Teaching and Learning > DISCOURSE
Only Connect: A Web-based Approach to Supporting Student Learning in the Philosophy of Social Science
Author: Stephen Timmons
Journal Title: Discourse
ISSN: 2040-3674
ISSN-L:
Volume: 8
Number: 2
Start page: 197
End page: 207
Return to vol. 8 no. 2 index page
Background
The University of Nottingham School of Nursing has 15 years experience in the development of high-quality e-learning resources, using a wide range of methods and platforms. A large number of its staff is involved in e-learning developments, and the School has attracted over £2 million in funding for these projects. An overview of the School's activity in this are can be found at http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/nursing/sonet/.
'Philosophy of Social Science' is a compulsory module for postgraduate students in the School of Nursing (and Sociology) at the University of Nottingham. This is necessary in order for postgraduate programmes in both schools to achieve ESRC recognition for funding. However, it is also thought to be a good introduction to post-graduate study. A major object of the philosophy of social science course is to increase students' awareness of the ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions that underpin various research strategies. Students employ or encounter these concepts in the studies they read and rely on to extend their knowledge of the world, even if the assumptions are implicit rather than explicit. The module aims to help students understand debates in philosophy and about the nature of knowledge claims so that they are able to critically examine assumptions that are built into the available methods of data gathering and analysis.
Most of the students on this module have never studied any philosophy before. Many are experienced health care professionals (for example, nurses, occupational therapists and so on). As such, they tend to be 'concrete' thinkers and are often uncomfortable with abstract concepts. It is perceived as being a difficult module, though our own research (Morgan et al 2008) shows that students find it very valuable, but not until they are further on with their research. One of the issues that students unfamiliar with philosophy find difficult is making the links between different ideas and concepts discussed in the taught sessions, and the connections with their own research. There is insufficient time in the lectures to draw out all of these connections, and seminars often end up being devoted to going over the key concepts again. Hence there is a need to help students to make these connections. In addition to these problems, students are often very anxious about studying philosophy.
In order to better support students, a project to create a module website was funded by the Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies. This project was completed in 2008, and more details of the module, the website and the evaluation data can be found in Timmons (2008). As has long been recognised with all IT projects, (Brooks 1975) what seems at the planning stage like a straightforward project turned out to be more complex than originally assumed.
A website was developed that used the hypertextual nature of the Internet to help students understand the connections between philosophical ideas. The website is integrated with, and supplementary to, existing programme of lectures and seminars. It elucidates how various themes thread through the material covered in the module, and how philosophical innovations are often a reaction to others. It situates each of the lectures in the wider history of philosophical ideas, and provides links to high-quality web resources in this field. Philosophy is not a subject that lends itself to linear exposition, and it was hoped that a web representation would be more productive in explaining philosophical concepts and their connections.
What the website is not
The website was not intended to be a substitute for doing the reading or coming to the lectures and seminars. As such, the material included comprised brief summaries, with the clear intention of showing the links between different concepts and philosophers, not expositing them in depth. The students were explicitly told that they could not reference the website in their assignments.
e-Learning in the PRS subject area
Mossley (2003) provides a useful overview of the advantages and disadvantages of using e-learning in the PRS subject area. However, the student groups discussed in this report are quite different from those studying the module reported on here. The approach taken has some parallels with that used by Victoria Harrison (reported in Lamb 2006).
Existing e-learning resources
Both the Stanford Encyclopaedia (http://www.seop.leeds.ac.uk/contents.html) and PhillWeb (http://www.phillwebb.net) are brilliant resources but are not suitable for these students as they are too advanced.
The content
The site is based around the nine lectures which make up the teaching, but only uses them as a starting point. Links are provided to definitions of terms, but in addition, themes are threaded through the whole site to help students understand the evolution of debates within the subject. A historical time line is also provided to help show how more recent thinkers are critiquing or adding to the whole canon of the subject.
The module covers the following topics:
- Introduction: ontology, epistemology, methodology
- Epistemology: an introduction to positivism and beyond
- Structure and agency
- Hermeneutics and phenomenology
- Is truth the purpose of enquiry?
- Feminism as situated methodology
- Social constructionism and critical realism
- Ideology
- Scientific paradigms and the sociology of knowledge
Due to the diverse nature of the students on this module both in terms of level (studying Master's, PhDs and professional doctorates) and subject (Nursing, Sociology, Social Policy and Education), the website provides links to examples which show the relevance of the philosophical debates to research in each of these subjects.
