Blended Learning – Virtual Canuck

I’ve been fascinated by the role of interaction all of my career as both a student, a researcher and a teacher. Michael Moore’s famous article details the role of the ‘big three’ (student-student, student-content, student-teacher) interactions and influenced Randy Garrison and I to explore the other 3 possibilities (teacher-teacher, teacher-content and content-content interactions). I’ve written a number of summary articles, a recent article on interaction in MOOCs and note that interaction serves as the primary indicator of ‘presence’ in the Community of Inquiry (COI) Model.

Many, many research articles have shown significant and positive relationships between interaction and a host of outcomes including persistence, achievement and enjoyment. However, these studies are almost always correlational and sometimes based exclusively on student perceptions. These are useful methodologies but marred by challenges of proving causation. Did the interaction cause the positive outcomes (causation) or do motivated students both interact more and get better marks (correlation)?

Thus, I was pleased to see an interaction study in the latest issue of IRRODL that used a quasi-experimental study to examine the impact of student-teacher interaction. The article:

Cho, M., & Tobias, S. (2016). Should Instructors Require Discussion in Online Courses? Effects of Online Discussion on Community of Inquiry, Learner Time, Satisfaction, and Achievement. The International Review Of Research In Open And Distributed Learning, 17(2). doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v17i2.2342

The study was set in the context of a US undergraduate, fully online course with between 25-30 students in each of three sections taught by the same instructor. In the first instance there was no discussion. In the 2nd, the teacher posted a weekly discussion question and students were obliged to post at least one answer and one comment per week (typical forced participation that brought down the wrath of friend Jon Dron in a recent post). In the final section the teacher actively participated in the weekly discussions. In all cases the teacher was readily accessible via email.

A strength of the study was the multiple measures of interaction effects. These included:

completion of the COI Inventory – a Likert-scale, perception instrument derived from the original indicators of teaching, social and cognitive presence).
Student satisfaction measured by 3 lLkert questions
Time on task as represented by login time to the LMS
Student achievement as measured by final grade. The authors wisely excluded the marks for participation awarded in instance2 and 3.

Perhaps the least surprising outcome was that perceptions of social presence were significantly different with, as expected, higher perceptions of social presence in the more interactive instances. Also not surprising is that teaching presence increased in the 3rd instance, but not significantly.

The results became both interesting and surprising on the final 3 measures. In each of the three course sections, each with markedly different amounts of interaction, there were NO significant differences in terms of time on task (logged into Blackboard), student satisfaction or student achievement. There was a small (but not significant ) increase in student satisfaction in the 3rd instance with enhanced teacher participation.

The discussion section of this paper is also very good. They note that time requirements for participation required in the forums in instances 2 and 3 did not end up costing students more time – at least as measured by Blackboard logins. Finally, they note the obvious – teacher participation did not lead to increased achievement – despite the assumed time commitment required of the teacher.

These results tend to reduce support for the importance a number of the types of student and teaching presence described and promoted in the COI model. But the results provide support for the ideas I promoted in my Interaction Equivalency Theory. I proposed there that given high levels of one of the three levels of interaction, the other two could be reduced without loss of academic achievement. I also noted in my 2nd thesis of that work that likely increased satisfaction would results if more than one of the three forms were used (in this study, there was an increase but it was not significant in student satisfaction across the instances) but that it would come at increased cost (usually time to both teachers and students).

The study also did not look at attrition, perhaps because the numbers were small. I know from experience at Athabasca, when teaching and peer interaction is drastically reduced in self paced and continuous enrolment designs, that attrition almost always increases.

This excellent study concludes with recommendations for practice which include the note that student-student and student-teacher interaction are just choices and shouldn’t be considered to be hallmarks of all online (or classroom) courses. Good learning design counts!

