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The WebQuest Design Process

as used and developed by Tom March
Originally created October 30, 1997. Updated October 6, 1998 (and still valid!)

Click on a section to get in the flow.

WebQuest Design Phase 1
WebQuest Design Phase 2
WebQuest Design Phase 3
WebQuest Design Flow

The WebQuest Design Process - Phase 1

Before you begin...

If you're new to the notion of WebQuests, a couple online articles might help you understand the strategy. First, back in 1995 Professor Bernie Dodge posted Some Thoughts about WebQuests. A more recent rationale is Why WebQuests? This introductory article attempts to dispel a few myths as well as point out the instructional strengths behind the WebQuest strategy.

In short, WebQuests are designed to bridge the transition between teacher-led instruction and self-directed learning by students. The hope is that through the scaffolding WebQuests provide, both teachers and students will gain experience in a learning-centered approach and internalize some of the helpful strategies.

a few words about "Flow"

First off, this is not necessarily a linear process. So if you feel yourself needing to surf the 'Net first to help find a topic, great. Maybe you want to begin with challenging / thematic questions and then work back to the curriculum. Sounds fine. The main imperative here is to muster your interests, needs, and resources in an effort to get into that vibrant "Flow" experience. You know the state: it's when you're in the process of something fulfilling that's challenging you to do your best. Writing a poem, playing tennis, line dancing, calculating a solution, designing a WebQuest...

Feel free to skip around this phase of the process and jot notes when the ideas and insights arise. Some like to use some brainstorming software like Inspiration to cluster their thoughts. Others still turn to backs of napkins or yellow legal pads.

choose & chunk the topic

If you want some ideas on possible starting points for choosing a topic, you can try out the Idea Machine. It will prompt you to consider some areas like student needs, technology, upcoming events, local interests, etc. It's designed to help you begin brainstorming.

How do you know when you have a good topic? The best topics seem to be large enough that you, the designer, have some wiggle room to discover what's most interesting. For example, look at the unit level (The Civil War), not the activity level (the Battle of Bull Run). This will make it more likely for you to come across some really interesting Web sites that will add to your brainstorming.

Generally, a topic will be a good candidate for a WebQuest if it holds some inherent complexity. Once you have some ideas for topics, chunk them out into sub-categories by clustering. You might look for things like relationships to other topics, controversial issues, multiple perspectives about the topic, changing beliefs, unknowns, etc. This clustering will help you when it comes time to uncover your main question and devise roles for learners.

Identify Learning Gaps

Good instructional activities attempt to address students' needs. Once you've been teaching even one semester, you have a good idea about things that are difficult for students to learn. This is a good starting point for designing an instructional activity. Professor Allison Rossett has described a useful equation. Envision the optimal learning outcomes for a particular unit or activity. Then compare that to the actual outcomes. The learning gap is the difference between Optimals and Actuals. Given a curricular unit you'd like to develop, look for the learning gaps. Keep these handy for when you want to state the Question and Task for your WebQuest.

If the students' learning gap has mostly to do with knowledge, affective connection, or understanding concepts, you might be better off choosing a different format than a WebQuest. Take a look at Working the Web for Education to learn about formats that target these learning goals. If the gap has something to do with limited critical thinking abilities, pedestrian problem solving, or uncooperative learning groups, then it makes sense to design a WebQuest.

Inventory Resources

When you inventory your learning resources you're consciously collecting all the raw materials that COULD go into your WebQuest. Yes, this includes Web sites, but before we get to that, don't forget all the other things you might have available. If you haven't yet used the Idea Machine, this would be a good time. It will prompt you to consider about a variety of things that you might not think you have available. The main thing at this stage is to linger in the land of "what if." Later you will need to make choices that limit your options, but in this early design stage you never know what little thing could be the piece that brings the whole activity together. Examples of this little piece might be a certain software program you want to learn or a particular local/school interest or a colleague's expertise in white water rafting. You just can't tell about these things.

