First Forays into Online Teaching

When I first started teaching as a graduate student, I saw potential in online tutorials to help my students learn some content at times when they were ready to learn it.

It started with a tutorial on Bioinformatics, guiding students through the completion of an assignment.  We, the TAs, had been teaching the same material in the “conventional way” for years, and invariably were swamped by emails from panicked students the night before the assignment was due.  This was because they hadn’t really paid much attention when we initially covered the topic in class – that information wasn’t particularly relevant to their lives at the time.  Instead, these students needed guidance at a time when we simply couldn’t provide it.

The online tutorial was my solution to this problem.  It provided links to the appropriate bioinformatics tools, and guided students through selecting the appropriate settings in order to generate the information they would need to produce their assignments.  

Once I became a lecturer in the course, I developed a new Bioinformatics Assignment – one intended to introduce a greater variety of Bioinformatics tools – and thus also needed a new version of the Online Tutorial.  In developing this updated tutorial, i tried to break up the content over several pages, and to include more images.  At the time, loading speed was still a bit of a concern (not everyone had broadband internet at home yet  ***), so I didn’t embed the larger images in the tutorial, but instead I linked to the images so that students could choose whether they wanted to see them.  Any images embedded in the tutorial were cropped and optimized to be small for quick loading.

This strategy changed over time. As internet bandwidth became less of a concern, I made an effort to include as much visual information as possible in my tutorials. Some of the “newer” tutorials, like the ones seen on the course webpage from the Spring of 2007, contained numerous images (unfortunately not saved by the archive.org’s crawler) as well as several animated GIFs.

*** Also, optimizing pages for fast loading, and minimizing “frills” was a bit of a web development habit for me at that point.