Technology-Enhanced and Collaborative Learning

Affordances, approaches and challenges

Stewart Martin, Michele Notari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367886622
• eBook ISBN: 9781351981095
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Technology-enhanced, collaborative and blended learning settings can promote more effective approaches to teaching, learning and assessment when context, agency and individual characteristics are taken into account. This book presents critical insight into the theoretical and practical progress made towards establishing effective, valid and reliable strategies for using and evaluating such approaches, and the challenges and implications of doing so.

Topics explored include technology-enhanced learning and student evaluations; student engagement and the perception of teaching quality; instructional design and assessment strategies; blended network and mobile technologies for enriching learning and for monitoring and assessment; and the motivations of students to engage with evaluation. Contributors examine issues such as the underlying variabilities in student evaluation of teaching; the implications of inherited cultural and pedagogic practices for educators using collaborative and blended learning; and the international empirical progress in research to understand and measure interactions between cognition, successful learning, and individual difference in technology-augmented settings.

Modelling blended solutions for higher education: teaching, learning, and assessment in the network and mobile technology era

Stefania Bocconi and Guglielmo Trentin

The article addresses the role of network and mobile technologies in enhancing blended solutions with a view to (a) enriching the teaching/learning processes, (b) exploiting the opportunities it offers for their observability, and hence for their monitoring and formative/summative assessment. It will also discuss how such potential can only be captured by solidly integrating the process of instructional design with that of monitoring and assessment. First, the article presents the proposed conception of blended solutions, giving examples. In the second part, the article discusses a possible breakdown of blended solutions into its various components and how these can enrich both the teaching/learning and the assessment processes. Finally, it addresses the question of how to combine and/or use singly the various components of blended solutions. To conclude, implications for the implementation of blended solutions are discussed, also in relation to emerging contexts such as Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs).

Introduction

Blended learning environments have grown rapidly over the last decade, and have probably become the “new normal” in university course delivery (Dziuban, Moskal, Kramer, & Thompson, 2013). Although discussion of the precise meaning of the term “blended learning” is still ongoing (Graham & Allen, 2009; Kaleta, Skibba, & Joosten, 2007), there seems to be widespread agreement that blended learning involves a combination of face-to-face and online learning (e.g., Graham & Dziuban, 2008; Stacey & Gerbic, 2008).

Generally speaking, definitions emerging from the existing literature focus on three main scenarios (Graham, 2013): (a) blending online and face-to-face instruction, (b) blending instructional modalities, and (c) blending instructional methods. Some definitions of blended learning also imply a reduction in face-to-face contacts in favour of online activity (e.g., Picciano, 2009).

Several authors also focus on quality implications (e.g., Smythe, 2012), highlighting the transformational potential of blended learning. For example, Trentin and Wheeler’s (2009) definition requires that integration of online with traditional face-to-face activities occurs within a planned strategy, thus concerned with improving overall pedagogical quality.

Prominent models of blended learning in higher education (Graham, Henrie, & Gibbons, 2013) seem to vary along the following five dimensions: supplemental (e.g., online materials and activities provided); replacement (how much of a course is taught face to face versus technology mediated); emporium (e.g., offering on-demand personal assistance); buffet (students’ choice of learning options); and fully online learning.

Emerging practices and research (e.g., Graham & Allen, 2009) also show variations in the rationales for adopting a blended approach in higher education contexts; these mostly concentrate on: effectively responding to students’ current needs (Cavanagh, 2012); offering opportunities for personalised learning paths (Oh & Park, 2009); innovating university teaching (Trentin & Wheeler, 2009); increasing access for students and flexibility in terms of students’ on-campus time (Cavanagh, 2012); impacting on student and faculty satisfaction (e.g., Wu & Liu, 2013); and addressing sustainability issues and achieving greater cost-effectiveness (e.g., Trentin & Wheeler, 2009).

With traditional learning environments increasing the use of network and mobile technologies, the landscape of blended learning in higher education is now rapidly being transformed. By offering unprecedented opportunities for communicating, sharing, meaning-making, and content and context generation, network and mobile technologies provide affordances that stimulate students’ ability to operate successfully in, and across, different contexts, utilising their everyday life-worlds as learning spaces (Cook, Pachler, & Bachmair, 2013). Thus, critical distinctions between onsite and online learning also become less predominant. Cavanagh (2012) terms this as the “post-modality era”, where students are increasingly unconcerned with the distinctions between face-to-face and online learning, instead choosing individual courses that meet their particular needs at any given time, regardless of modality. At the institution level, Cavanagh also points out how meeting students’ needs with institutional ecosystems that adequately support them and enable them to succeed will become a crucial component of university strategic plans (p. 227). For this to happen, Repetto and Trentin (2013) moreover highlight the need to investigate how the uses of network and mobile technologies, which have been autonomously acquired by students and teachers outside the school context, could be channelled towards new educational paradigms.

