PSYCHOLOGY FOR ENGINEERS TAUGHT ONLINE:
COURSE DEVELOPMENT WITHIN A CHANGING PARADIGM
[also available at: www.science.wayne.edu/~wpoff/icee97wp.html]

ABSTRACT

Course development, if the materials are online, provides a substantial challenge to the author. Psychology taught to engineers is not very different from psychology taught to non-engineers, but to teach it on line is quite new. The "new paradigm" of the Greenfield coalition is described together with its impact on the course development process. Management issues are briefly discussed. The course structure and the course users are described. Hardware and software issues are described and recommendations are given. Human factors issues for both the user and the author are explained and some recommendations based on authoring experience are offered.

INTRODUCTION

The Setting

The Greenfield Coalition for New Manufacturing Education (CNME) is in the process of implementing engineering education for employed manufacturing workers and delivering the programs at the workplace. Courses delivered are not the lecture-/-simulation-/-labs-by- graduate-assistant type found in many engineering programs. Rather, manufacturing experiences from the students' daily work are integrated into the academic program. At least, this is the plan.

An apocryphal story within the Coalition concerns a candidate (student) explaining to an instructor who did not yet grasp the "new paradigm" why the assigned measurement lab assignment was not completed on time. "I didn't have time for the measurement assignment because I was too busy calibrating my machine." In the new paradigm this should not happen. The instructor should have incorporated the work activity of machine calibration into the course assignments, knowing that the actual work would be a far better learning experience than any simulation in a measurement lab.

The reality of implementation is that rethinking how and what to teach is very difficult. The Coalition took the name "Greenfield" in its engineering sense. It was a new operation and a fresh start. Innovation would not be hampered by prior practice. A wonderful mission, a marvelous dream, a great hope, and one achieved to a remarkable degree. But, the Coalition is composed of traditional institutions operated by human beings. Much "baggage" was brought to the implementation effort. Successful approximation to the new paradigm involves balancing quality, innovation, retaining useful traditions, eliminating the obsolete, tolerance for ambiguity, commitment to the mission, and mutual trust among the participants. The Coalition was fortunate to eventually evolve a management style that fostered these elements despite their sometimes contradictory and conflicting aspects.

Instructions to course developers consisted of broadly stated design specifications for the work to be performed. The included computer based instruction (CBI), use of actual work and life experiences in preference to simulated experience, a delivery system allowing both distance learning and asynchronous communication among the students and instructors, and the use of the most current and innovative learning design and technologies. Some lobbying for accelerated learning to be incorporated also has occurred but this aspect is still under discussion. Overall, what was desired from course developers was fairly clear but not clear enough for any developer to be confident they were producing appropriate course structure or content.

The Consumers

The candidates work a full eight-hour day at their manufacturing jobs. Academic content is delivered or individual study occurs for approximately three hours daily. As a consequence candidates are often fatigued but performance seems not to suffer and complaints are few. In addition, during what would be a layoff during changeover in normal manufacturing, full time study becomes the main activity of the candidate.

Are the candidates sufficiently prepared for collegiate studies? Would they have gained admission to a traditional institution of higher education? Was their skill level sufficient for the studies upon which they embarked, or, did they require remediation? The Focus:HOPE education department has consistently refused to perform testing that might answer these questions. This was probably a wise decision since most instructors agree the candidates compare favorably with students they have previously taught at other institutions. Performance, not prediction, is the goal of the program.

DESIGN OF THE COURSE

Is an Internet Course Possible?

For ten months in 1995 the developers refined the materials, discussed the potential of new methods, presented the course, and evaluated the outcome. The use of web browsers like Netscape was quite new. For practical purposes, the internet had not existed for more than two years. Yes, we knew about ARPNET, but only since 1993 or 1994 would a reference to the web elicit any recognition from a classroom of students. It was necessary that widely available software be in place before an internet course would be possible as we envisioned it. Much credit for sustaining our hopes for this format must be given to Richard C. Smith, who, we discovered, had been teaching an internet based course since at least 1985. Consult the Smith and Taylor article in the American Journal of Physics, Vol. 63, December 1995, Pp. 1090-1096, for a report on this effort. As one might suspect, a version of this paper is available on the internet at www.montana.edu/wwwxs/netscape/edwin.html although the printed version is a later version. Yes, an internet course is possible, even for complicated subjects. Smith currently teaches Special Relativity and two other physics courses using this format.

General Description

The course was developed as a beginning course in psychology with the addition of an introduction to sociology. It was written by two psychologists and a sociologist. One psychologist was a Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology with an external minor in Sociology, a background in both experimental and social psychology. The other psychologist was a Ph.D. in Social Psychology with a strong background in psychological testing, personality, and developmental psychology. The sociologist was a Ph.D. in Sociology with a strong background in political sociology and the empowerment of groups.

Eight separate but interlinked "modules" were generated. These were encoded in hypertext markup language (HTML) and were made available on an internet server. These materials constituted the major "text" for the course. In addition, a printed "normal" textbook, a coursepack of handouts, and a computer simulation of a psychology laboratory were used. Students used the hypertext materials and the coursepack. They reported the other two sources were not helpful. Student feedback throughout the first presentation of the course was incorporated into the hypertext materials, a process requiring only a few minutes. Rapid revisions in response to student requests is a formidable advantage of using the online courseware format.

