We envisage a model of putting the concept of using the Internet for education into real practice in school in which the student-teachers play the key role for the successful implementation. In order to achieve the target depicted in this model, a large scale teaching development project is being carried out to develop various subject-based courseware to make the student-teachers at the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd) to have intensive exposure to some interactive hypermedia resources for self-learning on the Internet. Furthermore, those student-teachers are trained to have certain competence in developing course materials in the World Wide Web format for broadcasting on the Internet. Some preliminary findings of the questionnaire on their attitudes towards using the Internet for education indicate that they generally have positive attitudes but they probably need more time by self practicing in order to develop sufficient confidence in authoring their own course materials on the Internet. The situation is critical at HKIEd as there is still no strategic planning to integrate the Internet with any existing teacher education program. It remains largely the responsibility of individual teacher educators in helping the student-teachers to develop basic competence and favorable attitudes in using the Internet for education.
Like many other developed countries, Hong Kong has recently put much emphasis on the information technology (IT) with the aim of using IT to teach at least 25% of school curricula in the next five years. Internet for education has then become the hot issues of current educational research (see, e.g. Yeung and Ng 1996, Bolye et al. 1996 and Sloane 1997) and forum. There is a good consensus that school teachers' computer competence and the availability of suitable local courseware (rather than finance and technology) are the major problems for achieving this target. However, various kinds of teaching materials are now being put on the Internet in many tertiary institutions [HREF 1-8]. A courseware called "Induction CD-ROM (Sixth Form Electronics)" has been developed [HREF 9] for providing some computer-mediated learning materials to support those Hong Kong secondary schools which offer the AS Level Electronics subject in September, 1997. The present authors and their collaborators have also tried to put the concept of teaching through the Internet into real practice at the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd) by developing learning materials of various disciplines (including Biology, Chemistry Computer, Mathematics, Physics, Science Education etc. for the time being) in form of the WWW home-page format with extensive use of interactive hypermedia-features. This leads to the establishment of a virtual centre of interactive hypermedia materials for self-learning at HKIEd called the HAS Centre [HREF 10]. Hence the student-teachers trained at HKIEd will have fairly adequate exposure to self-learning on the Internet with the hypermedia courseware specifically designed for them. The present paper aims to describe the approach and share our experience on achieving the target of promoting the usage of Internet for education with our student-teachers laid as the corner-stone.
As concisely depicted in Figure 1, our approach could be described as a model of combined expertise development and implementation for using the Internet in the teaching and learning activities of teacher educators, student-teachers, school teachers and school pupils. There are five stages of development involved by the corresponding five layers of participants which are outlined as follows:
A virtual centre of interactive hypermedia resources for self-learning called the HAS centre [HREF 10] is currently being established at HKIEd.
The design of this homepage delivers independent, self-paced learning experience for students to work at a personal pace, which benefited student teachers with different previous science background. It provides a set of interactive activities, documents and learning resources to help students to develop the knowledge and skills necessary to use the science process skills in primary science teaching. In the learning of science process skills, it is necessary that student teachers should observe, measure, classify, communicate, infer, make hypothesis, identify variables, design experiments, and analyze data. To achieve this, the learning of science process skills should involve with hands-on science activities. The design of the homepage "Science Process Skills" provides hands-on environments for students to have a better understanding of the science skills. Hands-on and computer simulation activities engaged students in testing the refining ideas and were comparable (Baxter, 1995). Simulations are time, safety or financially, costly, they do not only reduce the drudgery of repetitive experiments, they replace some aspects of the experimental work, or in some case the whole laboratory experiment. The simulations offer a time and cost efficient alternative to direct observations of student performance, because materials need not be replaced and students could be provided with feedback in terms of comments entered on the screen. The format of computer simulation activities also increased students’ confidence, allowing them to experiment. The homepage "Science Process Skills" also provides problem solving environments that might have been constrained by practical realities and cost. Taking into the fundamental constructivist assumptions implying that learning is dependent on the students’ prior experience and learning needs reconstruction which requires active "mind-on", rather than rote-recall and performance. The homepage can be used as tools to facilitate "minds-on" activity, in other words, is to provide students with an inquiry mind that seeks to evaluate the data in order to base judgment on reflection of the information available. With the belief that learners are better able to recall information if responding in pictorial rather than verbal form, packages which employ speed and good quality graphics to present new information to students will be included in this homepage will benefit students with different science achievement.
The teaching practice is an important part of the teacher education program. In the Hong Kong Institute of Education, student-teachers studying the full-time Certificate in Primary Education Course have to undergo a total 12 weeks of teaching practice in primary schools. It is intended that during this period, supervising teachers and the lecturers will provide advice and support to the student-teachers. The teaching practice is an important part of the program as the student-teachers will test out the theories they have learnt in other parts of the course, experiment with new teaching ideas and form their own personal style of teaching. This is a period when the student-teachers experience much anxiety but also satisfaction. The HAS Centre can be seen as an additional support for the student-teachers during this critical period. Through the discussions in the newsgroup, the student-teachers can share their teaching ideas or problems with their peers as well as the lecturers. This provides also a venue for immediate sharing of experience during the teaching practice period. The design of the homepage takes the shape of a beehive. Each content area is placed in one unit and in some units i.e. lesson ideas, safety precautions, stimulating pupils to think and the newsgroup the cells are subdivided into primary and secondary. The design takes an analogy that teachers are hard-workers like bees and store their "goodies" in the cells. Bees or visitors to the homepage are welcomed to enjoy the storage and at the same time make a contribution to renew the storage.
