Cases on Online and Blended Learning Technologies in Higher Education: Concepts and Practices

Cases on Online and Blended Learning Technologies in Higher Education: Concepts and Practices Yukiko Inoue University of Guam, Guam

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Editorial Advisory Board Kyle Smith, University of Guam, Guam Mark Goniwiecha, University of Guam, Guam

List of Reviewers Martin Reardon, Virginia Commonwealth University, USA Roisin Donnelly, Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland Roberto Di Scala, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy Katarzyna Grzybowska, Poznan University of Technology, Poland Linda De George-Walker, University of Southern Queensland, Australia Patrick Danaher, University of Southern Queensland, Australia Richard Engstrom, Georgia State University, USA Chris Morgan,Southern Cross University, Australia John J. Doherty, Northern Arizona University, USA Kam Hou Vat, University of Macau, China Paul Shield, Queensland University of Technology, Queensland

Table of Contents

Foreword .............................................................................................................................................. xi Preface ................................................................................................................................................ xiv Acknowledgment ............................................................................................................................... xxii

Section 1 Implementing Blended Learning Technologies A: Programs/Environments Chapter 1 The Nature of Complex Blends: Transformative Problem-Based Learning and Technology in Irish Higher Education ........................................................................................................................ 1 Roisin Donnelly, Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland Chapter 2 Experiences and Perceptions of Learner Engagement in Blended Learning Environments: The Case of an Australian University ................................................................................................... 23 Linda De George-Walker, University of Southern Queensland, Australia Abdul Hafeez-Baig, University of Southern Queensland, Australia Raj Gururajan, University of Southern Queensland, Australia Patrick, A. Danaher, University of Southern Queensland, Australia Chapter 3 Instructional Leadership and Blended Learning: Confronting the Knowledge Gap in Practice .......... 44 Martin R. Reardon, Virginia Commonwealth University, USA Chapter 4 Blended Learning in a Creative Writing Program: Lessons Learned from a Two-Year Pilot Study............................................................................................................................................. 63 Chris Morgan, Southern Cross University, Australia Janie Conway-Herron, Southern Cross University, Australia

Chapter 5 Blended Learning for Adaptation to Needs .......................................................................................... 76 Joan E. Aitken, Park University, USA B: Courses Chapter 6 Virtual Reality or Virtually Real: Blended Teaching and Learning in a Master’s Level Research Methods Class ....................................................................................................................... 91 John Lidstone, Queensland University of Technology, Australia Paul Shield, Queensland University of Technology, Australia Chapter 7 Teaching Online: What Does Blended Learning Require? ................................................................. 112 P. Toyoko Kang, University of Guam, Guam Chapter 8 The Perfect Blend?: Online Blended Learning from a Linguistic Perspective ................................... 132 Roberto Di Scala, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy Chapter 9 Reflections: Two Years after Implementing a Blended Educational Research Course ....................... 145 Yukiko Inoue, University of Guam, Guam

Section 2 Integrating Online Learning Technologies A: Programs/Environments Chapter 10 A Case of Using Wikis to Foster Collaborative Learning: Pedagogical Potential and Recommendations ........................................................................................................................ 167 Hong Lin, Oklahoma State University, USA Kathleen D. Kelsey, Oklahoma State University, USA Chapter 11 Virtual Organizing Professional Learning Communities through a Servant-Leader Model of Appreciative Coaching ................................................................................................................... 183 Kam Hou Vat, University of Macau, Macau

B: Courses Chapter 12 Bothering with Technology: Building Community in an Honors Seminar ........................................ 208 John J. Doherty, Northern Arizona University, USA Chapter 13 Online Materials for Teaching Japanese ............................................................................................ 227 Kai Masumi, University of Guam, Guam Chapter 14 Composition Goes Online: How a Small Pacific Island is Blogging into the Future ......................... 249 Michelle Bednarzyk, University of Guam, Guam Merissa Brown, University of Guam, Guam Chapter 15 Integrating Classroom and Online Instruction in an Introductory American Government Course ............................................................................................................................ 283 Richard Engstrom, Georgia State University, USA

Compilation of References .............................................................................................................. 296 About the Contributors ................................................................................................................... 313 Index ................................................................................................................................................... 318

Detailed Table of Contents

Foreword .............................................................................................................................................. xi Preface ................................................................................................................................................ xiv Acknowledgment ............................................................................................................................... xxii

Section 1 Implementing Blended Learning Technologies A: Programs/Environments Chapter 1 The Nature of Complex Blends: Transformative Problem-Based Learning and Technology in Irish Higher Education ........................................................................................................................ 1 Roisin Donnelly, Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland Qualitative data from focus groups, reflection papers, and participant observations emphasize the need for effective interaction between pedagogy and technology to ensure that both are used to best effect in implementing problem-based learning in a blended learning environment. Chapter 2 Experiences and Perceptions of Learner Engagement in Blended Learning Environments: The Case of an Australian University ................................................................................................... 23 Linda De George-Walker, University of Southern Queensland, Australia Abdul Hafeez-Baig, University of Southern Queensland, Australia Raj Gururajan, University of Southern Queensland, Australia Patrick, A. Danaher, University of Southern Queensland, Australia The authors make an attempt to extend current understandings of blended learning, and realize that ongoing challenges cannot necessarily be resolved easily or permanently because several factors influencing the challenges lie outside the control of individual course team members.

Chapter 3 Instructional Leadership and Blended Learning: Confronting the Knowledge Gap in Practice .......... 44 Martin R. Reardon, Virginia Commonwealth University, USA The course was particularly designed to engage participants, who were seeking endorsement (i.e., certification) at the school district superintendent level, in examining the instructional leadership ramifications of the effective integration of digital technology and learning. Chapter 4 Blended Learning in a Creative Writing Program: Lessons Learned from a Two-Year Pilot Study............................................................................................................................................. 63 Chris Morgan, Southern Cross University, Australia Janie Conway-Herron, Southern Cross University, Australia The authors express the strong need for a flexible learning approach offering a variety of formats to meet the needs of a diverse student body spread across the university’s three campuses, and including older students. Many challenges were exposed through the initiative discussed. Chapter 5 Blended Learning for Adaptation to Needs .......................................................................................... 76 Joan E. Aitken, Park University, USA Describing the experiences of institutions using various levels of distance learning integration, the information of this case includes the type of technology used, the way blended learning has been configured in several contexts, and questions for the future applications of blended learning. B: Courses Chapter 6 Virtual Reality or Virtually Real: Blended Teaching and Learning in a Master’s Level Research Methods Class ....................................................................................................................... 91 John Lidstone, Queensland University of Technology, Australia Paul Shield, Queensland University of Technology, Australia As the authors maintain, it may be that technology has become virtually transparent, so that people have moved from the ‘e’ to the ‘learning,’ or, in other words, from thinking of pedagogy in terms of virtual reality to a student experience that is virtually real. Chapter 7 Teaching Online: What Does Blended Learning Require? ................................................................. 112 P. Toyoko Kang, University of Guam, Guam This case shows simple ways to make currently incomprehensible input comprehended, and to increase input, with the benefit of a memory efficient approach developed from human parser learning theory (HPLT), justifying why input comprehension matters according to HPLT.

Chapter 8 The Perfect Blend?: Online Blended Learning from a Linguistic Perspective ................................... 132 Roberto Di Scala, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy This case identifies the many challenges facing the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia as it attempts to find the optimum blend of components. The University has offered blended e-learning courses for its distance learning programs to ensure that the ‘human touch’ is included. Chapter 9 Reflections: Two Years after Implementing a Blended Educational Research Course ....................... 145 Yukiko Inoue, University of Guam, Guam Based on the instructor’s observations, as well as the student self-ratings and self-narratives, this case confirms the prediction drawn from the literature that, after all, pedagogical and technological difficulties present major challenges for blended course instruction.

Section 2 Integrating Online Learning Technologies A: Programs/Environments Chapter 10 A Case of Using Wikis to Foster Collaborative Learning: Pedagogical Potential and Recommendations ........................................................................................................................ 167 Hong Lin, Oklahoma State University, USA Kathleen D. Kelsey, Oklahoma State University, USA The author argues that although wikis have increasingly been used for collaborative classroom writing and have been hailed as a learning/writing tool that is more powerful than blogs and e-mails, the pedagogical impacts of using wikis is thus far underrepresented in the literature. Chapter 11 Virtual Organizing Professional Learning Communities through a Servant-Leader Model of Appreciative Coaching ................................................................................................................... 183 Kam Hou Vat, University of Macau, Macau The author is very much interested in enhancing the student’s experience by designing a collaborative and problem-based learning environment, which relies on the virtual organizing of the various professional learning communities distributed throughout the institution.

B: Courses Chapter 12 Bothering with Technology: Building Community in an Honors Seminar ........................................ 208 John J. Doherty, Northern Arizona University, USA The author contends that instructors of honors courses, who might be predisposed to more traditional teaching methods, need to ‘bother’ with technology in order to provide their students with the combination of learning strategies that are most efficient and effective. Chapter 13 Online Materials for Teaching Japanese ............................................................................................ 227 Kai Masumi, University of Guam, Guam The author asserts that although new software has yet to show dramatic change in student learning, it clearly gives different stimuli to the student and is useful for the student’s self study, based upon the theory that technology affect the process of foreign language learning. Chapter 14 Composition Goes Online: How a Small Pacific Island is Blogging into the Future ......................... 249 Michelle Bednarzyk, University of Guam, Guam Merissa Brown, University of Guam, Guam This case provides a detailed historical background of the course development; insights from two instructors about the process of teaching this way for the University of Guam’s diverse student population; and suggestions for future successes based on current challenges and issues. Chapter 15 Integrating Classroom and Online Instruction in an Introductory American Government Course ............................................................................................................................ 283 Richard Engstrom, Georgia State University, USA The author discusses online components to provide course material that the students would otherwise have missed due to decreased lecture time, and recognizes the opportunity to add the components as a chance to address the usual limitations of large, introductory sections.

Compilation of References .............................................................................................................. 296 About the Contributors ................................................................................................................... 313 Index ................................................................................................................................................... 318

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Foreword

In the Middle Ages, the educated class consisted largely of priests and monks, who copied the Bible and missals by hand on leaves of parchment. Each hand-written book was unique, including transcription errors (some inadvertent, some maybe deliberately introduced) and even whimsical doodles. Little other than prayer books was available when the Church was in charge of information dissemination. Later on, the need for copies of business documents was filled by public scribes who worked in the town square near the office of the clerk or registrar of documents. Johann Gutenberg’s invention of printing from movable type in the 1450s changed everything about our world. Not only did he introduce the revolutionary technology to make multiple copies of a book, but also, the new medium of printing altered the content of the book product. In addition to religious works, new secular subjects, such as histories, biographies, novels, poems, and newspapers began to appear. More people learned to read as more printed literature was produced. Merchants and tradesmen wanted an education, too, creating a middle class. The number of persons attending high school increased. More universities were established. In The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan (1962) explored the symbiotic relationship between the mass media, in general, especially printing, in particular, and the larger socioculture, human selfawareness, circumspection and cognizance. McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964) and The Medium Is the Massage (1967) continued his analysis of how the medium affects the message itself. The technology is more than just the method of transmission employed. The means (the medium) alters the end (the content). At St. Clement Schools, which I attended in Center Line, Michigan, for 11 years, teachers used the latest technology available—slide projectors, filmstrips with sound, and later, movies, then referred to as “moving pictures.” In the state-of-the-art language laboratory, the teacher, Sister Francis Marie, a Catholic nun, could monitor interactively each student’s progress and oral performance—listen and repeat, conjugate a verb, demonstrate subject-predicate agreement. She could speak to one student through his headphones to attempt to improve pronunciation, or she could broadcast directions to everyone in Spanish class. Typing with carbon paper and wet mimeograph duplicators reeking of fumes gave way to dry photocopiers. Mainframe computers, then personal computers, spelled the end of the typewriter. High school yearbook classes and clubs, then newspaper and magazine production rooms, made the transition from cut-and-paste page layouts to computerized composition. The invention of electronic mail, then the Internet, changed forever the way people communicate, search for, retrieve and deliver information. Each new technological invention introduced new means, and along with that, new ways of perceiving the message itself.

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Educators have been in the forefront in the introduction and employment of new technologies in the classroom. Students utilize and master the technologies, then go on in their own careers to design new ones. Every era and every step forward have had its doomsday naysayers. Education of the masses in free public schools would make the world a more vulgar place, some claimed. Free public libraries would denigrate learning, they said. But the historical record and empirical evidence have not born out those fears. Instead, the United States Congress went ahead anyway and established the land grant university system to locate and support with federal funding a “state university” in every state and territory. Cities undertook the founding of free public libraries for everyone, city colleges and city universities, using local tax regimes approved by voters. Sons and daughters of farmers, teamsters, coopers, butchers and bakers went to college, earned degrees, became intellectually productive knowledge workers, and moved up the rungs of the economic and social ladder to join the ranks of the middle class. From personal experience, I know that the son of a factory assembly line worker can become a university professor capable of understanding complex concepts, conducting lectures, making academic presentations, producing research results, and writing them up for publication. When Barack Obama, the son of a visiting Kenyan student father and a Kansan-Hawaiian mother, can become a lawyer, professor, senator, and be elected president of the United States, almost anything is possible. American students know that, through their earnest endeavors, they can achieve higher aspirations. Other nations are studying, emulating and replicating free public schools for all children, free public libraries for everyone, and political systems that provide fair and equal treatment and suffrage for all. Dictators are afraid of open societies and the free flow of information. The introduction of the Internet promises new possibilities for educating students. Moodle and other interactive programs allow students in distant, even remote and isolated, locations to pursue courses and programs not previously offered in their areas. On small islands, such as in Micronesia, and in other developing countries, students can use the Internet and email to enroll in and complete university courses and finish entire distance education degrees successfully. Professors have identified ways to use email and the Internet in their traditional courses, by keeping in touch with their students via listservs, with course Web sites, posted syllabi, reserve readings online, and important links to explore. Students on campus can also take advantage of the new technologies, using the Internet and e-mail, to enhance the classroom experience in blended learning opportunities. Students can send in their assignments via email to the professor, or upload them to the Web page, where they can be viewed and critiqued by other readers, fostering a collaborative environment. Students can communicate with each other, and with the instructor, outside of class, using the Web page. Professors can send out questions or new assignments electronically, or return corrected assignments. In the chapters of this book of cases, researchers present their findings concerning professors’ classroom use of listservs, course Web sites, Wikis, blogs, and Moodle for teacher-student interaction and learning. The process is interactive and the learning occurs on both sides. Professors learn from the students. Students learn from the teachers and from each other. The possibilities and progress are limited only by our imagination and creativity. Research, such as that in the present work, serves to analyze, evaluate, assess, and improve some of the new functions, roles, and perceptions. Collaborations, critiques, analyses, and syntheses will develop still further uses,

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and newer methods and media, on future journeys in education. Indeed, this book of cases celebrates such new journeys. It’s a brave new world, and we are creating it.

Mark C. Goniwiecha University of Guam, Guam September 2009

Mark Goniwiecha is a professor of library science at the University of Guam. He is the author of numerous publications, including articles in Taiheiyo Gakkai Shi—Journal of the Pacific Society—(Tokyo, Japan), Government Publications Review (New York), Contemporary Pacific (Honolulu, Hawaii), Reference Services Review (Ann Arbor, Mich.), Libri (Copenhagen, Denmark), The Nation (Bangkok, Thailand), Pacific Daily News (Hagåtña, Guam), and others. He served two terms as the Guam Library Association chapter representative to the American Library Association Council. Email: [email protected]. edu

REFERENCES McLuhan, M. (1962). The Gutenberg galaxy: The making of typographic man. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press. McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. New York: McGraw-Hill. McLuhan, M. (1967). The medium is the massage: An inventory of effects. New York: Bantam Books / Random House.

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Preface

In the Internet Age, the notion that a traditional classroom with face-to-face instruction, by itself, is no longer adequate for higher education teaching and learning as one that has considerable intrinsic merit. Institutions of higher education, therefore, realize that lecture-based teaching methods alone will not prepare students for the challenges they will face. The State University of New York and the University of Illinois, for instance, have entirely abolished the separation of online programs from campus-based programs, awarding the same degree for both programs and allowing students themselves to combine campus and online coursework as best suits their individual needs and choices (Theil, 2008). Furthermore, in Theil’s words: The move to such hybrids will be driven by students questioning why they should sit in lectures taking notes three times a week when they can go once and do the rest at their own pace online…. By combining face-to-face interaction with new online options in more powerful ways, these programs should offer the best of both worlds—rendering moot today’s debate over whether virtual or in-person degrees are best. (p. 65) In spite of both substantive and specious concerns about the pervasive ongoing role of computers in modern life, the Internet is already well established in higher education and promises to continue to fill all the crevices of the educational fabric (Rudestam & Schoenholtz-Read, 2002, p. 9). Higher education is now available at the students’ fingertips, as technology enables them to do their tasks more efficiently, effectively, comfortably, and quickly (Sethy, 2008, p. 29). Moreover, the rapid growth in the use of new technologies, particularly in the use of the Internet and Web-based communication, has provided higher education instructors and institutions with new options that enable them to experiment with the most suitable mix of instructional approaches and learning environments. An especially important aspect of today’s higher education environment is that students are more diverse than ever before. In the United States, for example, in addition to a more diversified student population in terms of ethnicity, social status, and expectation, the proportion of non-traditional university students has been steadily increasing. Higher education institutions are thus being challenged, not only by the rapidly developing information and communication technologies, but also by the non-traditional character of today’s university students as well (Orhan, 2008). These changing student demographics and expectations, as well as technological innovation and the imperatives of a lifelong learning agenda, are transforming higher education for the 21st century.

