Charles M. Slem and Ned Schultz
Cal Poly
San Luis Obispo
cslem@calpoly.edu
Introduction
Despite the proliferation of World Wide Web based resources for college courses (Baer,
1998), a significant number of students enter a course as computer novices or novices
in web competency. As more courses adopt web resources, the ability of these novices
to rapidly gain sufficient web competency becomes an increasingly important concern.
The status of "novice" may be associated with factors such as access to
computers and the internet, gender, attitudes about computer based instructional
technology, perceived ease of use, and perceived usefulness of resources in achieving
student goals (e.g. Anderson & Hornby, 1996). Each of these suggest different
intervention strategies. In addition, the typically very limited campus resources
for training and remediation suggest identifying those characteristics that distinguish
novices who could not develop competency on their own from those who develop competency
without an additional intervention. In that way, scarce university resources could
be more appropriately targeted.
Within this context, the purpose of this study was to determine what factors distinguished
novices who became heavy users of course web resources from novices who rarely or
never used the resources before the first examination of a large introductory psychology
course of 500 students. Comprehensive web resources had been developed to support
the course (Slem & Schultz, 1997). Components included lecture outlines, links
to library and related campus resources, sample exams, chapter outlines, concept
synopses, graphs and figures, definition of terms, and topical world wide web sites.
The resources had been designed to be simple and easy to navigate. Aside from a five
minute demonstration and encouragement to see the instructor or a campus computer
lab assistant if students had any problems, no further training was given. Although
all students theoretically had access via campus computer labs, the material included
in the resources was available in paper form so that it was possible to do well in
the class without using the web resources.
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