Go back to Case Studies menuFrank Klucken, Landmark College
Frank Klucken faces more teaching challenges than most college educators. He teaches mathematics at Landmark College, a two-year college in Putney, Vermont, for students with learning disabilities. "They are at Landmark because they are not typical learners. Landmark students might have auditory problems, so they could miss concepts and ideas if you're only lecturing. Or, if dyslexic, students could interpret visual cues differently from the way you and I might see them. Or they have an attention disorder that doesn't keep them in the room, even though they're there physically." Frank found in teaching his freshman-level elementary statistics course that he needed a way to reach the students in his class that he wasn't reaching through other means. He wanted to find a way to "get the content of statistics across to students who weren't getting it through classroom discussion."
The opportunity came when, as a student in Teaching Using Internet Technologies at the Graduate Center of Vermont's Marlboro College, he was assigned the project of identifying and addressing a need using the Web. "I immediately thought of statistics." In working on this project, Frank created his course Web site, the Virtual Statistics Teacher, a carefully crafted integration of Web-based resources and online communication and collaboration.
Frank began by searching the Web for resources he could use in his teaching. "Initially I thought, this will be great! I've got some visual learners here. Or students that just aren't getting it because of the way I'm saying it or the way the textbook is, so they can go look at another textbook, or they can go see it online." Frank found an abundance of materials, including sources for visual explanations and simulations, online textbooks, and data sources and online data manipulation tools. On his course Web site, he tied these resources into his syllabus and course topics, guiding his students' use of the Web by giving them direct access to resources that he has reviewed and integrated into his syllabus.
The Virtual Statistics Teacher also has a WebBoard: an online discussion area where students can post questions or discuss class topics. When teaching the course, Frank set the WebBoard as the home page in his Web browser, and he began and ended each day with a visit to the WebBoard to answer questions and sound out his students.
To create the site, Frank used a hodgepodge of tools - from visual Web authoring tools to conversion utilities to basic HTML coding using NotePad. But much of the work of creating the site was locating resources and linking his online syllabus to them. "The World Wide Web is a tremendous resource. There is no need to 'redo' because much of what you want to do in your teaching has already been done by others and is there to be used." Frank completed his program successfully and, in fact, now helps teach new students in the programs at the Graduate Center.
But back in the classroom at Landmark College, the Virtual Statistics Teacher had a limited impact. Frank presented the site to his students and assumed that they would use it without explicitly including use of the site in the course requirements. It turned out that his students needed an extra push to get online. "Why go online when assignments are due and Web site use is not required?" Frank faults his presentation, not the technology, for students' limited use of the site. "It was a very new thing having a Web site. I was one of two of a faculty of 130 that actually had a Web site for their class. Being new, it probably didn't reach as many students as it could have. And I couldn't take as much time out of class to really go over the features of the Web site and really bring them into it all of the time. So I didn't get the results that I wanted." He found that students' use of the site depended on their level of comfort with the Web and their willingness to spend additional time outside class.
For those students who did go online, some aspects of the site were particularly successful, especially online discussion. "Students who weren't active in the classroom because of their learning disability or shyness or whatever would log onto the discussion board and ask questions that they could not have asked in class." Frank thinks that students have preferences about how they want to ask questions, and under what conditions they will ask them. "There are some students - at Landmark particularly - that just have trouble speaking up in class. It's emotional, it's perhaps a speech impediment, or just the dominance of some other students in class, so they just sit there and you don't know if they're really there or not. Then they log onto the discussion board and ask a question, and you know where they are. I really like that."
The online simulations were also popular with the students. Frank explains that a common classroom exercise is to have students flip coins - heads, tails, heads, tails - as a demonstration of central tendencies. "Why flip coins in class, where you can do it only ten or twelve times, when you can do it online? Press a button and there it is, a hundred times. Press it again, and there it is another hundred times." Frank says that simulations do not replace having students do the calculations manually, but the use of visual explanations makes the concepts more accessible, particularly for his students. "For example, you can hold the attention of a student with attention deficit disorder if something dynamic is happening. It also gives them an opportunity to go back and work with the material when their focus is a little better."
The next time Frank teaches using the Virtual Statistics Teacher course site, he will do things differently from the start. "I will make sure there's time in the syllabus to demonstrate how to use the Web site. Maybe hold a class in the computer lab once every two weeks, so we can work with the site together." Frank feels that effective use of online simulations is something best done in a computer lab. "And I would also require the students to go there: for example, tell them to go post something this week. Make part of their grade depend on interacting with the Web site instead of just leaving it as a stand-alone resource that they can explore when they feel like it, because that doesn't really work."
Although his course site was not heavily used, Frank remains enthusiastic about the Web as a tool for teaching statistics. "It's everything that statistics needs to be: it's visual, it's interactive, and all the different explanations and approaches are available. The fact is, I probably cheated my students by not requiring them to use the site."
Page information
From Web Teaching Guide
Copyright 2000 Sarah Horton
The Virtual Statistics Teacher
Copyright 1998 Frank Klucken
www.techteach.org/classes/stats