USING ONLINE QUIZZES AND DISCUSSION FORUMS TO ENHANCE LEARNING NUMERICAL METHODS

The use of quizzes to enhance learning outcomes has been used by educators in several courses to various degrees of success. On our campus the class on numerical methods has been offered for the past two summers as a hybrid course, with both the online and face-to-face components. As it is a course offered in the summer's shortened eight-week session, the 3-credit hour course in only a face-to-face class setting typically meets two hours, thrice a week. The hybrid course that was taught in the past two summers met once a week and the other two meetings were conducted as "online" meetings. The purpose of this paper is a description of how an existing course was transformed to a hybrid course and how the use of online activities such as quizzes and discussion forums has helped in the student performances in the course. By assigning a substantial portion of the course grade to online quizzes and homework (in this course 20%), the author essentially forced the students to use the Blackboard Vista course management system (http://blackboard.com), which is available freely to our students on campus. The Blackboard Vista system is also available to students either on-campus or off-campus. Technology and skill requirements are made clear to the students who sign up for the course. The students are also made aware of the participation expectations. For the pilot study the author used online quizzes to help him in the teaching delivery of the numerical methods course. In addition, one of the other requirements for the online portion of the course was that all students had to participate actively in online discussion forums. Only 5% of the course grade was attributed to the online discussions. The students had to post at least one new discussion thread on a topic and respond to at least two others. The discussions were monitored by the author and the rules of "netiquette" were explained at the beginning of the course making it very clear that any use of "foul" language will not be tolerated. It was not very surprising to find that the students who took the online quizzes and who participated actively in the online discussion forums actually performed much better in their mid-term and final exams than those that didn't participate actively in the online activities. There were no control groups set to determine the effect of taking online quizzes and participating in online discussion forums. It just so happened that two or three students did not participate actively in the online quizzes and/or discussions. Therefore it was possible to do a comparison between those who participated in online activities with those who did not.