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Qualitative Research Rebooted 2018

Written by terrya
Qualitative Research Rebooted 2018

For the past two months, I’ve been occupied with a qualitative study of teachers’ use of digital technology in Alberta Schools. The study is sponsored by the Alberta Teachers’ Association.  It has been very useful for me to get down to actually doing a full scale qualitative study after years of teaching grad students research methods courses and advising and supervising graduate students.

This post is to highlight (and celebrate) two great tools that we have used that I think have almost revolutionary, or at least potentially disruptive effect on interview based research.

For this study we conducted 19 interviews mostly via Skype or Google Hangout, but also face-to-face and two on the old-fashioned telephone.  We recorded the interviews using a variety of digital tools included with Skype or Hangout or recording apps on our machines. We also used a portable digital recorder as backup. The MP3 recordings were then uploaded to new tool – Trint.com

Trint is an automatic transcription tool, which converts the audio track to text.  We uploaded the approx. 50 minute recordings and received notification about 15 minutes later when they had been transcribed to English texts.  As expected, the transcription failed (and sometimes comically) at transcribing proper nouns and other slang or colloquial terms relevant only to specialized audiences. The genius of the system is the editor within which the new text transcription is then displayed. This specialized editor has an audio track at the bottom, that reads aloud the audio track. You can vary the audio playback speed that then highlights on the screen the first draft transcription.  This editor allowed us to add speaker’s name, insert or delete paragraph breaks, search and replace, delete extraneous chatter and of course has a built-in spell checker.  The initial editing took us  about the same length of time as the recording runs. So,  we went from an Mp3 Audio recording of 50 minutes of clean text in about an hour.

We did however notice significant variation in the accuracy of the transcription and thus the length of time needed to manually edit the transcription. The recordings that were done through Skype or Hangout, were very accurate and required minimal editing. Those we recorded on the phone, produced much worse transcription, requiring us to edit and re edit as we listened to the actual interview. Thus, as Trint notes on their home page, the quality of the recording is critical to success.

Trint has an interesting pricing system, that after the first $10 free credit, charges are based upon the length of the transcription submitted. The cost is $15 US per hour, but we were pleasantly surprised that the cost was significantly lower than the actual length of our recordings. So this was money very well spent compared to shipping the transcripts to India or hiring professionals here in Canada. I’ve heard that professional cost for transcription can easy mount to over $300 per hour.

Once we had the text transcript, we uploaded to the cloud-based analysis program Dedoose. Dedoose.com, is not a new program, but has some interesting features that are certainly an improvement on my earlier work with Atlas and NVivo.

First, Dedoose is designed for coding teams. It has extensive tools for training and then testing inter-coder reliability. Next, is the general ease (not too bad a learning curve) of the coding itself. We were quite easily able to code, create new codes, arrange them in families and other functions of high quality qualitative analysis tool set. Finally, Dedoose’s has an integrated suite of quantitive tools. These allow you to look at any significant differences between subjects based on a host of ‘descriptors’ such as gender, school size or whatever variables the research chooses to associate with each of the interviewees.  Of course, such quantitative analysis is only meaningful if the coding is done systematically and reliably – a challenge to the very epistemological validity of the subjective experience of qualitative coding. Nonetheless, Dedoose worked as advertised and the coding was straight forward. Retrieval of the code excerpts to a Word file was also quite easy.

Dedoose also has an interesting pricing system. An account is billed (after the free trial) at $14.95 (US)/month – BUT only for the months in which the program is used. I was pleased to see the system remembered my account from over 2 years ago- and I am awaiting to see my monthly charge appear on my credit card.

Now I am looking for a program that writes up the research, recommendations and implications for practice and further research.

 

 

Distance Education, Research Methods

More on Distance Education Journal Rankings

Written by terrya

Both academics and administrators love to argue about the value (impact) of their academic work.  The old adage of “Publish or Perish” still has currency. Despite the many distribution opportunities besides and beyond publishing in scholarly journals, the bean counters (myself included) love citation indexes. The basic idea is that the more your work is cited or used by other scholars, the more impact it has had on the field.  Especially since the onslote of predatory open-access journals that support themselves through publishing fees with minimal peer -review, the decision as to where to send one’s work and the prestige, value and exposure involved in its publication, depends a great deal on the Journal. Work published in prestigious journals is distributed more widely – but of course, these journals also get more submissions, so acceptance is usually more difficult.