Self-paced MOOCs and Blended Learning

One of the challenges in designing any educational program is balancing the need for individual freedom (of pace, space, relationship, technology and other freedoms that Jon Dron and I have described in Teaching Crowds) with the benefits of social learning. Maximizing freedom leads down a path of individualized and self-paced programming. It may be possible to Have your cake and eat it too, but incorporating social activities into self-paced programming presents many challenges to designers, teachers and students. In this post I want to describe promising developments in self-paced MOOCs for use in blended learning contexts

One of the advantages of blended learning and its variation of a “flipped classroom” is the mix of event based programming with student freedom to shift at least space and time during the asynchronous, online portions of the course. However, aggregating, creating and curating the content and activities for the online portions of this model can present challenges for teachers and especially those with limited levels of network literacy. The growing number of Open Educational Resources and content, not specifically designed for education, but with an open license certainly helps meet this need. I’ve often thought that MOOCs or portions of MOOCs could be ideal material for this task. They often display production quality beyond a single, underfunded teacher/producer and student exposure to well-known academic experts and good teachers can enhance the learning experience. However, two challenges have, to date, frustrated extensive use.

The first challenge relates to access. Most MOOC content and especially that produced by commercial companies is copyright protected and often hides behind passwords or is only accessible a limited number of times during a year. The second challenge also relates to scheduling in that the majority of MOOCs have been paced, meaning the start and finish dates are set by the MOOC provider and these dates rarely match with the scheduling needs of blended learning programs.

Progress is being made on both fronts. The recent “State of the Commons” report celebrates the continuing increase in amount of content licensed with a variety of Creative Commons licenses. This material can legally be included in blended learning courses. On the second front more and more MOCCS are moving to a self-paced delivery format or they are offered as self-paced resources after their debut as a paced course.

This shift is illustrated by data from Class Central, which provides a directory of MOOC offerings from many providers.

As can be seen there are 2,316 finished MOOC courses. Presumably none of the content from these courses is available for re-use. However, there is a significant and growing number of courses that are offered in self-paced format. Udacity has been delivering its mostly science orientated programming using self-pacing almost since their inception. But it is CoursEra who is demonstrating the shift towards self-paced programming most clearly. No doubt they see potential revenue (from completion certificates and revenue generating eye-balls) disappearing as soon as the course has finished.

A very limited of educational institutions (for example Athabasca and Thompson Rivers in Canada, Open University of the Netherlands and Open PolyTech in New Zealand) offered self-paced courses for years. Predictably, course completion in self-paced courses is always less than in event paced courses. However, as CoursEra and other MOOC suppliers are realizing, self-paced courses offer distinct advantages to some students. As described in my earlier post, we have attempting for years to provide “compelling, but not compulsory” learning activities that include social learning opportunities for our self-paced students at Athabasca. These effort have not been overly successful and integration within the administrative structure of self-paced institutions remains challenging. (see for example the challenges uncovered by one of my Doctoral Students, Jan Thiessen in her thesis Self-Paced study at a Distance.

Nonetheless, the much larger context of blended learning, may more easily incorporate self-paced resources in their blended programing. A number of studies have looked at MOOC use in flipped or blended classrooms – (Bruff, Fisher, McEwen, & Smith, 2013; Holotescu, Grosseck, Cretu, & Naaji, 2014; Milligan, Littlejohn, & Margaryan, 2013). Generally they conclude that the social glue from the classroom does a nice job of pacing and providing social interactions between and among students and instructors. Yousef, Chatti, Ahmad, Schroeder, & Wosnitza (2015) also do a nice job of showing how learning analytics can also be used by students to monitor the course and their performance.

Thus, I think self-paced MOOCs will continue to find a valuable role in the ongoing (if SLOW!) evolution of Universities and adult education and learning generally. The classroom experience can motivate and pace while providing an instructor the opportunity to personalize, regionalize or in other ways add value to the MOOC. And finally, let’s never forget the potential of this type of blended intervention to save instructor time.

References

Bruff, D. O., Fisher, D. H., McEwen, K. E., & Smith, B. E. (2013). Wrapping a MOOC: Student perceptions of an experiment in blended learning. MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 9(2), 187-199.

Holotescu, C., Grosseck, G., Cretu, V., & Naaji, A. (2014). Integrating MOOCs in Blended Courses. Paper presented at the The International Scientific Conference eLearning and Software for Education.

Milligan, C., Littlejohn, A., & Margaryan, A. (2013). Patterns of engagement in connectivist MOOCs. MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 9(2).

Yousef, A. M. F., Chatti, M. A., Ahmad, I., Schroeder, U., & Wosnitza, M. (2015). An Evaluation of Learning Analytics in a Blended MOOC Environment. The European MOOC Stakeholder Summit.