Internet Techniques in the Social Sciences

List of Ideas

Course Catalog

Here is an example of the course catalog from the Hamilton College Anthropology Dept.. One concern that's been voiced is whether the online version can be considered the "official" course catalogue for purposes of graduation requirements. Also the question arises as to whether it should be continuously updated or instead "frozen" to match the printed version.

Departmental Brochures

A departmental brochure online can serve the purpose of introducing the department with the advantage over paper that it can be updated easily and inexpensively. You would probably want to do as the and put all the info on one long page, so that it can be printed easily. If each subheading were linked off to separate Web pages, then printing the entire "brochure" becomes problematic. Examples: Hamilton College Anthropology Dept., Duke University Political Science Dept. Undergraduate Brochure,

Class Schedules

Class schedules are an obvious item for Internet dissemination. Here is an example from UCLA's History Dept.. Where possible it might make your life as a Web administrator easier to directly download this information from the campus administrative mainframe and not worry about formatting it especially for the Web.

Course Descriptions

Putting a department's course descriptions onto the Internet makes it easier for current and prospective students to plan. And even staff and faculty can find it convenient at times. Here is a graduate course listing from the Marquette University History Dept.

Faculty Lists and Home Pages

These often start out as departmental lists of faculty, sometimes including research interests, office hours, phone numbers, email addresess, courses, etc. Then when individual faculty members start creating their own home pages on the Web, links to those are added as well. Example: UCLA History Department Faculty

Class Web Pages

Many of the following ideas you will read about are found grouped together in class Web pages. Putting class material up onto the Web has benefits for students as well as faculty in that it provides a 24 hour a day online "center" for the class in which supporting materials can to be found and in some cases interaction with the instructor and other students can take place. These sites often start with a syllabus and can include sample test questions, links to recommended and assigned online readings, "discussion rooms" and anything else the instructor creates. In many cases, these start at the instructor's initiative, but another approach is for a department or school to decide that every class will have a home page, with at least certain minimal information, which the instructor can build onto.

Course Syllabus

Generally this is one of the first and easiest items to be put online. Examples: Prof. Geary's History 121b THE HIGH MIDDLE AGES course at UCLA

Restricting Access to Course Syllabi and Supplements - Restricted Access

Some universities, like Yale, restrict access to their course syllabi and supplements to on-campus only. This might assuage some faculty fears about making their course material available to a wider audience than intended. This kind of restriction is done through limiting which subdomains of the Internet are allowed to access which directories of your Web or Gopher server. Most any type of Web or Gopher server software allows this. Another technique is to put a password on a section. Then just give the password to those you want to allow entry. That way you don't have to restrict your users to a geographical area. That's what Prof. Katz did in a Sociology classes at UCLA. The student feedback areas are password controlled to give them more freedom in their comments.

Summary of the Lectures or Course Outline

Examples: Prof. Geary's History 121b THE HIGH MIDDLE AGES course at UCLA.

Sample Exams

As supplementary material probably nothing will evoke as much interest as sample exams. Examples: UCLA History 121b look at an old midterm exam,

Interactive Quiz

Online quizzes can be used to give students a chance to test out their knowledge of the material. These examples from an econometrics class taught by Prof. Cameron at UCLA were done as CGI scripts in the Perl language.

Annotated Sample Statistical Output

In classes where the students will be running statistical programs and then analyzing the output, it might be helpful to show the students what to look for and what different parts of the output mean.

Display Student Projects

It may very well affect the effort taken when students know that their class projects will be posted on the Interenet. Examples: UCLA History 121b THE HIGH MIDDLE AGES student projects

Online Forums

In this example (forum for students enrolled in History 200C, UCLA) from Prof. Geary of UCLA required students to post a position paper each week, which the other students were required to read before the class meeting. Others have used online forums as a way for students to exchange comments with each other and the instructor, in some cases anonymously.

Electronic Reserve Shelf

This paper by Manfred Kuechler of Hunter College for the section of "Sociology and Computers" at the 1996 ASA (American Sociology Association) meetings in New York, July 1996 describes using the Internet to mirror the traditional reserve shelf or folder for a particular class in the college library. The Electronic Reserve Shelf (ERS) -- Using the WWW as a Teaching Resource

Important Contributors in a Field

The idea here would be to list and solicit names and contributions of important members of a field of study. While I haven't seen this done in the Social Sciences yet, this example of Contributions of Women to Physics shows how this might be done. Notice that they allow and request contributions from viewers of the Web site.

Tools and Utilities