Thus, the better authors, submit better work, to better journals – creating a lockin of prestige that favours the older and more established journals.  Given this landscape, how does a new journal both attract quality submissions and then see that the work is widely distributed, such that it is cited by other researchers?

In this post I highlight some of the factors that lead to the success of the International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning (IRRODL)

In our case, it was helpful that the discipline is relatively new and expanding – certainly the context of distance, open and online education has expanded since 2001 when IRRODL was founded. It turns out that being an early adopter of online (only) and open access were also critical decisions. Being online only, meant that our distribution and production costs were significantly lower than paper only or dual media publications. Secondly, by allowing free and open access, we allowed scholars from around the world to read our publications, without needing subscription purchases, going to physical libraries or finding our work through proprietary indexes or scholarly database systems. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we had a sponsor (in our case Athabasca University) who felt that the focus of the journal matched well and supported the strategic mission of this relatively new and totally online university.

During the ten years that I served as Editor, we fought many battles with funders, authors, software systems and ourselves!, but we managed to attract a growing numbers of subscribers, authors and reviewers.  A very significant move was as early adopters of Canada’s Open Journal System (OJS), that coordinates review and publication processes. OJS has come to be, by a  wide margin, the world’s most widely used journal publication system – offering open access systems for free in many languages.

So, where are in 2018?

The major commercial journal publishers (notably Scopus and Social Science Citation Index) provide listings of the citation metrics from major scholarly journals in all fields.  These are used as a numeric indicator quality of the journal and the articles published. These ratings are calculated using a variety of metrics but basically they count the average number of times an article published in a journal is referenced or cited by others (now including automated systems). These indexes can be modified to discount self publications, to include a measure of the annual number of publications and the prestige of the journals in which the work is cited and other factors designed to enhance the validity of the count – thus the different column headings in the table below.

The current co-editor of IRRODL Rory McGreal has gathered recent (2017) data from Scopius to produce the table below see .

Journal Title

Acronym

Cite Score

SJR

SNIP

Rank
Journal of Research on Technology in Education
JRTE
3.03
1.435
1.593
1
Educational Technology Research and Development
ETRD
2.79
1.31
1.913
2
British Journal of Educational Technology
BJTE
2.74
1.333
1.815
3
International Review of Open and Distributed Learning
IRRODL
2.5
1.034
1.632
4
Open Access
Educational Technology and Society
ETS
2.47
1.103
1.719
4
Distance Education
DE
2.36
1.001
1.632
6
Australasian Journal of Educational Technology
AJET
1.42
0.854
1.035
7
Technology Pedagogy and Education
TPE
1.4
0.844
1.412
8
International Journal of Technology in Higher Education
IJTHE
1.33
0.425
0.928
9
Open Access
American Journal of Distance Education
AJDE
0.9
0.522
0.72
10
Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education
TOJDE
0.36
0.233
0.559
11
Open Access
International Journal of Distance Education Technologies
IJDET
0.47
0.157
0.328
11
Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology
TOJET
0.32
0.218
0.514
11
Open Access

At one time, is was useful to discount comparison with educational technology journals as the focus of learning design, technology used and delivery was quite distinct between campus and distributed contexts. Today, in an era of blended and extensive technology use both on and off campus, these distinctions are much less meaningful.  By this old distinction, IROODL (followed closely by Australia’s Distance Education) is the most widely cited (of about 20 – not listed here) distance education journals.  The table shows that IRRODL continues to gain ground on the older and more established educational technology journals.

Also of interest is to note that 3 of the 14 journals offer their products freely to all. – giving evidence that publication in an open journal does not result in lower citations.

However it isn’t all that simple. Rory McGreal has informed me that TOJET is not open access in that their freely READABLE articles carry an “all rights reserved” tag.  This of course begs the question of how ‘open’ does ‘open’ have to be?

The gold seal that is supported by the DOAJ  calls for journal articles to “using Creative Commons Attribute (CCA) only.  Adding restrictions such as Non Commercial (CCNC) or non derivative (CCND) means that anyone can still read and cite the work but they can’t change or sell it and there may be other restrictions on re-use.  David Wiley argues that we need to clarify the definition of OER to allow for “free access to the resource” which at least from an end user’s perspective amounts to open access – though it may NOT allow for reuse, re-sale or other purposes. However,  Stephen Downs notes “It’s a clever argument but has the unpalatable consequence that a resource might not be available to anyone and yet still, by this definition, be classified as an OER.”

