MERLOT Award Confirms That Physics Professors Are "Web Wide" Education Leaders
The Physlets team -- (front) Mario Belloni with (back) Wolfgang Christian and Melissa Dancy.
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9/25/2002
Contact: Bill Giduz 704/894-2244 or bigiduz@davidson.edu
An international consortium that helps educators find and use online resources has awarded one of its three top prizes for educational software to Davidson professors Wolfgang Christian and Mario Belloni for their work on "Physlets®."
Editors at the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) declared that Physlets® are the best online resource to help students understand the unseeable world of waves, particles, and forces.
Professor Wolfgang Christian, who has developed Physlets during the past decade at Davidson, emphasized that they represent a new teaching paradigm that finally takes advantage of technology. He commented, "Davidson and many other institutions have spent millions in wiring the campus and buying hardware and software, but how much impact has it really had on the education? Is it better, or just different? Our experience and research shows that at least in the area of physics, Physlets® are helping students learn better."
Physlets® are small computer programs that simulate concepts such as the Doppler effect, optics, binary stars, the moment of inertia of solids, rocket propulsion, and the conversion of kinetic energy to thermal energy. Christian created them to overcome the inadequacies of other multimedia learning methods by making them authentic, adoptable, and adaptable.
Physlets® are not based on proprietary software, but are written using HTML, Java, and JavaScript—flexible Internet standards that are likely to prevail for years to come. They are also available for free for noncommercial use, inviting educators to adapt them to their own curricula and develop new modules to enrich the thousands of existing Physlet®-based exercises.
MERLOT is a National Science Foundation-funded digital library that provides peer-reviewed evaluations of learning material, sample assignments, and links to people with common interests in a discipline. MERLOT reviewers in ten disciplines ranging from world languages, to history, to mathematics considered more than 8,000 educational software resources in the awards program. One resource was chosen as a winner in each discipline, and then the MERLOT editorial board chose three of those for "Editors Choice" top awards. Physlets® won in the physics discipline, and won again as an Editor’s Choice. Results are available at http://taste.merlot.org/awards2002/.
Bruce Mason, editor of MERLOT’s physics discipline board, said Physlets® are unique among other resources because of their comprehensiveness. "There is a huge range of things you can do with them," he said. "A lot of the resources on MERLOT address a single concept. But Physlets® can support practically a whole undergraduate physics curriculum, as well as many graduate topics."
Mason noted that Christian, Belloni, and Visiting Assistant Professor Melissa Dancy, who is a physics education researcher, are developing Physlets® with close consideration for how students learn. He commented, "After 25 years of examination we’ve found that the best way for students to learn physics concepts is through hands-on exercises. They have to be able to move things around and get engaged. They don’t learn if you just give them a set of equations and tell them to solve something."
Mario Belloni teaches Physlets to a summer workshop for high school and college physics teachers.
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Patricia Allen, an associate professor of physics at Appalachian State University, said Physlets® require students to employ thinking skills, rather than just make calculations. "Physlets® are presented so that you have to figure out what you need to measure before you can start taking measurements and answering your questions," she said.
"Physlets® present virtual experiments, like shooting a ball across a room, that are very much like what you do in a physical lab. But students don’t have an equation to work with. Physlets® permit them to take measurements of the variables like time and distance, and see how changes in variables produce different results. They challenge students to figure out what we mean by terms like ‘velocity’ rather than just calculating it from a formula. As they succeed with the exercises, they internalize the concepts much more deeply."
As proud as he is of the MERLOT recognition, Christian sees it as just a very helpful step toward his overall goal. "We want to be leaders at the national level in physics education. Period," he asserted.
That ambition requires careful management of an entire strategy of curriculum development, publication, educational outreach, and education research.
Christian, Belloni, and Dancy have worked to prove that Physlets® help students learn, disseminated them at no charge to encourage users to customize them for their local needs, engaged in a broad education program to raise awareness and acceptance of Physlets®, and collaborated with a major publisher, Prentice-Hall, to broaden their distribution.
That strategy has raised Physlets® above the "signal to noise" point, so that most of the 12,000 or so physics instructors nationwide are aware of them as a valid learning tool. Christian and his collaborators have presented scores of talks at national conferences, including Belloni’s invited appearance last summer at a prestigious Gordon Research Conference. The team has also published two books in a unique arrangement with Prentice-Hall—Physlets: Teaching Physics with Interactive Curricular Material and Just-in-Time Teaching: Blending Active Learning with Web Technology.
Prentice-Hall has published the books under a new paradigm for that company. In most cases, publishers of instructional books that incorporate educational software require that it be proprietary. However, Christian recognized that the best way to encourage the adoption of interactive teachings methods in the physics community would be to maintain Physlets® as an open system that users could freely adapt and change.
Prentice-Hall granted that concession, leaving Physlets® free for educators to use individually in their own classrooms, but protected its own interests by retaining exclusive commercial rights to use the material in the higher education market.
Alison Reeves, executive editor for the publisher’s physics and astronomy list, explained that the arrangement pays off for Prentice-Hall because Physlets® are incorporated into its five physics textbooks and their associated Web sites. "If teachers are familiar with Physlets® and like them, then it is an added value and convenience to have them in customized websites to go with our books. Professors can go to Christian’s site and create their own set of Physlets® and associated problems for their course, but we have already done that work for them."
Davidson received a $500,000 National Science Foundation grant last summer that is directing Physlets® outreach more directly toward students, ensuring that Physlets® become a long-term, accepted tool rather than just another technological flash in the pan. The grant funds development of a workbook and CD that includes about five hundred Physlet®-based activities covering all areas of introductory physics, and development of new Physlet® material for upper-level students. The grant will also finance more comprehensive studies of their effectiveness.
Christian and his collaborators receive no royalties from Physlets®, since they are distributed for free. He is motivated instead by the prospect of a lasting legacy in the field. "We’ll have faculty, students, and developers creating their own Physlet®-based material, which gives the program sustainability beyond my own professional life," he said.
Davidson is a highly selective independent liberal arts college for 1,600 students. Since its establishment in 1837, the college has graduated 23 Rhodes Scholars and is consistently ranked in the top ten liberal arts colleges in the country by U.S. News and World Report magazine. Davidson is engaged in "Let Learning Be Cherished," a $250 million campaign in support of student financial assistance, academic resources, and community life.
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