Using the Web to create student dialogue outside the lecture hall: an empirical evaluation

Dialogue can be an important instructional activity. However, the practicalities of university engineering education require that dialogue must occur outside the lecture hall and between students. This study required students to post their work and to comment on others' work as a form of asynchronous dialogue. This format also allowed the instructor to supervise the dialogue, preventing misinformation and keeping student effort high. To assess this method, two sessions of an industrial engineering course "Introduction to Human-Machine Systems" were compared. Both sessions were identical except for the use of the web for dialogue. Grades were generally not found to be different between the two sessions. Significant differences were found in the institute-administered course evaluation: students in the "dialogue" session gave higher ratings concerning all elements of the course, including aspects not originally hypothesized to be affected by dialogue. Likewise, student comments suggest several benefits of this form of dialogue.