Education Research Frontier June 2014, Volume 4, Issue 2, PP.30-34
Web-based Instruction for the Numerical Analysis Course Yu Bai #, Chongyu Lu, Shangwen Wu, Zhijie Xu School of Science, Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Beijing 100044, China #Email: buceaby@163.com
Abstract Web-based instruction is one of the main directions of teaching reform in current information society. According to the features of numerical analysis course for engineers and the characteristics of students in our university, we establish a course website, including the site functionality, site structure and page layout. This website has been applied to all aspects of web-based instruction process, such as courseware sharing, assignment correcting, and other daily Q/A. In practice, the course website plays an important role in the instructing process, which is helpful for the improvement of the education quality. Keywords: Numerical Analysis; Course Website; Web-Based Instruction
1 INTRODUCTION In the 21st century, web-based education comes across a dominant position for the development of educational information. How to adapt to the development of the Internet age, and reinforce the combination of the traditional teaching mode and online teaching standards, and how to take the advantages of modern educational technology to improve the traditional teaching methods, has become an important issue for education reform[1]. The course of numerical analysis (computational method) belongs to the intersection course in the fields of mathematics and computer science, which is also a very practical course closely contacted with the computer science. Currently in our university with two campuses far apart, this course has been instructed every year for the students from civil engineering, traffic engineering, geographic information systems, computer technology and other majors with about 300 students. The traditional teaching has encountered various kinds of problems, so the construction of the course website is an innovative experiment of teaching reform for applying the web-based instruction, which is not only adapted to the needs of the new situation and development, but also meets the needs of teachers and students in instruction process[2]. In this paper, the course website establishment of the numerical analysis is proposed at first, which includes the site functionality, site structure and page layout, and then the applications of the course website in various teaching mode are discussed, at last analysing the effect of the course website according to the final examination. The instruction practice proved that construction and application of the course website is of great significance for education reform.
2 COURSE WEBSITE CONSTRUCTION The website of numerical analysis course is constructed based on the curriculum centre of our university, which is established from the international open curriculum OCW, following the open, free, interactive, engaging spirit of the Internet based on Web 2.0[3,4]. This centre services as the core business of a large educational software system platform, combined with Chinese characteristics and educational practices. This platform makes the construction of the website easily to be operated.
2.1 Functionality From the user’s prospect, the user has been divided into three categories, which are teachers, students and other visitors, with different function according to their identification, as shown in Figure 1. First, the user's classification - 30 www.erfrontier.org
is determined by the teacher, which determines their access privileges in turn. Secondly, updating and maintaining the website contents are done by the teacher. Then, the interaction is conducted by teachers and students all together, including Q & A, forums, assignments and tests. Finally, other visitors can visit the website, but can not download the instruction materials and participate in curriculum interaction [5]. Remote Login
Interaction
Teacher
Student
Others
Browsing
Download
Browsing
Test
Assignment
Forum
Q/W
User managment
Website building
FIG. 1 FUNCTIONAL DIAGRAM OF THE COURSE WEBSITE
2.2 Structure This website contains eight first-level columns, namely courses navigation, teaching staff, teaching resources, knowledge expansion, curriculum construction, teaching accomplishment, curriculum notifications and interactive sections, as shown in Figure 2. Each first-level column also contains a number of second-level columns. For example, the curriculum navigation is composed of four second-level columns, such as the course introduction, syllabus, teaching calendar and textbooks. Q/W forum
Paper Interaction
Introduction
Notification
Accomplishment
Assignment
Evaluation Objectivity
Syllabus Numerial analysis (Computational Method)
Navigation
Construction Reform
Calendar
Textbook Staff
Resource
Expansion
Related websites
After class reading
Refered books
Examination
Exercise
Answers
Video
Courseaware
Lecturer
Tutor
FIG. 2 STRUCTURE DIAGRAM OF THE COURSE WEBSITE
Page layout is based on the students-centred principle, which enables students to visit learning resources quickly and easily. Course Homepage is shown as in Figure 3, the URL is http://jxzx.bucea.edu.cn/405.html. Here, the first-level menus of the homepage are corresponding to the first-level columns, and each second-level menus are corresponding to the respective second-level columns. - 31 www.erfrontier.org
At the same time, in order to highlight the instruction emphasis, we set four quick links for each four columns, that is syllabus, courseware, textbook and extracurricular reading. On the other hand, students can quickly link to the homepages of the frequently visited website, such as the Contemporary Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modelling, university library, Google search engine, Baidu search engine, and Wikipedia, etc., so that the relevant information can be easily found.