The present article aims to explore the roles of network and mobile technologies in facilitating the emergence of new blended learning scenarios (i.e., blended solutions) in higher education. The paper begins by defining key components of blended solutions. The proposed definition of blended solution suggests a conceptual alignment for the further understanding of (a) the multifaceted nature of blended solutions and (b) the role of network and mobile technologies within each component of the proposed blended solution model. Hence, there is an exploration of network and mobile technologies potential in enriching the teaching and learning process, as well as in enabling multiple perspectives on its monitoring and assessment. Guidelines for using the proposed blended solution components in the instructional design process are also suggested.

The various facets of blended solutions

It clearly emerges from the specialised literature that there are various ways of seeing blended solutions (e.g., Garrison & Kanuka, 2004; Graham, Woodfield, & Harrison, 2013). The reason for this likely lies in the very concept of “blended”, that is, the mixing of different teaching approaches in the most varied of combinations when proposing learning activities aimed at the achievement of one or more educational goals.

In university teaching, many teachers believe that blended solutions are the most sustainable, since they offer the combined typical advantages of the different approaches that form them. Trentin (2010) highlighted some of the reasons often leading to the adoption of these approaches, including the following opportunities for:

•Recuperating classroom time in favour of greater interaction with students, whenever possible delegating to teaching materials the explanatory role the teacher has often played in a face-to-face lecture. In other words, in class the teacher limits his/her explanation of what the student can study independently (explicit knowledge vehicled through handbooks, publications, videos), reinvesting the time gained in direct interactions with the students, either for further explanations and clarifications or for transmitting his/her own particular professional know-how (non-explicit knowledge or in any case knowledge which cannot be vehicled through handbooks and publications). Consistent with this, Means, Toyama, Murphy, Bakia, and Jones (2009) found evidence that students’ opportunity for increased face-to-face time with the instructor during instruction results to be one of the significant moderating variables for effective blended learning. The primary findings of their study claimed that “classes with online learning (whether taught completely online or blended) on average produced stronger student learning outcomes than did classes with solely face-to-face instruction” (p. 18).

•Fostering structured collaborative learning processes, which would otherwise be impossible due to lack of sufficient classroom time and/or physical spaces; in addition, thanks to the asynchronous nature of online communication, each student is given the chance to actively participate in the group study, according to his/her own study and learning pace. Moreover, researchers have argued that improved outcomes may have more to do with increased learner time on task in the blended learning (BL) environment (Sitzmann, Kraiger, Stewart, & Wisher, 2006).

•Reducing the number of face-to-face lectures, for example, in order to help working students or students living far from the university, or finding solutions, albeit bland ones, to the problem of classroom availability.

As can be seen, in the first and second cases the choice is more of a pedagogical type, that is, aimed at optimising classroom time, without necessarily reducing the number of face-to-face lectures; additionally, in the second case the intention is primarily to find solutions to logistic/organisational problems. However, available evidence shows that it is the pedagogical possibilities (i.e., by combining both the richness of interactions in a face-to-face environment and the flexibility, convenience, and reduced opportunity costs associated with online learning) enabled by the modality that can lead to students’ satisfaction with blended learning options. In fact, recent research looking at over a million course evaluations across different course formats (Dziuban & Moskal, 2011) showed that the overall educational experience is what is valued by learners, and “modality does not impact the dimensionality by which students evaluate their course experiences” (p. 240).

Although the aspect of blended solutions which is normally most emphasised is the alternation between face-to-face and distance learning activities, the concept of “blended solution” actually refers to the integration of methods and teaching tools rather than to the space/time dimension. In fact, as already discussed, the concept of blended solutions is used to cover a mixture of various instructional approaches, either exclusively face-to-face or distance teaching or a combination of the two.

In this article, instead of emphasising the alternation of face-to-face and distance learning, and in order to underline the role of technologies in enhancing the particular characteristics of blended solutions, the “onsite/online” learning terms are used as follows:

•onsite lea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Modelling blended solutions for higher education: teaching, learning, and assessment in the network and mobile technology era
• 2. Expectancy theory outcomes and student evaluations of teaching
• 3. What response rates are needed to make reliable inferences from student evaluations of teaching?
• 4. Challenges for collaborative blended learning in undergraduate students
• 5. Measuring cognitive load and cognition: metrics for technology-enhanced learning
• Index