Building the website: the process
The function of the website was explicitly not to be a repository of the module content in the form of lecture notes and slides, but to show how the different ideas covered in the module related to each other. This meant that the individual pages had to be fairly short, and focussed on links, rather than content. Philosophy, by its nature, tends to be discursive, and relies on the reader making the connections through a knowledge of the background to the issues being discussed. This was, in a sense, the main rationale for the project, in so far as the students taking this module did not have that background knowledge. Therefore, the links had to be made explicit (in fact, hypertext links are probably the best way of doing this). However, this made the task of writing the material for the individual pages harder, as it is difficult to express complex ideas briefly.
There are philosophical texts that are written in a compressed format. The Tractatus and The Philosophical Investigations spring to mind. Intriguingly, there are hypertext versions of both at http://www.kfs.org/~jonathan/witt/tlph.html and http://users.rcn.com/rathbone/lwtocc.htm respectively, suggesting that the hypertext format works well with ideas expressed in this way. However, they could not be said to constitute a model for the website discussed here. The process I used started with the topics covered in the lectures for the module. In collaboration with the lecturers who delivered these lectures, I broke each lecture up into between 5 and 10 topics. So, for instance, the lecture which covered the sociology of knowledge was broken up into Merton, Kuhn, critique of Kuhn, sociology of science, the 'strong programme' and actor-network theory. These sub-topics formed the basis for the individual web pages. Before being coded as html they were written on index cards. An initial set of about 40 cards was created. These were then all placed on a large table to attempt to draw the connections between them. This also proved to be harder than it might appear, as it was difficult to keep track of which connection had already been made. Connections to other cards/pages were noted at the bottom of the card. It was at this point that the first phase of coding and site-building took place. The grant enabled me pay a student studying computer science to write the html to create the individual web pages and links.
This proved to be the next practical problem: explaining the website and its function to a non-philosopher. As I tried to do this, it became clear that he did not, conceptually, see the website as I did, in terms of interlinked ideas, but in terms of a data structure (Standish 1980) ; a fundamental concept for a programmer, but one which I struggled to remember. This proved to be more successful at explaining what I want than trying to give a computer scientist a crash course in epistemology. Once I explained (and he understood) the site as a data structure, he was able to work quickly and efficiently to produce the pages. At this point, the website was 'released ' to the module team for comments. This generated a new list of pages to be created and links to be included. I wrote most of the content for the new pages myself, but this time five were written by another member of the team.
Additional features
The main additional feature implemented at this stage was a timeline, originally written by a member of the module team. This showed the historical development of the main themes of the module, with key thinkers shown in their historical context. It can be seen at http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/nursing/students/research/social_science/timeline.php. I did not appreciate until after the website was complete that this use of a historical approach would signify to some that we were 'Continental' rather than analytic philosophers. Neither myself not the module team have any clear allegiance, and it was not my intention to identify the project with any particular approach.
A feature which probably should have been included, but was abandoned due to its complexity, was some sort of concept map, which would reprint the various ideas and connections graphically. It is possible that this sort of representation may help certain types of students to understand these ideas better than a more text-based approach. I was quite attracted by something akin to 'The Great Bear' by Simon Patterson, (the picture based on the London Underground map). I hope to develop this in the future.
The final website
The module website created to help these students (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/nursing/students/research/social_science/index.php) is about making the connections between the various topics in the module, and showing how philosophy is an ongoing debate between different thinkers and schools. This is difficult to achieve in the lectures (and hard for these students). Topics are broken into 'bite-sized chunks', in common with other e-learning approaches in the University of Nottingham School of Nursing (see, for instance, http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/nursing/sonet/index.php). The material included (over 50 individual pages) is richly interconnected, taking full advantage of the Internet in its original manifestation as hypertext.
Evaluation
The formal evaluation of the website, via a survey, is reported below (and Timmons 2008). However, some interesting points were made by students informally, which were not covered in the main evaluation. The first of these was that the website showed that the ideas covered in the module were connected, and that those connections were important. This concept, which seemed so obvious to the module team, was, up until that point, unclear to some of the students. Some students also appreciated that the team were making an effort on their behalf. For them, the website said, symbolically, that the module team acknowledged that the subject was difficult, and that we were prepared to make an effort ourselves to help students make progress.
