Department of Physics, United States Air Force Academy
The explosion of the World Wide Web technology over the past few years has spurred the development of an ever-increasing number of web-based teaching
and learning materials and techniques. Is this to the benefit of our students? If so, how, and in what cases? In this talk, we'll first briefly
survey the spectrum of ways in which the web is being used by the physics education community in the United States to promote physics teaching and
learning. We'll look at what is being done and the technology needed to do it. Then we'll focus in particular on some implementations in which web
technology is being used to support student-teacher, student-student, and teacher-teacher interactions not previously possible. We'll explore how this
changes the way teaching and learning occur, consider the reactions of the teachers and the students, and discuss how and why teachers new to the web
might begin combining pedagogy with web technology.
Special emphasis will be given to "Just-in-Time Teaching", JiTT, a pedagogical strategy that combines use of the web with a collaborative
learning environment to improve student learning of and attitudes toward physics. The JiTT pedagogy exploits an interaction between web-based study
and an active learner classroom. Essentially, students respond electronically to carefully constructed web-based assignments, and the
instructor reads the student submissions "just-in-time" to adjust the lesson content and activities to suit the students' needs. Thus, the heart of JiTT
is the 'feedback loop' formed by the students' outside-of-class preparation that fundamentally affects what happens during the subsequent in-class time
together. The students come to class prepared and already engaged with the material, and the faculty member already knows exactly what the students'
difficulties and questions are and where classroom time together can be best spent. While this is still a work in progress, we can point to dramatic
improvements in retention rates and to significant cognitive gains as well. Encouraged by participants at US national workshops (sponsored by, among
others, The National Science Foundation, Project Kaleidoscope and the American Association of Physics Teachers) we have produced a book on the
subject [1]. Many people are now contributing to the JiTT effort. In addition to close collaborators Prof. Gregor Novak at the US Air Force
Academy, Prof. Andrew Gavrin at IUPUI (the joint urban campus of Indiana University and Purdue University), and Prof. Wolfgang Christian at Davidson
College, there are now over thirty JiTT adopters across the United States and Canada, in disciplines ranging from physics to philosophy to business
management.
Given the focus of the workshop, this talk will feature numerous examples of JiTT materials that utilize Physlets(TM), Java applets created by Wolfgang
Christian for physics instruction. Although JiTT can certainly be implemented fully using technically simple web-based assignments,
incorporating some Physlet-based questions can heighten the extent to which student understanding can be probed and encouraged. Responding to questions
that involve watching or analyzing a Physlet animation often requires different skills and a different level of understanding than responding to
static questions, and JiTT is ideally suited to help students improve their analysis skills and deepen their understanding. The JiTT strategy as applied
in physics education is richer for the incorporation of Physlets, and we'll demonstrate this during the talk.
[1] Novak, Gregor M., Patterson, Evelyn T., Gavrin, Andrew D., and Christian, Wolfgang. (1999) Just-in-Time Teaching: Blending Active Learning
with Web Technology, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ.
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