University of New England

Keywords: Online learning, learning community, computer science, virtual university, online technologies, Internet, world wide web, collaborative learning.

Article style and source: Peer reviewed. Original ultiBASE publication..

Contents

• Abstract
• Introduction
• Background
• Designing a Web-Based Computer Science Unit for Second Year students
• Student Interaction and Responses to the Innovation
• Analysis and Reflection
• Conclusion
• References

Abstract

As thousands of universities world wide decide to go virtual, there has been an explosion in the number of courses and course components on the World Wide Web. There are, however, great variations in the way online technologies are used to deliver the courses.. This case study illustrates that in order to exploit more fully the potential of online technologies in educating learners for meaningful and effective participation in the emerging knowledge economy,the university community which includes both teachers and students needs to make major innovations in its teaching and learning approaches respectively. The focus needs to shift from content delivery to the process of learning the content. It means building a learning community online and this is implemented by adopting the collaborative learning model as the underpinning educational framework for the online environment.

Introduction

As thousands of universities world wide decide to go virtual, there has been an explosion in the number of courses and course components on the World Wide Web. There are, however, great variations in the way online technologies are used to deliver the courses. Research shows that there is a tendency for lecturers to adapt familiar teaching methodologies such as lectures to the online technologies, focusing on the content to be learned and replicating an important learning resource in an online environment for their students. (Jasinski, 1999) This pedagogical approach to the use of the Web seems to be typical of the first initial experience of many lecturers while others have gone further to explore the potential of online technologies to accomplish specific learning activities. No major changes or innovations are made in the teaching and learning models with the Web being viewed as primarily another medium of delivery of content. This case study illustrates that in order to exploit more fully the potential of online technologies in educating learners for meaningful and effective participation in the emerging knowledge economy,the university community which includes both teachers and students needs to make major innovations in its teaching and learning approaches respectively. The focus needs to shift from the content to be learned to how the content is to be learned. In short, the focus needs to be on the process of learning. This investment in developing an innovative and effective underpinning educational framework in the use of online technologies for educational purposes is crucial. The focus has to be on assisting the student to achieve the key competencies in the subject and facilitating students’ own development of the ability to plan and realise their own learning. The students are encouraged to take control of the learning process. Our paper attempts to document and analyse the development process in the building of a learning community online in a computer science unit. top

Background

The University of New England has chosen WebCT as the online delivery product and is supporting lecturers to develop their units online using this package. This approach involves an institution-wide strategy with the University investing a considerable amount of resources in logistics support. (Reid., I.C., 1999) The main aim of the online teaching initiative is to deliver several quality courses from across the University reliably to a large number of students.

The lecturer teaching the unit decides the level of engagement with the online technologies. As Reid points out, "The purpose of moving to an online teaching and learning environment is to afford different opportunities for teaching methodologies across the University." At the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences in the Science Faculty, many lecturers are at the supplementary stage in their use of online technologies where "the information and learning services provided online are also available in another form for the students." (King, in Reid, p.5) The student does not have to spend an extended time online and the online dimension is used mainly for information delivery. Lecturers have been mainly adapting familiar methodologies such as lectures to the web and assuming the multiple roles of content expert, instructional designer, graphic designer and HTML author.

The online teaching project has adopted a multidisciplinary team approach to assist lecturers with the development of their units for an online teaching and learning environment. (Chapman, 1999) With the multidisciplinary team approach in the development of an online teaching and learning environment, the focus can shift to pedagogical issues with more time invested in framing/structuring the underpinning educational design of the teaching and learning web site. top

Designing a Web-Based Computer Science Unit for Second Year students

Our main goal has been to build a learning community for a second year computer science unit using online technologies. One of the key elements of creating a community is effective communication which can be greatly facilitated by some of the online technologies. We wanted to use the technologies to enhance and improve teaching and learning by increasing human interaction. With the adoption of the multidisciplinary team approach in the development of units for online delivery, we were able to focus on the educational design for the web site as the interface design and navigation was provided by the WebCT product and other logistics support provided by a html programmer and other multimedia specialists.