I’ll not resolve this issue in this post, but I’ve always favoured the rights and convenience to use a product over those seeking to re-use or benefit commercially. From my pragmatic perspective and much as I think that re-use and repurposing of digital media is a major problem in education, serving the needs of end users (students, actual teachers) shouldn’t be compromised by endless debates over ownership. However, I’ve been in enough useless arguments over software ownership by academic developers to know that CC licensing is a game changer for collaborative production. That is why there are a number of licences. Let’s not limit the right for anyone to benefit from the work in order to protect all possible rights of the creator.

Finally, let me address the now old argument  (first made to me by my PhD supervisor) that publishing only online, will limit the distribution of the work.  Open publication results in the work being more widely distributed- especially to practitioners and research audiences from developing worlds or in industry or K12 schools where journal access is often restricted due to costs.

Finally, It should be noted that a growing number of the proprietary journals publishers  (some in the table above) allow individual authors to “free” their work by submitting a publication fee – often around $2,000. This isn’t of too much value to educational researchers who rarely have an extra $2,000 lying around – or needing to be spent from a research grant!

So congrats again to IRRODL, to OJS and to Athabasca University for helping open quality scholarship to the world!

Distance Education, IRRODL, Open Scholarship

What the FOLC is new in this article?

Written by terrya
4 Comments
What the FOLC is new in this article?

Sorry, but I couldn’t resist spoofing, in the post title,  the unfortunate sound of the acronym for the “new” model proposed in this article. Now,  I’ve got it out of the way and can only suggest that if this “divergent fork of the Community of Inquiry model” is to survive, it needs a new English acronym.

This post is a critical review of  Democratizing digital learning: theorizing the fully online learning community model Todd J. B. Blayone, Roland van Oostveen, Wendy Barber, Maurice DiGiuseppe and Elizabeth Childs. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education 2017 14:13
DOI: 10.1186/s41239-017-0051-4

First, let me get out the good things about this article stated. I love the fact that the authors published this in a peer reviewed,  Open Access journal (thanks to Roland van Oostveen for noting an error in my original post) . Second I love articles about the now venerable Community of Inquiry model because it is flattering to see this work live on, nicely adds to our citation rating indices and  because I share with Randy Garrison and Walter Archer an ongoing interest in constructivist models for online and blended education. And finally, as always conceptual arguments and calls for research are welcomed – especially if they follow with real research results!

First in a number of concerns with the paper. The basic claim is that the Fully Online Learning Community (FOLC) is a “divergent fork of the Community of Inquiry model”.  It seems the divergent claim is made on the basis that the revision is for FULLY online courses.  In fact no divergence is needed or called for as the original COI model was always based on fully online courses – blended courses – or at last the name hadn’t been invented in the 1990’s when we developed the COI model.  The authors may argue that the divergence stems from the integration of synchronous and asynchronous discussions. The original COI model was grounded in asynchronous threaded discussion, as the Internet did not support synchronous interaction in those days. However, Randy and I had been working since 1989 on synchronous delivery models based on group teleconferencing, (see  for example Anderson, T., & Garrison, D. R. (1995). Transactional issues in distance education: The impact of design in audio teleconferencing. American Journal of Distance Education, 9(2), 27-45.). We certainly thought the constructivist underpinnings of the COI could and would support synchronous communciations as well.

Second, is the claim that FOLC “responds to the limitations of distance learning and MOOCs (e.g., student isolation, low completion rates, etc.)”  and “the needs of transformative and emancipatory learning” and “responds to requests from some international partners for new models of learning aligned with democratic and socio-economic reforms. Both Randy and I had long argued and published about the need for distance education to use technologies to get beyond distance education, as perceived as one-way content dissemination to “education at a distance” based on social construction. Thus, the ‘new’ FOLC adds nothing new to our initial claims and desire to supplant individualistic models of correspondence models of distance education.  MOOCs and especially cMOOCs are much more than mere content dissemination as decried by these authors. Finally, the COI was and is a response to the need for new models of learning and the needs for emancipatory learning.  The only claim that is true is that the COI didn’t directly respond to the need for 21st Century learning competencies -mostly because these hadn’t been invented when we developed the COI model. Moreover, these newer ideas certainly fit within the original COI and its development and support by thousands of researchers in the past two decades.

