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disCourse

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LILT, Dept. of ICS • University of Hawai`i at Manoa • 1680 East-West Road, POST 309 • Honolulu, HI 96822 • 1-808-956-3890

disCourse

From the instructor's and student's point of view, disCourse is a web-based learning environment that supports discussion-oriented and project-oriented courses such as many that we teach in ICS. Student work (both individual and group) can be posted and commented on by other students and the instructor. Students can contribute resources of interest to the class as well as the instructor. DisCourse takes a community-oriented approach in which courses are embedded in the larger context of the departmental community.

From a research point of view, disCourse is the third generation of our systems for "artifact centered discourse" and the second generation of our online community software. (It builds on our prior work with Kukakuka and Pink.) Much of learning focuses on "artifacts" (documents and other objects created by learners or others), yet commercial online environments provide poor support for discussing such artifacts. In disCourse we are exploring ways to place artifacts on equal status as discussion groups and threads, and enabling participants to access the information or discussions they need via either the artifact of interest or the discussion topic.

History of disCourse

Dan Suthers

My colleagues and I have been experimenting with the use of online learning environments to support both face-to-face courses and online courses for a number of years. The role of software in an online course is obvious, but we find it useful for face-to-face courses as well because there is not enough time in class to do everything we want to do, and the online medium affords certain kinds of interactions that are more difficult in class. For example, online you can examine another student's work carefully and take the time to compose reflective commentary. You don't have time to do this in class, and some students may be too shy to speak up in class.

I began by using commercial course management systems such as Blackboard and WebCT. I found them to be deficient with respect to pedagogical approach taken in many of the courses I teach. I focus on project-based learning, where students create and iteratively refine designed artifacts (programs, interfaces, etc.). We may also examine other examples and resources. To learn effectively we need to be able to share and discuss these artifacts. At the time Blackboard did not even allow students to see each others' work, and WebCT separated the discussions from the area for sharing work. Therefore I undertook to develop a simple online discussion tool that let one easily reference web pages in the discussion.

The original system, Kukakuka, consisted simply of a web based discussion tool that associated discussions and messages with web pages. This software was developed by an ICS student, Jun Xu, written as Java servlets that effectively functioned as a dynamic "cons cell" to bind discussions to web sites. I used it in my first ICS 463 class.

I liked this tool but wanted to embed it in a course management system, so I asked my next student, Viil Lid, to embed Kukakuka in WebCT. She decided that she would rather build a full functionality course support system! With help from some friends, in about 6 seeks she developed an innovative interface in PHP/MySQL that served us for a few years through several ICS 667 and 691 courses and from which we learned a lot. However, there were some limitations to its code design.

At the same time Viil and other LILT lab students (including Wil Doane and subsequently Joshua Wingstrom and Dan Morton) were developing software for online community support in a project we do in collaboration with the state Department of Education: HNLC (http://hnlc.org). That site supports many special interest groups, but situates them in a larger context where members may share resources and discover new friends across groups, enabling a synergy that is not possible if each group had its own isolated web site. Services provided to everyone include community forum postings of educational events and opportunities and a Hawai'i educational resource database. More services are accessible by members who login. Members can post stories on the community forum, share documents in group workspaces, engage in online discussions, add new resources to the resource database, and subscribe to email lists. Another "artifact-centered discussion" tool, inspired by Kukakuka but named Alu, had been developed by Bruce Harris as part of this effort, and later taken over by Sam Joseph.

One December when I asked Viil and Sam to prepare disCourse for the next semester, they decided they would rather abandon this code in favor of the much more mature hnlc.org software, which included Alu as well as other tools for online community support. Our move to this code base also reflects an increasing shift in my teaching from instructor-controlled activities to collaboration among a community of students. We decided to open up this environment to use by other ICS graduate students as well.

Subsequently, Sam Joseph, supported by Viil Lid and Kar-Hai Chu, reimplemented this entire code base in Ruby on Rails and AJAX technologies to improve the user experience and our ability to respond quickly to requirements for changes to the interface. Since then, we have begun experimenting with more flexible ways to combine wiki pages and threaded discussion.