This second year computer science unit is taught to both internal and external students. Internal students have face-to-face sessions with the lecturer with the traditional lecture-tutorial or laboratory method of teaching and learning. External students are provided with instructional materials in print with some contact between the lecturer and student by electronic or voice mail. There is limited human interaction in this pedagogical approach. The educational objectives that can be accomplished are mainly those of dissemination and acquisition of information on the part of the lecturer and student respectively.

Today’s graduates are expected to acquire the generic skills needed to participate effectively in a knowledge based society. These generic attributes include problem solving, communication, team work and negotiation skills, information literacy, lifelong-learning and social responsibility. The best way that these generic skills are learned and made meaningful is through facilitating student engagement with the culture in the community of practice of the subject content/discipline. How to do this continues to be the $60,000 question.

We decided to adopt the collaborative learning model as the underpinning educational framework for designing our teaching and learning web site for this unit.

This unit Software Engineering is an information technology type unit and as such not only needs to prepare students for the workforce in the practices of writing software but also aims to teach them how to research and to improve their communication and team skills. The web offers an environment where students can exercise and develop these skills as illustrated below

Effective collaborative learning involves meaningful peer interaction and knowledge construction on the part of the learner. Just like other aspects of good teaching, collaborative learning requires careful planning and must be facilitated purposefully. Our aim has been to create online "a means of study and an environment of study that a) lets a group of students formulate a shared goal for their learning process, b) allows the students to use personal motivating problems/interests/experiences as springboards, c) takes dialogue as the fundamental way of inquiry." (Paloff & Pratt, 1999:110)

One way to influence student effort and direction is through the assessment system. We decided that we could orient students towards co-operative or collaborative learning emphasising more conceptual work and the development of discussion and team work skills by requiring them to apply the mental models that they learn to complete joint assignments. For example, one assignment required students to work as a team of four members using the bulletin board. The assignment consisted of a problem that required the modelling of a software engineering entity. The model was then submitted as a team and marked accordingly with each team member receiving the team mark. The members of a team had to negotiate their individual roles and responsibilities within the team and prepare the team goals and objectives. Further, the team had to negotiate a project plan and carry out both web and library based research in order to be successful in the assignment.

In collaborative learning students work together in some way in order to aid or enhance their learning. According to Johnson and Johnson, there must be disciplined structuring of these essential components such as positive interdependence, individual accountability, promotive interaction, social skills and group processing in every learning group and learning task. One of the most important tasks for the lecturer to perform is that of skilfully structuring positive interdependence so that all students are motivated in the direction of shared learning goals or objectives. Broadly there are two categories of functions that a lecturer must carry through in order for effective collaborative learning to occur.

1. Set learning objectives carefully and state them explicitly.
2. Communicate those objectives to all students in the group.
3. Assure that those objectives are understood by all students.
4. Design learning activities to meet those objectives
5. Implement those learning activities
6. Monitor the progress towards achievement of the learning objectives.
7. Make adjustments as need arises.

1. Create a warm welcoming and non-threatening atmosphere where all are free to contribute
2. Keep people who inappropriately try to dominate discussions under control
3. Learning is accepted by all students as the existence of the group(s)
4. Students must actively participate regularly
5. Students must spend time preparing their postings
6. Enforce a code of ‘civility’ and ‘respect for all’.
7. Use reflective techniques such as ‘so you’re saying that…’ to keep the dialogue going and to validate the worth of contributions.
8. Use seconding techniques such as ‘that sounds good/interesting/ worthy of further research,’ etc. to encourage students to express their viewpoints. top

Student Interaction and Responses to the Innovation

In our case study we selected the conferencing/forum concept to engage students to participate actively online. Other learning resources which were provided on the web include lectures, assignments and web resources. However,the pace and direction of the students’ learning community discourse was mainly generated by the assignments and projects that they were set.

We administered a survey to ascertain student reaction to learning online with a 62 per cent response from a class of 50 students. All computer science students are required to have a modem for direct dialling to UNE or Internet access. As these students are in their second year into a computer science degree, ninety-nine per cent rated their experience with computers as good. From answers to our questionnaire, approximately 78 per cent of the students who responded said that they logged on more than once per week while 48 per cent logged on three or more times per week.