Part of the magic of creating Web-based activities is that you never know what you'll find on the Web. Sure there's a lot of garbage to sift through, but on any given topic, there can be one gem of a Web site that you didn't expect to find that create sparks for both the designer and future learners. Link Like You Mean it will give you some ideas on the types of links to look for and how you might use them.

In terms of finding good Web sites, there's no one way and a lot has to do with serendipity. A few pointers to help, though is to look through the Hotlist category in Blue Web'n or use your favorite search engine and look for someone else's hotlist on the topic. This will save you time. Finally, look back to yourself. Remember that list you clustered earlier. Those sub categories are also search terms, aren't they?

If you need an easy way to gather Web sites, you can use the Hotlisting feature of Filamentality (more on this in the design section on Creating Your WebQuest).

Decision: Uncover the Question

The single most important aspect of a WebQuest is its Question. Unless answering the question demands higher order thinking, you don't have a WebQuest. Another way to say this is: if there's a clear and easy or factually known answer to the question, this isn't a WebQuest. You can explore Uncovering the Question / Task to get an idea for the kinds of questions that have been successful.

You'll notice that the last box in this phase of the WebQuest Design Process isn't actually a box like the other three. The super-imposed diamond shape suggests that this section requires you to make a decision. The decision is, "Do you have what it takes to make a WebQuest?" Posing these questions will help you to elicit a positive response:

If you've answered yes to all the questions above, you're on the way to creating a great WebQuest!





WebQuest Design Flow

The WebQuest Design Process - Phase 2

overview

The second phase of the design process could also be called shaping, outlining, or drafting. This is the time to make sure you have all the right pieces before actually putting them together and then up on the Web.


Brainstorm Transformations

Bernie Dodge stood at the chalkboard in an empty classroom pointing to a row of three boxes he had just drawn. The first he'd labeled "learning inputs" and the last "learning outcomes." But the one in the middle excited him: "Transformations." The goings-on in the mids of learners that take the raw information and work with it until it's transformed into new knowledge, constructed into new meaning. From that day back in 1995, this has been the definitive focus of the WebQuest strategy.

The main thing you want to do at this stage of the design process is to brainstorm all the possible transformative cognitive tasks that could be involved with your Question. To gain some sense of what Bernie was grappling with, read his Active Learning on the WWW. If you're game and want to apply what you've learned, try the ITO Activity (Input - Transformation - Outcomes) that prompts you to look closely at the thinking tasks in several WebQuests.

a strong caveat

There are many Web-based activities online that don't require transformative thinking to complete. These are done by well-meaning and smart people. What likely happens is that the Question and Task COULD prompt this kind of cognition in expert thinkers (like those people designing them), but they're not structured in such a way as to require it. An example is the first Searching for China version 0.9. Although a person could learn a lot from it, they wouldn't have to. Most of the tasks involve a "step and fetch it" process (i.e., "Go get some info. Bring it back to me. Don't bother doing anything with it, just bring it on back.")

We've been waiting for a great constructivist resource, it would be a shame to waste it. If you haven't, now would be a good time to read Why WebQuests?


Identify Real World Feedback

Asking students to test their learning in the real world is one place Bernie Dodge and I differ. My thinking is that it's a fairly short step to take to make the WebQuest a truly authentic learning experience and therefore legitimize the students' efforts. But this had been my bias as a classroom teacher...

Because of email and the Web, it's never been easier for students to test their learning with others interested in the same topic. This is not to say that students should be shooting off email indiscriminantly, filling up busy people's mailboxes. But if you've ever (and I hope you have) been on the receiving end of some online support, info, or encouragement from a "friend" you've never met except via email, then you know how powerful that can be. So let's discuss a few suggestions to preserve this Golden Age of email a few years longer.

No "Can you tell me everything / anything..." emails

Who, let alone a busy person, could respond to the kind of emails students tend to write initially? It's a little bit insulting for two reasons: 1) it makes the expert do all the work while the student asked one little question. 2) If someone's an expert, how could they boil it down to one email response (he or she may have written a book, movie, or Web site on the topic!).