THE COMING OF THE AGE OF BLENDED LEARNING Internet-based online distance education is certainly becoming an important long-term strategy for many institutions of higher education throughout the world. However, blended learning promises to be an even

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more significant modality than an entirely online learning approach. Blended learning is not entirely new. “Back in the last century, the term ‘blended learning’ was invented, accompanied with typical e-learning hype…. It was thought that developing a blended learning solution was all about choosing from an ever-widening selection of methods and media” (LINE Communications, 2006, p. 1). In the past five years, particularly, the concept of blended learning has become widely accepted in both academic and corporate worlds: the term is now generally used to mean a structured process that involves a mix of teaching and learning activities, including e-learning, face-to-face instruction, and telephone contact (CILIP, 2008). Blended learning is viewed as having myriad possibilities for enhancing higher education instruction, primarily “because new ways of thinking about course design are required to reconcile traditional values and practices with evolving expectations and technological possibilities” (Garrison & Vaughan, 2008, p. 3). In a study by Orhan (2008) focused on blended learning and teaching, college students felt that: “the integration of face-to-face and online learning environments was more enjoyable than purely online distance learning or purely face-to-face environments” (p. 61). In Orhan’s words: Blended learning can improve students’responsibility for their own learning through online activities and improve their motivation through face-to-face interactivity. In blended learning environments, instructors may be able to spend less time delivering content and more time guiding students…when trying to implement a student-centered learning environment. (p. 64) Orhan (2008), therefore, recommends that instructors should be (1) encouraged to forego strictly traditional lecturing in favor of courses designed to incorporate blended learning approaches, and (2) trained for the dual roles of both content developer and facilitator in courses redesigned for blended learning environments. Based upon the view that the value of blended learning lies in identifying situations in which technology-enhanced learning experiences might prove more effective and efficient in supporting meaningful learning, the following success factors for blended e-learning described by CILIP (2008) are useful for instructors in designing effective blended learning courses: • work with and within the context (blended e-learning is most effective when it is designed and developed within and for a specific context); • use blended learning as a driver for transformative course redesign (the best results are obtained when blended learning is used as a driver for course redesign that includes analyzing the current course and obtaining feedback from stakeholders, especially students); • help students develop their own conceptions of the learning process (students are more likely to engage in learning and teaching activities if they understand the rationale for it); and • disseminate and communicate results of findings (the report authors highlight the importance of disseminating the findings from research about blended e-learning). (p. 3) The mixture of blended learning can incorporate a variety of teaching and learning styles, course materials, and learning technologies, such as traditional classroom settings (including lecture theaters, and laboratory environments), CD-ROMs and DVDs, e-mails, course management systems, e-books, virtual learning environments (including message boards and chart rooms), asynchronous online delivery and tools such as Wikis and blogs, and synchronous online delivery and tools such as instant messaging (Gulc, 2006). The choice of a blend is best determined by the nature of the course and its learning objec-

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tives, instructor experiences and teaching styles, and student needs. Blended learning is also concerned with effectively leveraging the strengths of differing kinds of learning activities and venues in achieving some overarching learning objectives (Howard, Remenyi, & Pap, 2006, p. 1). Insofar as the aim of blended learning is to meet the challenges of widely differing situations, the following characterization is intriguing: Blended learning isn’t really about assembling media or methods. It isn’t design by numbers. What blended learning must do is to provide an integrated environment in which to learn. It must provide an experience that is more effective than the sum of its parts. In fact, blended learning is like so much that happens in our increasingly networked world: it’s not the individual components that matter, but the way they relate. It’s not the nodes in the network, but the way they link together. (LINE Communications, n. d., p. 1) Blended learning is considered to be an effective first step toward implementing fully online learning. Even when it is the first step, “maximizing success in a blended learning initiative requires a planned and well-supported approach that includes a theory-based instructional model, high-quality faculty development, course development assistance, learner support, and ongoing formative and summative assessment” (Dziuban, Hartman, & Moskal, 2004, p. 3). This point deserves emphasis. The potential for new technologies to increase the quantity and timeliness of information from learning activities performed in different venues will be realized only if higher education instructors are motivated to use this information to improve the quality of teaching (Howard et al., 2006). That is why preparing faculty for blended and online learning is so important.

PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK Blended learning, as previously discussed, has many faces (including combining instructional modalities or delivery media, and integrating instructional methods). In this publication, Cases on Blended and Online Learning Technologies in Higher Education: Concepts and Practices, blended learning is generally understood as a balanced combination of traditional classroom-based activities with appropriately designed online learning experiences, or the convergence between traditional campus-based learning and online/distance learning. Despite the growing interest in blended learning approaches, there are few published cases that provide specific insights into how blended learning courses should be designed, implemented, and evaluated in order to maximize teaching effectiveness and learning quality. The interest “in blended learning—thoughtful fusion of classroom and online learning experiences—has surged in the past two to three years throughout higher education. The need to provide more engaged learning experiences— and greater flexibility for students and faculty—are at the core of this interest” (Rochester Institute of Technology, 2008, p. 1). Three guiding principles of the book are as follows: • Blended learning might be the solution. It is a time to think about redesigning courses for blended learning, reconciling “traditional values and practices with evolving expectations and technological possibilities” (Garrison & Vaughan, 2008, p. 3). In this regard, the cases in the book focus on the challenges and directions of redesigning courses, especially for student-directed learn-

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ing, based upon a wide range of designs, methodologies, and applications of blended and online learning—thus from course design to assessment of learning outcomes. • Experience is the best teacher, as the adage goes. This is especially true for the contributors of cases who are eager to discuss and share their real-life examples and experiences in order to make a positive impact on blended and online learning. Their examples and experiences can be applied to any other settings or institutions of higher education throughout the world. • Lifelong learning is an educational agenda. Lifelong learning is one of the most important engines driving education in the 21st century (Magoulas, 2008). Providing cases of blended and online learning technologies and environments for different needs and settings, the book discusses the role today’s higher education instructors and institutions can play as they become genuinely lifelong instructors and institutions, better helping students to survive in a technologically sophisticated society. The aim of this book of cases is to contribute to an educational transformation based upon new models of teaching and learning, and made possible by “the confluence of new pedagogies (e.g., the change in emphasis from teaching-centered to student-centered learning paradigms), new technologies (e.g., the rapid spread of the Internet, World Wide Web, and personal computers), and new theories of learning (e.g., brain-based learning and social constructivism)” (Dziuban et al., 2004, p. 2). It is hoped that the book will be a valuable resource for both the conceptual understanding and practical application of blended and online learning technologies in higher education.

ORGANIZATION OF THIS BOOK This book of cases consists of 15 chapters. A brief description of each of the cases follows: Chapter One, “The Nature of Complex Blends: Transformative Problem-Based Learning and Technology in Irish Higher Education,” discusses the case of blending technology and problem-based learning (PBL) group interaction in the context of academic staff development with two objectives in mind: (1) to establish, in a PBL tutorial setting, the factors that govern the success of blended PBL; and (2) to identify technical, academic, and interactional indicators of learning in the online and face-to-face PBL tutorial. Qualitative data from focus group interviews, reflection papers, and participant observations emphasize the need for effective interaction between pedagogy and technology to ensure that both are used to best effect in implementing PBL in a blended learning environment. Thus pedagogy and technology must work effectively together. Chapter Two, “Experiences and Perceptions of Learner Engagement in Blended Learning Environments: The Case of an Australian University,” discusses the case of a collaboration by the faculty of business and education, presenting a detailed examination of three postgraduate courses in relation to design, development, and management of blended learning as it intersects with learner engagement. The authors make an attempt to extend current understandings of blended learning: what it is, in what contexts it occurs, how its effectiveness can be maximized, and what its connections with learner engagement are and should be. The authors realize that these ongoing challenges, including issues such as student retention and attrition, cannot necessarily be resolved easily or permanently because several factors influencing the challenges lie outside the control of individual course team members. Chapter Three, “Instructional Leadership and Blended Learning: Confronting the Knowledge Gap in Practice,” discusses an initiative taken by a professor in the educational leadership department to explore the concept of blended instruction in his own delivery of a doctoral course. This course was designed to engage participants, who were typically seeking endorsement (i.e., certification) at the school district

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superintendent level, in examining the instructional leadership ramifications of the effective integration of digital technology and learning. Many challenges were exposed through the initiative discussed. It may be that the advantage of this approach from the disruptive innovation perspective was a disadvantage for those developing the program in that the very remoteness of the participants exacerbated the ill effects of the unexpected missteps encountered in developing the new program. Chapter Four, “Blended Learning in a Creative Writing Program: Lessons Learned from a TwoYear Pilot Study,” discusses the case of a two-year pilot study of blended learning in an undergraduate creative writing program. The authors express the strong need for a flexible learning approach offering a variety of formats in order to meet the needs of a diverse student body spread across the university’s three campuses, and including older students with competing family and work commitments. Drawing from the evaluation data, the case details both the successes and problems encountered in the transition to a blended learning format, along with lessons learned along the way. The author concludes that although the entrenched inequities between distance and on-campus students are no longer necessary or conscionable, achieving parity will require reform at the institutional level as well. Chapter Five, “Blended Learning for Adaptation to Needs,” discusses the author’s observation and experience with multiple blended approaches in communication arts, and emphasizes that blended learning is more than the old learning modes of correspondence and televised courses. The study describes the experiences of both state and private institutions using various levels of distance learning integration. The case information includes the type of technology used, the way blended learning has been configured in several contexts, and questions for the future applications of blended learning in undergraduate and graduate programs. The author believes that blended communication is a process of individuals’ adapting to the Internet to increase their overall communication effectiveness. Chapter Six, “Virtual Reality or Virtually Real: Blended Teaching and Learning in a Master’s Level Research Methods Class,” discusses implementing blended learning approaches in the case of a master’s level research methodology course, which was intended to help students become critical professional consumers of research reports. The authors recognize that higher education instructors are now placed in a pivotal position and are required to take up the work of designing high-quality teaching and learning for students in order to meet standards set by governments, which include demands for increased use of technology. As the authors maintain, it may be that technology has become virtually transparent, so that people have moved from the “e” to the “learning,” or, in other words, from thinking of pedagogy in terms of virtual reality to a student experience that is virtually real. Chapter Seven, “Teaching Online: What Does Blended Learning Require,” asks the following question in a study of blended learning for foreign/second language acquisition: How can the instructor increase input, and improve the comprehension of input, in a second-language classroom? Describing blended learning and teaching for foreign/second language classes, this case attempts to answer the above-stated question by showing simple ways to make currently incomprehensible input comprehended, and to increase input, with the benefit of a memory efficient approach developed from human parser learning theory (HPLT). The author justifies why input comprehension matters according to HPLT, and shows how simply the instructor can make audio files, for example. Chapter Eight, “The Perfect Blend?: Online Blended Learning from a Linguistic Perspective,” discusses the case of online degree courses offered by the communication sciences and economics faculty at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, where the author is currently a contracted professor in charge of two courses in English language. Since 2002, the University has offered blended e-learning courses for its distance learning programs that provide actual, physical links between teachers and students so as to ensure that the “human touch” is included. The study identifies the many challenges facing the University as it attempts to find the optimum blend of components, and also notes the problems posed by extraneous factors such as obsolete phone-line connections.

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Chapter Nine, “Reflections  Two Years after the Implementation of a Blended Educational Research Course,” discusses a pilot study incorporating blended learning in an introductory educational research course at an American Pacific island university, and presents a detailed overview of how the instructor applied blending learning design to this particular course. The author compares her goals for the course with the concept of blended learning, and discusses reasons why the two complemented one another. Based on the instructor’s observations, as well as the student self-ratings (quantitative data) and self-narratives (qualitative data), this case confirms the prediction drawn from the literature that pedagogical and technological difficulties present major challenges for blended course instruction. The need for future research to obtain additional empirical evidence about student achievements and outcomes is also noted. Chapter Ten, “A Case of Using Wikis to Foster Collaborative Learning: Pedagogical Potential and Recommendations,” discusses a Wikibook project involving graduate students teaching adult education in the American mid-South. Findings from this case challenge idealistic hypotheses that Wiki work, without careful design and implementation, is naturally beneficial. Although Wikis have increasingly been used for collaborative classroom writing and have been hailed as a learning/writing tool that is more powerful than blogs and e-mails, the pedagogical impacts of using Wikis is thus far underrepresented in the literature. It is the belief of the authors that the Wiki work presented in this case is consistent with is consistent with Fishman and Pea’s statement about enhancing learner’s networked learning and encourages learners to become self-directed lifelong learners through collaborative writing and public presentation of their work. Chapter Eleven, “Virtual Organizing Professional Learning Communities through a Servant-Leader Model of Appreciative Coaching,” presents the case of a set of empowerment concerns in the context of transforming classes of student and teacher learners, considered as department-wide learning units in higher education, into professional learning communities (PLCs). In particular, the author is interested in enhancing the student’s experience by designing a collaborative and problem-based learning environment, which relies on the virtual organizing of the various PLCs distributed throughout the institution. Of specific interest to the author is the generative potential of the PLCs when nurtured by the practice of appreciative coaching, adapted from the established positive change paradigm of appreciative inquiry, through a servant-leader model of student-centered education. Chapter Twelve, “Bothering with Technology: Building Community in an Honors Seminar,” discusses the use of technology to enrich the learning experiences of students in a first year honors course in critical reading and writing, and examines the framework of Web-based learning. Noting that honors courses involve an especially concentrated curriculum, the author contends that instructors of honors courses, who might be predisposed to more traditional teaching methods, need to “bother” with technology in order to provide their students with the combination of learning strategies that are most efficient and effective. The highlight of this case is an extensive discussion of four strategies to build community through interaction and engagement. The case also provides the course syllabus and teaching materials. Chapter Thirteen, “Online Materials for Teaching Japanese,” examines the merits and demerits of learning the Japanese language through blended and online instruction, based upon the theory that technology-based learning methods affect the process of foreign language learning in terms of motivation, performance, and effectiveness. Hiragana practice software developed by the author was used in teaching Japanese. The author asserts that although new software has yet to show dramatic change in student learning, it clearly gives different stimuli to the student and is useful for the student’s self study. Moreover, a blended learning course comprised of both face-to-face instruction and online learning is promising because learning a language requires both memorization and repeated exercise outside the classroom.

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Chapter Fourteen, “Composition Goes Online: How a Small Pacific Island is Blogging into the Future,” provides a historical background of the course development; insights from two instructors about the process of teaching this way for the University of Guam’s diverse student population; and suggestions for future successes based on current challenges and issues. This was the first offering of an online version of the English course at the University. As emphasized in the chapter, the authors argue that students at the University are ready for more technology in their classroom environments, and the University should accommodate their requests in order to successfully prepare them for their careers. Chapter Fifteen, “Integrating Classroom and Online Instruction in an Introductory American Government Course,” compares two sections of an introduction to American government course. One section involved both lecture and online components, while the other was taught as a typical lecture course. The author designed the online components to provide course material that the students would otherwise have missed due to decreased lecture time, and also with the intention of improving the course. The author recognizes the opportunity to add a significant online course component as a chance to address the usual limitations of large, introductory sections. The author also believes hybrid online classes will most likely be adopted on a case by case basis, depending on the interest of the instructor. The prospective audience thus includes professors, researchers, trainers, library media specialists, teachers, administrators, and educational technologists (who design instruction, produce instructional materials, and manage instructional computing services or learning resources collections) in academic communities particularly. This book will be helpful to all professionals who are enthusiastic about exploiting the potential of blended and online learning to maximize the teaching-learning process of higher education. The book can also serve as a library reference, faculty manual, course supplement, reading text, and resource for instructors. Finally, it should be emphasized that the goal of this book is to appeal to all higher education stakeholders—especially students, faculty, and administrators—with a professional interest in blended and online learning technologies and environments. Anyone working with blended or online learners, or anyone engaged in such learning, will also find this book beneficial.

Yukiko Inoue Mangilao, Guam April 2009

REFERENCES CILIP. (2008). Developing the best blend? From blended e-learning to blended learning. Retrieved January 20, 2009, from http://www/cilip.org.uk/publications/updatemagazine/archieve/archiv... Dziuban, C. D., Hartman, J. L., & Moskal, P. D. (2004, March 30). Blended learning. EDUCAUSE ECAR Research Bulletin, 7. Retrieved April 2, 2008, from http://www.educause.edu/ecar Garrison, D. R., & Vaughan, N. D. (2008). Blended learning in higher education: Framework, principles, and guidelines. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass (A Wiley Imprint). Gulc, E. (2006). Using blended learning to accommodate different learning styles. Retrieved January 13, 2009, from http://escalate.ac.uk/2916

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Howard, L., Remenyi, Z., & Pap, G. (2006). Adaptive blended learning environments. Paper presented at the 9th International Conference on Engineering Education. Retrieved January 13, 2009, from http://

www.vanth.org/docs/ICEE%20Howard%20Remenyi%20Pap.pdf/ LINE Communications. (n. d.). Blended learning. Retrieved January 10, 2009, from www.line.co.uk Magoulas, G. (2008). E-infrastructures and technologies for lifelong learning. Retrieved January 14, 2009, from http://vwresearchersgroup.pbwiki.com/E-Infrastructures+and+ Technologies+

for+Lifelong+Learning Orhan, F. (2008). Redesigning a course for blended learning environment. Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education, 9(1), 54-66. (ERIC Database #ED499473) Rochester Institute of Technology. (2008). Update on blended learning. Retrieved December 20, 2008, from http://online.rit.edu/about/newsletter/one_article.cfm?which=131 Rudestam, K. E., & Schoenholtz-Read, J. (Eds.). (2002). Handbook of online learning: Innovations in higher education and corporate training. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Sethy, S. S. (2008). Distance education in the age of globalization: An overwhelming desire towards blended learning. Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education, 9(3), 29-44. Theil, S. (2008). Tune in tomorrow. Newsweek (Aug 18- 25), p. 65.

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Acknowledgment

Producing a book of cases is an exciting but complex endeavor. I would like to thank the staff at IGI Global, especially Mehdi Khosrow-Pour, Kristin Klinger, Jan Travers, Jennifer Neidig, Kristin Roth, Andrew Bundy, and particularly Tyler Heath who worked with me from start to finish. Their assistance and expertise was invaluable to me throughout the production process—from the initial prospectus to the edited book. As always, working with the reliable and high-energy team at IGI Global was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. Producing a book of cases involves the efforts of many other individuals as well. I would especially like to thank editorial advisory board members and all those who reviewed the cases. Without such reviewers’ comprehensive, critical, and constructive comments and suggestions, this book would not have been possible. Special thanks to Mark Goniwiecha, professor of library science at the University of Guam, who wrote the Foreword to the book. His extensive knowledge and experience, not only in library/information literacy but also in the use of technology for diverse learners, made his contribution especially valuable. More than anything else, a book of cases represents the synthesis of its many contributions. I would like to express my sincere appreciation to all the case contributors who wrote, revised, clarified, and responded to my many inquiries, especially during the editing phase. Many of the case contributors were also the case reviewers. This book and its value are truly built upon these contributions, which come from countries as diverse as Australia, Guam, Island, Italy, Macao, and the United States. Most of the contributors would not identify themselves as technologists; rather, they are using new technologies, in both blended and online learning, to deliver or to reinforce the content in their areas of expertise. The case contributors have shared their real-life experiences—thus their own practices, applications, challenges, and discoveries— as they seek to improve university teaching and learning in the Internet Age of today. In closing, I would like to thank my colleagues and my students at the University of Guam for their encouragement and their countless helpful suggestions during the development of this book. Finally, I want to acknowledge and thank Kazuko Onodera, a retired educator and my academic and lifelong mentor, who has never lost faith in my scholarly endeavors and personal aspirations.

Yukiko Inoue Mangilao, Guam April 2009

Section 1

Implementing Blended Learning Technologies

A: Programs/Environments

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Chapter 1

The Nature of Complex Blends: Transformative Problem-Based Learning and Technology in Irish Higher Education Roisin Donnelly Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland

ABSTRACT This chapter discusses the complexities of blending technologies and problem-based learning (PBL) group interaction within the context of academic development in higher education. For both designers and tutors, it is important to seek best practices for combining instructional strategies in face-to-face and computer-mediated environments that take advantage of the strengths of each and avoid inherent weaknesses. A qualitative case study of the lived experiences of 17 academic staff participants in a blended PBL module over a two year period was considered likely to provide a much-needed analysis of current thinking and practice on the potential of interaction in this form of higher education professional academic development. Specific aspects of interaction (technical, peer, content, and the learning experience) within blended PBL tutorials are analysed to provide research-based evidence on the realities of delivering a PBL programme using technology. The study reported in the chapter argues that the intersection of PBL and learning technologies can offer an innovative way of teaching and learning and is a reflection of pedagogy and technology as an integrated model that can work effectively together. The findings show that the synergy from the collaborative blended PBL approach in this module can result in the coherent and comprehensive provision of training, support, and research throughout higher education institutions.