The course consisted of weekly seminar meetings (about three hours in duration) and assigned readings as well as projects. Each of the eight "modules" had its own project suggested, but students were encouraged to propose projects of their own devising. Some did so and some did not. Single word tags were created for each module, so some clarification will help explain the content. The eight modules were:

• "basics" was used instead of "scientific method, experimental method, research methods, and the interpretation of data"
• "bodies" was used instead of "The physiological bases of behavior including neurology, the peripheral and central nervous systems, the endocrine system, and genetics."
• "senses" was used instead of "The anatomy of sensory receptors and their response characteristics, senses and their stimuli, "reitz limen", hearing instead of auditory, taste rather than gustation, smell rather than olfaction, etc."
• "memory" was used rather than "human learning and memory with emphasis on classical condition, instrumental training and the principles of cognitive learning"
• "growth" was used instead of "human growth and development at the prenatal, child, adolescent, adult, and elderly stages, with definition or normal and abnormal development"
• "people" was a simple term for "the psychodynamic (Freudian), trait, learning, humanistic, and transactional approaches to both theory and therapy, tests of personality, IQ, and occupational testing"
• "groups" was used instead of "social psychology and the formation of attitudes, impressions, attraction; influence and group dynamics, formal organizations, and community action"
• "social" was short for "sociology and a bit of social psychology, the study of people interacting in their social context, social structure and dynamics at the level of the society and its institutions and organizations"

Those remembering their undergraduate experience with psychology will recognize much of the above as corresponding to a standard beginning course, or maybe two beginning courses. However, the many external links found on the pages provided a far richer set of alternatives, and, potentially, a deeper understanding of the concepts presented. In a normal text the author(s) might augment the coverage of basic genetics with color plates and diagrams. The hypertext materials allowed several levels of further information seeking including the Human Genome Project pages at Columbia.

Hardware / Software Issues

Platform independence in the context of this course development means that materials may be viewed on PC, Mac, or UNIX system on monitors from 640 by 480 to higher resolutions. It is impossible to cover all display possibilities, so a "minimum configuration" was specified as 256 color VGA which is fairly standard for our student population. Microsoft Windows does a few strange things with colors, so graphic design had to be restricted to a color set handled properly, the so called "non-dithering" set.

Frequent revisions became necessary to take advantage of changes in software capabilities. The HTML coding conventions changed from version 2.0 to 3.2 during the development. Transparent graphics and animated graphics became possible. The Netscape browser improved its capabilities and the Internet Explorer became more frequently used. Capability differences between browsers restrict design to the use of elements which major browsers have in common. A major consideration in design must be the speed with which information can be transferred from the server to the client. Very large graphics, the use of many graphics on a page, and use of very long pages all increase the time needed to load a given page. Bandwidth, the capacity of the communication link used, must currently be assumed to be low compared to what we might hope for. Therefore care must be exercised in design to minimize load times (see the Human Factors section below).

The most serious problem with both hardware and software occurs with atypical configurations, unhappily at academic sites, due to poorly implemented networks and "external firewall" software. A single example will suffice. While attempting to test a music selection attached to a revised web page an unfamiliar machine was used. Nothing worked. The browser was available only over the local network and the network was unstable. When software problems were overcome no sound emerged from the external speakers. The operating system had been configured for the internal speaker. This solved problems persisted. Finally, when the AC power converter was found unplugged, the system tested properly.

It is clearly necessary to have a "minimum configuration" machine available for testing. This computer should copy or emulate the conditions under which student users will be operating. In the academic setting this is frequently a local computer laboratory.

Human Factors Issues

Bandwidth and the size of the files requested from the server machine interact with the attention span of the user. As a guideline, we will redesign or split into more pages any page taking in excess of four seconds to load at times of average internet traffic using 14.4 modem on a 486 machine running at 50 MHz.

It is important, in any large set of interlinked pages, for the visual design to be standardized, and for the on-screen navigation aids to be placed for ease and accuracy of use. Once the user becomes accustomed to the function and placement of controls they should remain constant for the entire site. Standardized "bars" of controls of similar function should appear at both the top and bottom of all pages, and in the middle if a long page cannot be avoided. The bottom of each page should have two standard controls, one to return to the top, and another to return to the previous page.

Sounds, animated graphics, and other visually "busy" aspects of page design should be minimized. Just because it is possible to implement a new feature on a page does not mean it should be done. Such features should be used only when they have an actual pedagogical purpose. In all cases, it should be possible for the user to turn off an animation, turn down the volume of a sound or stop it at will. Features that show one's colleagues mastery of web page design may only prove to be annoyances to the end user.

Human Factors for the Author

Any experienced programmer will admit that revision of code can be far more tedious than the initial coding. Any time an author generates more than a few pages at a site it becomes necessary to have a tight and easily accessed structure for the entire collection of pages. Comment lines will be very helpful and should not be omitted. Since the comments must be transmitted to the client (even though the browser does not display them) they should not be lengthy. Simple carriage returns and spaces can serve as good dividers for sections of code since they consume little transmission time.

All materials should bear a revision date, and it should be a part of the displayed page. The page should also have a unique name. This allows visual inspection by either the author or the user. We have found that requesting the user to notify the author of errors, omissions, and other concerns is a very wise strategy. We normally include a "mailto" control on each page to facilitate this process.

The author would be well advised to design pages that make maintenance and revisions as easy as possible.

SUMMARY

Initial presentation of the materials revealed a preferences (by self report of students) for the HTML materials and a rejection of the traditional textbook and the CBI "Psych Lab" simulation. Students found the handouts helpful. Student performance was evaluated using written and oral presentations. The three project co-authors agreed the performance level generally was equivalent to junior-senior level performance at other institutions. Many times difficulties arose getting all participants together at the same time. Students are also production workers and have emergency demands in addition to those of normal students. Asynchronous communication among the students and the instructor is being explored through the private news group facility of Netscape, the browser used to access the HTML materials. Since e-mail is also a function the same software fills several functions.

Design issues in this type of implementation are unique. Platform independence means design must be for multiple screen resolutions and multiple color depths on multiple computer platforms. Currently slow internet connections require restraint in size of graphics and of pages with download time as brief as possible being the major criterion.

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