Job Aid for Online Learning
In a 2004 Sloan-C report created by Karen Swan, Kent State University and the Sloan-C Editor for Effective Practices in Learning Effectiveness, Relationships Between Interactions and Learning In Online Environments provides an overview of research "about interaction online and its implications for practitioners". The report (effectively a job aid for those who teach or design in an online learning environment), highlights research findings regarding learner interaction in an online learning environment and the corresponding implications for those responsible for creating and managing it. Some examples include:
Interaction with Content:
- Findings: "Online discussion may be more supportive of … experimentation, divergent thinking … than F2F discussion", whereas "Online discussion may be less supportive of … convergent thinking, instructor directed inquiry … than F2F discussion"
- Implication: To support divergent thinking, encourage multiple perspectives through open-ended discussion questions while encouraging diverse points of view. To support convergent thinking, use other activities, such as group collaboration and written assignments.
Interaction with Instructors:
- Findings: Teaching presence (as well as quality, timeliness and quantity of the interaction and feedback) is linked to student learning.
- Implication: Frequent, timely and supportive teacher interaction and feedback (both private and public) must be encouraged.
Interaction with Classmates:
- Findings: Learning occurs socially within "communities of practice" and is related to the quantity and quality of discussion posts, including the perceived value that the instructor places on them.
- Implications:Discussion participation must be highly valued within the instructional design and by the teacher. In addition, other community-building activities must be incorporated and encouraged.
Interaction with Course Interfaces:
- Findings: The student’s impression and interaction with the course interface impact learning. Narration and animation can provide better learning than on-screen text alone, as can the learner-controlled pace of the presentation.
- Implications: Selection of best course platform and interface to support learning is crucial, including consistent interfaces for all courses.
Hi Jennifer,
Nice article – it should be required reading for online instructors. I agree with the study’s findings, especially concerning the role of the instructor. Including this semester, I have taken eleven courses via Oncourse at Indiana University and I have found that instructor participation is the number one determinant of course quality.
If an instructor participates in the discussion forums and works hard to make the course the best that it can be then the students respond. I have taken courses where the instructor expected a lot out of us, but he/she gave as good as he/she got – they set a high standard for both the students and themselves, and I think the students responded and learned a lot. On the other hand, I have had instructors who were nothing more than glorified paper graders. These instructors would seed a discussion topic and then disappear – any further posting from them would be like a Bigfoot sighting; not only that, they would also take a long time to mark our assignments, which caused me to wonder, “Just what are they doing with all their time? They’re not posting on the board so I know they’ve got the time to at least grade our papers in a timely fashion.” My worst instructors were doctoral candidates (maybe they were busy working on their doctorate and just coasting with my class?), but my best instructor was a doctoral candidate, too; my instructors who already had their doctorates were all good.
I think distance education has limited applications because certain subjects don’t lend themselves well to a distance format. I think that subjects like languages and mathematics require a physical classroom. I majored in Philosophy in undergrad and don’t think that I would have learned nearly as much if I had taken it via distance. Fortunately for us, the study of education is a subject that lends itself well to the distance-learning format.
I sometimes have lingering doubts about distance education, in that I wonder if it’s as rigorous as a F2F class. So far, I’ve made A’s in every distance class I’ve taken (I hope I didn’t just jinx myself!). I work hard, I read the material, I make a lot of posts, I write good papers – but would it be “A” material in a F2F class? I have worries about the legitimacy, too; for instance, distance degrees are not recognized in Taiwan, so I couldn’t get a university instructor position there with my IU degree. Sometimes it’s like a dirty secret – I tell people that I’m doing a distance degree but qualify it by saying, “It’s Indiana University – it’s a good school, really!”
At the end of the day, I think I’ve made the right choice. When I complete my degree in the summer I will have an M.S. TESOL + 5 years experience teaching EFL and I will almost certainly be able to get a sweet university instructor job in Japan or Korea; without the degree, attaining a job like that would be a long shot.
What is your opinion of the article? Do you think it reflects your experiences with distance learning?
Ken
Jennifer Maddrell
Thank you for the comments! This is my first semester at IU and my fourth online course (I took two at NYU). As we are only in week 6 of the IU program, I have tried hard not to compare and contrast the NYU vs. IU programs. However, since you asked my opinion about this article, I will use my experiences to aid my response.
One thing I really appreciated about the NYU program (that I have not seen, yet, at IU) is synchronous “lectures”. Once a week, all students in my NYU classes got together to participate with the instructor in an 1 1/2 hour live session. They included audio chat and live screen sharing where the instructor delivered a live lecture with audio based question / answer and break out audio discussions. This was my favorite part of the NYU courses and made the student / instructor interaction *almost* the same as F2F.
I was disappointed when my first two classes at IU were both 100% asynchronous. I was under the impression (from reading the IU course descriptions on the IST web site) that there were weekly “live chats” – they were mentioned in most of the course descriptions I read? For example, in 511 “Live chat will take place once a week for about one hour. Hosted by the instructor, these regularly-held real-time sessions will bring the class together in a lively and informal setting.” So far in 511, we haven’t had any live chats hosted by the instructor. However, what is interesting is that the students in the class have shared IM ids and I have nearly daily IM chats with fellow students – all outside the course interface, by the way. I guess that was our way of “community building”.
I think it is much harder to feel part of a “community” – or to get the same quality of interaction (with content, other students, instructors) – in 100% asynchronous sessions. However, I can’t tell if ultimately the “Learning Effectiveness” suffers – too early to tell.
I agree that the instructor is key in the success of an online class. However, I also think that learning effectiveness depends a lot on each student’s motivation and dedication. In some respects, a F2F traditional setting is easier, but maybe not as effective in the long run. It is pretty easy to sit and get entertained in a lecture for an hour or two, complete some readings and repeat it all back in a paper or test. However, in an online setting, the student has to work much harder to pull the information that is made available by the professor and piece it together in a meaningful way. Since I am motivated to get the most I can out of this program, I too work really hard to complete all the readings, watch the video lectures, participate in the discussions and blogs, etc. However, I question how less motivated students would fare in an online setting?
Thank you, again, for your comments!
Jennifer Maddrell
Hi Jennifer,
I think that I’m less concerned about the asynchronous nature of my online classes, mainly owing to temporal circumstances. I live in Japan and thus am ten time zones away from most of my classmates, so I often end up as the odd man out on real-time discussions. This term my W505 instructor has already hosted two discussions via AOL AIM but I’ve missed both of them; while the Sunday evening Indiana time start was convenient for everyone else, I was busy at work on a Monday morning in Japan.
I definitely agree with you that online learning requires a motivated learner. There’s kind of an unreality to the experience; I mean, all you have to do is stop doing the work and no one is the wiser. If you quit going to a physical classroom it seems like a much more “real” act than just stopping logging onto a website.
Ken