The authors present a “revised model” as below

I can’t see anything new here beyond the original three presence Venn diagram of the COI model.  Both note the collaborative learning environment, both have social and cognitive presence and teaching presence is assumed in the organization and management of the digital space as the FOLC model (like the COI) is based on formal, institutionalized education.

The paper then goes on to provide conceptual scaffolding for a number of tending educational related theories or ideas – digital space; democratized learning and collective identity and responsibility, community and authenticity.  I don’t have any problems with these conceptual arguments and they could each be used to update and strengthen the original COI model. I really don’t see anything new here except for the inclusion of references and arguments that have developed since the COI model was first introduced.

The article then goes onto to propose a research agenda which is little more than a wish list of things that could or should be researched. We criticized this type of rather adhoc model of research agenda development in our Stöter, J., Bullen, M., Zawacki-Richter, O., & von Prümmer, C. (2014).  From the back door into the mainstream: The characteristics of lifelong learners.  In O. Zawacki-Richter & T. Anderson (Eds.), Online distance education: Towards a research agenda (pp. 421-457). Athabasca: Athabasca University Press. But again, nothing wrong with this list of things to do, but nothing new either.  Finally, the authors invite others to join them in this research process – all good stuff but….

I don’t think there is enough new here to claim a “divergent fork” merely by strengthening the original argument.

Community of Inquiry, Distance Education

Quality in Online Learning Presentation

Written by terrya

I was asked to do a video conferencing talk to a meeting of three Mexican Universities yesterday. They are attempting to come up with a common set of criteria to define and measure the quality of their online courses.

QualityPerhaps I was not the best person to ask, as I have very mixed feelings about quality control systems dealing with emerging  technologies and pedagogies.  In particular, I hate it when quality standards impeded innovation and opportunity for experimentation. I hope I got across the complexity- if not a solution!   I illustrated the challenges of defining quality by presenting the different quality measures associated with each of the Three Generations of Distance Education pedagogy from a 2011 article by Jon Dron and myself.

I did however end with a plug for one of the most respected non-profit quality consortia Quality Matters, but I fear I didn’t clearly answer my own title question – Quality Online Teaching and Learning – Is it really different than campus-based education?  It Depends! – not least of which depends on the pedgaogy employed

Here are the slides I used:

Distance Education, My Work

Our Spanish adventure

Written by terrya
Our Spanish adventure

Unlike most of our voyages, this month I was accompanying my wife Susan on a trip to her conference. She registered in the 16 European Symposium on Suicide Prevention that took place this month in Oviedo, Spain. We took the opportunity to rent a car and bought a GPS with European maps (thank god!) and travelled through most of northern Spain. We headed up to the Basque country with stops in Pamplona (fortunately no running bulls this month) and then to the beautiful, but tourist plugged town of San Sebastian. We then motored through Basque countries, many mountain passes and tunnels (a bit white knuckled at 120 Km/H) to visit Guernica (site of first mass civilian bombing and immortalized by Pablo Picasso) and then to Bilbao.

guggenheim-museum-belboaOf course, like all good tourists we couldn’t miss the Guggenheim Museum and it did not disappoint.

We then headed west to Oviedo, capital of Asturias.  I didn’t attend much of Susan’s conference, except for a couple of sessions in which Danish and Belgian online Suicide prevention systems were presented.  I was impressed with the scientific rigour with which these interventions were tested – though trying to randomly assign suicidal participants to interventions presents a variety of ethical challenges.

We also travelled by car, (I know it was cheating) along some of the Camino de Santiago routes, trying to assess if we have the interest and the legs for such adventures. I had not realized the number of different Camino routes nor the number of pilgrims on them. I learned that  in one day they ‘processed” over 600 pilgrims who were finishing the pilgrimage in Santiago.

We then headed south to Madrid with a stop in Leon. I was fortunate to be invited to give a talk at Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, which is the largest University in Spain with all courses delivered at a distance. Like Athabasca University, this University has had considerable challenges moving from its roots as a correspondence university to interactive online delivery. We visited many of the tourist spots and of course the famous museums in Madrid – though the huge line ups at the Prada scared us away.

