Group items tagged

It is definitely not for everyone -- you must be committed (especially time-wise) to using it. But knowing that you and your hundreds of students are finally seeing eye-to-eye is worth the effort!

The success of Fb described above, as well as survey data I collected showing positive reactions to the Fb group, will lead to my continued use of this technology.

After all the years of teaching these “mega-sections” and with the tough financial situation of my state university it was clear that this type of class was not going away.

I was hoping to include something that would add a greater sense of community to the class, something that everyone in the class could use to better connect to one another.

I knew the data about how many college students were on Fb, but would students be willing to spend some of their valuable Fb time communicating within a Fb group for a college course? Also, would I be willing to become an avid Fb user, following the flow of communication several times a day? It did not take long to learn that the answers to these questions was “Yes,” and that I had reached my goal of facilitating a sense of community. Although joining the Fb group for the course was not required, a little over 80 percent of the class became members of the group.

Moreover, the students essentially ran the group.

These included everything from asking for notes, getting clarification on points made in lecture, posting videos and images that pertained to class material, forming study groups, noting relevant events on campus, and congratulating class members on specific accomplishments.

Social presence is the perceived presence of others in mediated communication (Rourke, Garrison, & Archer, 1999), which Garrison et al. (2000) contend supports both cognitive and teaching presence through its ability to instigate, to sustain, and to support interaction. It had its genesis in the work of John Dewey and is consistent with all theoretical approaches to learning in higher education.

Teaching presence is defined as “the design, facilitation and direction of cognitive and social processes for the purpose of realizing [students’] personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile outcomes” (Anderson et al., 2001, p.5). Vygotsky’s (1978) scaffolding analogies illustrate an assistive role for teachers in providing instructional support to students from their position of greater content knowledge. Although many authors recommend a “guide on the side” approach to moderating student discussions, a key feature of this social cognition model is the adult, the expert, or the more skilled peer who scaffolds a novice’s learning

Shea, Pickett, & Pelz , 2004

Each category of a tutor’s presence is vital to learning and to the establishment of the learning community; tutors' behavior must be such that they are seen to be “posting regularly, responding in a timely manner and modeling good online communication and interaction” (Palloff & Pratt, 2003, p.118). Without an instructor’s explicit guidance and “teaching presence,” students were found to engage primarily in “serial monologues” (Pawan et al., 2003). Baker (2004) discovered that “instructor immediacy, i.e., teaching presence (Rourke et al., 1999), was a more reliable predictor of effective cognitive learning than whether students felt close to each other. Studies have demonstrated that instructor participation in threaded discussion is critical to the development of social presence (Shea, Li, Swan, & Pickett, 2005; Swan & Shih, 2005) and sometimes not fully appreciated by online faculty (Liu, Bonk, Magjuka, Lee, & Su, 2005). Shea, Li, and Pickett (2006) proposed that teaching presence – viewed as the core role of the online instructor – is a promising mechanism for developing learning community in online environments.

students ranked instructor modeling as the most important element in building online community, while instructors ranked it fourth.

Shea (2006), who completed an extensive study of teaching presence and online learning, concluded that two categories (“design” and “directed facilitation”) sufficed to define the construct.

Kalman, Ravid, Raban, and Rafaeli (2006) argued that interactivity is an essential characteristic of effective online communication and plays an important role in keeping message threads and their authors together. Interactive communication (online as well as in traditional settings) is engaging, and loss of interactivity results in a breakdown of the communicative process.

Research indicates the existence of a relationship between learners’ perceptions of social presence and their motivation for participation in online discussions (Weaver & Albion, 2005).

Northrup (2002) found that online learners felt it was important for instructors to promote collaboration and conversation. When interactive activities are carefully planned, they lead not only to greater learning but also to enhanced motivation (Berge 1999; Northrup, 2002).

Researchers have suggested that timing of messages can serve as a proxy for a sense of social presence (Blanchard, 2004), as an indication of attentiveness (Walther & Bunz, 2005) or respect (Bargh & McKenna, 2004), and as a clue to the sociability of a community (Maloney-Krichmar & Preece, 2005). As such, the frequency of messages may serve as a signal for how engaged participants are with the community.

Eom found that the most significant factors for increasing student satisfaction with online classes are paying attention to students and responding to their concerns.

The highly esteemed instructor was especially active from semester midpoint to semester end; she more than doubled her active participation in both teaching presence (especially discourse and instruction) and social presence (all three categories).

the lack of specific, progressively structured inquiry tasks and/or the lack of facilitation skills (teaching presence/facilitating discourse) may have contributed to the relatively limited occurrences of cognitive presence.

something else accounted for the extreme satisfaction and dissatisfaction experienced by students in the two forums. The something else may be the two exceptional events that occurred during the third month: The instructor held in low esteem became nearly dysfunctional, while the highly esteemed instructor exhibited very high teacher presence and social presence (see Table 3 and 4).

