Distance Education Degree Program

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The foundation to the web-based distance education degree program in exercise physiology centered on the development of Internet-oriented lectures and practice quizzes. Additionally, students were instructed to view video-based presentations and perform outside laboratory assignments in exercise physiology on their own. The software we used in developing our lectures was Adobe Pagemill. This software was found to be the most users friendly. Most graphics, illustrations, digital movies, and other images can be dragged into Pagemill web pages without having a vast knowledge of HTML language. This saved the developers a significant amount of time and energy.

Additionally, Microsoft PowerPoint 97 was used in creating outlined lectures in HTML format. The advantage to PowerPoint 97 is that the HTML saving feature allows web site designers to transfer traditional PowerPoint presentations to HTML presentations with the click of a button. PowerPoint directs one through a Wizard (series of questions) and upon completion, the presentation is created automatically into a bundled file, ready to be downloaded onto a server. Due to the complexities of integrating digital movies, audio advanced images, and e-mail links; some HTML language changes were made after the presentations were created.

Cognitive Evaluations
Student's cognitive abilities were evaluated through two written examinations and five web-based practice quizzes. Due to the nature of the exercise physiology course materials, the instructor required that the students return to campus and take their mid-term and final examinations. A preliminary investigation was accomplished by administering one hundred and thirty True/False and multiple choice questions to students and comparing the results to those from the same tests given in the Fall of 1998 when the course was offered in a lecture-based format.

It was expected that students in lecture format would outperform a matched sample of students in web-based format on a midterm examination. A focused comparison of performance on a 130 item examination confirmed the hypothesis that students in lecture-based instruction generally outperformed students in web-based instruction. Students in the lecture-based format scored 74.09, SD=18.64 while students in the web-based averaged 70.29 SD=19.90 T(130)=1.58, p [is less than].05.

Further comparisons of performance at the individual item level revealed that students in the lecture-based format outperformed those in the web-based format on 57.7% of the test items. The investigators suggest that the pattern of performance on individual items will be useful in the future for exploring the extent to which particular curriculum items are more or less suited for web-based or lecture-based instructional formats. From the data analyzed in this preliminary study, it appears that the web-based class in exercise physiology was able to deliver content at a level comparable to that of the traditional class lecture-based format.