INTRODUCTION In higher education institutions (HEIs) in Ireland, as elsewhere, the use of online technologies has DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-880-2.ch001

become an increasingly important challenge in academic staff development. As a field, blended learning has impacted on higher education in local, national and global contexts and is fast-changing, highly fragmented, but still rapidly growing. The Internet has made it impossible for HEIs to ignore

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The Nature of Complex Blends

technology in fulfilling their strategic mission and responding to the expectations of a diverse student body. The promises of blended learning in the literature are extensive: increased learning, a reduction in the need for ‘brick and mortar,’ increased engagement, collaboration, and higher quality learning. However, there has been little examination or questioning of the interplay of new technologies and pedagogies in the context of higher education academic development. Transformative learning theory is being proposed in this study as a means to understand the complexities of education in an age where information and communication technologies (ICTs) are constantly reshaping and redefining our accepted notions of what it means to teach and learn in a HE environment. It is recognised that transformative learning is a complex process of interaction among people, the tools they use and the context in which they are embedded. By analysing the blended problem-based learning (PBL) tutorial within a framework of transformative learning in professional academic development in higher education, the purpose of this chapter is to illuminate a complex situation so as to understand it better and therefore be enabled to facilitate beneficial change. Based upon extensive empirical research in higher education in recent years, Savin-Baden (2006) has concluded that the objective of combining PBL and e-learning is in itself complex. There are two objectives of this case study: •

•

To establish, in a PBL tutorial setting, the factors that govern the success of blended PBL To identify technical, academic and interactional indicators of learning in the online and face-to-face PBL tutorial

This chapter argues for a much-needed analysis of current thinking and practice on the transformative potential of interaction in professional

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academic development in higher education; the chapter begins with an illumination on the background and context of the case study on the blended PBL module for academic development, with the associated literature review focusing on the fields of PBL, e-learning, and the convergence of the two. Special attention is given to the importance of interaction in the blended learning environment. Thereafter the case study is discussed and details provided on the research findings. Current challenges are outlined and conclusions drawn.

BACKGROUND The role of blended learning within a pedagogical approach such as PBL has been gaining international recognition among practitioners and academic educators alike. Research into the concepts, tools, and methodologies of both e-learning and PBL has increased in momentum in recent years. However, contemporary commentators have voiced concerns with the speed at which technology has been proceeding at the expense of pedagogical advances. Within the specific field of blended learning, Jones (2006) has concluded that the practice of blended learning has outpaced the research owing, in part, to the rapid increase in both the quantity in use of and the sophistication of the technology. Issues related to the design and implementation of blended learning environments have increasingly surfaced in recent years, as technological advances continue to blur the lines between distributed learning and traditional campus-based learning. This has raised questions about advances in technology during that last decade that have brought challenges and opportunities to the ways in which individuals are educated and trained, in particular through online instruction. There is a qualitative difference between ‘teaching online’ and merely ‘putting a course online’; a central feature of academic staff development involves conveying the difference between

The Nature of Complex Blends

using technology as a delivery mechanism and using it as a communications medium. The impetus for blended learning depends partly on a growing acceptance that higher educational and training programmes should be student-centred and partly on the need to develop enhanced efficiency in the provision of teaching. This case study is taking cognisance of the need for strong and effective interaction between pedagogy and technology to ensure that both are used to best effect in implementing PBL in a blended learning environment. Gredler (2005) in his consideration of learning and instruction suggests that the role of technology in learning remains an issue for theory development and research. Specifically, there is a need for research on learning principles that address teacher-student interactions, student-to-student communication and student-to-subject-matter interactions for various uses of computer technology in blended environments. There seems to be much evidence in the literature that as blends of Internet-based teaching and learning have proliferated, researchers, theoreticians, and pedagogues have recognized that an educationally viable environment requires students to interact with content and with one another. The chapter explores all these core issues in depth.

THE RESEARCH CONTEXT The focus of the research reported here is a Postgraduate Diploma module on designing elearning for academic staff in an institution of higher education, which will be referred to as the Institute. Within the context of the Irish higher educational system, a module is a unit of study on a programme. The diploma programme is typical of many in HEIs today. In this context, the demand for institutions to put e-learning initiatives and the accompanying academic staff training and development firmly on their agendas has resulted in a number of emergent issues. For example,

many academic staffs lack the online experience of the Internet generation, and so do not feel as confident in an online environment as they do in a traditional classroom setting. In this context, the problem is a social rather than a pedagogical one and lecturers may need to experience being online students themselves in order to gain the necessary confidence to move to facilitating an online environment. Putting staff training online can be one response to this problem, but making more efficient use of lecturer time is more often the reason why the online environment is used. Such moves can lead to a negative rather than a positive experience of the online environment, in some cases leading academic staff to believe that buying in to this growing phenomenon means subscribing to their own eventual redundancy. As increasingly it is also becoming important not just to make such training more accessible, but explicitly designed to produce qualitatively improved pedagogy (Ham & Davey, 2005, p. 263), it is important to ensure that the lecturer’s first experience of an online environment is positive, one that will allow her or him to see the pedagogical possibilities at her or his disposal. The institution in which the study took place is a large multi-campus, multi-discipline organization, with subjects offered within Applied Arts, Built Environment, Business, Engineering, Science, Tourism, and Food. The current and emerging higher education environment in the Institute, as elsewhere, is seeking solutions to problems of changing paradigms of learning and the influx of learning technologies. Skilbeck (2001) believes: “the essential test for such higher education institutions is their readiness to introduce policies and programmes to bring in and provide opportunity for ‘new blood’ as well as for the continuing development of the capabilities of existing staff for amongst others, mastery of the new technologies in both teaching and research” (p. 10). “Well-handled,” he has concluded, “the opportunities of online education could improve

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The Nature of Complex Blends

the relationships between staff and students and foster a better quality of learning” (p. 72). This study presents the opportunity to work with eager members of the teaching community in offering a novel approach to their academic development. As all participants on the module are self-selecting and choose to pursue this professional development opportunity themselves, arguably it is a situated reality that participants are motivated and keen to explore the blended PBL approach offered through the module. As it is important to incorporate capacity development in formal courses on higher education (Segrave, Holt, & Farmer, 2005), a postgraduate programme in higher education learning and teaching was developed in 2001, and has over 100 graduates today. The programme offered to academic staff still needs to be integrated with various levels and types of expert and peer practitioner support at faculty and institutional levels, provided through online and face-to-face encounters. In this way, translating their professional development experiences from the module into their own environments could become easier, allowing them to work effectively within a blended environment in the future. The nature of these academic staff’s varied work responsibilities today is complex, with demands on their time (ranging from lesson preparation, student support and research to staff meetings and curriculum development) pulling them in many directions. As a result of all the pressures academic staff face in today’s higher education environment, Donnelly and O’Farrell (2006) have argued that for their own professional development they need to be provided with streamlined learning experiences which deliver essential topics and learning materials in readily accessible formats. It is believed a central challenge here is to create and sustain quality learning environments of enduring value for teachers. The module used the WebCT course management system, which provided both asynchronous and synchronous interaction tools. For the former,

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the module had discussion forums where the participants posted their messages and its own email system that enabled the participants to exchange private emails. For synchronous communications, the module had ‘chat rooms’ where individuals exchanged instant messages at the same time.

Literature Review There has been a consistent thread of research into the fields of e-learning and PBL in recent years and less in blended learning and online academic development. There has not been a focused study of the potential of blended PBL to transform the quality of the learning experience for academic staff in their own learning and their subsequent classroom practice. This current research represents the convergence of three major activities in higher education today: academic development; the blending of the technologies within e-learning; and the pedagogy of PBL. There have been many practice-based studies in each of these fields, but arguably each remains under-researched in its own right and engaging in critical debate in this converging research area is much needed. Generally, there have been unexamined actions and initiatives that have entrenched the issues of PBL and e-learning and made each more intractable and less open to reasoned debate. Some of the main issues for the former centre on content coverage and use of appropriate assessment. It can impose steep learning curves on both tutors and students, and initial tutor awkwardness and student hostility to the process are common. For the latter, the use of technology in education strongly depends on a variety of different factors such as staff training, consistent support, and funding. Informally enthusiasm among academic staff for blended learning continues to grow and where explicit institutional policies are lacking pressure on lecturers to engage with new technologies is coming from students and from their own peers. Alongside this, new pedagogical approaches emerge on the educational scene to support

The Nature of Complex Blends

complex, flexible and integrated learning and the development of professional competencies. Although not new, PBL is one which appears to have captured the imagination and support of teachers; there has been a growing interest in the last few decades, particularly in the collaborative construction of knowledge through active learning and the importance of higher order skills such as problem solving. Given our increasingly networked society, interest has grown in such new educational methods and in where and when to teach them. PBL is an educational strategy that involves the presentation of significant, complex and real-world problems to students that are structured in such a way that there is not one specific correct answer or predetermined outcome. The blended PBL module at the heart of this study itself strives to be both proactive and responsive to the changing needs of all academic staff from across the Institute, and other institutions of higher education in Ireland. By giving the participants the opportunity to be an online and a face-to-face PBL tutor using principles of good practice in PBL, this study provides evidence of the online PBL tutor role and whether it can be as effective as the tutor in the face-to-face PBL tutorial. Central to the delivery of the module has been critical academic discourse in tandem with the exploration of innovations in practice. This study recognises that there is still confusion about the models, media and environments used to support PBL that use technology in some way, and is particularly concerned with illuminating current knowledge of PBL group-oriented interaction. Central to this aim is the need for a better system for delivering education and training for academic staff which Hameed et al. (2006) have recommended is paramount in the context of the move to a knowledge economy. Myers (2006) has made a case for such Internet-based courses being well suited for transformative pedagogy. He argues that online class discussions tend to be more collegial and informal than those that occur face-to-face, and thereby challenge con-

ventional notions of power and authority in the higher education classroom. McAuliffe and Lovell (2000) also propose that such online discussions result in a relatively egalitarian environment and this is appropriate for teaching approaches that critically examine societal patterns of power and dominance. Issues related to the design and implementation of blended learning environments have increasingly surfaced in recent years, as technological advances continue to blur the lines between distributed learning and traditional campus-based learning. This has raised questions about advances in technology during that last decade that have brought challenges and opportunities to the ways in which individuals are educated and trained, in particular through online instruction. McConnell (2006) suggests that a major motivating factor in the uptake of e-learning in organisations is “the professional development of trainers, course developers and teachers in the new form of learning provision” (p. 25). This echoes the sentiments of other researchers in the field (Segrave et al., 2005), and forms the core of many institutions’ e-learning strategies. In addition to technological challenges for teachers and academic developers, there are issues that arise during the change process from a traditional delivery mechanism, such as the lecture, to a problem-based educational model. Kolmos (2002) has reported that, in spite of an extensive staff development programme to introduce teachers to the new PBL model, the change in the nature of teaching caused problems with retention and curriculum. She urged academic developers to be aware of the need to facilitate the change at individual, culture and organisational levels, which is a comprehensive challenge in itself. McDonald and McAteer (2003) believe blended learning, a blend of on-campus and external education facilitated by technology, has emerged in response to the global and educational changes experienced by HEIs mentioned earlier. Arguably it has also emerged as an alternative to fully online

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The Nature of Complex Blends

programmes. As a result, research continually calls for an emphasis on pedagogy to drive the design of blended courses today. Most recently, Reinmann et al. (2007) in providing evidence from qualitative studies of blended learning in practical situations, including PBL in higher education, draws on tutors’ and students’ perspectives to argue that the introduction of blended learning requires clear decisions to be made on a number of key areas; these include the distribution of learning content, didactical approaches, ways of communicating and characteristics of learning environments. Certainly, if one text-byte can capture a trend such as blended learning, then perhaps it is the well known one by Rosenberg (2001): “the question is not if we should blend…rather the question is what are the ingredients” (p. 86). Bonk and Graham (2006) agree that the term blended learning is being used with increasing frequency in academic conferences and publications in higher education and, based on their global research perspective, the use of blended learning now seems to be omnipresent across Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. The comprehensive case studies included in their research would certainly signify this. In the midst of the current wave of enthusiasm for blended learning in higher education, consciousness should be raised about the criticism in recent years about blended learning environments that fail to create effective settings for learning. Informed by such studies as Noble (2001) and Oliver and Herrington (2003), I am aware of the ubiquitous debate about the ongoing relationship between pedagogy and technology. This study is taking cognisance of the need for strong and effective interaction between pedagogy and technology to ensure that both are used to best effect in implementing PBL in a virtual environment. In parallel with these developments, one of the pivotal debates in higher education in the last few decades has centred on what has become known as a paradigm shift towards student-centred learning. The impetus for blended learning de-

6

pends partly on a growing acceptance that higher educational and training programmes should be student-centred and partly on the need to develop enhanced efficiency in the provision of teaching. Although these two forces can work in opposite directions, it is important to acknowledge what these shifts can imply in practice. McDonald and Mayes (2005) believe that in the concept of blended learning we see a measured approach to the delivery of education and acknowledge that learning technology has a role in achieving a student-centred approach. However, there remains a paucity of research on blended learning from HEIs in the United Kingdom and it is argued here that a similar situation exists in the Republic of Ireland, although in an Irish higher education context O’Donnell and Garavan (2003) have reported there is “positive recognition for the benefits of blended learning” (p. 11). Sloman (2001) has highlighted that it has widely been accepted for some time that technology has the potential to enhance and transform the traditional learning experience, for students and teachers alike. Gurrie (2003) has argued that although very little research has been conducted to determine the effectiveness of PBL in the online environment, she believes it embraces many of the concepts that have been identified as best practices in online teaching and learning. There appears to be a lack of comprehensive analysis of the activity and practices of blended PBL in academic development to have taken place. Within this, a number of outstanding issues remain to be addressed, including the nature of questioning, the character of informative feedback, the scheduling of reinforcements and the structuring of information for students. There is a pressing need to address these gaps within the use of blended PBL if academic development is going to include it as a widely accepted practice. It has been found that previous studies in the area of blended PBL have not prompted sufficiently diligent inquiry and serious debate. McShane (2006) has called for further research into academics’ perceptions

The Nature of Complex Blends

of what it is to teach in a student-centred manner in a blended environment. Similarly, Lycke et al. (2002) advocate in their ongoing project on PBL and ICTs in Norwegian higher education that up-close studies are needed to answer vital questions such as how academic teachers can promote effective e-learning strategies among their students. Panda and Juwah (2006) note that the increased use of the Web for learning and teaching has “necessitated a re-examination of some of the issues with e-learning and the professional development of academic staff engaged in an online facilitation role” (p. 207). Masie (2006) contends that blended learning has always been a major part of the landscape of training, learning and instruction; however, in reality it has only become a noticeable feature of the higher education sector in the Republic of Ireland since the beginning of this new millennium. There has been a community of practitioners studying and working in blended courses for many years; nevertheless research in the main has been inadequate. This places this current study on the continuum for revision and rejuvenation of the field of research into blended learning and a starting point for the exploration of blended PBL as a model of academic development. The study aspires to be a source of information, stimulation, and encouragement for those academics who have not fully understood or accepted the concept of blended PBL and is an attempt to capture the participant experience of learning using a blended PBL approach to their academic development in higher education and their subsequent exploration of transformation in classroom practice.

Interaction in Blended PBL The research surrounding this module is based on the notion that interaction among participants in the PBL group is the key element of a successful blended learning experience for all involved. This is based on a sociological understanding of one of the dimensions of interaction for describing

groups, coined by Wagner (2006) as interactions as transactions. Interaction has been and continues to be one of the most hotly debated constructs in the realms of distance and e-learning, instructional design and academic transformation, to name but three. The ability to interact—with tutors, students, content interfaces, features, code, channels and environments—can be argued to be analogous to being connected. Whilst this may appear simplistic, for technology-mediated learning interaction is undoubtedly a key value proposition. It continues to be perceived as the defining attribute of quality and value in a blended learning experience. Interactivity is the core of learning, and is evident at all levels of engagement. However, the term interactivity is used so loosely that in the fields of e-learning and blended learning it has become almost synonymous with the notion of learning itself. This chapter proposes that, by bringing the concept into sharper focus, real insight is gained into the nature of blended PBL. Interaction in the context of this study is explored at three levels: interaction with concepts, tasks, and people (peer learners and tutors).

