The Project 25 Report details efforts at NCSU to place twenty five courses online. The evaluation covered in the report investigates six pairs of courses. For each pair studied, a single instructor taught one course in a face-to-face classroom and one section of the same course via a Web site. You can view the entire report online.

Evaluation was approached from four angles:

• learner-content interaction (how students interact with course materials)

• learner-instructor interaction (how students interact with the instructor)

• learner-learner interaction (how students interact with each other)

• learner-environment interaction (how students interact with the physical or web-based environment). (Project 25 Report; see also information on the evaluation criteria)

The report's findings relating to the first concern, learner-content interaction offer several points of interest.

Students in web-based sections often expressed the feeling that they were missing something by not being in the classroom; feelings of isolation and the perception of a lack of feedback were also commonly reported.

Students in the classroom sections liked the presence of the instructor and the imposed pacing of the course, whereas students in the web sections asked for more deadlines and benchmarks for working through the course materials. (Project 25 Report)

Also of interest here are the results of evaluations investigating the third angle, learner-learner interaction. According to the report

Overall, learner-learner interaction was perceived by survey respondents to be a more common phenomenon in classroom sections than in web-based sections.

Concerning the discussion of course content, assistance with assignments, formation of study groups, and social/informal interaction, respondents in classroom sections rated both the importance and occurrence of learner-learner interactions significantly higher than did respondents in web-based sections.

In terms of using an electronic forum to communicate and share ideas, 60% of respondents in web-based sections indicated that the (on-line) Net Forum had been of some benefit. Fifty-six percent indicated that Netforum had been of benefit in assistance with assignments, but 52% indicated that Netforum had not been of benefit in forming study groups. Focus group participants in web-based sections expressed reservations about Netforum as a tool for online learner-learner interaction.

Netforum appears to have been utilized by students primarily in courses where it was required, and not because the students were enthusiastic about it. (Project 25 Report)

Finally, faculty evaluations suggest additional areas of concern:

Project 25 faculty¹s responses and comments expressed the need for other instructors, administrators, and technical support staff to understand the amount of time that it takes to transfer, design or redesign, and conduct a web-based class the first time. The majority of this time is spent in learning the technologies necessary for putting the course on the Internet. Some faculty are not interested in investing this much time on the technology but are still supportive of having their course in a web-based format.

For the most part, faculty appear to believe that their courses were as effective taken on the Web as they were in the classroom. There were however some concerns with being able to promote good interaction between themselves and the students, and to encourage high amounts of interactivity between the students and the course content. Most responding faculty wanted to encourage student-to-student interaction, but found the technologies available for this purpose to be inadequate. (Project 25 Report)

From these excerpts we might distill two points of consideration for this presentation:

An important faculty concern is the amount of time necessary for creating successful Web-based courses. Some instructors were interested in assistance with the design and implementation of their Web-based courses.

While instructors felt that both face-to-face and Web-based courses were effective, both students and instructors expressed concern about potentially missing interactions between instructors and students and students and students.