Send hypotheses and ask for opinions, not facts

A better solution is to have the students do all the work and then send their final, best thinking to someone for feedback. Use the students' expertise as a calling card. When someone receives a thoughtful and effortful request for a little feedback, people are more likely to respond. Ask for opinions, as facts can be gained from other sources. Expert opinions are precious.

How to find real world feedback?

Although there are pages to Ask an Expert, the real power of the Web is that behind every Web page is at least one real person. And they are usually pretty passionate or they wouldn't be posting a Web page. So try "looking behind" Web pages. Email addresses are often listed at the bottom of pages. By having students seek out their own "experts," they must think about who to ask, learn about that person's work, etc. Also, when students find their own, you're not sending entire classes to spam one poor soul's mailbox. This is the strategy used in Searching for China 2.0. It's also a nice idea to ask someone if they would be willing to help out before actually sending the request for feedback (and NEVER send unannounced attachments with email messages).

Another way to access "experts" is through listservs and newsgroups. Some people have been very successful using these with their students, but there's some pretty heavy overhead involved: lurking long enough to see if the list or group has anything to say about your topic (never post without lurking for a little while or expect to be flamed). Also, the decorum (or lack) of some newsgroups is legendary and just the kind of thing to fuel justifiable parent outrage.

A safer bet is to hook up with another school or classroom. Registries like ePals can get you connected to another school. Once you break the ice and find someone to get feedback from, you might want to maintain the relationship and do some collaborative projects / WebQuests together.

Don't forget the local

Real world feedback does not have to come from the Web. It's fairly easy and sidesteps scheduling problems, but student work can be given authentic and legitimate assessment through such local options as presentations, debates, and exhibitions to local experts, peers, cross age students, and parents.


Sort Links into Roles

Once you have collected maybe 10 - 15 robust and varied Web sites on the topic, it's time to try sorting them. Probably while you collected the sites you started to formulate some ideas as to how they might be divided. Try to chunk them out now and see what happens. Don't worry if the boundaries between the categories are a little fuzzy. There isn't a job that doesn't overlap into some other area of expertise. You might wonder how many roles to create, but that's usually self-evident. You can't force a role into being that you don't have resources for.

What you may find is that for some topics it works to divide the Web sites by their perspectives. This is often the case for controversial topics. The beauty of chunking out links by perspective is that it requires students to find their own truth amidst disagreement. Searching for China is an example of this. Other times, you may not find any disagreement, but the topic may be large or complex enough to divide the Web sites into jobs or tasks. An example of this is Tuskegee Tragedy. Part of the trick in cases like these is to choose jobs that are mirrored in the work or academic worlds.

After you've sorted your collection of Web resources, think about the students' background knowledge of the topic. Make sure they all start out on solid footing by doing one of three things: 1) Use learning activities prior to the WebQuest to prepare this fundamental knowledge on the subject. 2) Give each role at least one link that provides good background. 3) Engage students during the WebQuest process in some sort of "background for everyone" phase. This is easily done as in Donner Online or a separate activity as in Seaching for China.

Finally, there's never been a WebQuest designer who didn't have to go back and surf some more when it's discovered some role doesn't have a healthy enough set of links. Such is life this late in the 20th Century. I guess it's better than running out of room when you're chiseling a long word into a granite tablet... While you're at it, take a look to see if the content across the roles is roughly equivalent in its rigors. A little imbalance is realistic, but if one of the roles involves a lot more reading or harder material, that might be tough.


Decision: Define the Learning Task

The easiest way to think of the Learning Task is the students' physical product. Whereas the Question identifies what will go on in the minds of learners, the Task defines how that learning will materialize. So they definitely go hand-in-hand, but they decidedly different. You might want to go back to Uncovering the Question / Task to see examples.