CASE DESCRIPTION Interpretivism was the paradigm for this study. Interpretivism seeks to understand the complex world of lived experience from the perspectives of the participants. It draws on a broad combination from the history of ideas, which includes hermeneutics, critiques of scientism and positivism, practical philosophy and discourse analysis, and asserts that we can understand the world only by interpreting it, as reality is subjective rather than objective. Within the spectrum of interpretivism, this study was situated in a position that interprets the participants’ discussions in the blended PBL tutorials as both constitutive of the world and constituted by the world. Mertens (2005) gives an elaboration of its philosophical core and points out

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The Nature of Complex Blends

that the interpretive and constructivist paradigm emphasises that research is a product of the values of the researcher and cannot be independent of them. However, Cohen et al. (2000) highlight that there is a risk in interpretive approaches: that “they become hermetically sealed from the world outside the participants’ theatre of activity—they put artificial boundaries around subjects’ behaviour” (p. 27). Recognising that there is an interpretative, subjective aspect to the qualitative data gathered in this study; therefore, I took appropriate steps to preserve data quality, namely triangulation— cross checking data collected using different sources of information; peer consultation; and maintaining accurate up-to-date data records to assist in the establishment of a chain of evidence (Merriam, 1998). The interpretivist emphasis on meaning and the relationship between language and meaning are addressed in the concept of discourse, which in this study is a Web of statements, categories, beliefs and practices. The aim of this approach was to explore the research objectives in ways that made connections among the words from the videos and online discussion forum transcripts, the social functions these words perform and wider social practices. Interpretivism was chosen to identify the essence of human experiences concerning the phenomenon of blended PBL as a model of academic development, as described by the 17 participants in this study. It involved this small number of participants in extensive and prolonged engagement designed to provide a basis on which to understand their lived experiences and develop what Creswell (1998) calls patterns and relationships of meaning. Consequently, the motivation of this research was to gain a rich insight into the PBL nature of the blended environment rather than focus on the statistical analysis of quantitative responses by participants. In research that is very pertinent to this study, in an exploration of the theoretical debate about Mezirow’s transformative learning, Taylor (1997) has called for designs of research which

8

included other methods beyond interview, such as observations and content analysis in an ongoing educational context. For this study, the analysis of written transcripts, which have been created by the participants during computer conferencing, invariably takes the form of a systematic content analysis. Donnelly et al. (2007) believe whether the analysis is used quantitatively or qualitatively, there is much to commend this type of approach by higher education tutors wishing to assess the progress of their students and further their understanding of how students learn through computer conferencing technology. The general research design was to observe the process of learning on the module in some depth. In order to ensure that sufficient observational data had been collected for a thorough analysis of what was occurring in the module; three complementary methods were chosen to provide the data relating to the experiences of the participants, in addition to my more obvious tutor role in the module delivery. Collating computer mediated conferencing (CMC) transcripts of online discussions were used to capture what was happening in the online component of the blended PBL tutorial, and textual analysis of participants’ reflective papers was used to explore transformations in learning and focus group interviews to augment the observational data. The research methods employed to collect face-to-face and online observational data from the module itself were participant observation, online discussion logs, open-ended focus group interview and self-reflective papers to capture the participant’s own thoughts and experiences of the blended PBL approach. Each method was chosen for the opportunity it could offer to explore interactions and dimensions of transformation, both of which were central to this study. Figure 1 illustrates how the research methods fitted together and have allowed me to gain deep insights into how interaction happens in a blended environment within each of the groups. The approach taken to the collection of data about the blended PBL groups was multi-faceted. A major

The Nature of Complex Blends

Figure 1. Integration of data collection methods

concern has been to provide meaningful and accessible insights into the practice of blended PBL based on the analysis of real life situations. There were two levels taken to the analysis of the data. Level One was descriptive in nature and through video observations explored the interactions among the peers, the tutors and the content of the blended PBL tutorial. Level Two was a thematic analysis of transformative learning in blended PBL and, through a combination of online logs, focus group interviews, and participant self-reflective papers, categories and themes emerged to inform the findings of the study and implications for practice. Being engaged with the events as they happened in the field and attempting to bring holistic attention to the practices as constitutive of a distinct culture were important to this study. As suggested by Hine (2000, p. 20), this study has examined those enduring practices through which

the blended PBL groups have become meaningful and perceptible to participants. Data collection took place over two years in this study, as the intention was to study more than one PBL group, and this was achieved with three groups in total. The activities of three blended PBL groups, two of which were working at the same time but separately in the 2004-05 operation of the module, and one in the 2005-06 academic year were the observed focus of the study. The intention was to carry out a detailed study of the work of each group for an extended period of time (typically ten weeks) and produce an interpretation of their academic discourse through close examination of their activities. The PBL tutorial observations for each group were transcribed. The face-to-face classroom and online observation was complemented by two focus group interviews for all three groups. It was important to observe

9

The Nature of Complex Blends

the groups over the complete ten week period of the module in order to examine how the groups negotiated the problem face-to-face and online, how the group dynamics worked in the blended environment, how the life of the group unfolded thereafter and what influenced the participants in reaching a transformation in their learning. The four methods of collecting data for this study (participant observation, collation of asynchronous online discussions of the PBL groups, focus group interviews, and textual analysis of participants’ reflective papers) were continuously complemented by prolonged immersion in the literatures of the field. The sample for this study was the total population (17 participants) of blended PBL groups undertaking the PBL module in the two years that the data were collected in order to explore the lived experience of a heterogeneous population of academic staff in higher education; there were three PBL groups in this study. I now discuss the ethical and power issues involved in the process of reasonably informed consent. There are numerous sources of advice about preparations prior to embarking on fieldwork (Davies, 1999), involving the more general injunctions about intellectual preparation through familiarizing oneself with literature about the area. A number of steps were undertaken in the preparation for observation in the study. Firstly, it was necessary to arrange access and this involved the module participants, guest tutors, the Head of School and colleagues in the centre in which the module is located. A formal ethics statement and statement of informed consent were prepared and distributed to module participants and guest tutors. It concerned areas such as selecting participants, types of questions asked, agreement of participants to be involved, storage of data from the research, anonymity (pseudonyms were used throughout the study to protect the identity of the participants) and disclosure of results to participants. Inherent in this was the need for persons to review drafts to validate observations and descriptions. The video cameras were prepared and the online discussion

10

software recording capabilities were checked. I then drew up a schedule of the observations, and developed a standardised procedure for how the observation would run. Finally, as part of the initial preparation, I evolved a record-keeping system involving the videotapes, and a coding system. A further challenge concerned the notion of addressivity of ‘compliant talk’ by the participants in the study. Due to the dual role in the relationship between the researcher as tutor and the academic staff who were learners on the module and participants in the study, it is acknowledged that the possibility that the participants may have said what they thought you wanted to them to could be considered a limitation. However by building triangulation into the research process this possibility was lessened.

Discussion of Findings This section of the chapter concentrates on the findings from the content analysis of the CMC discussions. With the participants’ permission, the discussion space software was also employed to capture their contributions as text files and as prints of the discussion site pages. In addition to the text entered by the participants and tutors, the files include automatic time and date stamping and an indication of the source of each message. The content of messages and the extent to which they formed patterns of interaction between peers, tutors and content of the blended PBL module were analysed. In the literature, typically analysis of CMC is at a number of different levels including the frequency and patterns of interaction, categorization of messages and thematic analysis to allow a much more detailed interactional analysis and message content. Individually, none of these allow analysis of how online collaborative learning takes place in PBL but a combination of detailed interaction plus content was very helpful in this study. Bosley and Young (2006) have suggested that ethical concerns may be among the reasons that group discussions are more commonly analy-

The Nature of Complex Blends

sed than one-to-one exchanges. There was the opportunity to access the data in these postings as messages sent through WebCT on the module were stored and retrievable. In order to analyse the dimensions of the learning process in the asynchronous data transcripts, a number of CMC analytical frameworks were considered for this study (Donnelly et al., 2007). The conferencing contributions were analysed quantitatively (the number of messages per participant and tutor to investigate the patterns of interaction) and qualitatively (content of the messages were scrutinized to investigate the extent that participants were forming, critiquing and communicating ideas online) in this study. The paper transcripts were examined and each post was free coded to generate categories. These were then refined and divided into components that signified their use was to do with building of community (that is, social) or cognitive (that is exploring content issues relevant to the module and the PBL problem). An early issue was to decide on the most appropriate and fruitful unit of analysis. Units of meaning were categorized into common themes and a list of codes devised to represent the emerging categories. Categories were modified, developed and regrouped as analysis proceeded. New catego-

Table 1. Categories used for thematic content analysis of cmc discussions Code

Category

SE

Posting is to share prior experience

SR

Posting is to share references and resources

PF

Includes positive peer feedback in response

C

Provides/seeks clarification

FI

Forms a new idea

CR

Critiques peer response (expresses reservations/ disagrees with another contribution)

GT

Interaction with the international guest tutors

M

Miscellaneous

U

Unrequited messages from peers

ries emerged and some early ones dropped. The final categories derived are given in Table 1: These categories were not exclusive and together they provided some evidence about the extent to which the contributions answered one of the research objectives of this study. Clearly the small numbers in this study do not support comparisons between the different corpuses of data in the field and it is not my intention to make such comparisons. The WebCT course management system automatically numbers, in a threaded manner, the postings of the module according to the time a text was posted and placed on the discussion forum. All the postings on the discussion forums were not modifiable by the participants and thus, all the postings remained in their originally posted forms. While the WebCT system technically organized the online environment of the PBL groups, actual interactions took place through the actions and reactions of the participants to the PBL learning setting, module materials and activities, to tutor and guest tutor directions and to peers’ ideas and actions. There were eight enumerations collated from this data and all were taken at week 10 of the module to explore the individual participant’s activity in the discussion boards and the PBL group work patterns in the online environment, so that some comparisons could be made to face-to-face (f2f) activity. Table 2 shows these findings for each participant in the study: •

•

Revealing levels of online activity for each individual participant required collation of the frequency of contributions of each participant to the online PBL group discussion forum; Exploring the development of substantive discussion amongst all the participants in each of the three PBL groups needed the average messages per thread;

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The Nature of Complex Blends

Table 2. Breakdown of statistics for online participation of each participant Participant

Frequency of Contributions

Average Messages per Thread

Amount of Time Online [per week]

Average Time Online [whole module]

Postings Repeated

Number of Messages Read

Number of threads per PBL Group

Number of Attachments per Participant

•

•

•

•

12

Ronan

73 postings

/38 = 1.92

3.5 hours

35 hours

-

245 (All)

38

31

Padraig

30 postings

/38 = 0.78

3.5 hours

35 hours

-

211

38

16

Aidan

45 postings

/38 = 1.18

3 hours

30 hours

1

202

38

26

Loirin

48 postings

/38 = 1.26

6 hours

60 hours

-

194

38

21

Aine

49 postings

/38 = 1.28

5 hours

50 hours

1

223

38

30

Niamh

47 postings

/46 = 1.02

5 hours

50 hours

1

206

46

22

Eimear

46 postings

/46 = 1

2 hours

20 hours

2

190

46

24

Sorcha

59 postings

/46 = 1.28

5 hours

50 hours

1

231 (All)

46

26

Caitlin

38 postings

/46 = 0.82

1.5 hours

15 hours

1

210

46

26

Dervla

41 postings

/46 = 0.89

2 hours

20 hours

2

198

46

23

Declan

98 postings

/55 = 1.78

4 hours

40 hours

-

365 (All)

55

14

Michael

37 postings

/55 = 0.67

2.5 hours

25 hours

-

327

55

22

Darragh

33 postings

/55 = 0.6

3 hours

30 hours

-

312

55

17

Myra

89 postings

/55 = 1.61

3.5 hours

35 hours

-

365 (All)

55

37

Caolan

32 postings

/55 = 0.58

2.5 hours

25 hours

-

304

55

13

Maeve

40 postings

/55 = 0.72

3 hours

30 hours

-

297

55

15

Ryan

36 postings

/55 = 0.65

1.5 hours

15 hours

-

284

55

11

Comparing the f2f and online contact in the blended PBL tutorials required the amount of time each participant spent online; Enabling comparison with f2f activity in the PBL tutorial, the average time spent online per week for each participant was needed; Repeated postings (queries and requests for help) was collated; a low number would indicate how comprehensively the peers were responding to each other in their groups and possibly ability in searching through messages and reading them for key words and phrases; Revealing individual levels of online passive participation required the collation of the number of messages read only by individual students;

•

•

Showing the number of different conversations happening online required the collation of the number of threads created per PBL group; and Demonstrating evidence of reflection by returning to the discussion forum with work on the PBL Problem necessitated the collation of the number of attachments of learning material to postings per participant.

There was an average of 49 postings made by each participant over the ten weeks of the module. Column 3 showing the average messages per thread for all the participants in each of the three PBL groups and it indicates little development of substantive discussion with an average of 1 message posted per thread. However, Column 9 shows an average of 22 attachments of documentation

The Nature of Complex Blends

on the PBL Problem made to a posting by each participant.

very helpful to myself and Niamh who have been allocated this task.

Blended Community and Cognitive Development

Message no. 1711[Branch from no. 1704]

Results from a recent study by Dawson (2006) on online forum discussions reported that mere quantity of discussion postings is not an indicator of community development; a significant relationship is observed when contributions are codified into various discussion interaction types (learner-learner; learner-content). Earlier research by Harasim (1987) also endorsed the categorisation of forum interactions and suggested that these types of interactions were the most important for enhancing the learning process. Similarly, in this study, the online discussion forums provided the participants with an opportunity to enhance community building in their PBL group and extend the collaborative dialogue from the face-to-face PBL tutorials. Postings from the discussion boards from all three PBL groups are included below whereby the participants were working towards the building of community within their group both online and face-to-face.

Posted by Ryan on Sunday, March 19, 2006 10:06am

Subject: Re: Many happy returns

Hi Myra and everyone,

Excellent summary - you are a hard act for me to follow as Chair next week.

Asking for technical help Posted by Eimear on Thursday, December 16, 2004 10:19am

Subject: Ground Rules

Positive Peer Acknowledgment of Work Message no. 779[Branch from no. 778] Posted by Sorcha on Monday, December 20, 2004 1:39pm

Subject: Re: Philosophy statement

Hi Dervla, you are doing absolutely Trojan work and putting the rest of us to shame. I couldn’t face any of it until yesterday and all your messages were making me feel very guilty! Thanks for starting the work on the learning outcomes as it will be

Help anyone? How can I create a new thread??? I know we covered it before in class but it eludes me this morning.

Peers Expressing Concerns: Overwhelmed, Chaos, Information Overload Message no. 694[Branch from no. 675] Posted by Niamh on Friday, December 10, 2004 6:34pm

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The Nature of Complex Blends

Subject: Re: re group task

Subject: Final Group Report

Hi Sorcha, Thanks for this. I agree re the allocation of tasks. Like Eimear, I do feel adrift but I am confident that after a lengthier discussion on

Hi Everybody,

Tuesday in class we will have a greater idea about where we are going. We haven’t really had an opportunity to do that yet.

Message no. 684[Branch from no. 673] Posted by Padraig on Thursday, December 9, 2004 9:52pm

Subject: Re: Group name

I am coming late into this discussion and feel like a real “Dumbledore”. I can vouch for one thing since I came late to the f2f tutorial on Tuesday - now I feel I have missed a lot of info and direction. However, moving from my student to my teacher hat - it’s a useful lesson for me but also to be aware of it in designing online learning in the future. Similarly, the evolving of a cognitive dimension to their work in PBL can be illustrated from the data and examples are set out below.

Sharing Work Completed on Individual Task (Updating on Progress, Including Asking for a Critique of Work, and Debating Subject Issues)

Please find attached Myra’s version posted on the 27th at 9.00pm after Declan’s and Michael’s excellent tidy up job but with all the colours removed and every thing in black type. Declan, I hope you don’t mind but I thought the Evaluation piece was a bit weak and I was not sure if you would get any time to add more, so I wrote a little just in case. Essentially I feel we need to show cognizance of several models of evaluation and also include a theoretical basis for why we are doing so. Then we should link this to the philosophical rationale for our course and the instructional design model we have adapted. Please feel free to come in on this – a critical friend would be great just about now on this part of the report!

Myra, just an idea - rather than you being left to write up the conclusion by yourself, should all members of the group contribute a reflective piece of writing? We could use some of the material from our reflective journals or from the reflective thoughts we wrote during our or just after our live online chats? Maybe everyone in the group might use this thread and respond yes or no. Maybe we can discuss this further when we meet at 9 on Thursday.

Peers Sharing Resources Message no. 765

Message no. 1778

Posted by Caitlin on Friday, December 17, 2004 3:14pm

Posted by Ryan on Monday, March 27, 2006 11:24pm

Subject: Useful Journal Articles

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The Nature of Complex Blends

I have attached an article I found on the British Education Index which I thought was quite interesting and which you might like to read. It is entitled ‘When learners learn on-line, what does the facilitator do?’, so it is directly relevant to what we are doing. If I come across anything else I will post it up under this thread.

Peers Sharing Experiences

Peers Taking the Lead on the Problem, Providing Clarification and Encouragement to Each Other, Forming New Ideas, Updating a Peer on Missed Work Message no. 710[Branch from no. 708] Posted by Loirin on Saturday, December 11, 2004 9:36pm

Message no. 785[Branch from no. 748] Subject: Re: re group task Posted by Ronan on Monday, December 20, 2004 8:27pm Hi Aine, Subject: Re: Student survey

I get phone calls almost every week from students or their parents asking for tuition for those who have failed previous exams with math being their major difficulty. My line manager has asked me on numerous occasions to assist students also.

I have spoken to several colleagues in recent weeks who all believe there is a need for extra tuition for weak students and am supportive of the concept of an online module.

At the moment the evidence is anecdotal and based on opinion but it is the opinion of experienced educators so should we go with this at the moment and elaborate on the needs for our final report.

Nice to see someone else online with me on a Saturday night! Am missing Strictly Come Dancing at the mo! Getting my priorities straight! I know you missed the synchronous chat yesterday so you may feel a little out of the loop at the moment.

We need a decision emanating from our group on this issue; but don’t worry - there will be plenty of time on Tuesday morning when we all meet in the class to reorient ourselves as to the best way forward. I feel this is the important time now when as a group, we are all happy with the decision taken so we can work together on aspects that particularly interest us. It will all come together in the next couple of weeks, I’m sure.

PBL Content Interaction with Guest Tutors Message no. 1413[Branch from no. 1347] Posted by Myra on Wednesday, February 15, 2006 7:17am

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The Nature of Complex Blends

Subject: Personal greetings

• Answers to library questions

Hi all,

• Declan will be the Chair.

We now seem to understand the importance of having this kind of non-formal discussion or messages. Some of us told you about visits in Finland, and Scandinavia and I have been thinking a lot of my visit too. I think it’s really interesting to explore why we do this? I understand it is a reflective (or not conscious) process of trying to understand the other’s background and culture. And if we are trying to reach a real dialogue, we need common ground and shared understanding.

• Tuesday 21st: dry run for the guest tutor video conference - 9am.

I think we need to keep this up as language is a tool which we use to reproduce the reality.

Linking to F2F Tutorial Directly (Blended Approach)

• Questions for the guest tutor this week: thread set up in Cyber club 7

Other notes:

• Divide up Webliography between us, and report on what we find.

• Task 3 Home work: to be carried out over two weeks.

Message no. 1357[Branch from no. 1356]

• Note the Sunday night dead line!

Posted by Ryan on Saturday, February 11, 2006 12:33am

Table 3 shows the breakdown of the community and cognitive aspects of the online discussions for each of the three PBL groups. The essential elements of PBL learning conversations were provided though the sharing of multiple perspectives on experience and research, complemented by a range of individual disseminated research amongst the groups. PBL Group 1, self-titled CPD challengers are in blue; PBL Group 2, self-titled The Apprentices are in orange; PBL Group 3, self-titled Cyber Club Seven are in pink. The use of direct quotations is now used to provide evidence of both the shared enthusiasm for the blended PBL process and some real concerns voiced by the participants. Whenever possible by using the words of the participants themselves, key issues have been highlighted.

Subject: Re: Tuesday’s forthcoming f2f class

Hi all,

Well done Michael on your summary. I will reply to your experience another thread.

Things to do for class next week:

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The Nature of Complex Blends

Table 3. Community and cognitive online posts for three PBL groups Community Categories

Postings

Cognitive Categories

Positive peer acknowledgment of work

10 20 37

Sharing work completed on individual task (updating on progress, including asking for a critique of work, and debating subject issues)

16 69 31

Asking for technical help

9 (mainly in early weeks) 5 (mainly in early weeks) 5 postings and 9 peer responses helping out

Peers sharing resources

13 12 12

Peers expressing concerns: overwhelmed, chaos, information overload

5 (present in first 3-4 weeks only) 1 2

Peers sharing experiences

5 2 4

Peers simply announcing online presence

4 2 7

Peers taking the lead on the problem, responding to peers on technical problems, summarizing and weaving themselves, providing clarification and encouragement to each other, forming new ideas, updating a peer on missed work

7 32 49

Peer unrequited messages

2 0 4

PBL Content Interaction with Guest Tutors

19 44 61

Miscellaneous (Humorous)

5 5 5

Linking to f2f tutorial directly (blended approach)

3 3 6

For inclusion of all participant quotes, the following applies:FG = Focus Group Interview (either indicated by 1 or 2 for the first or second interview)RP = Reflective Paper (numbered 1-17 for each participant) Commonalities existed between all three blended PBL groups in the online discussion forums: •

•

•

Postings

The most prolonged interactions over all three groups were with the guest tutor discussions (Column 4, Row 5); Resource sharing and diffusion of experiences dominated the first 4-5 weeks of online interactions over all three groups (Column 4, Rows 2 and 3); Posting individual tasks and updating peers on progress dominated the use of the threaded discussions (all had attachments of work) conducted outside of face-to-face

•

•

•

tutorials in the last 5 weeks of the module (Column 4, Row 1); In 2 groups, there was evidence of peers taking over the tutor’s online role (Column 4, Row 4); All groups had members who felt the need to acknowledge their online presence without contributing to the discussion (Column 2, Row 4); and There were low levels of unrequited postings in all groups (Column 2, Row 5); throughout the life of these groups, it was evident that members did reply to requests and questions from other members. In the few instances where there was no response to these, the second focus group interview with ‘Cyber Club Seven’ offers a reason.

