OWL goes national

Homework may be a critical component of learning but it can be a source of frustration for faculty—especially when it becomes a time-sink. Now computer science professors can avoid that angst by taking advantage of OWL, the Online Web-based Learning tool. The computer science homework package is being offered nationwide this fall as an accompaniment to Thomson Higher Education’s textbooks.

The new computer science package is one in a series of comprehensive Web-based homework systems developed by the Center for Educational Software Development (formerly CCBIT). “It’s a labor-saving device for faculty and it’s a more effective way to learn,” said David Hart, director of the center and one of OWL’s creators. OWL was designed to encourage what educators call mastery learning, said Hart. Students work as long as they need to master each concept and must be able to demonstrate that they have a handle on it before moving onto the next unit. The exercises encourage critical thinking and analytical skills.

Shortly after OWL’s inception, a physics package was added to the curricula and since then the online learning tool has been revised and expanded to be used by more than 20 departments and thousands of students at UMass Amherst. In 2001 Thomson Higher Education began offering the chemistry package nationally with their textbooks. More than 200 colleges and universities across the country now use OWL in one form or another, said Hart.

Professors can customize OWL’s content to their course or syllabus, mix and match questions, or create their own via an authoring interface. In the database behind OWL there are more than 600 questions correlated to specific computer science textbooks. The computer science package stands out in that it gives automatic feedback on student-submitted code. It also has several projects that students can return to, building on previous work. For an insurance project, for example, students start with next to nothing and end up creating an electronic prototype of an insurance form.

Students purchase the package along with their course textbooks and then log onto OWL through a Web browser. When students submit a response to an assignment question, OWL automatically grades their response and displays the correct answer along with helpful hints about where they went wrong. For computer science OWL assignments this includes fragments of Java code that are automatically checked for compilation and correctness. And if a student is stumbling with a particular concept or task, they can repeat an assignment; OWL will generate a new question set each time.

“OWL is evaluation with teeth,” said Professor Robert Moll, a creator of the computer science OWL. “It tells the student why they are right or wrong and gives meaningful feedback, in real-time.”