In addition to the survey another technique that I should probably have used in the evaluation is the kind of simple usability testing suggested by Nielsen (2000) who argues that fairly simple observation of as few as five users can generate almost all the useful usability information that can be gathered about a website.
Evaluation data are given below. Evaluation was done using the University of Nottingham School of Nursing's e-learning evaluation instrument, to enable comparison with other e-learning projects within the School of Nursing. 12 students returned surveys (out of 20 on the module). Questions marked with an asterisk allowed multiple answers.
| At home | At university | Elsewhere | ||
| Where do you have access to the Internet?* | 8 | 9 | 2 | |
| Only used by me | Shared with family | Shared with others | ||
| The computer I use is*: | 4 | 5 | 4 | |
| Very high | High | Low | Very low | |
| How do you rate your confidence in using computers? | 2 | 8 | 2 | |
| How do you rate your confidence in using MS Office? | 2 | 8 | 2 | |
| How do you rate your confidence in using the web? | 3 | 8 | 1 | |
| How do you rate your confidence in using multimedia? | 3 | 4 | 5 | |
| Yes | No | |||
| Any problems in accessing the module website? | 4 | 8 | ||
| Strongly agree | Agree | Disagree | Strongly disagree | |
| Was the website clear about its purpose? | 4 | 8 | ||
| Was the website easy to navigate? | 3 | 8 | 1 | |
| Did it introduce new concepts/language clearly? | 3 | 8 | 1 | |
| Would you recommend the module website? | 4 | 8 | ||
| Should there be more of these websites in other modules? | 3 | 8 | 1 | |
| Was the content appropriate for the course? | 4 | 8 | ||
| Was the content well integrated? | 3 | 8 | 1 | |
| Was the content pitched at the right level? | 3 | 9 | ||
| I enjoyed being able to learn on my own | 4 | 8 | ||
| The website helped me address specific gaps in my knowledge | 2 | 10 | ||
| The website helped me meet the requirements of the course/module | 1 | 10 | 1 | |
| The website helped me retain knowledge in this area | 3 | 8 | 1 |
These data are encouraging, in so far as they are almost exclusively positive. The difficulties in accessing the website were all due to an incorrect URL being published in an early version of the module handbook.
Using the 'CAMEL' model of tangible benefits from e-learning (Ferrell et al 2007), the website provided benefits for students in terms of student achievement. Overall marks were higher on the module than in previous years. While this cannot be directly attributed to the website, and is certainly a product of several factors, the website may have contributed to this improvement.
Possible future developments
Among the future developments actively under consideration by the module team is the transfer of the platform to the University of Nottingham standard VLE, Blackboard. An idea which was initially considered as part of this project, and will be implemented in the future, is using the existing website as the basis for a wiki, with contributions from both students and the module team.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to:
- The module team (Dr. Alison Edgley, Prof. Mark Avis, Prof. Nicky James (Nursing) Dr Tony Fitzpatrick (Sociology and Social Policy), and especially to the module convener, Dr Alastair Morgan (School of Nursing).
- The University of Nottingham School of Nursing web team, Ms Cherry Poussa and Mr Aaron Fecowycz.
- Mr Anton Kouprianov (Nottingham Trent University), who did much of the initial coding.
- All of the students on the module.
References
Brooks, F., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1975).
Ferrell et al, CAMEL Tangible Benefits of E-Learning Project Final Report (JISC, 2007).
Lamb, D., 'Successful e-Learning Applications: PRS Funded Projects Report', Discourse vol. 6, no. 1, (autumn 2006) pp. 63-70.
Morgan, A., Timmons, S., Edgley, A. and Park, J., What Impact does the Post-graduate Philosophy of Social Science Module have on Post-graduate Students' Learning? (Report to the Staff and Educational Development Unit, University of Nottingham, 2008).
Mossley, D., (ed.) The Challenges of using the World-Wide Web in Teaching History of Science (Leeds: Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies, Learning and Teaching Support Network 2003).
Nielsen, J., Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity (Indianapolis: New Riders Publishing, 2000).
Standish, T., Data Structure Techniques (Reading, MA: Addison- Wesley, 1980).
Return to vol. 8 no. 2 index page
This page was originally on the website of The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies. It was transfered here following the closure of the Subject Centre at the end of 2011.
