WEBCT AS A COURSE SUPPLEMENT IN LARGE GENERAL EDUCATION PHYSICAL GEOLOGY COURSES - I CAN FINALLY MAKE STUDENTS READ THE TEXTBOOK!

Textbooks are of variable value in physical geology courses, especially large general education courses. The problem is generally due not to faults with the text but to the fact that students seldom actually read the text in advance of class. A high level of success at coercing students to do this has been achieved with WebCT, the software used by the university for online courses, as a course supplement.

Students are required to take online, open-book quizzes before the class meeting. Questions are in the multiple choice format to take advantage of the software for grading large numbers of quizzes. Initial utilization of the online quizzes for large lecture sections used the question bank provided by the text. These questions should relate directly to the textbook and be appropriate for open-book quizzes, although frequently containing more details than may be desirable for a closed-book exam.

During the fall of 2003, the use of online quizzes was applied to physical geology lab sections. The initial goal of simply requiring students to read the manual before the lab quickly expanded to focus on maps, diagrams, and images. These were either included online with the question or a reference given to a page in the lab manual. The software would randomly select one of several items for each question so students did not have exactly the same quiz.

Future efforts will focus on developing questions that require higher level thinking skills and to developing a large enough pool of questions that students can be allowed multiple attempts at the quiz.