Because the WebQuests on ozline.com / TomMarch.com have to live on the Web, they usually use writing email messages, creating HyperStudio stacks, or posting Web pages as the Tasks. But many WebQuests have prompted students to do such things as create a newsletter, post a mural, write and perform a play, or give a presentation. The best suggestion is to use the Task that you prefer. If you're not a craft person, skip the scissors and glue. If you want to learn a certain software, use it for the Task. If you're the Speech and Debate coach...

Now we get to the decision aspect of this phase. Because you already answered Yes to all the questions in the first phase, you're in good shape, but here are some critical questions you'll also want to answer in the affirmative:

If you've answered yes to all the questions above,
you're on the way to creating a great WebQuest!




WebQuest Design Flow

The WebQuest Design Process - Phase 3

overview

The final phase of the design process is actually the easiest. Now that you have gathered all the raw materials for your WebQuest and thought through its key features, now you get to put it all together. You'll probably experience of sense of momentum heading into the final stretch that will carry you toward ultimate and euphoric completion (that is if it's not already 2:00AM).


Write the Web Page

Write the Web page. Easier said then done? Well, not really. Back in the gray (background) days of the Web, people had to learn the funny tags of HTML. That's not really true today. A number of tools have sprung up that allow people to ignore HyperText Markup Language. The most obvious tools are WYSIWYG editors like Microsoft Frontpage, Claris Homepage, Macromedia Dreamweaver, etc. If you like using one of these programs, then simply open the WebQuest Template and begin adding your content. You can also use any WYSIWYG Blog like WordPress. If you want help adding cool titles to your template, here's a great graphics generator called Cool Text .

You may have heard of a friend named Filamentality. He's been sitting in a dark room in San Ramon, California spinning Web pages since March of '96. He'll be glad to help you surf for sites, give some pointers about creating your WebQuest, and even post it on the Web (for free). I guess he's trying hard to make friends.

Also look at a new friend introduced in 1999 called Web and Flow.

Finally if you are one of us hardcore HTML coders, just peel back the source on any WebQuest you really like, attribute and email the original author, and make it your own. If this sounds interesting, but you've never closed a tag, break the ice with a Quick and Dirty homepage.


Engage Learners

So if you thought "Write the Web page" was a bit nonchalant, "Engage Learners" must seem over the top. Easier said than done, huh? That's true. But, isn't this also what you attempt to do anytime you write a lesson plan, create an activity, facilitate a discussion, etc. So look to your own sense of your students, your teaching style, and your sense of interest and humor to find a way to pique curiosity (yes, one more time).

A couple things to keep in mind are that if the Question and Task are authentic you already have a lot going for you. Remember that everyone loves to feel they are involved in real learning. Also, realize that students will soon be using the killer Web sites you found for them. Another motivator in the waiting. So your main challenge is to write an engaging introduction that naturally leads into the Question / Task. After that the rest of the WebQuest is really about righting for clarity. You might try traditional attention-getters like anecdotes, examples, quotations, metaphors or scenarios to get the creative juices flowing.

Lastly, don't forget about the conclusion. Naturally it makes good semantic sense to return to whatever attention-getter you used in the introduction. This helps learners complete the cognitive link back to that initial thinking. Research has shown that we help students develop cognitive skills when we talk about them. So overtly discuss the transformative thinking the students engaged in and talk about what it was like (how it was hard, what was different, what were they used to, etc.). Finally, it's nice to include discussion of how what the students learned applies to other topics. If you can help students internalize and transfer these skills you've done a terrific job.


Scaffold Thinking

Remember all the emphasis on how the Question must prompt transformative thinking? Well, this is where it happens. But it's not magic and can't happen with a quick presto-change-o. It will take clarity in your thinking to guide learners toward higher level thinking.

The first step is to clearly lay out all the instructions for the phases on learning background information and developing expertise in the roles. This isn't tricky because it's really about knowledge acquisition. One tip is that is the roles will be challenging for the students to master, have the students in like roles work together. If the students are more advanced, keep students in like roles apart so that each can develop his or her own interpretation.

