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What would you expect to find if you were handed a book about teaching on the Web? An entire book would be a lot to say about posting a syllabus to a course management system, but only the tip of the iceberg for a complete “how to” manual on course design, complete asynchronous delivery, and the technical aspects of a course delivered entirely on the Internet. Faculty
Guide for Moving Teaching and Learning to the Web (FGMTLW) is very effective at including the right mix of issues on the subject, issues that current faculty are likely to find useful and interesting—some history, just enough learning theory presented in context, course planning, instructional design and implementation, tools and resources, and enough case studies to provide context for almost any reader.
Faculties in all disciplines are being asked to move certain materials and/or activities to the Web. Most institutions concentrate their efforts on providing faculty and students with the basic tools (e.g., email, course management systems, information technology support) and varying degrees of support on how to use them. But most often this support takes the form of very practical assistance, such as how to transfer exam grades to the grade book in the XYZ course management system. Moving
Teaching and Learning to the Web provides the reasons and justification for doing so, outlines for organizing the process, stepwise instruction for designing an online course from scratch and then implementing it, and strategies for moving existing courses to the Internet. FGMTLW does not compare, contrast, or evaluate the merits of course management systems.
The book, organized into 11 chapters, is very readable. I started reading it in the order of presentation, as I would a novel, but then jumped ahead to the last three chapters—stories about online teaching and learning, issues in the online environment, and perspectives on the future—before returning to the intervening ones. The tone of the writing indicates that the target audience is faculty with the need to move their courses to the Web. It is a scholarly work with plenty of references to research but does not get bogged down in those aspects. It would be equally useful to a novice as to someone who has much more experience with some of the issues. Each of the 16 case studies (including one specifically from chemistry) tell the story of a different course from the perspective of the faculty or support personnel. These stories illustrate the three basic types of courses: Web-enhanced, Web-centric (defined as hybrid or blended ones), and fully online courses, as well as full-degree programs online.
This is not a book written by chemists for chemists but is more general, and in this reviewer’s opinion, more useful as a result. I recommend it for the library of anyone teaching chemistry and thus dealing with the myriad issues involved with teaching and learning on the Web.
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