Currency and Innovation School of Crystallography, Birkbeck College, University of London

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Teaching over the Internet

Teaching over the Internet is still frontier country, although distance learning per se is not. The Internet brings with it some advantages and disadvantages. Anyone with a suitable computer, browser and Internet link can follow an Internet course from anywhere in the world, at any time of their choosing. Naturally, tutors have to help student progress using established pacing techniques, and by using various means of communication. However, it is expected that part-time learning discipline will be even harder to maintain than in face-to-face teaching as tutors and students never meet. Some interactive course material can be provided for use over the Web, which would be difficult to do in face-to-face teaching.

Course Organisation and Course Technology

It is intended to update the course regularly, especially as the nature of powder diffraction has changed rapidly in recent years This course itself is a natural progression of producing web-based teaching materials derived directly from research. This process originated in the development of new face-to-face teaching material for the MSc in Crystallography, a University of London course run by Birkbeck College, which ended finally after some 40 years in July 1997. Changes will therefore partially be driven by research and quality control of course organiser and tutors. Other changes, will be driven by student comments, questionnaires, external examiners reports, external opinions, etc.

The course has three modules:

1. Instrumentation & Fundamental Crystallography for Powder Diffraction
2. Analysis of Powder Diffraction Data
3. Project

In addition there is an Information Technology introduction, which is expected to be the least stable, as computer technology is always changing. As the Internet is such an ephemeral medium it will be necessary to annually update the links to outside pages. For the really critical pages, needed for efficient revision and the projects, it will be necessary to update more often. In order to keep the material stable, links to outside pages will be collected together as much as possible. Furthermore, it has been the aim of this course to keep outside links to a minimum.

Good Web Etiquette

This course tries to avoid unstable technologies, so that students with different hardware/software combinations are not inconvenienced. We therefore do not use frames. The standard requires 8+3 filenames (therefore filename.htm), and an attempt has been made to only use lower case filenames in the internal links. Each page has a navigation button to allow browsing to be efficient, and not lead into a dead-end. The course navigation button bars are present both at the top and bottom of most pages. Large pictures are not in-line, but have to be called up by the user. The course pages have been developed into a tree-structure, avoiding too much diversion by sideways hyperlinks. Javascript and Java are not used to avoid the bugs and security risks that come with them; also some companies do not always allow them.

Course Contents

The course aims to exploit the use of colour which is the standard for Web-based material in stark contrast to the printed page of the textbook. Already many students have access to colour printers and it is expected that this will become the norm over the next few years. The course aims to keep mathematics to a minimal level, but does not expect to eliminate it - crystallography is a physical science with parameters that derive directky from mathematical equations. Pictures will be used wherever possible to show the effects of functions, etc., but we still expect that some of the concepts of crystallography to still be hard.

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Administration

CDCO