Using the tracking facilities of WebCT it was found that most students spent their time looking at the assignments and projects that were required as part of their course work. Of the five assignments and two projects it was the assignment that required group work that students spent most of their time viewing.

The bulletin board also proved to be very popular with over 2000 postings made to date during the semester. Of these postings approximately 5 per cent were made by the instructor/lecturer while the other 80 per cent were made by students and dealt with the assignments. Approximately 15 per cent of postings were general postings on problems that students were experiencing in their studies of the unit

Conferencing Tool Usage

In this unit the most frequently used resource provided by the web is the conferencing system. WebCT provides a conferencing system which consists of the bulletin board tool. The bulletin board tool allows students to post, read and search board messages. All course participants including the instructor, markers and students can communicate with one another. The bulletin board can have any number of fora. The lecturer can make the fora either public or private. With public fora all students have access while the lecturer may set up private fora for group projects such as group presentations. The lecturer can assign each group a private forum to allow the group members to discuss the project and exchange ideas.

The bulletin board was made the communication medium for the unit. All correspondence such as questions regarding the unit that were not of a personal nature was to posted to this forum. This encouraged students to answer each other’s queries.

To motivate students to use the bulletin board all the assignments contained a communication component. The first assignment required all students to introduce themselves and discuss a prescribed issue. Three assignments required all students to make a posting to the bulletin board to share their experience of what they learnt from each assignment while the final assignment was based on group work. The communication component accounted for approximately 11 per cent of the final grade. This proved to be enough incentive for students to participate.

This section examines students’ impressions of whether and how the online technologies have assisted them in their learning strategies. Lecture notes were placed online to be used as a learning aid to provide new information to the students to seed their discussions for their assignments and projects. Each online lecture contained a set of objectives and a reading guide to aid students in achieving the defined objectives. At the end of each online lecture a question was also asked. Answering this question was voluntary but required the students to post an answer to the bulletin board.

Internal students were provided with not only the online material but also given two one-hour lectures per week. The content covered in these lectures was partially based on the online material. The lectures were primarily used to promote discussion amongst the internal students in order to promote thinking critically about content rather than them just digesting content. Using lectures in this way had a flow on effect through to the external students who were able to leverage off these discussions through the internal students’ comments on the bulletin board.

Seventy seven per cent of respondents stated that having this resource online was of assistance to their learning while 23 per cent felt that having the lectures online did not assist their learning.

One of the main assumptions behind the collaborative learning approach is "that the most valuable activity in a classroom of any kind is the opportunity for students to work and interact together and to build and become part of a community of scholars and practitioners." (Jonassen, 1995) The bulletin board in WebCT can be used by the lecturer to build a learning environment which encourages students to work collaboratively, question each other and discuss relevant issues, problems and emerging understandings of the subject matter. The lecturer can motivate students to work collaboratively in assignments and projects and therefore facilitate the social construction of knowledge. Of the 31 students who responded to our questionnaire, 74 per cent felt that the online interaction with other students and with the lecturer was beneficial for achieving their learning goals. Again there were about 23 per cent who felt ambivalent or negatively about the use of the bulletin board to facilitate collaborative learning online. With respect to the external students approximately 86 per cent said that interaction with other students on the bulletin board was beneficial to their learning.

Approximately 68 per cent of all respondents were satisfied with the lecturer’s feedback on online activities (with 23 per cent reporting that they were very satisfied). The response from the external students in this unit who answered our questionnaire was very positive with 86 per cent satisfied with the level of communication with the lecturer.

