Blog Topic 3 and 4
This blog is an achievement! What sounded so simple and I thought would be so smooth, was not what it looked….
But looking back at Topic 4: Design for online and blended learning, I will also look back at Topic 3, thereafter (arguing these topics are interrelated). Topic 4: I attended an interesting Webinar (with Martha Clevenland and more) and the first Tweetchatt ever. My take-home lessons after the webinar was both the importance of well planned interaction between students, and the actual experience of being split in the break-out rooms with other students during the webinar. Lovely!
The Tweetchat was really an interesting experience. I got another picture of Twitter using such a closed forum and could see several advantages, most of them feeling secure who was on-board reading.
What have I learned about design for online and blended learning? So much as this blog would be even too boring to consider reading!
Before going into the Design, a brief Topic 3 reflection follows since that put the reflections of Topic 4 into context. In Topic 3: Learning in communities – networked collaborative learning, we did explore aspects of collaborative learning (as how can PBL work in ONL?) in relation to networked online spaces. As part of the deisgn of the course we learned together with peers in different formats and my group mates have an unended rows of ideas of different ways to presents, what I remember were all of them almost new or completly new to me. As I learned from those ideas, and the interaction in PBL13, l was reading and smiling that ”technology offers new possibilities for interaction…..but if offers challenges such as keeping focus on learning processes, not tools, in online environments.” Yes,Topic 3 taught me that challenge (as the very peak in my other work was that time too). But the written beauty of topic 3 was also its acctually medicine to me: I hesitate I would have stayed in the course if not the group enviromnet was so welcoming and inspiring and if not its host (Gregor) and co-host (Marie-Louise) would have been that encouraging. This Blog (3) was to ”reflect on the meaning of networked collaborative learning” and the experience with PBLgroup 13 was my first, and it will stay in warm memory in my future ONL endeavors.
Back to Topic 4, about the design I have come across in this course I have already used these weeks in my (fresh) online teaching at my new university! I also came across some new words, one of them was scaffolding, meaning this (forgot the reference) Scaffolding, also called scaffold or staging, is a temporary structure used to support a work crew and materials to aid in the construction, maintenance and repair of buildings, bridges and all other man-made structures. Somebody knowing how this concept is used in ONL are welcome to reply this on my blog…Even as there as many words and design aspect I still miss in regard of this issue, for sure I have improved my skills and feel more secure as teacher in on-line learning after this phase of the ONL course.
The skilled stars in the PBL group 13 I joined did a journey from discussing a lot about different concepts of blended learning until we produced a common rhetoric speech about the advantages about Online/online blended learning! I was a lovely experience – the random selected rows from our common manuscript in the PBL13 final presentation, linked above hopefully, felt in my ears like poetry, check this: “Finally, online blended learning is simply better. Well designed online learning makes it possible to connect and build community thus creating a great learning environment It also allows for collaborations transcending the formal boundaries of the educational setting, making it possible to connect and interact globally!”
We enjoyed focus on the advantages with ONL, but when digging on-line before and after our PBL-work I found some critical studies more than indicating performance gaps in the on-line learning. For example Xu & Jaggars (2014) compared as much as 500,000 courses taken by over 40,000 community and technical college students in Washington State. They examined the performance gap between online and face-to-face courses and how the size of that gap differs across student subgroups and academic subject areas. While all types of students in the study suffered decrements in performance in online courses, those with the strongest declines were males, younger students, Black students, and students with lower grade point averages. Online performance gaps were also wider in some academic subject areas than others. After controlling for individual and peer effects, the social sciences and the applied professions (e.g., business, law, and nursing) showed the strongest online performance gaps. Another study showed similar results, by Ampara, Smith & Friedman (2018) but they had emphasis on gender and student performance in online learning, compared to face-to-face classes. The data were collected from 95,944 students in a two year institution and 50,593 students from a four year institution, with a five year difference between institutional data collections. On-line learning showed a persistent and consistent under-performance by online students of all genders vs face-to-face classrooms based students of all genders. Additionally, females outperformed males in face-to-face classes while males and females were performed identically online. The authors finalized: ”This significant finding of persistent lower student achievement in online classes across institutions is a strong area of concern that contradicts smaller scale studies touting no significant difference in online and face to face learning.”
Another, older study by Johnson, Aragon, Shaik and Palma-Rivas (2000) did not show such clear differences. This empirical study compared a graduate online course with an equivalent course taught in a traditional face-to-face format on a variety of outcome measures. Comparisons included student ratings of instructor and course quality; assessment of course interaction, structure, and support; and learning outcome measures such as course grades and student self-assessment of their ability to perform various Instructional Systems Design (ISD) tasks. The students in the face-to-face course held slightly more positive perceptions about the instructor and overall course quality although there was no difference between the two course formats in several measures of learning outcomes.
In order to overcome some of the previous mentioned gaps in performance, Vo, Brodsky and Wilks (2017) claim that infusing authentic learning into online courses will improve learning authenticity or reducing the gap between what being taught at school and what being used in the real world. The authors describe a 6-step model with Madeline Hunter’s Lesson Planning Model to employ learning authenticity in online courses and received positive feedback from the students after implementation. In our rhetoric session, the disadvantages were discussed and considered and IF you just plan it well, example building in activities supporting online-interaction between students (as you can hear in the link above, my line in our speech!) The plan presented by PBL13 might need some follow-up to be really evidence based, and yet not any model for others, and following, plan the online blended learning very well, and those the potential drawbacks will be prevented or avoided, and we conclude in consensus that On-line blended learning ”our” way😊 simply is better!
References:
Adonis Ampara, Glenn Smith, Alon Friedman (2018). Gender and persistent grade performance differences between online and face to face undergraduate classes in EdMedia + Innovate Learning, Jun 25, Amsterdam, Netherlands Publisher: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE), Waynesville, NC.
Johnson, Aragon, Shaik and Palma-Rivas (2000). Comparative Analysis of Learner Satisfaction and Learning Outcomes in Online and Face-to-Face Learning Environments, Journal of Interactive Learning Research Volume 11, Number 1, 2000 ISSN 1093-023X Publisher: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE), Waynesville, NC
Xu & Jaggars (2014). Journal of Higher Education Volume 85, Number 5. ISSN 0022-1546 Performance Gaps between Online and Face-to-Face Courses: Differences across Types of Students and Academic Subject Areas.
Vo; Brodsky and Wilks (2017). Infusing Authentic Learning into Online Courses: a Case of Online Introduction to Sociology: EdMedia + Innovate Learning, Jun 20, Washington, DC. ISBN 978-1-939797-29-2
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