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The Nature of Complex Blends

I think there is a certain amount of maturity needed online and you have to be in touch with your own feelings so you can relate to others. If you put up something and hope for a response from others because you think it is very important and none comes, you can’t take it personally as people may have been too busy. (Ryan, FG2) If there were no postings by participants in a PBL group, it was perceived as their absence by their peers. There was a strong sense across all three groups that by making postings, participants were embodying their presence in the group and after an absence of more than a few days, some felt it necessary to post just to proclaim their online presence; reading others’ postings without this proclamation was not considered good enough by some. Reasons provided by participants about some in the group not valuing online participation as much as face-to-face and not understanding the mechanics of online communication moves into the realm of lurking, but beyond the two-pronged argument explaining such passive participation, we must be aware of the lack of knowledge that we really have about their behaviour. I mean I was in WebCT all the time and I didn’t always feel the need to contribute a posting. For me it was like people were making comments just for the sake of it and there wasn’t really anything to say sometimes. What I was doing in that time was reading a lot and then I was better equipped to contribute to the discussions afterwards. (Sorcha, FG2)

I don’t like posting messages up until I have something to say. When I did log on and unless I said - hello, it’s me, there was resentment there. I actually felt quite vetted because my name was not up there as much as everyone else’s. And why am I feeling guilty about this, and I think it is simply because your name is not up there, and

18

the others are, having more of an online presence - whatever that means. So I thought; am I contributing in class? Yes I am, and I am doing my work? – so what am I doing wrong? And there was this whole onus of guilt surrounding posting that I didn’t like. (Caitlin, FG2) The postings became the only clues that the person was present and were made with a certain goal, i.e. to inform the other participants of Caitlin’s and Sorcha’s potential inactivity or invisibility. The other two groups did not experience this: I think it was so important that we all felt comfortable if you didn’t have something to say, you didn’t have to. (Loirin, FG2, ‘The Apprentices’)

The main thing is that our group members came in online at all times, and could say, I just don’t know what I am doing this week; and you felt able to say that. (Maeve, FG2, ‘Cyber Club Seven’) The cognitive dimension of learning involved the contribution of knowledge and experience and the community dimension involved a balance of support and guidance with the creation of a pleasant learning environment. Both cognitive and community or social congruence is necessary for effective group functioning. For all three groups, at the close of the ten week period, the cognitive postings were significantly higher than the community postings. This is akin to the cognitive apprenticeship models of learning, where learning is scaffolded by both peers and experts. When one looks at the relationship between the participant contributions and the sense of community in the group, findings from all three groups indicated that a significant relationship exists between the quantity of peer-to-peer contributions and the participant reported sense of community in the group. The group composition appeared to contribute towards the cohesion within.

The Nature of Complex Blends

We had a very supportive group, almost all of us from the Apprentice trades background. I thought it really interesting from reading through these categories and examples from the data that the group who was having a less than positive experience were the ones who had the least amount of postings. In other words if you participate at a certain level you are more likely to get something out of it. Perhaps if you participate at a minimal level you are not as likely to. (Ronan, Participant Verification Session, 08/02/07)

CURRENT CHALLENGES This study was an attempt to provide insights into blended PBL in a higher education academic development context in order to encourage indepth discussion and open debate on the field. While there is much growing interest in blended PBL in practice, if this interest is not married to current research and knowledge in the field it can be argued that it will be of little, if any, transformative value for higher education. At this point, it is important to acknowledge the obstacles to, and the limitations on, the enactment of transformative learning in this case of learning environment. It is acknowledged that there are hazards in entering the choppy waters of intellectual debate on transformational learning. Transformative learning in blended PBL takes place when students elaborate old or learn new frames of reference as well as transform old or learn new habits of mind. However transformative learning is a complex process of interaction between people, the tools they use and the context in which they are embedded. It is contended that there is a need to focus on interactivity within blended PBL and its critical application. The blended format coalesces Webbased and face-to-face instruction into an entirely new model that holds potential to transform both learning and teaching in higher education. However, the improvement of educational practice is

notoriously difficult, especially when the goal is to foster transformation in thinking and practice. Tyack and Cuban (1995) have argued that pockets of effective teaching exist but they seldom last long or spread beyond a few dedicated pioneers. Clarifying the principles of effective problembased and e-learning pedagogies and sustaining the means to support its enactment in a wide range of departments and institutions constitute an abiding challenge of professional development for teachers. To meet the demands facing academic staff today, teachers need professional development opportunities that support them in a transformational process and in a sustained way. Such transformation of curriculum and pedagogy is a complex process for teachers; it is the findings of this dissertation that blending PBL and new technologies appears to hold promise in overcoming the traditional limitations of professional development which in this Institute and elsewhere in Ireland have tended to be short-term workshops, focused on general topics rather than deep knowledge of subject matter and pedagogy, disconnected from specific classroom practices and isolated from ongoing support from colleagues and tutors. Systematic, comprehensive staff development is a crucial requirement of the contemporary learning organization and there are many different ways of providing for it other than conventional short courses. Learning that involves the analysis of complex problems and issues, and more complex higher order learning generally, are not amenable to this form of packaged e-learning. Something more dynamic that addresses the complexity and messiness of real life is needed. The issue of transferability of innovative approaches and developing the capacity to respond to innovation and change remains a key area for further research. Whilst this may appear to be an unpalatable position to take at times, realisation is required that for real and not just cosmetic change to take place a whole range of well-established cultural tools needs to be re-created to transform

19

The Nature of Complex Blends

the way that academic staff experience their professional development.

CONCLUSION A qualitative study of the lived experiences of 17 participants in a blended PBL module provided findings on specific aspects of interaction (technical, peers, content and the learning experience) within blended PBL tutorials which have not previously been analysed within a framework of transformative learning. It is acknowledged that there are hazards in entering the choppy waters of intellectual debate on transformational learning. Mezirow (1990) has pointed out that all learning is change but not all change is transformation. The main findings of the analysis of the data indicated that for all three groups, at the close of the ten week module, the cognitive postings were significantly higher than the community postings. However, the technology also acted as an activating event for transformation in that the online discussion forums provided the participants with an opportunity to enhance community building in their PBL group and extend the collaborative dialogue from the face-to-face PBL tutorials. The nature of the blend involved distinguishing what worked best in the face-to-face and online environments. It was important to utilize time spent online for organising work for the face-to-face tutorial and as a source of positive peer feedback. Conversely, the face-to-face tutorial was useful for clarifying any misunderstandings which took place online. Ultimately, there is no single mode of transformative learning that exists; differences in learning contexts, learners, and teachers all affect the experiences of transformative learning.

REFERENCES Bonk, C. J., & Graham, C. R. (2006). Introduction. In C. J. Bonk & C. R. Graham (Eds.), The handbook of blended learning. Global perspectives, local designs (pp. 5-15). San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer. Bosley, S., & Young, D. (2006). Online learning dialogues in learning through work. Journal of Workplace Learning, 18, 355–366. doi:10.1108/13665620610682080 Cohen, L., Manion, L., & Morrison, R. (2000). Research methods in education. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Creswell, J. (1998). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five traditions. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Dawson, S. (2006). Online forum discussion interactions as an indicator of student community. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 22(4), 495–510. Donnelly, R., Holmes, B., & Gardiner, J. (2007, March). Content analysis of computer conferencing transcripts – Which one should I use? Paper presented at CAL’07, Trinity College Dublin. Donnelly, R., & O’Farrell, C. (2006). Blended e-learning for continuous professional development of academic staff. In J. O’Donoghue (Ed.), Technology supported learning and teaching: A staff perspective (pp. 45-61). Hershey, PA: Information Science Publishing. Gredler, M. E. (2005). Learning and instruction: Theory into practice. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Merrill/Prentice Hall. Gurrie, J. (2003). What’s your problem? Increasing student motivation and quality of participation in discussions through problem-based learning (pp. 1-3). Retrieved February 9, 2007, from http:// www.elearnspace.org/Articles/contributor/pbl. htm

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Ham, V., & Davey, R. (2005). Our first time: Two higher education tutors reflect on becoming a ‘virtual teacher.’ . Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 42(3), 257–264. doi:10.1080/01587910500168017 Hameed, C., Hameed, K., & Clements, M. (2006, August 29-31). E-learning: Through the looking glass. Paper presented at the 7th Annual Conference of the Higher Education Academy Information and Computer Sciences, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Harasim, L. (1987). Teaching and learning online: Issues in computer-mediated graduate courses. Canadian Journal of Educational Communication, 16(2), 117–135. Hine, C. (2000). Virtual ethnography. London: Sage. Jones, N. (2006). E-college Wales: A case study of blended learning. In C. J. Bonk & C. R. Graham (Eds.), The handbook of blended learning: Global perspectives, local designs (pp. 182-193). San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer. Kolmos, A. (2002). Facilitating change to a problem-based model. The International Journal for Academic Development, 7(1), 63–74. doi:10.1080/13601440210156484 Lycke, K., Strømsø, H., & Grøttum, P. (2002). PBL goes ICT: Problem-based learning in face-to-face and distributed groups in medical education at the University of Oslo (Report No.4). University of Oslo: Institute for Educational Research. Masie, E. (2006). The blended learning imperative. In C. J. Bonk & C. R. Graham (Eds.), The handbook of blended learning: Global perspectives, local designs (pp. 22-26). San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer.

McAuliffe, G., & Lovell, C. (2000). Encouraging transformation: Guidelines for constructivist and developmental instruction. In G. McAuliffe & K. Eriksen (Eds.), Preparing counselors and therapists: Creating constructivist and developmental programs (pp. 14-41). Virginia Beach, VA: Donning Company. McConnell, D. (2006). E-learning groups and communities. Maidenhead, UK: The Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press. McDonald, J., & Mayes, T. (2005, June). Pedagogically challenged: A framework for the support of course designers in an Australian distance learning university. In CRLL Conference Proceedings (Vol. 2) (pp. 397-404). The University of Stirling, Scotland. McDonald, J., & McAteer, E. (2003). New approaches to supporting students: Strategies for blended learning in distance and campus-based environments. Journal of Educational Media, 28(2-3), 129–146. doi:10.1080/1358165032000165662 McShane, K. (2006, October). Technologies transforming academics: Academic identity and online teaching. Paper presented at Institute for Teaching and Learning, University of Sydney. Merriam, S. B. (1998). Qualitative research and case study applications in education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Mertens, D. M. (2005). Research methods in education and psychology: Integrating diversity with quantitative & qualitative approaches. London: Routledge. Mezirow, J. (1990). Fostering critical reflection in adulthood: A guide to transformative and emancipator learning. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

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Myers, S. A. (2006). Can I use transformative pedagogy when teaching online? College Teaching, 2(1), 82–94. Noble, D. F. (2001). Digital diploma mills: The automation of higher education. New York: Monthly Review Press. O’Donnell, D., & Garavan, T. (2003). eLearning in Irish Organisations? Dublin: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development in Ireland. Oliver, R., & Herrington, J. (2003). Exploring technology-mediated learning from a pedagogical perspective. Journal of Interactive Learning Environments, 11(2), 111–126. doi:10.1076/ ilee.11.2.111.14136 Panda, S., & Juwah, C. (2006). Professional development of online facilitators in enhancing interactions and engagement: A framework. In C. Juwah (Ed.), Interactions in online education. Implications for theory and practice (pp. 83-104). London: Routledge. Reinmann, G., Macdonald, J., Donnelly, R., Fransen, J., & Poldner, E. (2007, August). Blended learning in higher education: Theory and Praxis. Paper presented at the annual symposium of the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI),University of Szeged, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest. Rosenberg, M. J. (2001). E-learning: Strategies for delivering knowledge in the digital age. New York: McGraw-Hill.

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Savin-Baden, M. (2006). The challenge of using problem-based learning online. In M. Savin-Baden & K. Wilkie (Eds.), Problem-based learning online (pp. 3-13). Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press. Segrave, S., Holt, D., & Farmer, J. (2005). The power of the 6 three model for enhancing academic teachers’ capacities for effective online teaching and learning: Benefits, initiatives and future directions. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 21(1), 118–135. Skilbeck, M. (2001). The university challenged. A review of international trends and issues with particular reference to Ireland. Dublin: Higher Education Authority. Sloman, M. (2001). The e-learning revolution: From proposition to action. London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Taylor, E. (1997). Building upon the theoretical debate: A critical review of the empirical studies of Mezirow’s transformative learning theory. Adult Education Quarterly, 48(1), 34–59. doi:10.1177/074171369704800104 Tyack, D. B., & Cuban, L. (1995). Tinkering towards utopia: A century of public school reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wagner, E. D. (2006). On designing interaction experiences for the next generation of blended learning. In C. J. Bonk & C.R. Graham (Eds.), The handbook of blended learning. Global perspectives, local designs (pp. 41-55). San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer.

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Chapter 2

Experiences and Perceptions of Learner Engagement in Blended Learning Environments: The Case of an Australian University Linda De George-Walker University of Southern Queensland, Australia Abdul Hafeez-Baig University of Southern Queensland, Australia Raj Gururajan University of Southern Queensland, Australia P. A. Danaher University of Southern Queensland, Australia

ABSTRACT One of the most significant challenges in learning and teaching is to maximize successful and sustainable learner engagement. The growing literature about blended learning environments and technologies provides plenty of scope for an interrogation of the intersection between learner engagement and blended learning. This chapter takes up that interrogation by presenting the case of the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. The chapter focuses on three postgraduate courses offered by the institution: two in the Faculty of Business and the other in the Faculty of Education; and each course representing a different position along the continuum from blended to fully online. The chapter presents a detailed examination of all three courses in relation to design, development, and management, informed by a conceptualization of blended learning as it intersects with learner engagement. Several types of evidence are deployed in evaluating the courses against the assembled information about experiences and perceptions of learner engagement and blended learning communicated by students, academic staff members, and program administrators. This evidence suggests some significant implications for the ongoing theorization of blended learning, how its effectiveness can be maximized, and what its connections with learner engagement are and should be. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-880-2.ch002

Copyright © 2010, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.

Experiences and Perceptions of Learner Engagement in Blended Learning Environments

INTRODUCTION One of the greatest challenges in learning and teaching, regardless of delivery mode, is to maximize successful and sustainable learner engagement, whether with fellow students, teaching staff members, content, context, or the educational technologies being used to provide the instruction (Guthrie, 2001; Linnenbrink & Pintrich, 2003; McFadden & Munns, 2002; Zyngier, 2005). The complexity of this challenge derives partly from a lack of consensus in conceptualizing learner engagement (Butler-Kisber & Portelli, 2003; Vibert & Shields, 2003; Zyngier, 2008), and partly from the difficulty of establishing a direct, oneto-one correspondence between different types of inputs and the desired output of learner participation and achievement. This is certainly the case in exploring learner engagement with various educational technologies, including educational software (Bangert-Drowns & Pyke, 2001, 2002) and simulations (Davies, 2002). The burgeoning scholarship about blended learning environments and technologies provides plenty of scope for an interrogation of the intersection between learner engagement and blended learning. Elements of that literature include efforts to define blended learning (Driscoll, 2002; Osguthorpe & Graham, 2003), to explore examples in corporate, multinational, workplace, and higher education contexts (Bonk & Graham, 2006), to elicit strategies for making it effective (Rossett, Douglis, & Frazee, 2003; Singh, 2003), to maximize its facilitation of a sense of community (Roval & Jordan, 2004), and to elaborate its transformative potential (Garrison & Kanuka, 2004). Provisionally, for the purpose of orienting the discussion in this chapter, we take Graham’s (2006) account of the historical emergence of blended learning as the convergence between face-to-face and computer mediated learning environments as the starting point – although, as we shall see, by no means the finishing line – in defining blended learning.

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It is therefore timely to bring together these two streams of literature, as the chapter seeks to do. For example, it is important to integrate claims about the educational benefits of blended learning with evidence gleaned from contemporary case studies about how learners and other stakeholders view the enactment of blended learning in specific educational programs. Likewise it is necessary to highlight strategies garnered from that evidence as being demonstrably effective in moving from theory to practice in maximizing learner engagement in blended learning environments. The chapter takes up that challenge by presenting the case of the University of Southern Queensland (USQ), Australia. The chapter both links with and builds on current publications about the case site (Danaher, Gururajan, & Hafeez-Baig, 2009; Hafeez-Baig & Danaher, 2007a, 2007b) by focusing on three courses offered by the institution and not previously canvassed in those publications. As Table 1 indicates, the courses exhibit considerable diversity: while all three are postgraduate, two are located in the Faculty of Business and the other in the Faculty of Education. Furthermore, the courses occupy different positions along the continuum from face-to-face to blended to online: one course blends face-to-face, distance and online delivery; one blends distance and online delivery; and one is mainly online, with some face-to-face provision (the latter as potentially contrasting and/ or overlapping with the other two courses). What these three courses have in common is a commitment to enhancing learner engagement in varied combinations of learning environments. Indeed, the variety of the selected courses – in relation to paradigm, subject matter, and assessment – is helpful in illustrating the multiple ways in which blended learning can be implemented to facilitate learner participation and achievement. The chapter’s four objectives are as follows: (1) to outline a skeptical but hopeful conceptualization of blended learning gleaned from

Experiences and Perceptions of Learner Engagement in Blended Learning Environments

Table 1. The three courses at USQ Course number

Course code and title

Faculty

Level

Learning environment type

One

CIS5001 Information Systems for Managers

Business

Postgraduate

Blended between face-to-face, distance and online

Two

EDU8317 Educational Measurement and Assessment in Inclusive Education

Education

Postgraduate

Blended between distance and online

Three

CIS8011 Emerging Information Technologies

Business

Postgraduate

Mainly online, with some face-to-face provision

the contemporary literature, particularly in relation to learner engagement; (2) to discuss the three courses in terms of their design, development, and management; (3) to evaluate the courses against the assembled evidence of experiences and perceptions of learner engagement and blended learning communicated by selected students, academic staff members, and program administrators; and (4) to contribute to the ongoing theorization of blended learning on the basis of the outcomes of the evaluation of the courses. The chapter’s intended outcome is to extend current understandings of blended learning: what it is, in which contexts it occurs, how its effectiveness can be maximized, and what its connections with learner engagement are and should be.

