School of
Chemistry
Presentation

Chemistry IT Workshop 16 November 1998

Use of the Web in Teaching Chemical Risk Assessment

Background

The drive to use the World Wide Web in teaching is coming from various quarters. In some instances the students are demanding it. Sometimes peer pressure is an influence. But the most important reason should be because it provides a better way of teaching, or more importantly it enhances student learning. In the School of Chemistry, all these pressures are probably at play to some extent. I would like to explore a very simple use of the web in a module that was taught this year (1998) as part of the Environmental Science 3 course. Following the description of the course and application of the web I will discuss whether I found it useful as a teaching tool and whether there is evidence of better student learning of the subject.

"Environmental Science 3" is a Senior course, a compulsory subject available only to students enrolled in the B.Sc. (environmental) degree. The enrolment in 1998 was 26 students. All students had completed Chemistry 1, but only about one third of them had completed Chemistry 2, and even fewer taking Chemistry 3 concurrently. "Chemical Risk Assessment" is an 8 lecture (4 x 2 hours) component of the course, delivered early in second semester. The objective of the topic is for the students to be able to perform a straightforward risk assessment of the exposure of one chemical to one environmental compartment. This entails searching for information about the chemical, including the effect on organisms, the fate of the chemical, physico-chemical properties, and carrying out calculations and extrapolations pertinent to their particular problem.

Different ways of using the web

There are four simple purposes to which the web was put in this component of the course, and could be fairly simply applied for most courses:

course materials (lecture hand-outs, assignment, etc);

information for lecturer;

information for students; and

tool for student learning.

It should be noted up front that every student in this course had access to the web. A course home page was set up under my own research page and the URL communicated to the students on the course outline sheet that was provided in the first lecture.

A fairly trivial application of the web is to provide course materials for the students. They were all given fairly detailed lecture notes throughout and these were available for downloading by clicking on the appropriate lecture. Their assignment was handed out in class, but also available electronically.

Environmental risk assessment is a topic I had not considered for seven years, and certainly never taught. I found no good textbooks on the subject. The concepts and protocols for such assessment are in fact still very much in the development stage by regulatory authorities around the world. Australia is mainly following the US protocols and colleagues at the NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA) directed me to the US EPA (United States Environmental Protection Agency) home page. "Surfing" the US EPA pages and links allowed me to download some fairly extensive documents about the current state of environmental risk assessment. I also sent an email to the US EPA and requested access for myself to their environmental database for teaching purposes, which was granted.

Of course, all appropriate links to information on risk assessment were passed on to the students via the course home page. Some databases were available globally and these links were also passed to the students. The US EPA declined to allow student access to their database, however allowed me to download as much information as I wanted to make available locally. I downloaded information about several chemicals and created a mini-database for the students to use (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Mini-database information downloaded from US EPA full database

This gave them experience at using the type of data contained in these databases, if not in using the actual database. As can be seen in Figure 2, the information in these databases is not at all straightforward to extract.

One advantage of the web is that it can be a vehicle for students to explore beyond the confines of information presented by the lecturer. Links to sites and databases were provided on the course home page, which provided sufficient information for students to complete the assessment exercise. However, each of these sites provides links to an ever expanding information source.

Figure 2. Example data from US EPA AQUIRE database

Self-evaluation of web effectiveness

The first three applications of the web in teaching (course materials, information for teacher and learner) are fairly easy to evaluate. The assignment on the web was very slightly different to that handed out. There was absolutely no difference in the structure of the assignment, however, one number in the description of the problem was different. This allowed me to discover retrospectively that three students had taken their assignment from the web page rather than from the paper version. While this may not seem a large number, if translated to a large Junior course then the availability of the assignment on the web has the potential to save the lecturer from many visits by students to replace their assignments. A web counter was not used so the number of students who accessed the lecture notes is unknown. For large classes, there could be a substantial economic saving by providing students with abbreviated hard-copy lecture notes in class, and making the full version available only electronically.

The web proved an invaluable source of information for this module. The quality of the module was certainly enhanced by incorporation of current practice and thinking used by experts in the field, and by the availability of the most current data. These are not available in textbooks, and even if the expert thinking and protocols were firmly established and published in print, the research data is constantly changing.

There is also no doubt that my knowledge of environmental risk assessment was increased markedly by use of the WWW, but is there any evidence that student learning was enhanced? This is a different issue to the quality of the course. What evidence is there then that the students have learned more effectively? The performance of students in the assignment proved illuminating. Students were allocated one of 10 chemicals to investigate, based on the last digit of their student number (see Figure 1). Successful completion of the exercise required them to access the course home page and extract data from the mini-databases provided there. 24/26 students handed in their assignment and all had accessed the information. The table below indicates the fraction of these 24 students who utilised the course home page further.

Half of the students went further than the minimum requirement by accessing and utilising the links that were provided on the home page (one link was utilised particularly heavily). Two students went even further and discovered environmental safety data beyond what I had provided, linked to, or knew about (teaching the teacher). The evidence is strong that they discovered these sources together, however, the assignments were distinctly different. Finally, I provided my personal email address, mostly as insurance against problems with the site. Three students utilised this facility to ask questions; one with a site problem, the other two with conceptual problems.

The use of the web in this course by the students has led to at least one positive learning outcome: a large fraction of students (50%) learned how to use and incorporate information beyond that provided in lectures, or on the course home page, into an environmental risk assessment (though not always appropriately). Have they learned the principles of risk assessment better? This was the first time the course was offered and so comparison with learning by traditional methods is difficult. This is a question that may be better addressed after the course has run for a few years.

Review and changes for next year

The use of the web in teaching this eight lecture course to a fairly small number of students has been reasonably successful from several perspectives: as an alternative source of course material for the students; as an information source for the teacher and learner; and as a vehicle for improving student learning. An important question that needs to be addressed is the value (time and money) of providing web-based resources versus other resources. For the present course I believe these web-based resources were good value. Although it took many hours (days) of web searching to prepare the course the amount of HTML programming required to create the home page was trivial (it is a simple layout). The mini-database can be extended year by year until it is itself a fairly extensive resource. New links, including those found by students this year, can be simply included. Finally, making lecture notes and assignments available is also trivial. One could spend time and/or money making the home page more professional. Links could be opened in a new window so that students do not get lost. The format of the pages could be more attractive. However, these would probably not make a significant difference to the final outcome, and there is a risk that they would come at the cost of removing flexibility. I could, and did, add information and links at the last minute. Any School-wide initiative for course home pages must retain this lecturer control of the information (though not necessarily the format).

One change that will be made next year will be to include an element of "contract learning" into the course. I was concerned that there was no incentive for the students to extend themselves beyond the information provided on the course home page (although many did). An assessment contract would provide a reward for students who go beyond the course home page in the search for more knowledge and data. A contracted maximum mark of, say, 80% could be gained from the information sources provided by the lecturer. The remaining 20% could only be earned by utilising extra information found beyond the home page.

© 1997 - 2010 UniServe Science

Page Maintained By: PhySciCH@mail.usyd.edu.au
Last Update: Friday, 12-Feb-1999 17:02:12 EST
URL: http://science.uniserve.edu.au/workshop/chemit/kable.html