How This Site Developed: During Spring, 1997, undergraduate majors in Exercise Science designed home pages to replace the traditional term paper for Exercise Science 597, Exercise and Energy Metabolism. No student had prior experience designing home pages, and only one-half of the students had prior experience "surfing" the web. Doris Peterson of the Office of Information Technologies at the University arranged for the class to participate in one weekly session (2 hours) using Microsoft Font Page to design individual web pages. The intial session consisted of a one hour tutorial; from then on studnets designed their own pages. The week prior to the tutorial, Professor Katch presented general information about the web. Topics included how obtain student authorization codes, how to log on to the web, browsers, URL's, doing searches, using FTP, switching between the 5-College library system and the host computer, saving pictures, bookmarking sites, and downloading text and site information.

The first assignment required students to send an e-mail to Professor Katch describing their topic (students had previously selected a topic of their choice from a list of possible topics). In the e-mail, students included 5 URL's from surfing the web (to provide experience surfing the net and location information in the exercise sciences). At the end of the first week prior to the tutorial, students had devoted approximately 5 hours to web surfing (on a computer of their choice and location). This amount of time was deemed sufficient preparation for the upcoming tutorial.

Expectations For The Computer Project: The expectation was straightforward: pull together resource about their topic using books, abstracts, pictures, and URL locations. The idea was to "link" resource information and provide extensive content information about their topic. Students did not have to follow a formal structure in creating their site. On non-computer classroom days, students "collected" information about their topic. They then "uploaded" this information from a floppy disc to their project page during classroom instruction.

During the semester, students discovered how to locate and incorporate animated gifs into their project page, so many of their sites now include "hot" animated gifs. This is an example of an animated gif:

Student Evaluations: Student feedback about their web experience can only be described as overwhelmingly exhuberent! Students loved the experience, and believed the "hands-on" guidence enabled them to achieve a level of excellence they would not have accomplished using the traditional term paper approach. While the experience certainly was "fun," students found the experience challenging and demanding (but without the heartaches and last-minute rush to complete a term paper).The following examples are taken directly from student evaluations about their experience:

"Now I am able to feel more comfortable working on a computer. I'n not afraid to tackle a project that requires computer work. I have a new found interest in computers now."

"Computers are the future. It just makes the project much more interesting."

"Best educational experience of the semester."

Professor Evaluation: Student exhuberence did not exceed that of my own. I was absolutely thrilled with the opportunity to offer this experience as a regular part of the course, particularly because I participated as they did in the weekly sessions, designing my own home page and this page. Being a die-hard Macintosh enthusiast, I was not looking forward to working with a pc. In fact, I had never even turned one on! What I found, however, was a relatively quick learning curve to Windows 95 and a moderate degree of success with Microsoft Front Page. I still expereince difficulty navigating through the maze of directories and unevenness of organization of the pc file structure in relation to the Mac.On a ten point rating scale, FrontPage would earn a 6 in comparison to ease of use for Mac programs (drag and drop, importing and exporting files, editing photos within FrontPage). That's actually a pretty good score from someone who had expected less. Having used both FrontPage for Windows and Mac, and pagemill 2.0, pagemill 2.0 would rank first. It is a superior product on the Mac than FrontPage on the pc. However, many new products are emerging, and should quickly "up the ante" for ease of use and overall performance. One such product is GoLive CyberStudio (http://www.golive.com).

The Future: I hope to include the Internet experience in all future classes. I am thrilled with the progress the students made during the semester, and would encourage others to just "dive" in as soon as possible, particular professors who have not yet tried to link aspects of classroom instruction to some aspect of the Internet experience. My plans are to upload lecture materials, quizzes, practice exams, Powerpoint presentations, and self-paced materials to assist the student with their classroom experiences. Taking a peek into the future, I believe that traditional lecture methods will soon be enhanced by a wide variety of Internet experiences, including live video, sound, movies, and "visual reality." I hope my predictions come true much sooner than later. By the year 2000, I expect that a majority of a students "learning" time will involve the Internet in one way or another.