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Case Study 1 Of Existing Blog Weblog As A Educational Tool
The Nuffield Foundation started a weblog looking for ideas to support students taking their chemistry courses and raise the participation level of online students. Creating a www.chemistry-react.org was their first experiment with blogs.
www.chemistry-react.org proved to be an incredibly popular online genre. Soon they realized that how easy was it to use - no user names to remember and no complicated tools to learn how to use etc. Chemistry-react like all the best blogs became a web page packed with great links and useful annotations.
Often blogs are used as a topical focal point for online communities, proving to be a success where discussion boards or forums have failed. Because the content is news oriented, it means there is always a reason to return to the site. Because the content is time oriented, it is very easy to catch up with what has happened since your last visit.
A blog was good fit for the students taking the chemistry courses too. Taking a course is something that happens over time. As a student, one week you are looking at polymers, the next at acids. All the students around the world will pretty much be experiencing the same challenges at the same time. The blog could support this process.
Though the blog content created became popular with the students, blog owners realized that the commenting feature wasnt used as much as we all expected.
The story would have ended there, except for the fact that a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section was added to the blog and it was massively successful. Students ask intelligent questions and that in turn became useful content which brought the students back for more. Interestingly, the blog has evolved into a news delivering part of a FAQ site.
Nuffield hit upon a format that is popular, productive and participative. They are now developing tools to help the blog team be more effective at answering questions and improving the usability of the FAQs themselves, by letting the system learn about chemistry questions and answers. |