BACKGROUND USQ is a university in Queensland, Australia, with about 24,000 enrolled students. It is characteristic of many of the ‘new generation’ universities in Australia, having been established in 1967 and for most of its existence to date operating as an institute of advanced education, serving simultaneously its local community (a regional area west of Brisbane, the capital city of Queensland) and thousands of students throughout Australia and internationally as one of eight nationally desig-

nated distance education providers of university education. The organization was proclaimed the USQ in 1992, since when it has expanded its Australian campuses as well as its international outreach and its research activities (University of Southern Queensland, n. d.). Its success in these endeavors led to its being named Australian University of the Year in 2000-2001 by the Good Universities Guide (Smith, 2005). With the provision of distance and online education by most if not all contemporary universities, USQ has worked meticulously to maintain and even to extend its reputation in this dimension, for example winning the Commonwealth of Learning Award of Excellence for Institutional Achievement in 2004 for “its provision of flexible learning opportunities for people with diverse social and cultural backgrounds” (Smith, 2005, p. 12). Since 1977, USQ has been “a dual mode institution” (Smith, 2005, p. 1), with both on- and off-campus students, and with the developments associated with the Internet it has enhanced its “triple option teaching styles” (Smith, 2005, p. 1), offering courses on-campus, externally and online. The organization’s international standing is reflected in its study centers in many overseas countries and in its enrollment of students from over 30 countries. Blended learning is strongly represented in the increasing number of courses that combine classroom teaching, electronic discussions and sometimes intensive residential schools.

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Experiences and Perceptions of Learner Engagement in Blended Learning Environments

USQ has worked hard to develop strong support mechanisms for its off-campus students. Its Distance and e-Learning Centre, which manages students enrolled to study via external and Web modes, collects and dispatches over 200,000 assignments each semester from distance students, provides learning resources through the post to students who opt to study in the external mode using printed materials and CD-Roms, helps students to identify resources on the learning management system, and directs enquiries from students to staff desktops using a special software application that can convert telephone messages into a form that is compatible with computers. This support infrastructure and the associated policies and processes are crucial to maintaining USQ’s market reputation as a strong provider of flexible learning – and thereby to enhancing learner engagement with USQ’s blended learning courses.

SETTING THE STAGE In common with all other Australian universities, USQ undergoes continual review of its expenditures and revenues, especially as these relate to learning and teaching activities. It is committed to expanding its student base, both Australian and international, and in doing so to providing the best possible combination of learning experiences and opportunities. At the same time, the real costs (including the often hidden labor costs associated with implementing new policies and technologies) indicate that retaining traditional approaches to pedagogical provision is not viable, particularly in courses with low enrollments (Smith, 2005). Consequently USQ has invested considerable resources, including time, in the development of a set of university-wide enterprise systems, which have provided the basis for coordination across the organization’s complex administrative, learning and teaching, and student support functions (Smith, 2005). The PeopleSoft enterprise software

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underpins the finance, student administration, and human resources systems, while in 2007 USQ changed its learning management system from WebCT to Moodle. A necessarily simplified representation of the intersection of these diverse enterprise systems is provided in Figure 1: A key implication of this approach to learning and teaching management is that most USQ academic staff members teach across a number of delivery modes. While it is fairly common for some academics to teach in both external and Web modes, and sometimes not to teach in the on-campus mode (with the possible exception of residential schools), it is less usual for academics to teach fully on-campus with no exposure to off-campus teaching. This trend has necessitated substantial change to academics’ roles and responsibilities and to the ways in which they enact their professional identities. This change has been accompanied and supported by university-wide training in specific aspects of the learning management system and by faculty-specific discussions of learning and teaching that take account of the technological developments. Nevertheless, the pressures to create engaging and meaningful learning environments across all three delivery modes are considerable, and are not necessarily easily accommodated within the short timelines and increased individual accountability characteristic of contemporary universities. Similar pressures have been exerted on students, who have had to adjust their learning aspirations and experiences to fit with the requirements of learning management systems. Sometimes this has included having to change delivery mode from on- to off-campus if there are insufficient numbers to operate on-campus classes. Furthermore, Australian university students are increasingly studying part- or even full-time while carrying out part- or even full-time paid employment to cover tuition and related costs (Willans, Harreveld, & Danaher, 2003). This trend places an additional burden on blended learning’s capacity to generate and expand learner engagement, because for many

Experiences and Perceptions of Learner Engagement in Blended Learning Environments

Figure 1. Enterprise systems at USQ (Smith, 2005, p. 4)

students such engagement is only a part – and sometimes a small part – of a complex set of diverse activities. This is potentially complicated further in the situation of international students, whose full range of responsibilities and expectations are not necessarily known to USQ staff members. Partly in response to these kinds of pressures, the higher education environment has moved – at least rhetorically – from ‘chalk and talk’ to studentcentered, independent, and flexible learning. This development has constituted an attempt to engage with an increasingly diverse student population and has reflected the need to exploit advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs) (Palalong, 2003). Under these circumstances, the use of learning management systems has become an integral part of distance and online education in recent years (Finkelstein & Pittinsky, 2003). Morgan (2003) reported that in most cases academics use learning management systems to communicate with students, provide access

to teaching and tutorial resources, and transmit other information to students. Similar sentiments have been conveyed by Schibik, Harrington, and Gordon (2005). It is clear from these developments that combining learning management systems and ICTs in blended learning environments is no easy mission: there are lots of complexities, some of which cancel one another out in relation to maximizing learner engagement. Despite these complexities, and the diversity of the courses discussed below notwithstanding, the academic staff members involved in all three courses have been committed to using all the pedagogical and technological resources and strategies at their disposal to encourage students to use these tools for learning, to participate actively with other learners, to conduct self-evaluation, to deploy time management skills, and to enact effective teamwork in diverse learning contexts. These are the principles needed to optimize the links between

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Experiences and Perceptions of Learner Engagement in Blended Learning Environments

learner engagement and blended learning environments in contemporary universities.

CASE DESCRIPTION We turn now to present the three courses that constitute the case of learner engagement in blended learning environments being analyzed in this chapter. While the courses represent considerable diversity, they have been analyzed according to a common framework incorporating: • • •

Course overview Course design, management Course evaluation

development,

and

CIS5001 Information Systems for Managers Course Overview CIS5001 Information Systems for Managers is a postgraduate core course in the Faculty of Business at USQ. This course is offered in the on-campus, external and Web delivery modes in Semesters 1 and 2 each year, and on average attracts about 500 students for each semester. Most students enroll in the course in the external mode. External and online students are supported by means of the online resources associated with the learning management system Moodle, including the EASE online assignment submission system and the Turnitin plagiarism checking system. These three systems are used extensively to facilitate the easy delivery of course materials and the students’ active engagement and participation. The course has three formal summative assessment items: an online quiz (weighting 5%) due in Week 4 of the semester; a major written report (weighting 35%) due in Week 9; and an open book examination (weighting 60%) at the end of the semester.

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Course Design, Development, and Management CIS5001 is offered with the help of printed material, such as an introductory book and a study guide, especially designed for students to facilitate their study and their weekly course commitments. A copy of this printed material is also provided online via the learning management system. External students rely heavily on the three systems identified above (Moodle, EASE, and Turnitin), whereas on-campus students are able to attend the face-to-face lectures and tutorials. Usually the course is developed and managed by a team of three academics and a group of external markers. Various discussion forums have been developed to enable students to learn and to engage with the various concepts and theories encountered in the course. Since its inception the course has received positive feedback and course enrollments have increased. The course design and development have been organized to provide maximum possible support and flexibility to students with work commitments, as most of the students in the course are working in middle to top level management positions. The basic educational philosophy underpinning the course is to help students to achieve the course objectives through active participation, by critiquing one another’s perspectives, through formal assessment items, and by sharing information. For example, weekly discussion questions provide an opportunity to share students’ experiences and knowledge, as all the questions are open ended and encourage students to build the arguments needed to justify their points of view. The major assignment report requires students to analyze real business scenarios, to evaluate problems, and to present consultant reports with in-depth analysis and focused recommendations. The Turnitin plagiarism application enables students to assess their own work and teaches them how to analyze and critique their peers’ work.

Experiences and Perceptions of Learner Engagement in Blended Learning Environments

The pedagogy employed in the course communicates to students the course expectations and requirements on a weekly basis through online discussion forums, weekly discussion questions, weekly extra activities, and case studies. The course resources in conjunction with the learning management system provide an opportunity for all participants to interact in teams and individually irrespective of their location or background. These interactions are monitored and moderated regularly by the course coordinator to maximize the richness of the discussion and the peer group teaching. Most of the interactions among the students and between the students and the teaching team members are in the online mode.

•

•

•

•

Course Evaluation CI85001 is reviewed regularly to ensure that it provides students with understandings of the business world and of the implications for that world of current and developing ICTs. Student interactions were consistent throughout the semester, but understandably the intensity of those interactions was extremely high immediately before the due date of each summative assessment item. The overall analysis, gleaned from student course evaluations and the teaching team’s focused reflections on the course outcomes, was that at the beginning of the course many students lacked confidence, but that by the end of the course most students had enjoyed the learning process, with the course offering being considered flexible and enjoyable. In particular, the course evaluation elicited the following motivators associated with enhancing the links between learner engagement and the blended learning environment of the course: •

By contrast, the course evaluation explicated the following factors that potentially reduced the level of learner engagement or otherwise indicated areas where our knowledge is not yet sufficiently developed to make definitive claims about such engagement: •

• The blended learning environment and the ICT tools provided students with substantial opportunities for effective and sustaining interactions among all modes of delivery.

The blended learning environment and the ICT tools helped to reduce the overall logical costs and to make the course more effective and efficient. The blended learning environment gave students the opportunity for engagement and potentially for empowerment through different kinds of interaction and through the flexibility offered in the course by means of various ICT tools and applications. The blended learning environment enabled the course participants to focus on problem-based learning (PBL), which in turn fostered greater learner engagement. The blended learning environment provided students with a rich learning context in which they were equipped to achieve their individual goals and to experience a considerable diversity of theoretical and experiential knowledge, again enhancing the depth and breadth of learner engagement in the course.

Although students were able to interact with the course coordinator in the blended learning environment and using the ICT tools, a number of students stated their preference for the positive effects of faceto-face teaching during the course teaching visits. The ICT tools and the other techniques used in the course’s blended learning environment did not provide specific evidence of individual interaction and progression, so the evaluation of the level and types of learner engagement in the course is necessarily generalized.

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Experiences and Perceptions of Learner Engagement in Blended Learning Environments

•

•

•

•

The potential of the blended learning environment was limited both by some limitations of policies and procedures at USQ and by the restrictions of the existing infrastructure. The cultural and political norms specific to the discipline in which the course is situated tended to make the students’ engagement passive rather than active, in the sense that that engagement was directed at mastering existing understandings rather than necessarily creating new knowledge (somewhat akin to the ‘master and apprentice’ analogy); this is undoubtedly true of other disciplines and paradigms as well. It is difficult to analyze and evaluate the balance among, and the most appropriate combination of, various blended learning techniques needed to optimize the students’ learning and teaching experiences. It is important to think further about engagement and interaction among all the stakeholders in the course in the process of establishing a constructive framework for the most effective and efficient blended learning environment. For example, as well as student to student and student to academic staff member interactions, it is necessary to maximize such interactions among academics and between academics and industry and community representatives, because those interactions inevitably impinge on the quality of learner interaction and hence engagement in the course.

EDU8317 Educational Measurement and Assessment in Inclusive Education Course Overview EDU8317 Educational Measurement and Assessment in Inclusive Education is a postgraduate course for Australian and international students

30

enrolled in the Master of Education program majoring in either Guidance and Counseling or Special Education in the Faculty of Education at USQ. The seven course modules introduce students to the fundamentals of psycho-educational assessment and include topics about assessment processes and procedures, basic measurement concepts such as reliability, validity, and norms, standardized and informal tests and testing, assessment accommodations, ethical and legal issues, and reporting. Prior to 2005, EDU8317 had been offered in the distance education mode, supplemented with a mandatory mid-semester face-to-face residential school. With many students, particularly those enrolled overseas, finding it increasingly difficult to attend the residential school owing to time, financial, and other constraints, and an organizational imperative toward increased access and flexibility for students, the decision was made from 2005 to trial the replacement of the face-to-face residential school component with online learning and teaching strategies. Enabling this new course design was an existing online course presence via the university’s learning management system. Before 2005, the EDU8317 online course page tended to be used mostly as a resource repository and a point of administrative contact between students and staff members. If crucial learning goals were not to be lost in the shift from a face-to-face/distance blend to a distance/online blend, the use of the learning management system needed to become a teaching, learning and engagement tool.

Course Design, Development, and Management From 2005, students continued to be provided with printed study materials typical of most distance offers at the university, including an introductory book, a study guide, and a book of selected readings. Students were also expected to purchase two set textbooks. Each study guide module followed

Experiences and Perceptions of Learner Engagement in Blended Learning Environments

a consistent pattern: focus questions (learning objectives); text and explanatory notes related to the topic; prompts to complete the required text reading and selected readings; and independent activities interspersed throughout the module that required learners to apply, evaluate, and synthesize the content. The face-to-face mid-semester residential school had employed the instructional strategy of PBL to simulate and engage students in the ‘real world’ of psychoeducational assessment. Thus, during the residential school students were engaged with fellow students and teaching staff in the exploration of the curriculum content but also the more generic skills of self-directed learning and collaborative problem solving – all required for real world assessment practice. From a learning perspective, it was considered essential that the PBL component be retained in the course, but it would need to be modified for online delivery. Few changes were made to the PBL content for the online version of the course. Taking a case-based approach to PBL (Barrows, 1986), students worked with a hypothetical 12-year-old learner who had been ‘referred’ to them for assessment. Students were gradually exposed to richly presented case information and associated artifacts (for example, a referral letter, interview transcripts, school records, and existing assessment data) that were available from the online course page. Students engaged with the case to determine the significance of information, synthesize that information, draw on course and other resources, formulate and adapt hypotheses as necessary, and plan for additional processes that they would undertake to progress toward making sound educational recommendations for the case. The role of the teaching staff in the online version of the PBL component of the course was also to remain as it had been for the face-to-face version and consistent with the implementation of PBL – that is, encouraging and challenging students to interrogate their thinking deeply rather

than necessarily offering solutions (Savory & Duffy, 2001). However, the change from face-to-face to online implementation of the PBL activity prompted a reconsideration of the scheduling and integration of the PBL activities with the module activities. For the previous face-to-face residential school version, students had completed four modules over approximately eight weeks before engaging with the PBL activities. With the new online approach, the PBL activities were reconfigured into three sequential phases each of about two weeks’ duration, which commenced from the start of the semester and were offered parallel with the module study. Consequently the online version of the PBL component of the course moved closer to the intentions of PBL in that from the outset learning was synthesized and organized in the context of the problem (Savory & Duffy, 2001). With the removal of the mandatory residential school, there was some concern about student engagement and participation in the online PBL. As well as considering engagement from the perspective of creating engaging learning and teaching resources, explicitly sharing the rationale for the task, and staff encouragement of participation, it was felt that assessment could play a role in fostering and sustaining engagement. With the mindset that a PBL associated assessment task should be one that not only encourages engagement in the PBL task but also enhances the learning outcomes, the assessment task that was devised involved students writing a reflective statement about what they had learned about assessment and their approach to such assessment, and a selfcritique of themselves as assessment practitioners and lifelong learners. This was accompanied by a self-assessment of their assessment knowledge and skills in terms of how prepared they felt for the final assessment item where they were to undertake an assessment of an actual student and write a psychoeducational report. Thus, the reflective statement and self-assessment task were an attempt not only to engage the students

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Experiences and Perceptions of Learner Engagement in Blended Learning Environments

in the PBL component of the course but also to develop their skills as reflective practitioners. The two other items of course assessment were more content focused and included a critical review of a standardized testing instrument and a PowerPoint presentation of a self-selected assessment topic. As well as independent engagement with the online version of the PBL activity, the other aspect requiring careful consideration was facilitating the collaborative engagement with other students and staff considered crucial for student learning from a constructivist educational philosophy but also as an authentic part of the PBL activities in that consultation and collaboration are necessary processes when undertaking psychoeducational assessment. Thus, for each of the three PBL phases, students were allocated to small online teams and encouraged to use their teams’ asynchronous online discussion forums to share their ideas and to collaborate with fellow students about the case. The PBL information sheet included prompts and scaffolding for the online discussion as well as independent reflection to support what was for most students their first experience of both the content area of psychoeducational assessment and the instructional strategy of PBL (see Figure 2).

Course Evaluation Delivery and management of this course during 2005–2007 revealed to the teaching staff some consistent patterns in terms of engagement with the online version of the PBL component of the course. All students engaged with the PBL activities, as demonstrated by their completion of the associated assessment task. However, not all students chose to engage collaboratively in the online discussion with some preferring to work independently, accompanied by passive reading of the discussion forum postings. The effects of this were twofold: not only did those students potentially affect the quality of their own learning experience, but also their fellow students reported that team members’ lack of engagement in discussions meant less team

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interaction and dialogue and negatively affected the quality of the learning experience for the whole team. After the first offer in 2005, students who wanted to participate actively in the discussions were alerted to the opportunity to be additionally signed up to another, more active group if they wished to do so. However, very few students took up this offer. Overall it was observed that only a few teams were engaged in high levels of genuinely collaborative discussion from start to finish. Other teams started well but participation dwindled throughout the semester. Student feedback about the course was gained through the broad university course evaluations as well as course developed surveys and students’ comments in the reflective statement assessment item. Generally students were very positive about the course overall. More detailed analysis of the student feedback revealed consistent themes in terms of the course and other aspects that both facilitated and challenged student engagement and learning. 1.

Aspects that supported engagement and learning – Most students rated the quality of the distance module materials and resources available on the learning management system as high. The majority of respondents also reported that the PBL was important for their engagement and learning in the course as a result of the following features: the practical, realistic, meaningful, and active ‘hands on’ character of the PBL; exposure to diverse points of view that enabled them to gauge their progress through the PBL discussion forums; deeper and more applied understanding of psychoeducational assessment content and processes; the requirement for self-directed research and learning; and motivational effects that included being able to apply existing knowledge. These features as noted by the EDU8317 students are similar to those identified in the literature as being particularly well addressed by PBL

Experiences and Perceptions of Learner Engagement in Blended Learning Environments

Figure 2. Phase 1 prompts for the online PBL in EDU8317

2.

instructional strategies (Barrows, 1986). Students also noted that online discussions and contact among students and between students and staff members using the learning management system were highly valued, with one student noting that s/he felt like s/ he was studying on campus. Aspects that challenged engagement and learning – Three key themes emerged relating to aspects that challenged learner engagement:

(a)

Student factors – Several students noted that full engagement with the PBL materials took considerable time. This in turn often led to posting responses to the PBL focus questions close to deadline, thus leaving no time for online discussion with peers. A few students noted that they hesitated to participate in the online discussion forums either initially or at all owing

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Experiences and Perceptions of Learner Engagement in Blended Learning Environments

to a personal sense of inadequacy and self-consciousness. (b) Technical issues – The technical expertise required by students to participate was low, with students needing only to download the PBL materials and to use the discussion forums. Some students did, however, report some personal technical problems (for example, Internet service provider issues and slower dial up Internet access) that affected their ability to download the PBL documents and to participate in the discussion forums before they closed (for example, Internet service provider issues and slower dial up Internet access). (c) Pedagogical matters – Several students noted difficulties with the asynchronous discussion forum and lack of real-time discussion with peers and staff members and felt that this affected engagement and motivation. Several students overcame this challenge by initiating face-to-face dialogue and mentoring in their local contexts. Student feedback highlighted the course mechanisms that both facilitated and challenged student engagement and learning, and provided some explanations as to the patterns of engagement observed by course staff during the delivery and management of the course. Based on this evaluation, the following areas are suggested as improvements to be implemented in subsequent offers of the course: •

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At the outset provide students with more information about PBL and in particular the importance of the collaborative discussion so that they are familiar with how to derive the maximum benefit from this instructional strategy.