Next we headed back to Barcelona, but we ventured into the hinterland for a brief visit to Belchite

belchite-1296 This town was left in ruins after a horrendous battle during the Spanish Civil War and a new town was built beside the ruins. These ruins now stand as a monument to the destruction of war, though they seem far off the tourist trail and we were the only visitors that day. It is strange that, unlike the American Civil war which is celebrated by numerous monuments and re-enactments, Spaniards seem to want to forget this sad time in their history. Perhaps because the “good guys” lost??

We then headed to Barcelona. As always, Barcelona with the inspiring architecture was a treat.  It was interesting to see the progress on the Sagrada Familia, sagrada-familiaGaudi’s most famous design. It looks to be on track for completion marking the 100th anniversary of Gaudi’s death in 2026. The new stain glass (abstracts and NOT crucifixion scenes) in the windows (though still far from complete) adds blue and green hues to the whole interior – in keeping with the natural and forest like feeling. I am sure that this is the most spectacular building that I have seen anywhere and I hope to live to see its completion!

I then spent 2 days and 2 web-cast lectures with my old friends at Open University of Catalonia.  The first talk was a repeat plus additions from a chapter I recently did on Theories for Online Learning and Research.

For the second talk, I overviewed the chapter that Jon Dron and I (mostly Jon) did on the Future of E-Learning.

After a great weekend with friends in Barcelona – we even made it to the beach and to watch my first game of handball, we headed back. Susan home to Edmonton and me to Helsinki, where I am the “opponent” in a PhD defence here on Friday.

 

 

 

 

 

Distance Education, Personal, Travel

Downe’s great summary article, but…….

Written by terrya
1 Comment
Downe’s great summary article, but…….

The good news is that Stephen Downes has posted the  full text from a chapter he wrote for New Models of Open and Distance Learning in Open Education: from OERs to MOOCs, Editors: Mohamed Jemni, Kinshuk, Mohamed Koutheair Khribi,  2016.

This is good news for two reasons – the first is that the full Springer book retails for $139 – but you can get it as an ebook for ONLY $109!!. This means the text is basically unavailable to the vast number of practitioners and scholars who would likely find it of great use.   The second reason is that it is a really good historical summary – describing the dance of education and technology as they have evolved with each other over the past half a century.

The bad news is that the very first sentence of the chapter (and first of the whole book!) is blatantly false.  Stephen writes “Historically most learning that has ever taken place has taken   place in a classroom with a teacher giving instruction and students reading books and writing on paper.”

Surely Stephen is not arguing that he “learned” to program the Painted Porch Mud in the 1980’s; devised Connectivism, or co-invented MOOCs by sitting in a “classroom with a teacher giving instructions”! In fact only a very tiny fraction of the “learning” that has ever taken place historically and of course 100% pre-historically, has occurred in a classroom. Only beginning in  the 19th Century have a few children of rich minorities been able to learn part of what they learned in life in a classroom. For the vast majority there were no classrooms for them to attend.   Even more so today, learning takes place from Google and Wikipedia searchers, from mass media, from social connection and the innumerable historical and pre-historic ways of learning – observation, apprenticeship, story-telling, guided practice and many more ways of learning.

Obviously Stephen’s mistake is to conflate learning with formal education. It is common enough because it is in the interests of teachers, educators and professors to promote their work context and their own self-interest by elevating education to encompass all forms of learning- but it does not. That is why it is especially strange to find this slip from Stephen Downes who has build a career and inspired many, based upon his championing of learning – and not only that subset that happens in classrooms. It is especially ironical that within the essay Stephen covers formal and non formal learning and argues that both have benefited from the wealth of online resources and communities.

Having gotten this irritation out of my system, let me strongly recommend this chapter. It helps if you mentally do a cut and paste and switch ‘education’ for ‘learning’. Perhaps Stephen will do it for us.

As with all of Stephen’s writing you get very clear, precise and knowledgeable argument, illustration and rationale.  And similarity with all his writing as you always get a good dose of “Downism” – where Stephen injects his personal insights, experiences, opinions and convictions.  The sections on PLE’s and PLN’s are especially good as is Stephen’s overview of connectivism. Strangely, this overview chapter ends without a summary or conclusion, but PERHAPS you have to cough up the $139 for that. So as not to make the same mistake with this post, let me again recommend this article for anyone trying to figure how both ‘learning’ and ‘education’ have evolved to both exploit and create technologies and pedagogies to make the most of our networked world.

