DSI 2002 ANNUAL MEETING-San Diego, CA, USA1 Web-based seminar Pekka Makkonen University of Jyväskylä Information Systems Science Finland

DSI 2002 ANNUAL MEETING-San Diego, CA, USA2 Course A course for the first-year majors: Knowledge work and its tools Themes Productivity of knowledge work Analyzing individual knowledge work Analyzing collaboration and work management PC software as improvement of productivity Groupware as improvement of productivity

DSI 2002 ANNUAL MEETING-San Diego, CA, USA3 Why web-based seminar? increased the amount of information systems education at universities-> impossibility to organize conventional seminar Need for more flexibility because of heterogeneous of the students Adult education technical infrastructure has been improved (for example high-speed connections to the student village)

DSI 2002 ANNUAL MEETING-San Diego, CA, USA4 How? Web CT and its presentations feature Working in small groups (3 to 5 students) dealing with one typical knowledge work profession (lawyer, teacher, etc.) Presentations were put in each group’s separate workspace on the web Other groups commented on the outcomes Control groups to compare the value

DSI 2002 ANNUAL MEETING-San Diego, CA, USA5 Was web-based seminar successful? Evaluation The process of the coursework and seminar: we wanted to know 1) how the WWW-based coursework affected motivation to learn different themes of a knowledge work course, and 2) how the WWW-based coursework affected learning skills from the perspective of goals of the course.

DSI 2002 ANNUAL MEETING-San Diego, CA, USA6 What we got Both methods worked in the learning of the themes equally from the perspective of motivation Effect on the skills was not helpful Concerning software use skill and groupware use skill traditional arrangements were even better Learning knowledge work management skills were equal in both groups

DSI 2002 ANNUAL MEETING-San Diego, CA, USA7 Some technical points Personal thoughts Prefer HTML format Avoid use of subfolders Think about differences of browsers As a teacher do not use all the features of a learning environment: think about your pedagogical design first. For example, the Web CT includes a lot of features: only some of them may be suitable for one course. This means that as a teacher you should choose the features used from the perspective of your own pedagogical view.

DSI 2002 ANNUAL MEETING-San Diego, CA, USA8 Research continues We analyze the benefit of our WWW-based seminar based on the goals of the course comparing experimental group to control group In the course of the academic year we used SOLO taxonomy-based tests and measures to clarify the quality of learning Tests included pre- and post treatments. In each test respondents produced 15 definitions of randomly selected concepts comparing experimental group to control group These results will be published