•

•

•

•

•

•

Assist students with their time management by providing them with a guide for participation in the online PBL – for example, “It is recommended that you begin posting to the discussion board within the first week of the PBL phase.” Open one online forum discussion for each PBL phase rather than up to 10 separate discussion areas for small teams. Additionally, the learning management system feature that requires students to make a posting before they can view other students’ postings may increase active rather than passive (reading only) engagement in forums and support those who are lacking confidence. Extend each PBL task from two to three weeks to allow students extra time to engage and also troubleshoot technical problems. To lessen downloading problems, ensure that all file sizes are as small as possible by converting from Word to PDF formats. Streamline and integrate the two separate independent and discussion forum focus questions/activities in the PBL activity prompts (see Figure 2) under a single heading of “For Forum Discussion” to simplify the process and orient students toward participation in forum discussion. Trial the use of synchronous discussion forums in addition to the asynchronous discussion forums to enable real-time engagement and collaborative dialogue.

The shift from the face-to-face/distance blend to the distance/online blend has been successful in terms of increased flexibility for students by not requiring their attendance at a residential school and replacing this with the online version of the PBL course component. Evaluation of the course has verified that equivalent learning goals can be achieved irrespective of face-to-face or online delivery, provided that students engage in all aspects of the PBL component, including col-

Experiences and Perceptions of Learner Engagement in Blended Learning Environments

laborative engagement with peers and academic staff members. However, it is encouraging all students to engage in this way that presents an ongoing challenge.

CIS8011 Emerging Information Technologies Course Overview CIS8011 Emerging Information Technologies is principally an online postgraduate course in the Faculty of Business at USQ. It includes an introductory book and study guide, reading materials, Web links, peer assessment, assessment submission, and assessment marking, all in the online mode. The study resources used in the course are threaded as online content using hyperlinks to allow easy access. Paper-based material is avoided in the course content. The course operates a peer review system for weekly assessment by students of submitted journals, and it assesses students in relation to solutions that they produce for practical problems. A mandatory plagiarism check for all submitted work is also in place. Completed assessment includes a rigorous submission through three different computing environments (anti-plagiarism software, the learning management system, and the peer review system), with the emphasis being on enabling students to learn from interacting with one another. This approach has improved the overall quality of the course. The feedback received from students shows that they are satisfied with the course outcomes and are willing to recommend it to other students. The course design and delivery have offered flexibility to both the students and USQ. They have reduced the cost of producing course materials, facilitated easy delivery of study materials to students, and maximized easy access of course materials by students and academic staff members. The course allows a flexible delivery schedule, and operates a clear and transparent structure.

Course Design, Development, and Management The educational philosophy framing the course design, development, and management for CIS8011 is founded on three key principles: learning by application; learning by observation; and learning by critique. The learning by application component involves students developing solutions for real life problems provided to them. The solutions are presented in the form of a consultant’s report, a management report, and an analysis component. The idea underpinning this component is to help students to think of various alternatives and then to generate feasible solutions taking into account all the known constraints. The learning by observation component enables students to benchmark their work against that of other students. This is done through peer assessments where students are given the opportunity to evaluate one another’s work. In doing so, they are able to compare the quality of their work with that of others (see Figure 3). The learning by critique component assists students to analyze and to review critically the work of others. This stimulates in-depth thinking because the subject matter is common to all students and they therefore have a mutually understood foundation for subsequent dialogue and engagement. Furthermore, this component helps students to improve the quality of their work in two distinct ways: while critiquing the work of others, students are required to demonstrate their in-depth subject knowledge; and students also receive an indication of others’ opinions of their own work. The combination of these two aspects of quality enhancement potentially helps all students to improve their overall standard of communication in the course (see Figure 4). USQ offers courses in different modes in order to accommodate the specific needs of local and distance students. Generally the main difference among the delivery modes lies in the way that

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Experiences and Perceptions of Learner Engagement in Blended Learning Environments

Figure 3. Learning by observation in CIS8011

Figure 4. Learning by critique in CIS8011

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Experiences and Perceptions of Learner Engagement in Blended Learning Environments

information is delivered to students. For example, a student might be resident locally and able to be on-campus but still enroll in the distance mode. Distance mode students are provided with printed learning materials suitable for self-study, and they are able to attend the two week residential school if they happen to be in the vicinity of the campus if such a school is part of the course. Web mode students do not have access to the residential school or to printed versions of the learning materials. CIS8011 uses the Web delivery mode, which is based on online provision irrespective of study mode (on- or off-campus). As noted above, the course material is offered through several hyperlinks enabling easy online access, and the materials are delivered to enrolled students via the Moodle learning management system as the standard interface. This approach provides the following advantages: •

• • • •

Flexible timelines for the academic staff members to submit materials to the Distance and e-Learning Centre Reduced costs in terms of printing Flexibility in updating course materials Easy delivery of course materials to students Shortened delivery schedule

Moreover, when the course was refined for the third semester in 2006, the modifications were easily incorporated into the course design and delivery. Many students liked this approach because it was easy for them to have ready access to materials via the Internet instead of having to carry around printed copies. Students who enrolled late received instant access and they were pleased by the rapid delivery of materials to them. Overall the benefits were significant. An added feature was the integration of online study materials into a single book. USQ courses in information systems traditionally provide two books, one outlining the course details and the other containing the readings required for the

course. The provision of one book in CIS8001 also ensured that updates to materials could be achieved easily with access to only one source. All study materials are presented in the form of pdf files. The advantage of this approach is easy addition to the reading sources without concern for the size of the book and hence postage charges. The course materials contain a number of hyperlinks to thread the content into a continuous flow (see Figure 5). The front end is a collapsed version of the course with a ‘telescopic’ view. Students are able to expand the modules to access either reading guidelines or reading materials to see how the task for a particular week can be accomplished. This provides flexibility to students depending on their level of understanding of the course content, and hopefully provides a strong foundation for enhancing learner interaction. The materials are presented with a set of standard readings. Each week certain sections of the readings are referred to in the study guide and students are asked to go through key elements of these sections in order to comprehend the weekly materials. These are then linked to assessments, which are presented in the form of weekly journals, mainly to demonstrate students’ understanding of the weekly materials. These journals are assessed by the students’ peers, as noted above. This forms the basis for their assignment and report work. This enables students to remain focused on the same set of materials, while still having the flexibility to read other sources. The design of the course materials is intentionally simple. Each week students are presented with a topic outline and the learning outcomes expected of students in that topic. They are provided with a set of readings to help their understanding, a set of guidelines for additional resources (mainly derived from the reference section of the readers), and an assessment task to stimulate their thinking for which they are required to collect additional evidence. The students are then required to submit their work.

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Experiences and Perceptions of Learner Engagement in Blended Learning Environments

Figure 5. Example of threaded discussions in CIS8011

This process is the central theme for each week, and it enables students to understand the delivery schedule of their work. Moreover, students must submit all their work through a plagiarism application and ensure that the ‘plagiarism count’ (the percentage of material from other published sources) is under 20%. This enables students to review their own work in order to avoid any allegations of plagiarism or collusion. The plagiarism software is configured in such a way that students’ work is checked with available materials on the Internet as well as with their fellow students’ work. This approach is considered a pre-requisite to enhancing learner engagement in this blended learning environment.

Course Evaluation The course was initially conducted as a pilot in Semester 1, 2006. The course was evaluated by a professional evaluator (an ex-Gartner research consultant) as well as by a group of students. The evaluation was carried out in relation to the quality of materials, presentation format, time taken to complete assessment tasks, and student workload. The course was refined by including the feedback received from these two sources. The course was rerun in the second semester of 2006 with 127 students. The student feedback re-

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ceived subsequently was encouraging. Three main themes identified from that feedback were: •

•

•

The peer review system provides students with an opportunity to see what others are doing and to compare their work with that of their peers. The mandatory plagiarism check ensures that students avoid plagiarism and collusion charges. The weekly journals enable students to study on a weekly basis and this assists them to develop a disciplined routine.

Overall students expressed satisfaction with the course and felt encouraged to recommend the course to other students. In order to ensure students’ satisfaction with the course, periodic telephone conversations were held with students studying away from the main campus to make the assessment requirements clear to them. On the other hand, students felt the burden of weekly journal submissions to be somewhat excessive, especially when other assessments were also due. Also the submissions are automated with strict date stamps and hence any delay in submission results in an unsuccessful submission. One improvement to the course can be the submission

Experiences and Perceptions of Learner Engagement in Blended Learning Environments

of three journals instead of five for the first and second assessments respectively. The second improvement can be in terms of peer assessment. Currently students are given a set of criteria to assess one another’s work. The criteria are loosely defined and are in need of more exact specification. The third area for improvement is the presentation format. Despite being given guidelines, students use their own presentation styles and there is no uniformity. One possible solution could be the use of formats with strict word limits; this will provide a uniform layout and will restrict students to a fixed maximum in terms of word count. Student evaluations indicated that the delivery of teaching materials is acceptable. However, on two occasions, owing to issues with the learning management system and the USQ server, students were not able to access and submit assessment. This needs improvement. As noted above, the students are given materials in pdf format. Owing to large file sizes, there have been occasional complications in downloading materials. It might be a good idea to recognize automatically students’ access schemes and to deliver an alternative version of the materials. Dial up modems and slow broadband connections limit the academic staff members’ ability to provide resources with larger file sizes. For example, course contact material is restricted to a small file size in order to accommodate students with dial up or lower bandwidth Internet connections, and for that reason files with sounds, images, and videos are avoided. Another area of weakness in the course is the lack of examples of report formats, as the course has not been running long enough to have established a significant corpus of such examples available to students. This will be addressed in later offerings of the course. In addition, a number of overseas students struggled with the management report writing style. Despite receiving examples and links to Web sites where guidelines can be found, students had

a difficulty in this regard for the first few weeks of the semester. One possible remedy is to conduct a teaching school in the initial weeks of the course to prepare students to undertake these activities. This will hopefully lead to an overall improvement in the quality of students’ submitted work. Generally the experiences of students and academic staff members in the course can be summarized into lessons learned by all stakeholders involved in the process in relation to learner engagement and blended learning: •

•

•

•

•

Plagiarism cases were very low as students have been able to check their work before final submission. It has been noticed that students are using these skills and resources in other courses, thereby improving the quality of their learning. Peer review assessment has proved to be effective in changing students’ attitudes toward marks allocated to them and to their fellow students. Students were generally very critical of one another’s work. This encourages students to produce assessment materials of high quality. Throughout the semester students are in considerable control of their assessment activities. This enables them to plan their future assessment items and to manage their future enrollment options before the end of the semester. There is clear evidence of interaction and engagement by students as active participants in the course. Students are generally willing and able to engage and to become empowered as the course proceeds. Students are also exposed to experiences of time management, teamwork, organizational skills, project management skills, academic writing, critical analyses of a given situation, the ability to defend their judgments, and the ability to plan and guide others. These skills provide students with a range of leadership training capacities.

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Experiences and Perceptions of Learner Engagement in Blended Learning Environments

Overall there was a positive experience for students and academics alike. Improvements to the next delivery of the course will include a uniform format for assessment reports, tighter marking criteria for peer assessment, and perhaps an early teaching visit to the USQ Distance and e-Learning Centre to increase students’ awareness of management report writing styles.

CURRENT CHALLENGES FACING THE ORGANIZATION This chapter has presented the case of an Australian university, USQ, in relation to multiple experiences and perceptions of learner engagement in blended learning environments. It has done this by focusing on three postgraduate courses at USQ in terms of their design, development, and management, and has canvassed such issues as technology concerns and components, management and organizational concerns, and the cultural and philosophical assumptions of the academic staff members coordinating and teaching the courses. Despite their diversity, the common focus in the courses has been on identifying and implementing strategies needed to maximize the level and types of learner engagement and thereby to optimize the potential benefits of blended learning environments. It is clear that all three courses have succeeded in highlighting this intersection between learner engagement and blended learning environments in several respects, reflected in positive experiences and perceptions communicated by students, academic staff members, and program administrators. The various types of evidence adduced here demonstrate that the strategies deployed to design and refine the courses have helped considerably to encourage students to feel ‘at home,’ regardless of their location and enrollment mode. Indeed, an important element of those strategies has been efforts to render the divisions between delivery modes invisible and seamless, and to enhance

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learning experiences and outcomes across modes of enrollment and delivery. At the same time, it is clear that a set of challenges remains with regard to integrating learner engagement and blended learning environments in all three courses. Perhaps inevitably, not all learners are fully engaged all the time. Student retention and attrition also remain a potential concern. These are ongoing issues and not necessarily resolved easily or permanently. This is so because several factors influencing these challenges lie outside the control of individual course team members, faculties or USQ as a whole – for example, students’ busy lifestyles of which university study is only a part. Even in relation to those factors that are more amenable to action at the program and course levels, some issues are highly complex and differentiated and do not admit of easy answers. A prime example is assessment, which is attended by several tensions – for instance, between assessment for and of learning, between assessment to demonstrate mastery of existing knowledge and assessment to construct new understandings, between varying levels of ownership of the assessment process. The latter is signified by concerns about plagiarism, which reflects wider debates partly about academic integrity and partly about program quality. These recurring issues are likely to remain precisely that: hardy perennials that each course team must encounter and engage within each new offering of the course. This is what we meant by our point at the beginning of the chapter: that Graham’s (2006) depiction of blended learning as the convergence between face-to-face and computer mediated learning environments is the starting point, but not the finishing line, in defining and theorizing blended learning. For one thing, convergence is neither easy nor automatic to achieve: if not quite a never ending story, it is a highly complex assemblage of rapidly moving parts – of students, academics, administrators, other stakeholders, technologies, cultural prac-

Experiences and Perceptions of Learner Engagement in Blended Learning Environments

tices, political imperatives, and the like – and so any settlement implied by the notion of convergence is liable to be tentative and temporary. For another thing, convergence is a potentially limited and limiting idea, in the sense that it implies a single meeting point (and hence a lowest common denominator). There is a possible risk that focusing excessively on convergence could lead to an elision of important and valuable differences among various educational technologies and delivery modes. From this perspective, we see the further theorization of blended learning environments as needing to take account of these kinds of differences, while attending also to equally significant questions of access, equity, quality, and sustainability. The evidence presented in this case study is a ‘mixed bag’about those questions: many students have found the respective courses enabling and even empowering, while others have struggled with particular pedagogical and technological concerns – as have the academic staff members charged with designing, delivering, and managing those courses.

CONCLUSION We have asserted that Graham’s (2006) depiction of blended learning as the convergence between face-to-face and computer mediated learning environments is the starting point, not the finishing line, in understanding blended learning. A key reason for this assertion is centered on the complexities in activating and sustaining learner engagement canvassed in this chapter. As the case presented here demonstrates, bringing blended learning and learner engagement into alignment entails the development of synergies across a range of factors, some of which lie outside the control of students and staff members. Their experiences and perceptions among the three courses outlined here highlight both challenges and opportunities in mobilizing those complexities. Those experi-

ences and perceptions also help to distill certain principles and strategies that might prove useful in future efforts to maximize learner engagement in blended learning environments. All of this underscores that this chapter, along with the others in this book, has sought to extend our current understandings of blended learning and its complex and sometimes perplexing relationship with learner engagement. The courses analyzed here are three separate contexts in which that relationship is enacted. The strategies identified here are efforts to optimize the alignment between the two phenomena, while allowing full rein for the particularities of each. Learner engagement and blended learning environments have much to offer each other, with hoped for benefits for learners and educators alike.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT Professor Yukiko Inoue has been an encouraging and facilitative editor, and two anonymous peer reviewers provided useful feedback about the submitted text. The authors are grateful to the students and academic colleagues who participated in the courses discussed here for enabling the data analysis presented in this chapter.

REFERENCES Bangert-Drowns, R. L., & Pyke, C. (2001). A taxonomy of student engagement with educational software: An exploration of literate thinking with electronic text. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 24(3), 213–234. doi:10.2190/0CKMFKTR-0CPF-JLGR Bangert-Drowns, R. L., & Pyke, C. (2002). Teacher ratings of student engagement with educational software: An exploratory study. Educational Technology Research and Development, 50(2), 23–38. doi:10.1007/BF02504992

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Barrows, H. S. (1986). A taxonomy of problembased learning methods. Medical Education, 20, 481–486. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2923.1986. tb01386.x Bonk, C. J., & Graham, C. R. (Eds.). (2006). Handbook of blended learning: Global perspectives, local designs. San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer. Butler-Kisber, L., & Portelli, P. (2003). Editorial: The challenges of student engagement: Beyond mainstream conceptions and practices. McGill Journal of Education, 38(2), 207. Danaher, P. A., Gururajan, R., & Hafeez-Baig, A. (2009). Transforming the practice of mobile learning: Promoting pedagogical innovation through educational principles and strategies that work. In H. Ryu & D. P. Parsons (Eds.), Innovative mobile learning: Techniques and technologies (pp. 21-46). Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference/IGI Global. Davies, C. H. J. (2002). Student engagement with simulations: A case study. Computers & Education, 39(3), 271–282. doi:10.1016/S03601315(02)00046-5 Driscoll, M. (2002). Blended learning: Let’s get beyond the hype. Retrieved September 7, 2008, from https://www-07.ibm.com/services/pdf/ blended_learning.pdf Finkelstein, J., & Pittinsky, M. (2003, JanuaryFebruary). The evolving role of course management system providers in the transformation of education: An interview with Blackboard’s Matthew Pittinsky. Technology Source. Retrieved November 16, 2008, from http://technologysource. org/article/evolving_role_of_course_management_system_providers_in_the_transformation_of_education/

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Garrison, D. R., & Kanuka, H. (2004). 2nd quarter). Blended learning: Uncovering its transformative potential in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 7(2), 95–105. doi:10.1016/j. iheduc.2004.02.001 Graham, C. R. (2006). Blended learning systems: Definition, current trends, and future directions. In C. J. Bonk & C. R. Graham (Eds.), Handbook of blended learning: Global perspectives, local designs (pp. 3-21). San Francisco: Pfeiffer. Guthrie, J. T. (2001). Contexts for engagement and motivation in reading. Reading Online, 4(8). Retrieved September 7, 2008, from http:// www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index. asp?HREF=handbook/guthrie/index.html Hafeez-Baig, A., & Danaher, P. A. (2007a, February). Future possibilities for mobile learning technologies and applications at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia: Lessons from an academic focus group. In D. P. Parsons & H. Ryu (Eds.), Proceedings of the conference on mobile learning technologies and applications (MoLTA) Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand February 19, 2007 (pp. 16-22). Auckland, New Zealand: Institute of Information and Mathematical Sciences, Massey University. Hafeez-Baig, A., & Danaher, P. A. (2007b). Challenges and opportunities in facilitating student engagement and empowerment: Perspectives from information systems and education courses at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. In C. Montgomerie & J. Seale (Eds.), Proceedings of world conference on education multimedia, hypermedia and telecommunications 2007 (pp. 459-468). Chesapeake, VA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education. Linnenbrink, E. A., & Pintrich, P. R. (2003). The role of self-efficacy beliefs in student engagement and learning in the classroom. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 19, 119–137. doi:10.1080/10573560308223