FIG. 3 COURSE HOMEPAGE (HTTP://JXZX.BUCEA.EDU.CN/405.HTML)
3 WEB-BASED INSTRUCTION After we finished the construction of the numerical analysis course website, the course website has been applied to all aspects of course instruction process. It really has changed the traditional teaching mode. First, the Q/W is no longer limited by time and location. The traditional Q/W way is weekly arranged on a fixed time and place by teachers. But it often happens that teachers have waited in vain, or students complain about confliction with teachers’ schedule. With the help of the web-based interactive Q/W, students can put forward his questions at any time in the Q/W column, and then teachers can immediately reply them in time to help students, which make it possible for teachers answering questions and guiding students’ learning at all times. Secondly, the problem of assignments checking is solved in web-based instruction. Students’ assignments are very - 32 www.erfrontier.org
important in feedback testing for the instructed knowledge. Students can understand whether they have mastered the knowledge or not through the assignments checking. However, due to that there are hundreds of students one semester for the numerical analysis courses; teachers are often overburdened by the assignments checking. For the class hour is limited and each student’s problem is different, teachers cannot explain all of the assignments in the classroom. With the help of the web-based instruction, teacher may regularly publish detailed answers to the assignments in the "Assignments Answers" column of the teaching resources, so students can check and correct their own errors by themselves. Students can also refer to the answer in a variety of problem-solving methods, rigorous problem-solving steps and the correct writing format; all these can improve the quality of their own assignments. Thirdly, students can receive the course information timely in the web-based instruction. Navigation bar of the course website consists of four sections, including "Course Description", "Syllabus" and "Course Materials", which allows students to access the course content and course requirements for class, and the "Teaching Calendar” column which can help students for course preparing and review. The information of the lecturer is introduced in the teacher staff column. Course notification can be published timely in course notification column, such as teachers’ Q/W time and location, examination time and location, course temporary change of time and location, and so on. These are the normally notified by the teacher or the class monitor through words to words. Now it can be said that web-based notification saves time and effort, which is a good service for teacher and students. Fourthly, web-based instruction facilitates the students' self-learning greatly. Students can visit courseware online or download through the "Courseware" column of teaching resources. Examples and answer of each chapter are given through "Exercises Collection" column. The comprehensive final test for students is provided in the “Comprehensive Examination" column. All these columns are convenient and helpful for the students’ after-class review and selfassessment, and also resolve the problem of less class hours and more course content. At the same time, some famous scientists are provided in the "Outside Reading" column, which is for students’ extended reading. The national quality courses website hyperlinks are provided in the "Related Sites" column, which is to pave the way for students to broaden their knowledge. Fifthly, web-based instruction arouses the enthusiasm of students. Students are now living in an information age, and accustomed to the Internet posting, blogging, microblogging. "Forum" column in the website interactive part, provide a platform similar to these newborn things. Here students can discuss problems encountered in learning, learning methods, etc., and the teacher can publish some thinking questions to motivate the students themselves to access to relevant information, and then express their own idea. For example, the question "In the method of Interpolation, the level of interpolation polynomial is higher, and the approximation is better?" Students actively participate in this discussion, someone says yes, someone says no, and other students illustrate the existence of the Runge phenomenon and so on. So we can communicate with each other, learn from each other, students have the enthusiasm to learn, all these can improve the attractiveness of the course. Sixthly, web-based instruction helps teachers to perform practice teaching. In numerical analysis course, lots of numerical algorithms are introduced for solving certain mathematical problems. The lab application of these algorithms is usually implemented using computer programming. And now the class hour is limited, the lab experiment should only be performed by the students after class themselves. Teachers can publish some of the lab topics in the curriculum interactive website "assignment" column, the students run their own programming, write lab reports, submit to the teacher directly through the website. This will be convenient for the lab teaching. Students can do more exercise to train the application of skills and cultivate their sense of innovation.
4 EFFECTIVENESS ANALYSIS For an example, as we selected the 86 students on the course website in the final exam. Their web access times and average score are statistically analysed in Table 1. As you can see, 66% of the students visited the course website, and their average score is 3 points higher than the total. Of course, this data is not absolute, but the construction and application of the web-based instruction plays a good role to improve the quality of education in the process of teaching. - 33 www.erfrontier.org
TABLE 1 THE STATISTIC OF EXAM SCORE AND WEBSITE VISIT NUM
Average Score Average Numbers of Visiting Website Visiting Numbers Student Proportion Average Score
67.8 point 58 0 34% 61.7point
1-10 5%
11-50 21%
50-100 20%
>100 20%
71.1point
5 CONCLUSIONS The learning process is an interactive and independent process. The traditional teaching pays more attention to the teacher’s instruction in the classroom. Web-based instruction play a good supporting role to the traditional one, and the website provides a good interactive environment for students after class. And to a large extent, web-based instruction also solves the problem of our two campuses teaching mode, such as questions answer, Q/W time arrangement, and assignment submission. The practice shows that this is a significant reform of teaching; it has greatly expanded the teachers' teaching and students' autonomous learning space. Next, combined with the characteristics of the calculation program, we will continue the development and construction of our websites, coupled with the application of mathematical software, to make use of existing resources and gradually form the three-dimensional teaching environment, which can provide better support for teaching; and the teaching quality should been further improved.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work is supported by the BUCEA’s Project of Constructing Courses with High Quality for Postgraduate Students (No. K2013008) and the Education Science Research Projects of BUCEA (No.Y11-43).
REFERENCES [1]
Yi Dayi. “Calculation Method” (2ed). Hangzhou: Zhejiang University press, 2007.
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Gong Zhiwu. “The Research and Practice of University Quality Course Construction”. Modern Distance Education Research, 2008(1):47-49.
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Xiao Shutie. “Discussion of College Mathematics Education Reform for the 21 Century”. Studies in College Mathematics, 2001, 4(2):6-10.
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Cai Hongmin. “The Design and Implement of Web Course of Network Technology and Appliance Base on the Web 2.0”. Microcomputer Applications, 2008, 29(10):36-41.
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Mao Jingzhong. “The Cultivation of the Creativity and the Creativity of Engineering Mathematics Education”. College Mathematics, 2003, 19(1):51-53.
AUTHORS Yu Bai was born at Liaocheng, Shandong
Chongyu Lu, Lecturer at school of science, Beijing University
province, in 1979. Ph.d degree of science,
of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Beijing, China.
Peking University, Beijing, China in 2006. Now Associate Professor at school of science,
Beijing
University
of
Civil
Shangwen Wu, Lecturer at school of science, Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Beijing, China.
Engineering and Architecture, Beijing,
Zhijie Xu, Lecturer at school of science, Beijing University of
China. The mainly research area are
Civil Engineering and Architecture, Beijing, China.
mathematic education and management.
- 34 www.erfrontier.org