Apart from being required to learn some topics on the Internet, our Science elective students in the Secondary Certificate of Education course at HKIEd are also given about six hours of lessons on home-page authoring as a part of the module called "Current Issues in Science Education". The contents include the following major components:
Every student-teacher was assigned individually a networked computer with Windows 95 operating system to do hands-on practice in a computer room during those lessons. All of them were required to learn web-authoring for developing their own course materials on the Internet. Immediately after completing those lessons, the student-teachers were invited to fill in a questionnaire. Being the first of its kind in the Institute, this is a pilot study aimed to capture the attitudes of the student-teachers towards using the Internet for education purposes. Furthermore, the learning effectiveness of every online courseware will be assessed by peer evaluation, questionnaire survey and interview/lesson observation in near future.
The measurement of students‘ attitudes toward computers has been argued to be central criterion in the evaluation of computer courses and in the development of computer based curricula (Woodrow, 1991). It is hoped that the findings of the measurement will form a basis for raising the awareness of local teacher educators towards students’ attitudes and for integrating the Internet (especially the World Wide Web) in the curriculum that tailor-fit the needs of the student-teachers.
In measuring the attitudes of the student-teachers, the questionnaire consists of four distinct constructs as identified by Kay (1993), Davis (1993) and Selwyn (1997). The four constructs are: affect (feeling towards computers); behavioural (behavioural intentions and actions with respect to computers); perceived behaviour control (perceived ease, or difficulty, of using computers) and perceived usefulness (the degree to which an individual believes using computers will enhance their job performance). For the purpose of measuring the student-teachers‘ attitudes towards using the Internet for education, the latter three constructs are re-defined. As given in Table 1, items in the perceived usefulness construct refer to the application of the Internet in helping the respondent to improve the quality of his/ her teaching. Items contributing to the perceived control component request the respondent to rate his/ her perceived familiarity in authoring a home-page. Items composing the behavioural component identifies whether the respondent would explore other computer software or homepage for self-learning or education purposes in future. Gender, previous education level, computer ownership and Internet access at home made up the demographic questions.
As a pilot study, about 50 Science elective student-teachers have been asked to participate the questionnaire survey and only 37 returned questionnaires are meaningful for detailed analysis. The four constructs made up a total of 19 items and were accompanied by a seven-point Likert response scale. The scale was labeled strongly agree, agree, slightly agree, uncertain, slightly disagree, disagree and strongly disagree. Items from the four constructs were randomly presented to avoid any "clustering" effect. Eight of the items were negatively worded to provide a check against respondents giving positive or negative response sets. The software package SPSS 6.0 was adopted in analyzing the data.
The demographic characteristics of the respondents were summarized in Table 2. In the present study, a total of 18 males and 19 females participated in the study. Computer ownership was high comprising 89% whereas Internet access at home amounts to 35% of the population. As compared with the corresponding figures of 81% and 15% found in Mid 1996 (Yeung and Ng 1996, Ng et al 1997), there is a trend of rapidly increasing popularity of Internet usage at home.
A preliminary analysis of the data was conducted in which the mean of each item was calculated. In computing the mean, a value of +3 was assigned to strongly agree, 0 to uncertain and -3 to strongly disagree. A positive value shows general agreement with the item, and a negative value shows general disagreement. The reliability coefficient alpha of the questionnaire itself is 0.854. The mean values (after proper change of sign) and standard deviations for all items under the four constructs were summarized in Table 3. Since the sample size is rather small for this pilot survey, we could not draw very definite conclusion from the findings. We could only say that student-teachers have slightly positive attitudes in the affective, behaviroural and perceived usefulness components with mean values of about 0.43 to 0.52 but they have rather negative attitudes in the perceived control component with mean value being -0.91. In a future large scale study, a pre-treatment and a post-treatment surveys are needed together with a survey on a control group so that we could investigate the changes induced by this small element of "Internet for education" component as embedded in the teacher education program.
The five stages of development as described above will have different kinds of significance and implications in the teacher education program and in the school curricula. For the first stage, it has already led to some education related conference papers or workshops presented. For the second stage, the efforts needed are found to be very huge but there are many kinds of output/deliverables that could be obtained:
Besides, the project will not only benefit (in Stage 3) our students with extensive education experience in the WWW provided by the latest information and educational technology but also help to establish the HKIEd as a centre of excellence in applying WWW for teacher education through the relevant research and development of staff expertise. However, we must conduct some in-depth research to investigate how to integrate the Internet with the pedagogical content knowledge and teaching methodologies in various teacher education programs and assess quantitatively and qualitatively the effectiveness of this new approach.