The tricky part of outlining the learning process comes when you want to prompt higher-order thinking. The cleanest way to do this is to make the transformative thinking happen when the students come back together after learning about their roles. It's the natural time because now you have individual experts ready to solve a common problem. The temptation is to simply say "share what you've learned and come to a common answer." I think this only happens in movies and other teachers' classes. It never happened in mine.

So focus on what instructions you give the group as they complete their Task (i.e., create their learning outcome). A main strategy we're developing is the use of visual organizers. One example is used in Searching for China's Group Process. A hexagonal shape is used to represent the "playing field" where the solutions must fall. By juxtaposing conflicting interests students are helped to see the impact of one force on its opposite.

Another visual strategy was used in the group process for Tuskegee Tragedy. Here a list of questions was posed to several topics that people had used in comparison to the Tuskegee Study. Because the Tuskegee Study was so obviously bad and wrong, some people linked their causes to this tragedy as a way to say, "See our plight is just as bad." The questions and comparisons in the WebQuest prompt students to see if this is true.

Another, more graphical comparison / contrast strategy is used in the new version of Eyes on Art (in the No Fear o' Eras activity). Here a Venn diagram, some questions, and a list guide students to defining the critical attributes of artistic eras.

In all these cases, it's always been helpful to simply ask (one more time), "Just what's going on in the minds of the learners?". Because that's where it's at. Here's where you make sure the Task elicits the desired cognition and addresses the learning Gap you identified at the beginning of this process. And you thought we did that just for fun.


Decision: Implement and Evaluate

You're there! You've got a solid WebQuest that you're ready to try out with students. If you've been moving through this design process you're in great shape. If you feel like getting a quick review you can use the WebQuest Designer's Checklist. For a more thorough once-over, use the BestWebQuest Rubric to check yourself. Also, if you don't have a rubric or some other assessment tool to let students see how they've done, you might try a variation on the Searching for China Rubric (remember, you can peel off the source code to either of the above rubric and add your own wording).

When it comes time to use your WebQuest with students, you have some choices in terms of delivery. If your district has a server, see about posting it there. If there isn't or it's bound up in red tape, you might post it on the Webspace that tends to come free with ISP services. If you can't get access to a server, remember Filamentality. He's got a few gigabytes to spare. Finally, you can simply run your WebQuest off a diskette, hard drive or intranet if you don't want to post your WebQuest at all.

Maybe you don't have access to the Net at your school? Look to the technology integration tips in Why WebQuests? for help. By the way, it's a good idea to "Web Whack" your site and its links as a back up.

Once you've tried out your WebQuest with students, spend time debriefing with them to find out how it went for them. Remember, we're planting the seeds of change & growth so that students will internalize some of these cognitive strategies and apply them to self-directed learning.

Part of the beauty of the Web is that you and others like you have gone to a lot of effort to create excellent learning experiences that are available for others to use. When you're happy with your WebQuest, it's a nice gesture to let others know about it. You can send a message to The WebQuest Page as Bernie offers a handy matrix of WebQuests by grade level and content area. You might submit your WebQuest to Blue Web'n to see if it will get posted in the database of Blue Ribbon educational Web sites. And our old friend Filamentality is still trying to please by offering a free registry of WebQuests and other Web-based activities. Post yours and look for WebQuests created by other teachers. Finally, you may be a member of an educational email list or discussion group. Let your colleagues know the URL of your latest creation.

After all that work, I'll bet you'll want to use your WebQuest again next year. Terrific! Be prepared though for the shifting strands of the Web to have moved a bit in a year. In other words, expect some broken links ("Link Rot") that you may be able to track down and others you'll have to find replacements for. And by the way, while you're re-surfing, you might as well identify any gaps between how you optimally envisioned the WebQuest working and how it actually turned out... Oops, sounds like we're back at the beginning of the process!




Originally created October 6, 1998

ozBlog by Tom March & ozline.
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