Shea, Pickett, and Pelt (2003) found that students’ perceived teacher presence also correlates with perceived learning as well as with students’ satisfaction with the forum. This correlation points to the tentative conclusion that teaching presence affords learning by setting a convenient climate.

we suggest that students’ perceived learning in course forums has a significant impact on their participation

the table is suggestive of the eventual possibility of having an “objective” tool for evaluating the quality of a given forum.

(Anderson et al., 2001).

Teaching effectiveness may be defined as how an instructor can best direct, facilitate, and support students toward certain academic ends, such as achievement and satisfaction. Teaching effectiveness has been investigated extensively in traditional classrooms for more than seven decades (for a meta-analysis of empirical studies from 1995-2004, see Seidel & Shavelson, 2007). Over the past five years, research has become directed toward teaching effectiveness in online or virtual classes. As a preface to our study, we discuss findings and conclusions concerning teaching effectiveness in traditional classrooms.

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One of the most widely cited sources for teacher effectiveness in traditional classrooms is Chickering and Gamson (1987), who suggested seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education.

encourages student-faculty contact, encourages cooperation among students, encourages active learning, gives prompt feedback, emphasizes time on task, communicates high expectations, respects diverse talents and ways of learning.

the academically decentralized/administratively centralized model

Changes in the institutional landscape may magnify competition among educational providers and allow new models and leaders to emerge.

Knowledge proliferation may increase content-breadth demands on higher education, spreading distance education resources ever thinner and complicating development decisions.

An NEA survey reported that faculty members’ top concern about distance education was that they will do more work for the same amount of pay, apparently a merited concern.

As long as distance education contributions are not considered in tenure and promotion decisions, and as long as professors have their own, traditional ways of delivering their courses, many faculty members will be reluctant to participate in online courses (Oravec, 2003). Concerning this reluctance, Dunn has predicted that many faculty members will revolt against technological course delivery and the emerging expectations their institutions will have of faculty members. Dunn forecast that some of the resistance will even be manifest through unionization and strikes (Dunn, 2000). Some have suggested the labor-intensive and time-consuming demands required to develop online modules as reasons for faculty resistance (Brogden, 2002).

The results of de Alva’s 2000 survey support this trend: governors rated “maintaining traditional faculty roles and tenure” as the least desirable characteristic of a twenty-first century university (p. 34).

Faculty members tend initially to try to use their conventional classroom methods to teach at a distance and then become frustrated when attempts are unsuccessful (Dasher-Alston & Patton, p. 14). In Green’s (2002) survey of the role

Distance education teams include administrators, instructional designers, technologists, and instructors/facilitators (Miller, 2001; Williams, 2003). The functions of instructors and facilitators then include being a “facilitator, teacher, organizer, grader, mentor, role model, counselor, coach, supervisor, problem solver, and liaison” (Riffee, 2003, p. 1; see also Roberson, 2002; Scagnoli, 2001). The role of faculty members in distance education requires “some specialized skills and strategies. Distance education instructors must plan ahead, be highly organized, and communicate with learners in new ways. They need to be accessible to students [and] work in teams when appropriate” (PSU, 1998, p. 4). Distance faculty members must be experts in maintaining communication, because there is increased demand for student interaction in distance learning (NEA, 2000). Finally, they may have to assume more administrative responsibilities than is true in a residential model (PSU, 1998).

“Rather than incorporating the responsibility for all technology- and competency-based functions into a single concept of ‘faculty member,’ universities are disaggregating faculty instructional activities and [assigning] them to distinct professionals” (Paulson, 2002, p. 124). Doing this involves a “deliberate division of labor among the faculty, creating new kinds of instructional staff, or deploying nontenure-track instructional staff (such as adjunct faculty, graduate teaching assistants, or undergraduate assistants) in new ways” (Paulson, 2002, p. 126

Online students are becoming an entirely new subpopulation of higher-education learners. They are “generally older, have completed more college credit hours and more degree programs, and have a higher all-college GPA than their traditional counterparts” (Diaz, 2002, pp. 1-2). For example, Diaz has noted that online students received twice as many A’s as traditional students and half as many D’s and F’s.

One result of the highly competitive e-learning market will be institutions that specialize in meeting particular niches in the market (Gallagher, 2003). Morrison and Barone (2003, p. 4) observed, “We can see the beginnings of the trend toward the unbundling of courses, credits, services, and fee structures.” Dunn foresaw a similar trend, predicting that “courseware producers will sell courses and award credits directly to the end user and thus, through intermediation, bypass the institutional middleman” (Dunn, 2000, p. 37). The transition may also blur the distinction between two- and four-year colleges and universities (Carr, 1999). In this context of greater “portability,” more educational “brokers” (e.g., Western Governor’s University, Excelsior College, Charter Oak State College, etc.) will exist (Pond, 2003). Further, as de Alva has asserted, “Institutional success for any higher education enterprise will depend more on successful marketing, solid quality-assurance and control systems, and effective use of the new media than on production and communication of knowledge” (de Alva, 2000, p. 40).