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Volume 9, Number 8: May 23, 2003

Implementing a "Weekly Web Link" Assignment

by Michael Ritter,
UW-Stevens Point

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Staying up-to-date with current events should be an important goal for students, especially in their chosen field of expertise, but busy schedules may not permit them to do so. This also applies to educators with heavy teaching loads and busy schedules beyond the confines of their offices. Instructors can promote currency of news events in their students by implementing a "Weekly Web Link" assignment in their courses. Submitting a weekly web link can serve several purposes beyond keeping abreast of current events.

I assign students in my Geography 353 Physical Climatology and Meteorology course to find and report on a weekly web link. Students are required to visit the Web site of an online magazine, journal, newspaper, or public or private organization, and send an annotated bibliographic entry to me via a Web form. The intent of the assignment is two-fold. First, it helps them stay current with issues related to the subject of the course. I provide a set of suggested web sites for them to use, but they can search out their own as well. Second, the course also requires each student to write a term paper. Visiting a website each week encourages the student to investigate potential topics and build a bibliography for the term paper.

Figure 1. Submission form.There are several ways one can implement a weekly web link assignment via the Internet. The easiest is to have students send the bibliographic information in an email. Even when instructors give explicit instructions on formatting, submissions may come with varying subject lines and message format. The potential for virus infection is always present with email submissions. Delivery errors occur when the instructor's email is improperly entered.

Another approach is to use a Web feedback form. A web form is relatively easy to create and deploy. Some HTML editors like Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver provide templates for web forms. I use Jmail to implement my web assignments. Jmail is an inexpensive way to enable your Web site to send emailed Web forms (http://www.dimac.net/). Beyond the server application, just two files are needed; the first is a standard feedback form that can be created in any HTML editor, and the second is an Active Server Page that contains the code for submitting the form contents to my university email server and displaying a confirmation message. The feedback form I built (Figure 1) requires the following information:

  • Student Name
  • Student Email address
  • Title of Article
  • Author(s)
  • URL
  • Source (Name of magazine or organization)
  • Date Accessed
  • Article description

I embedded my email address into the code of the form preventing the student from making a mistake while entering it. It does not prevent the student from making a mistake with their own email address however. The text of the email subject line, i.e. "Weekly Web Link," is coded into the form as well for consistency between student submissions. Doing so permits routing the message into a special folder when received by my Microsoft Outlook email client.

Figure 2. Confirmation page.After reading the article or report, the student fills out the form and submits the assignment by clicking a submit button. Experience with online assignments in a variety of courses has encouraged me to build redundancy into the submission process. When the assignment is sent to the instructor, a confirmation web page acknowledging the action taken and and their web link bibliographic information is displayed on screen (Figure 2). Students are encouraged to save the confirmation page of submitted information. Additionally, the contents of the web form is sent to both the student and instructor via email. Should the student not receive their email copy, I can retrieve mine and forward it to them. On very rare occasions has the form failed to submit.

Anecdotal evidence shows that student response has been quite favorable. A majority of students in the course find the activity useful in exploring current issues related to weather and climate. A number of students used the activity to prepare for their term papers as I had intended. The assignment has side benefits for the instructor. The student submissions can be archived to create a course reading list. The list can be shared with students in the class or future ones. Students have also turned up interesting reading that I haven't run across, helping me stay up-to-date as well!

The weekly web link is a relatively easy way to integrate critical thinking exercises into your course curriculum. It is a useful way of helping students, and instructors, keep abreast of current events related to the content of their courses. The digital format makes submissions via the Internet simple, cuts down on paper clutter in the office, and the return of graded exercises easy. I encourage you to try it out.

 

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