“WebTycho” continued from page 15
Wayne Precht (assistant director of Information Technology) offered another dimension to the discussion: I am not an instructor, nor have I ever taken an online course. But I have been programming distance education systems for more than 12 years here at UMUC—first with the PLATO system, then Tycho (frequently referred to as DOSTycho and WinTycho, though that refers to the client used to access it; the server side was the same), and now WebTycho. I have worked closely with faculty, especially when rolling out a new system, and I frequently skim through the running classes to get a sense of how things are going. This technology is in a constant state of evolution, but the underlying paradigms remain: conferencing as the main, asynchronous communication; e-mail (or “personal notes,” as they were called in the PLATO days) for communicating one to one. In many ways, as advanced as the Web version is over previous versions, it is still catching up to PLATO. I could make a one-to-one mapping of most of the PLATO features to Tycho to WebTycho. Maybe I will do that just to trace the intersystem anthropology. Beverly Morris ’99 (applications developer, Information Technology) gave us a look into the future of online education at UMUC: I have been working with WebTycho since 1998, and have taken online courses myself. I think the greatest improvement occurred in WebTycho during the past two years with the transition to WebTycho 2.x. That version and subsequent versions have largely been a response to the needs expressed by our distance education customers. Earlier in this conference, there was discussion regarding the committees that worked together to define the progression of distance education at UMUC. One of the most important pieces in the distance education puzzle is the user. In 1998, Team WebTycho began extensively polling its user base with usability studies and surveys. The technical evaluation (still in use) provided a vehicle for direct feedback from all WebTycho users. The future of WebTycho took on a new direction in response to that feedback. The usability studies helped define the navigation and interface areas of WebTycho that required updates or redesign by initiating testing sessions with a variety of users.
While the committees and advisory groups played a key role in the development of the software, it was imperative to tap the open resource of customer opinion. The surveys and feedback from the end users still provide valuable input to the WebTycho development team. Cindy Whitesel brought the discussion full circle when she posted the final response:
Hi, Everyone! It’s fun to see familiar names in the WebTycho conferences! Except for Beverly Morris, I recognize you all. I remember how exciting it was to be teaching writing online where students had to write to communicate. A novel idea developed—that students might have to participate in order to learn. In the online classroom, everyone participated and I got to know students better than I ever had. From there came another novel idea—that the classroom could be student-centered, that we could actually focus on the students and actually see in writing what they were learning and what they were thinking. When I could read through students’ thinking processes, I became much better at helping them learn the material. The early days were eye-opening for those of us who were open to new or innovative teaching strategies. In order to teach online, we teachers had to focus on what we were doing as teachers. In order to do that, we had to focus on what we wanted our students to learn. As we developed our notions of what studentcentered teaching was about, we had to examine how we taught and what we expected. Our students had to do the same. Rich and Nate may remember those early years in faculty training when a group of us came together to learn what it meant to teach online. Our training was more than “education management”— we were really relearning what it meant to be teachers. We were also learning how much more learning we could expect—and get—from our students. Although I never participated in those teacher surveys, Wayne may remember my stopping by to visit in IT. I’d often see Wayne or John and we’d have a conversation about the system, what it was doing or not doing, and what might make it better. I saw such a dedicated team of developers who seemed to actually enjoy their work as much as I enjoyed teaching.
—Cindy 17
U N I V E R S I T Y O F M A RY L A N D U N I V E R S I T Y C O L L E G E