 

 

Distance Education, MOOCs

Order of Athabasca University

Written by terrya
Order of Athabasca University

Yesterday at Convocation in Athabasca, I was deeply honoured by my former colleagues at Athabasca by being installed into the Order of Athabasca University. Most other members have been individuals from the community who have made exceptional contributions to the University. I was the first Faculty member (other than Dominique Abrioux, who also served as President) to be so honoured.  The hupalo started with the blurb below published in the Edmonton and Calgary daily newspapers.image003

It continued at Convocation where Rory McGreal made a terrific and over flattering introductionIMG_0928 to me at the beginning of the  ceremonies. Rory’s introduction contained comments from Mark Brown, Alan Tait, Morten Paulsen and Wayne Macintosh – thanks to each of you.  The life stream of the whole convocation ceremony is streamed at goo.gl/ZziwsG . Rory and my part begins around Minute 53

The celebrations ended  with a banquet. All very moving, and I am trying hard to not leave with a swollen head! But thanks to all who have helped make my time at Athabasca very personally rewarding and recognized!!

It was also flattering to have AUPress over 40% discount on three of my authored, edited or co-authored books.IMG_3962

 

I was asked to do a 3 minute speech which I addressed to the graduates and to the wider Athabasca Community. Here is the text;

Madame Chair;  Mr. President;  Distinguished guests;  Members of the Platform party;  Graduands: Ladies and gentlemen:

Thanks to each of you!

I think I am the first faculty member (who wasn’t also a president) to win this award, and so I feel very deeply honored for your recognition—of not just my contributions—but of our work, together, here at Athabasca University.

Today is a day primarily for the graduates—and thus, I would like to use this time on the stage to congratulate each of them—and their family members and friends networks that you created —who have helped to get them here today.

All of my research has been focused on the distance learning experience. One of the most common questions is:

“Is distance education as good as campus-based education?”

Well … my colleagues and I have been asking this question for more than 30 years! And in roughly 90 per cent of studies, the results have shown that there is NO significant difference in learning outcomes.

And even when there is a difference it is likely to be in favour of distance learners. However, there is certainly more to being educated than just simply ‘learning outcomes.”

What distance education students build—and usually in larger doses than campus students—is self-efficacy. The belief in yourself and the knowledge that you can succeed in the tasks you set for yourself.

Distance learning builds knowledge and belief in yourself and an empowered understanding that you can achieve your goals.

You didn’t earn a distance education degree without being—or getting—good at creating and meeting deadlines and producing quality output—usually without the help of peers or classmates.

And so, today I celebrate your earned increase in self-efficacy!

But, to be sure, this graduation milestone does not mark the end of your learning. Technological and social change continues to happen—and more rapidly than in it changed in the past.

Luckily, I know this for sure: Because of your experience with AU, you are armed with the confidence and the knowledge that you can learn—and learn successfully.

You have self-efficacy. You can succeed—and you will succeed—as life-long learners.

Finally, I want to speak to my colleagues and friends in our broader Athabasca University community:

Bear with me as I don my sailor’s cap,—one of the pleasures of retirement! —obviously, as an institution, we’re continuing to sail through some rough waters. We are facing weather winds and that are very hard to predict. However,  “the glass is rising”. Certainly there is value and risk in every decision we make.

But I want to continue to urge us to use the ever-increasing power of networks—and importantly, our own networking skills—to work together to build a new kind of university: A university that is not like the Athabasca University of 1970, nor that of 2016, for that matter.

But one that marries academic knowledge, collegial support and governance with cost-effective ways to study and teach. Alone, and together, we need to support and create better and more effective personal, academic, administrative and community networks.

These networks have demonstrated they produce the power to be critical components of the new ‘net-era’ university—and thus, they are a challenge for each of us to navigate—but a necessary one.

Oh, have I mentioned the Athabasca Landing yet?

Thank you very much!

Distance Education, My Work, Personal

End of Jobs in Online Education?

Written by terrya
2 Comments
End of Jobs in Online Education?

I started out my teaching career as a “shop teacher” – teaching middle school students how to work and built with a number of technologies. Thus, it was a bit disturbing to listen to recent CBC radio broadcast listing jobs that have disappeared and to hear that ‘shop teachers’ along with elevator operators, typists and postal worker were disappearing.

