Understanding the Learning Environment
Factors of the Learning Environment
Planning your class requires consideration of your students'
previous experience, current skills, and their attitudes
towards using technology as well as
the hardware and software available to them, the speed of their
connection to the network, and the capabilities of the server your
course materials will be on.
Evaluating Your Environment
Student Experience & Attitudes
- Have your students used computers for work, or just for games?
- Are your students comfortable working with computers?
Do they feel reasonably in control of what they are doing?
- Can your students express themselves well at a keyboard
(writing email, using a wordprocessor, etc.)
- Can your students conceptualize and navigate through a web of
interconnected information?
- Do your students know how to systematically approach learning
a new body of knowledge?
Student Skills
- Have students used computers in education before?
- Can they use a browser?
- Have they used electronic mail?
- Properly install software?
- Properly configure connections?
- Save, move, and delete files?
- Create HTML?
- Create and manipulate graphics?
Hardware & Software
- Which browser?
- How fast is computer?
- Are students required to have a computer?
- Will students work primarily on campus or from home?
- Are campus computers readily available to students?
- How much RAM does computer have?
- How much disk space is available?
Internet Access
- Does your campus provide support for home computers?
- Are there SLIP/PPP dial-in services with sufficient access?
- How fast is connection to the Internet?
- How reliable is the connection?
- Does speed of connection vary depending on time of day or
day of week?
- How expensive is the connection for the student?
Server Capabilities
- What type of server is it? (http, ftp, gopher, etc.)
- How stable is the server?
- How fast is the server? Does its response time vary
significantly during the day?
- How much disk space will you have on the server?
- Are there standard CGI scripts available on the
server that might be useful to you?
- Is the server configured to prevent other accounts
on the server from hogging all the resources?
© Copyright 1997 University of Washington