LearningSpace: Key to the Future
by Alice Smith and Carla Melucci
Teaching a course over the Internet requires a few components, one of the
most important being the medium through which the course is offered. After
extensive research of Internet-based training tools, we settled on
LearningSpace
, developed by Lotus Institute
, a division of the Lotus Development Corporation.
Why LearningSpace?
For starters, it has been specifically designed to provide all of the tools
and framework necessary to deliver any course over the Web. It is also very
easy to use. Once the Virtual High School teachers got the hang of it, they
were creating documents left and right. There is no need to learn HTML
(Hypertext Markup Language, the language of the Web) or any other program,
and it runs on both Macintosh and Windows platforms. LearningSpace is a
series of five specialized, interactive Lotus Notes databases that VHS
teachers are using to design their courses. We make these databases
available over the web via Lotus Domino to the VHS students using their
favorite browser.
What are the five databases and how do they work?
The All Important Schedule
The VHS teachers course design begins with the Schedule module. Here is
where teachers detail the course requirements, all overview information,
and the course activities and assignments, which include student
activities, homework, and exams. The Schedule module is the heart of the
course, acting as the hub from which all student actions and activities
originate.
Keeping Resources Organized: The MediaCenter
Resources that are needed and used for assignments are usually linked from
within Schedule documents into other documents stored in a second module,
the MediaCenter. This module acts much like a course library, providing a
separate storage place for helpful resources. VHS teachers are
incorporating multimedia files, graphics, photos, charts, scanned articles,
videos, and sound files. They are taking advantage of LearningSpace's
ability to easily accept the familiar and simple two-step process of
cutting and pasting graphics directly into documents. With similar ease
they are also creating links to interesting educational URLs.
The Activity Area: The CourseRoom
A key element of courses conducted over the web using LearningSpace is
interaction between participants. With these exchanges, assignments are
clear, students work together, and all those involved have a great
opportunity to get to know each other and share information. The CourseRoom
module houses two main document types-discussions and work assignments.
Teachers are using discussions in a variety of ways:
All students are asked to comment with their thoughts and feelings on a
specific teacher-posted topic, sharing their knowledge and ideas;
Students are grouped into teams and asked to research and debate a
topic, each student acting in a specific role, posting his or her results
to share and/or be graded at the end of the activity;
Students can post private questions to their teacher on any topic at any
time.
To help develop the feeling of camaraderie and connectedness, we've
encouraged our teachers to create a discussion thread reserved exclusively
for goofing off.
The work area is where students store and work on assignments and projects,
alone or with editors or teams. Teachers can locate work and discussions
specifically marked for their attention, and can assign grades if they
choose.
Even with a large number of documents and discussions posted and evolving,
students can make sense of them all by views. These views, activated by
simple button clicks, allow them to sort and select documents by
discussions only, by assignments, by teamwork, in addition to other more
common orders like by date and author.
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