Go back to Case Studies menuJim Davis, Harvard University
Being accessible is clearly central to the teaching philosophy of Harvard Senior Lecturer in chemistry and official Car Talk chemist Jim Davis. When I arrived for our interview, he was on the phone with a student, patiently explaining some interaction of molecules and atoms. Throughout the interview, he acknowledged passersby through a window that opens from his office onto the busy main corridor of the Science Center. So I was not in the least surprised to learn that his main use of his course Web site is to give his students even more access.
We talked mainly about Jim's use of the Web for his freshman chemistry course. This large class - with about 350 students and 20 teaching fellows - meets for lecture three times a week. One way that Jim increases his accessibility is by digitizing his lectures and making them available on his course Web site. "I guess I was the first person at Harvard to digitize lectures because I'm here in the Science Center, a few doors down from the Instructional Computing Group. They asked me if they could do some of my lectures for a trial run in summer school two or three years ago. We did that and it was no bother to me, and they seemed to learn quite a bit about what they needed to do. Then we did it for a whole course two years ago, and then they did it for another course in the spring. When the trial run concluded, the students were extremely unhappy that they no longer had access to the digitized lectures. So, that was an indication that they found the digitized lectures to be very useful. Now the digitization is a regular feature of the course."
Along with digitized lectures, Jim puts other course materials on the Web, such as problem sets and solutions and a link to an archive of old exams. Jim also provides a discussion forum for students to post questions for other students, teaching fellows, or Jim himself to answer: "I've encouraged students to use the Web site for questions instead of email, because chances are the other three hundred people might like to know the answer, too." In fact, when Jim receives an interesting question via email, he puts the question and its answer on the Web site, with the questioner's name deleted.
Jim also uses the Web to economize on lab time. Lab sessions typically begin with a "chalk talk" by a teaching fellow that provides an overview of the experiment. This approach has two disadvantages: first, it eats up valuable lab time, and second, some teaching fellows are more adept than others at giving these presentations. Working with Gregg Tucci, the assistant lab coordinator, Jim devised a better approach; they recorded Gregg giving the pre-lab talk and made a digitized version available on the course Web site. Now students watch the pre-lab lecture online, "and when they get in the lab, they hit the ground running."
The Chemistry 5 Web site was created using a courseware package created by Harvard's Instructional Computing Group. Jim has had little to do with the actual creation of the site. "I don't speak HTML," he says. The site is a collaborative effort between Jim and graduate students who not only understand the technology but, as Jim's teaching fellows, are intimately acquainted with his teaching approach. "I think there are relatively few faculty of middle age and beyond who make their own Web sites, but we all have students who can create them for us." Indeed, Jim claims that "part of the expectation of the job of being the head teaching fellow in a large course is that you will be the 'webmeister.'"
Jim is modest about his use of the Web. "I haven't done anything revolutionary with the Web. I've been teaching nearly forty years, and I've worked out things that work for me. I haven't tried to do anything very different with the Web. I've used the Web to help me do what I've always done more efficiently." Jim does, however, see ways that teaching with technology can improve on the traditional lecture format. "One of the curious things is that we don't know - at least, I don't know - how to determine whether people really do understand things in large classes. What we have is an article of faith that if they can work the problems, then we can assume that they understand what they're doing. However, educational research seems to have shown that often students can do the problem without the slightest idea of what they are doing." Jim plans to use more conceptual learning in his approach next year, more problem-solving strategies where students "try to figure out what is going to happen through a process of reasoning." One way to do this is on the Web by presenting "thought questions": questions that involve no calculation but require an understanding of the materials. (Eric Mazur of Harvard's physics department is an expert on this approach: for more information, visit mazur-www.harvard.edu.)
Jim also plans to incorporate computer-based simulations into his Web teaching, primarily to make up for limited resources. At Harvard, there is only enough lab space to offer labs for freshman chemistry every other week. Jim and Gregg Tucci are working on finding a way to handle this deficiency online. "Our idea, since we are not likely to be building any new freshman chem labs in the immediate future, is to set up a situation where it becomes routine that we do a 'wet' lab experiment one week and a computer-based 'dry' lab the next week." They will also be able to simulate experiments that are not feasible in standard lab facilities. "You can simulate experiments that are too complicated or dangerous to run in the lab. For example, synthesizing ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen is usually run at a couple of hundred atmospheres of pressure. You can't do that in a freshman chem lab. But you can simulate that experiment, and the reaction has all been digitized so that you run it under various conditions and a computer can tell you what your outcome is - what the yield is."
Before ending the interview, I couldn't help but ask the usual question about how putting lectures online affects attendance at the lectures. Jim patiently explained, "We don't get 100 percent attendance anyway, but I haven't noticed that it's any worse since we started digitizing than before. It does mean that students can re-watch the lectures if they weren't clear about something, or they can watch them for the first time if they slept through them, or...for whatever reason." Getting students into the lecture hall is not a priority for this educator. Giving them opportunities to learn is.
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From Web Teaching Guide
Copyright 2000 Sarah Horton
Chemistry 5: Introduction to Principles of Chemistry
Copyright 2000 President and Fellows of Harvard College
www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chem5