A Comparative Evaluation of World Wide Web‐Based and Classroom Teaching

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Abstract
This paper investigates the hypothesis that the World Wide Web (WWW) presents a new opportunity to interactively present and disseminate curricula. The WWW appears to have the flexibility needed to let students order the material and choose the presentation format that best suit their preference. The objective of this paper is twofold: to develop a general web‐lecture structure that provides such flexibility, and to compare its efficacy with a classroom style lecture. The average grade performance of the students receiving web instruction was higher than for those receiving traditional classroom instruction. An achieved significance level of 0.063 provides reasonably strong evidence to reject the hypothesis that the two groups performed equally. Analysis of web‐lecture use patterns revealed that the web‐group students spent roughly the same amount of time on‐line as the classroom group spent in lecture.However, the web group typically covered the materials in three short 30 minute sessions as opposed to one 90 minute lecture. Different students in the web group showed different preferences for either video or text‐with‐image presentation of materials. In a focus group, web students indicated that they valued the ability to pace their learning and review materials as needed. The positive results of this preliminary study raise the question of how teaching could change to exploit information technology and provide more effective and economical engineering education. Primary learning might take place individually through a medium such as the WWW, thus liberating classroom time for experiential activities.

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