Two articles from the latest issue of Online Journal of Distance Education Administration, caught my attention for the same reason. Will technologies soon reduce or even eliminate the relatively new job position of “online teacher”.

The first article,

Vu, P., Fredrickson, S., & Meyer, R. (2016). Help at 3:00 AM! Providing 24/7 Timely Support to Online Students via a Virtual Assistant. Online Journal of Distance Education Administration, 19(1).  http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/spring191/vu_fredrickson_meyer191.html.

directly addresses the issue of substituting the traditional teacher role of answering student queries with a machine. The article notes that most online students do their work in the evening and on weekends when many teachers are not interested and often not available to answer questions.  In an attempt to provide some sort of 7/24 service the instructors built a chat bot and seeded it with a database of questions culled from archives of questions asked by students taking the course in previous terms.  Chat boots have rarely been used in education, though colleagues at Athabasca worked developing a Freudbot. But chat bots are becoming ubiquitous on online shopping sites where they provide a type of 7/24 customer support.

During the design-based research project the Bot was involved in 475 sets of interactions with the 56 students enrolled in 2 sections of an early Childhood Education course. As expected more than half of the interactions took place on weekends and 88% were during evenings. Of course some of the questions were ‘off topic” and used by curious students to learn the capabilities of the bot. But many were on topic with 65% of queries focussed on information seeking – much related to assignments and exams.

Of perhaps most interest was the students’ reactions, which were queried by 5 point Likert perception questions.  Only about half (m=2.5) found the bot did effectively  answer their question, but nearly all (m=4.8) noted the extra service provided 7/24 by the bot and over half (m=3.3) preferred asking the bot rather than emailing the teacher.  The effectiveness of these type of bots naturally grows as the data base expands through use and the searching algorithms improve. Thus, one can, even now, see how machines will undertake ishot-266at least some traditional teaching roles which in a positive sense can give teacher more time for more important learning diagnosis and help and reduce time spent on administrative type queries.  It is also interesting to think about the “teaching presence” of of the female avatar (displayed at left) used in this study. In any case a very nice exploratory, design-based study.

The second employment related article compared adjunct teachers employed in for-profit universities as compared to those in the not-for-profit sector. This is an important problem as more than half of online courses in the USA are taught by part-time sessional instructors. This in itself has huge implications on job stability for teaching faculty, but the rise (in the US) of for-profit universities with a tradition of not offering tenured positions, doing no research and not training next generation of scholars is also threatening.

Starcher, K., & Mandernach, J. (2016). An Examination of Adjunct Faculty Characteristics: Comparison between Non-Profit and For-Profit Institutions. Online Journal of Distance Education Administration,, 19(1).  http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/spring191/starcher_mandernach191.html.

This study used an online survey to query 859 online adjunct teachers. The results were remarkable in the lack of statistical differences between the teachers at the two types of institution. No differences in age, satisfaction, education or a host of other variables. There were small differences in class size, but this was confounded by the higher percentage of graduate courses (with normally smaller numbers of students) in the public, not-for-profit universities.

The authors put a nice spin on the discussion by noting that the similarity means that professional development and support can be shared between the sectors – unlikely as that may be. But the study also adds empirical support to the notion that education can be and is being  “privatized” with resulting decreasing employment for traditional, tenured faculty.

So what do I conclude from these two very good articles? I think one of the largest challenges for our global population (ranking right up there with climate change) is the capacity to meaningfully employ people in a context in which machines are more and more able to perform both mundane as well as high performance and high communication tasks. My Interaction Equivalency Theory speaks to this by noting the ways in which activity that used to be performed by live teachers (student-teacher interaction) can and is substituted by bots and canned media to create high quality student-content interaction.

Design Based Research, Distance Education, interaction equivalency theory

The Enigma of Interaction

Written by terrya
The Enigma of Interaction

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.

anderson-learner-teacher-content-theory-p58

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:

  1. completion of the COI Inventory – a Likert-scale, perception instrument derived from the original indicators of teaching, social and cognitive presence).
  2. Student satisfaction measured by 3 lLkert questions
  3. Time on task as represented by login time to the LMS
  4. 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!

Blended Learning, Community of Inquiry, Distance Education, interaction equivalency theory, My Work

Self-paced MOOCs and Blended Learning

Written by terrya
1 Comment
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.

self-paced moocs

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.

 

Blended Learning, Distance Education, MOOCs