with their completed web assignment; they present their web pages to all the students enrolled in the course.

After asking students to create web pages in my courses in British literature for three semesters, I have observed that they learn more (about literature) because they enjoy using web technology. Time and again, I could see that their interest increased in a particular poem or essay as they worked on their web assignment. They turned back to closely read the literary work and consider its meaning -- and that is exactly what a literature professor wants to see! For example, one of my students who had read Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" made a page as she thought the Duchess would have made it. She read and reread the poem to better understand the woman -- in order to make a page expressing the Duchess' character and interests. She put photos of a sunset, a bough of cherries, and a white mule on the page because those were things that the Duchess liked. It was a simple, unpretentious page because that was the kind of woman the Duchess was. Another student made a page for Browning's "Fra Lippo Lippi," and the student said that he studied the poem's sections dealing with the theory of art so that the web page could exhibit that theory. The page had realistic art. There were beautiful paintings of people -- nothing abstract such as an allegory of the soul. After all, as Fra Lippo said:

If you get simple beauty and naught else,
You get about the best thing God invents:
That's somewhat; and you'll find the soul you have missed.

As I saw my students spending more time on web pages than on a traditional term paper, I expected the content of the pages to show greater understanding of works of literature, and they did so. When the same students turned in traditional papers, they were not better than usual.

Problems

On the whole, my students did not have a lot of problems creating web pages. All of them had learned something about at least one web page generator (usually FrontPage) in Introduction to Computers. Some of them had completed a full course in web publishing. Those who attempted to code their pages in HTML could do more than those who used only FrontPage or another generator, but they sometimes could not figure out how to write the code for a particular effect.

Some of my students had some (usually minor) problems when they created a page on one type of computer system and later attempted to display it on another type. For example, pages made with Microsoft's FrontPage were best viewed with Microsoft's Internet Explorer. When Netscape was used, the pages were often quite different -- and sometimes the pages were impossible to read. Images created on a Macintosh were sometimes too dark when viewed on a PC.

The only major problem was that students lost files. I told them to make backup files. I told them that it would not be an adequate excuse to inform me that the dog ate their zip disk. Nevertheless, several students in every class could not give a demo of their pages because their files were mysteriously missing.

Conclusions

There is no doubt in my mind that students learn more in a course when they make a web page rather than write a traditional research paper because they enjoy making a web page. Thus students do more and learn more.

Another point should be considered. When students write a research paper, it is a rather artificial exercise -- they seem to be unclear about what is expected. They could model their paper after scholarly articles, but they rarely read such articles -- probably they do so only under compulsion. However, today's college students frequently surf the web. They have seen many, many models of web pages. Thus, they have ideas about creating web pages from the start.

In addition, it could be argued that the skills of making a web page are more valuable than the skills of writing a scholarly article. Only a handful of undergraduate students will ever attempt to publish a scholarly article, but many of them may want to make a web page — a personal page if not a site for a business.

Moreover, frankly, I enjoy viewing students' web pages much more than reading their term papers. They are more original, more interesting, and contain more significant information.

Examples of Student Web Pages

Following are URL's for several online sites created by students for my course in Victorian Literature. The students who created these pages have expressly given me their permission to list their pages in this paper. Although there might be shortcomings in the student pages, I am proud of the web work created by my students. For many of them, this was their first college-level literature course and the first web page that was not simply an exercise in Introduction to Computers.

http://www.students.dsu.edu/rosheimd/victsite.htm

http://www.students.dsu.edu/ringlinl/the%20dukes%20page.htm

http://www.students.dsu.edu/tompkint/victorian%20lit%20class/Victorian%20Poetry
%20Homepage.htm

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