Finally, we also collected some information on the students’ overall impressions or feelings of learning online. With regard to the overall level of satisfaction with learning the unit online, 68 per cent of respondents felt satisfied with 26 per cent feeling very satisfied with the teaching method. Fifty five per cent of the respondents enjoyed the experience, with 84 per cent stating that they would take another unit online, and 77 per cent saying that they would recommend this unit to another person.. top

Analysis and Reflection

The advent of online technologies in education provides an opportune time for lecturers to reflect on the core business of teaching and learning. In deciding how to use these online technologies in teaching and learning, it is best to think in terms of making an innovation in teaching and learning rather than simply layering the online technologies atop existing unit materials. In other words, instructional and learning goals drive the use of the technologies rather than vice versa. When the online technologies are integrated with dynamic teaching and learning approaches, the experience will be truly effective and transformative for both lecturers and students.

However, transformative online education creates a new paradigm for teaching and learning which differs from the traditional classroom experience and which also differs from earlier developments at computer-based instruction. (Kearsley, 1998) More attention is given to the process of learning. The lecturer assumes the role of facilitator of learning which requires more cognitive effort and a wide range of skills such as pedagogical, social, managerial/planning/organisational and technical as well as time.

In the initial stages of the unit the demand on the lecturer’s time for maintaining the bulletin board was quite high, requiring in the order of five to six hours per week. This was due mainly to the students posting to the wrong forums. As the students’ familiarity with the bulletin board improved the maintenance factor became almost negligible with approximately four hours per week required for bulletin board monitoring.

This monitoring of the bulletin board was extremely important as timely responses to the students’ postings and the guidance of the instructor in the virtual environment were required in-order to keep the students interacting in this medium.

A number of other aspects helped, and were conducive to enabling the students to partake in self-directed learning.

• Students were asked by the lecturer to post all questions that they had on the unit to the bulletin board. In this way all students were able to share in the questions and answers. This reduced volume of e-mail to the lecturer with students more often than not answering other students’ postings.
• All assignments contained a communication component that required a posting to the bulletin board.
• At the end of each module a question was asked and the students were encouraged to post a response onto the bulletin board.
• One assignment was research-based requiring students to surf the net for appropriate materials.

It is also very important that the learners are also considered in the implementation of the innovation. In our survey we received some negative responses to the self-directed and collaborative learning approach adopted for building our web-based learning environment with the teacher acting as a guide and facilitator of learning rather than transmitter of information.. There were some negative reactions from a handful of students. This negativity may be due to the change in the way that students were asked to learn. Some students wanted the lecturer to put up overheads and feed them the necessary information so that they can just pass the unit. This circumvented any required reading that needed to be undertaken by the student. This is perceived perhaps by these students to make their study much easier in that the filtering of information is done for them by the lecturer.

We acknowledge that we are also requiring our students to make a paradigm shift in their learning strategies. We are directing them to move from a passive role, sitting in a class listening to lectures, memorising pre-packaged assignments and finding the answers the lecturer wants to one of assuming responsibility for their learning. Thus some students may feel that they are doing some of their lecturer’s work. Since students may have been conditioned to sit and wait to be told what to think from their earlier exposure to listening to lectures and taking notes, some may need more assistance to adapt to being challenged to think for themselves and to explore and evaluate other possibilities.

Thus, we will in future better inform our students about our teaching/learning approach and why it is being implemented. One way of doing this could be an induction session led by other students who have done this unit to introduce new students to both collaborative learning and its benefits and to the online technologies. There is also the need to accommodate the variation in student learning styles, student exposure to learning online and use of the tools of the learning package. One way to deal with the diversity in student experience with learning online is to provide an online help forum in the form of a frequently asked questions (FAQ) web page. The more advanced students can be encouraged to answer questions about technical aspects.

Another very important issue at the core of our collaborative learning online approach to teaching and learning is that of assessment. How does one assess interpersonal skills such as managing group dynamics, negotiation skills, team management and conflict resolution, the generic skills we are attempting to assist our students to develop? The assessment of these skills is difficult and time consuming. Suffice to say that the less technically oriented students tended to excel at these skills. This gave them more confidence in the unit and helped them to develop a support network for the technical content. top

Conclusion

Online technologies are providing lecturers the opportunity and the challenge of transforming teaching and learning. Although the current state of these technologies require potential lecturers and students/learners to be technically savvy and highly fault tolerant, we believe that the long term benefits outweigh these short-term costs. top

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