With the use of Internet in Stages 4 and 5, it is anticipated that the school teachers will have greater flexibility to handle the problem of mixed student abilities and solve the problem of insufficient Chinese references for practicing the Chinese Medium of Instructions approach in the junior secondary schools. Besides, most teachers could get rid of the remedial teaching as needed for academically weaker students by means of online tutorials or self-learning materials.
Financial support from the Teaching Development Grants of HKIEd is gratefully acknowledged. Thanks are also due to Mr. Wong Chi Fai for his assistance in the statistical analysis.
Table 1 Items in the four construct components
Item |
Affective Component (4 items) |
I feel it is a good experience |
It is uncomfortable to me* |
I am happy with it |
It is tense to me* |
Perceived Control Component (5 items) |
I could closely follow the teacher’s instruction to write HTML documents by myself |
I did NOT need any help/advice from my classmates on practicing the authoring techniques |
I am NOT familiar with most of the techniques to write various WWW home-page features* |
I can make any home-page materials that I need |
I still need an experienced person to assist/advise me on authoring any home-page* |
Behavioural Component ( 3 items) |
I prefer to have more hypermedia materials for self-learning on the Internet at HKIEd |
I do NOT like to explore more about developing home-page for education on the Internet* |
I would avoid taking a teaching post which requires me to develop home-page materials* |
Perceived Usefulness Component (5 items) |
I will use the Internet to help my teaching at school |
The Internet motivates me in self-learning |
The Internet does NOT enable me to be more creative and imaginative* |
The Internet improves the quality of my teacher education |
The Internet CANNOT enhance my teaching performance at school* |
*Items worded in the negative sense.
Table 2 The demographic characteristics of the respondents
Demographic Variable |
Number |
|
Sex |
Male |
18 |
|
Female |
19 |
Computer ownership |
Yes |
33 |
|
No |
4 |
Internet access at home |
Yes |
13 |
|
No |
24 |
Table 3 Preliminary results on students' attitudes
Affective Component |
Perceived Control Component |
Behavioural Component |
Perceived Usefulness Component |
|
Mean |
0.45 |
-0.91 |
0.52 |
0.43 |
S.D. |
0.85 |
1.29 |
1.14 |
0.57 |
Figure 1. A model of combined expertise development and implementation in using the Internet for education
Figure 2. Organization chart for developing the interactive hypermedia resources on the Internet
References
Baxter, G. P., (1995). Using computer simulations to assess hands on science learning. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 4, 21-27.
Boyle, T., Stevens-Wood, B., Zhu, F. and Tikka, A. (1996) Structured Learning in a Virtual environment. Computer Education, 26, 41-49.
Davis, F. (1993) User acceptance of information technology: system characteristics, user perceptions and behavioural impacts. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 38, 475-487.
Kay, R. (1993) An exploration of theoretical and practical foundations for assessing attitudes toward computers: the Computer Attitude Measure (CAM). Computers in Human Behaviour, 9, 371- 386.
Ng, P. H., Yeung, K. H. and Yeung, Y. Y. (1997) Development of WWW courseware: Experience of Design and Implementation, in Bacon-shone, J. and Castro, F. (ed.), Proceedings of The Third Hong Kong Web Symposium, The University of Hong Kong, 169-182.
Selwyn, N. (1997) Students' Attitudes Toward Computers: Validation of A Computer Attitude Scale For 16-19 Education. Computers Education, 28, 35-41.
Sloane, A. (1997). Learning with the Web: Experience of using the World Wide Web in a Learning Environment. Computers Education, 28, 207-212.
Woodrow, J. E. J. (1990) Locus of control and student teacher computer attitudes. Computer and Education, 14, 421-432.
Yeung, Y.Y. and Ng, P.H. (1996) "An Example of Using Internet for Teaching HKIEd Science Students" (ed. K.S. Volk) Science and Technology Education Conference '96 Proceedings , 290-294.
Hypertext references
[HREF 1] | The Learning Resource Server, College of Education, University of Illinois http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu |
[HREF 2] |
Best Information on the Net, St. Ambrose University http://www.sau.edu/CWIS/Internet/Wild/index.htm |
[HREF 3] |
Online Courses, Curtin University of Technology http://www.cs.curtin.edu.an/units |
[HREF 4] |
Physics with Java Applets http://icpr.snu.ac.kr/~gphys/java-physics.html |
[HREF 5] |
Collegenet Academic Resources http://www.collegenet.com/resource |
[HREF 6] |
World Lecture Hall http://www.utexas.edu/world/lecture |
[HREF 7] |
SUNY Vistual Classroom http://137.142.42.95/west/SVC.html |
[HREF 8] |
Teaching Theaters, University of Maryland http://www.inform.umd.edu:8080/TT/theaters.html |
[HREF 9] |
Induction CD-ROM (Sixth Form Electronics) http://www.hkstar.com/~hkiedsci/main.htm |
[HREF 10] |
Hypermedia And Self-Learning Centre (HAS Centre) http://www.ied.edu.hk/has |
[HREF 11] |
Hong Kong School Internet http://www.hkschool.net |
[HREF 12] |
Hong Kong School Net http://www.school.net.hk |
[HREF 13] |
Project CRUCIAL http://crucial.ied.edu.hk |