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McFadden, M., & Munns, G. (2002). Student engagement and the social relations of pedagogy. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 23(3), 357–366. doi:10.1080/0142569022000015409 Morgan, G. (2003, May). Course management system use in the University of Wisconsin system. Retrieved November 16, 2008, from http://www. wisconsin.edu/news/2003/bor_03_mar2003/ morgan-bor-presentation.pdf Osguthorpe, R. T., & Graham, C. R. (2003, Fall). Blended learning environments: Definitions and directions. Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 4(3), 227–233. Palalong, S. (2003). Using the virtual learning environment WebCT to enhance information skills teaching at Coventry University. Library Review, 52(3), 103–110. doi:10.1108/00242530310465906 Rossett, A., Douglis, F., & Frazee, R. V. (2003). Strategies for building blended learning. Learning Circuits. Retrieved September 7, 2008, from http:// www.essentiallearning.net/news/Strategies%20 for%20Building%20Blended%20Learning.pdf Roval, A. P., & Jordan, H. M. (2004, August). Blended learning and sense of community: A comparative analysis with traditional and fully online graduate courses. International Journal of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 5(2). Retrieved September 7, 2008, from http:// www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/viewArticle/192/274 Savory, J. R., & Duffy, T. M. (2001). Problem-based learning: An instructional model and its constructivist framework. CRLT Technical Report No. 1601. Indiana University, Bloomington, IN. Retrieved October 31, 2008, from http://64.233.179.104/ scholar?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=cache:9rXZtOc3RMJ:learning.north.londonmet.ac.uk/ im214/TR16-01.pdf+a+taxonomy+of+problembased+learning+methods

Schibik, T., Harrington, C., & Gordon, S. (2005). The utilization of course management systems in business schools: Some recent evidence. In 2005 Proceedings of the Midwest Business Economics Association (pp. 163-169). Retrieved November 16, 2008, from http://business.usi.edu/mbea/2005/ files/CHarringtonMBEA%202005%20CMS%20 V1NF.doc Singh, H. (2003, November-December). Building effective blended learning programs. Educational Technology, 43(6), 51–54. Smith, A. (2005). Using integrated enterprise systems to achieve strategic goals: A case study of a dual mode university. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 6(1). Retrieved November 16, 2008, from http://www. irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/220/868 University of Southern Queensland. (n. d.). From the beginning. Toowoomba, Qld: Author. Retrieved November 16, 2008, from http://www. usq.edu.au/40years/beginning/default.htm Vibert, A. B., & Shields, C. (2003). Approaches to student engagement: Does ideology matter? McGill Journal of Education, 38(2), 221. Willans, J. A., Harreveld, R. E., & Danaher, P. A. (2003). Enhancing higher education transitions through negotiated engagements of learning experiences: Lessons from a pre-undergraduate preparatory program language education course. Queensland Journal of Educational Research, 19(1), 42–50. Zyngier, D. (2005). Advancing student engagement through changed teaching practice: What does it take to engage a student? International Journal of Learning, 12(1), 102–113. Zyngier, D. (2008). (Re) conceptualising student engagement: Doing education not doing time. Teaching and Teacher Education, 24, 1765–1776. doi:10.1016/j.tate.2007.09.004

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Chapter 3

Instructional Leadership and Blended Learning:

Confronting the Knowledge Gap in Practice Martin R. Reardon Virginia Commonwealth University, USA

ABSTRACT Dewey’s concept of experience as an active engagement with a process of action, feedback, and reflection permeates the setting of the case reported in this chapter. The case involves an initiative to engage a group of experienced teachers and school administrators (in the context of a doctoral level course) with reading and reflecting on a vision of the future of education in a professional learning community permeated by the experience of blended learning. While the blended learning was heavily weighted towards face-to-face meetings, issues relating to the integration of technology with education became experienced realities for the group members. These issues included pre-service teacher education, equitable access to online resources, and the creation of an environment in which contemporary approaches to curriculum, teaching, and learning can flourish.

INTRODUCTION Christensen, Horn, and Johnson (2008) argued persuasively that the traditional K-12 educational model is on the verge of a renovation so comprehensive that it amounts to something of a revolution. They typified the emerging educational model as “learner centered,” and focused on the central mediating role of online resources in enabling the management and delivery of learner-specific approaches to DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-880-2.ch003

education. Blended learning retains the benefits of face-to-face social interaction with fellow learners while taking full advantage of the affordances of the online environment like ubiquitous access and virtual presence. The exploration reported in this chapter was motivated by a belief that instructional leadership is an essential element in steering the implementation of blended learning in the K-12 setting. The perspective of this chapter is that contributions to the present and forthcoming discussions of the role of blended learning and the evolving educational

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Instructional Leadership and Blended Learning

model will be most credible if they emanate from instructional leaders’lived professional experience and expertise. The credibility of educational leaders’ contributions is challenged by the contested concept of “digital natives” (Bennett, Maton, & Kervin, 2007; Prensky, 2001a; Prensky, 2001b), in that many of those currently in instructional leadership positions are less comfortable with technology than the younger teachers and, particularly, the students. This generational difference gives rise to an imbalanced pedagogical situation and can result in the type of discordance between words and actions so pungently summed up as “the multi-prong problem” on a recent blog post: I have found it increasingly annoying to hear from on high that we need to integrate more technology in our classroom…. (We have to) still (use) old standbys because we don’t have the time to use and troubleshoot our way through technology. (We have to make) worksheets by copying and pasting by hand. (We have to build) test questions from book programs that only work on PCs or OS 9 on (sic) macs. (We want) to use videos from the Internet only to find they are blocked. (We want to) post information to a Web site or build (our) own Web sites (only) to find that FTP is blocked, or that online-services are clunky, restrictive, and cumbersome. (Arizpe, 2008) The larger question of the integration of digital technology and education illustrated by Arizpe (2008) is not limited to just the United States. Distilling educationally related questions with respect to information and communication technology (ICT) across the broad sweep of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, the Center for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI, 2008) asked “how far does, and should, (ICT’s) potential to personalize learning get exploited, whether in schools or in other places where learning can take place?” (p. 57).

The CERI (2008) question invokes one of the crucial advantages of the revolution foreseen by Christensen et al. (2008): learner-centered education. The Christensen et al. perspective is supported by a range of findings. For example, Howell, West, and Peterson (2008) declared that “one of the latest education innovations to go mainstream (was) online education” (Howell et al., 2008, ¶ 1). To support their claim, they cited figures from the North American Council for Online Learning (NACOL) that suggested that enrollment in online courses totaled 45,000 in 2000—a figure which had grown to 1 million by 2007. Of these online courses, according to Howell et al., 70 percent were pitched at the high school level. Along similar lines, Zandberg, Lewis, and Greene (2008) found nearly a 60 percent rise from 2002 to 2005 in the number of students enrolled in technology-based distance education programs in the U.S., with the total number of students growing from 317,070 to 506,950. Although the “technology-based” label includes prerecorded video, and interactive voice technologies (among others), Zandberg et al. found that “among districts with technology-based distance education, 41 percent reported (using) two-way interactive video and 40 percent reported (delivering) Internet courses employing asynchronous computer-based instruction” (p. 44). Commenting on likely future trends, Zandberg et al. (2008) cited the United States Department of Education Office of Educational Technology in noting that “online (Internet-based) technology is considered by some policymakers to be the cornerstone of the educational landscape of the future” (p. 3). In this regard, Singleton-Rickman (2008) reported, that “Alabama’s high school students, beginning next year, will be required to pass a distance learning class in order to obtain their high school diplomas” (¶ 4) and that, “across the 16 states that make up the Southern Regional Education Board, there are about 200,000 students taking online courses” (¶ 13), including 77,000 students in Florida.

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Instructional Leadership and Blended Learning

This chapter presents and discusses an initiative to engage a group of potential educational leaders in a blended learning environment in the context of a course in a doctoral program. The adultlearning setting and the 21st century curriculum emphasis together constitute a fresh perspective on instructional leadership and blended learning. The graduates of the focus course will be eligible for high-level school district leadership upon graduation, and, consequently, will be the ones most empowered to make strategic decisions in terms of resource acquisition and allocation in the near future. The purpose of this initiative was to encourage the participants to enrich their perspective on the role of blended learning in the K-12 setting by their engagement with a blended learning environment in this doctoral-level course.

Policy Implications Educational policymakers appear to be on secure ground in their support for digital technology. For example, to directly support their “mainstream” claim from their own survey, Howell et al. stated that “fully 69 percent of the public, and a solid majority of every subgroup, say that they ‘would be willing to have a child (of theirs) go through high school taking some academic courses over the Internet” (Howell et al., 2008, ¶ 3). Shapira (2008) reported that “online schooling…is becoming more popular among students and educators as a way to break from the traditional classroom setting” (¶ 1). Shapira’s attribution of “break from the traditional classroom setting” motivation to students and educators is not supported by the findings of Picciano and Seaman (2007) in their survey of school district administrators. They found that the reasons for implementing online learning in districts were highly pragmatic. In order of importance, the reasons were: (a) offering courses not otherwise available at the school, (b) meeting the needs of specific groups

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of students, (c) offering Advanced Placement or college-level courses, (d) reducing scheduling conflicts for students, and (e) permitting students to retake courses they failed (p. 9).

Disrupting Class Each of the five reasons listed by Picciano and Seaman (2007) conform with the theoretical position propounded by Christensen, Horn, and Johnson (2008) regarding the ways in which online learning can provide educational services for those who have no option (as opposed to trying to supplant existing face-to-face teaching). Christensen et al. argued strongly in favor of student-centered education—implemented online in some appropriately supportive framework—as the way of the future. Song (2008) detailed a real-world scenario in which pragmatism could well motivate a move to a form of online learning when he described the issues surrounding college prep program offerings in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD)—the second-largest school district in the US. In 2005, the LAUSD Board of Education moved to ensure that all students would have access to college prep classes by 2006, “and to require (such classes) by 2012” (¶ 2). The human resource implications of this decision are daunting, but the situation could be alleviated by invoking the concept of blended learning (Picciano & Seaman, 2007). Concept presentations and appropriate learning resources could be made available on-line for students. In the absence of a fully qualified teacher, students could engage with these materials under the guidance of an in-house tutor, allowing highly qualified teachers to be used in a visiting capacity. While this situation is not ideal, to return to the Christensen et al. (2008) perspective, it is better than its alternative (which is access to few or no college prep courses).

Instructional Leadership and Blended Learning

Blended Learning Merges Old and New

Case Theme: Confronting the Knowledge Gap in Practice

Picciano and Seaman (2007) defined a blended/ hybrid course as a course that blends online and face-to-face delivery “where a substantial proportion (30 to 79 percent) of the content is delivered online” (p. 7). In this context, blended learning employed in a classroom environment is conceptualized as a way of merging the best of the old- and new-era pedagogies. Ideally, the burden of content delivery is shared by a variety of online resources, largely leaving to the face-to-face modality the creation of the social environment in which learning occurs (although the effectiveness of the virtual social environment should not be underestimated—as discussed later in this paper). The elegance of the blending of the old and the new largely determines the effectiveness of blended learning. The observed percentage growth figures cited in the introduction to this chapter accord with the expectations of Christensen et al. (2008) for the emergence of online learning from its current “beach head,” but the 1 million students involved in 2007 is small compared to the projected 15 million students in 2007 in the upper grades alone predicted by the United States Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES, 2008). It appears to be inevitable that there will be many students who will not be engaged in “online learning” during their school career. However, the conceptually intermediate step between “not online” and “online” provided by “blended” learning relies on the wide array of educational resources available online, while re-defining the role of the teacher as “fellow knowledge worker” rather than “omniscient guide.”

Clearly, leadership at both the school district and school building levels is crucial for ensuring the creation of effective blended learning experiences for students. In this regard, many instructional leaders are not well versed in current online learning technologies which (in some cases) were not invented when they were encouraged to develop lesson plans of their own. The image of the knowledge gap being invoked in this case is borrowed from the work of Tichenor, Donohue, and Olien (1970) who proposed: that “as the infusion of mass media information into a social system increases, segments of the population with higher socioeconomic status tend to acquire this information at a faster rate than the lower status segments, so that the gap in knowledge between these segments tends to increase rather than decrease” (pp. 159-160). Applying the knowledge gap concept in this context, many instructional leaders are envisaged as low in “technological SES,” whereas their students are high in “technological SES.” (In support of this typology, see, for example, the undergraduate survey of Salaway, Caruso, and Nelson, 2008.) To continue the analogy in the tradition of Tichenor et al. (1970), the infusion of educational technology into a social system comprising both technological “haves” and “havenots” is likely to increase the gap in technological knowledge between the two groups—the students will take-up the new technology faster than the instructional leaders. The purpose of this chapter is to describe a semester-long, multi-session learning experience (incorporating blended learning) intended to decrease the knowledge gap of a group of instructional leaders. Participants explored the potential

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of online learning in the process of engaging in a learning community to create blended learning experiences in their fields of expertise. Gagné’s (1965) six varieties of performance associated with learning (specific responding, chaining, multiple discrimination, classifying, rule using, and problem solving) were used as benchmarks against which to measure the learning that occurred among participants, with participants collaborating amongst themselves in a learning community environment. In particular, participants considered a set of teaching models from a well-respected text commonly found in undergraduate teaching courses (Joyce & Weil, 2004), and how these could be reconceptualized in a blended learning environment. From this common experience, participants set out to create their own blended learning “units” as significant learning experiences that would enhance teaching and learning in the 21st century.

BACKGROUND The university in which this exploration of blended learning is set is a large, public, urban university in an east coast U.S. capital city. It was established in the middle of the 20th century, when two pre-existing, thriving “down-town” public universities—one focused on medicine and the health sciences, and the other focused more on the arts—were merged. This university is rated as exhibiting “high research activity” under the Basic Classification Description (The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 2007), but the expectation that faculty will approach teaching from a learner-centered perspective is made very clear in university documentation, as well as being exemplified in the creation of learnercentered administrative structures—especially at the undergraduate level. The School of Education at this university houses six departments with a total of over 100 faculty members. The graduate Educational

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Leadership Department is one of the six School of Education departments, and it caters for several hundred masters-level participants (enrolled in administrative endorsement programs), and over a hundred doctoral-level participants in both Ed.D. and Ph.D. tracks. The vast majority of courses are delivered off-site at conveniently located school district facilities. Most of the participants are in cohort groups—which are usually at least partially supported by the participants’ school districts— although non-cohort participants are welcome. Class groupings often consist of mixed cohort and non-cohort participants.

SETTING THE STAGE Digital technologies are heavily supported in the School of Education—as they are in this university as a whole. The School of Education supports its own technology department, which houses faculty members who not only provide courses in educational technology, but also ensure that School of Education technology resources are maintained, assisted by a cadre of tech-savvy undergraduate students—most of whom are taking educational technology courses. At the university-wide level, the Center for Excellence in Teaching (CET) actively supports the integration of technology and teaching. In addition to conducting many workshops on the integration of technology and teaching, CET acts as a sounding-board for faculty who wish to “push the envelope” and explore ways of teaching that take advantage of “the proliferation of interconnectivity and interactivity of Web-delivered content” (Web 2.0, 2008). As a minimum, the university expects that faculty will utilize the course-management aspects of Blackboard, but many faculty members go well beyond that minimum expectation and integrate a range of digital technologies with the learning experiences they orchestrate for their students. The confluence of reliable and knowledgeable support for technology

Instructional Leadership and Blended Learning

and a high level of faculty motivation to engage in cutting-edge research related to teaching and learning constitutes the environment in which this case plays out.

CASE DESCRIPTION This case focuses on the initiative taken by a professor in the Educational Leadership Department in the School of Education at this university to explore the concept of blended instruction in his own course delivery of a doctoral-level course designed to engage participants in examining the instructional leadership ramifications of the effective integration of digital technology and learning. The participants in this particular course are typically seeking endorsement at the school district superintendent-level, making the focus of this course particularly salient to instructional leadership in the 21st century. This course is focused on three key tasks of instructional leadership: curriculum development, group development, and professional development (Glickman, Gordon, & Ross-Gordon, 2007). In particular, in this course participants engage with issues arising from (a) the creation and implementation of curriculum in the 21st century (b) in an academic environment which challenges them to earnestly pursue their own professional development vis-à-vis digital technologies (c) immersed in a group-supportive environment which encourages risk-taking.

Technology Concerns The main technological concerns relating to this blended learning endeavor concerned the twin problems of the expertise of the participants (the “knowledge gap”) and reliable broadband Internet access. The blended learning concept envisages online learning experiences and face-to-face meetings which complement each other.

The expertise of the participants. It is not unusual to find a large range of comfort with technology in an “adult” group of learners—even in a group of highly capable academics. The professor’s concern was that participants who were challenged by particular instructional technologies would be disinclined to persevere with them long enough to realize the benefits those technologies promised. However, while this is clearly an element to be taken into account, educational technology is one area in which the adage “action precedes learning” is borne out. In the first class meeting, participants were encouraged to seek support from each other, from the university’s technical help desk, and from the professor. While the unevenness of technological expertise was a factor, it did not detract from the overall blended learning experience—rather the opposite. As an aside, the ease of interaction focused on making things work that the participants developed amongst themselves was strikingly evidenced late in the course. On one scheduled face-to-face meeting evening, an unexpected clash at the school district level resulted in half the participants being unable to attend. The remaining participants opted to meet with the professor in a classroom at the university. The previous meeting in the appointed room ran late, so the professor and the group sat in an adjacent classroom to wait. The participants— who could all login to the university’s wireless network—began to share in small groups while they were waiting, with individuals moving freely from one small group to another depending on the software being used. The professor was reluctant to interrupt this spontaneous social constructivist occurrence when the designated room became available. Reliable broadband Internet access. Since the face-to-face meetings were scheduled to occur at a conveniently located middle school where participants would be introduced to many of the online resources, Internet access at that site was essential. The middle school in question was known to be wireless-enabled, but it was not clear

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whether the participants from other buildings in that school district would be able to use their own logins at this designated site. Even more problematic, the professor and four non-cohort course participants needed Internet access as well. Starting three months before the course was scheduled to commence, repeated phone calls and emails to individuals and to the technology help desk of the relevant school district asking for clarification regarding Internet access, and, if necessary, guest logins were unproductive. As the first meeting for the course approached with no clear response in sight, the computer room next door to the designated meeting room at the host middle school was booked. The professor, resigned to demonstrating the online experience by simulation in the designated meeting room (with participants trying the software out for themselves in the computer lab next door), printed the screens of Web sites relevant to the first class meeting to Microsoft Windows Journal on his Tablet PC. Fortunately, the professor decided on the spur of the moment to take a 50-foot roll of CAT-5 cable that had been used in an earlier project to the designated meeting room to try to “jury-rig” a solution that would enable him to demonstrate the online software live. The cable easily reached a spare “drop” in the student computer lab next door. The professor was preparing to use the generic student login and ID (provided by a helpful secretary) when the Internet connection simply went live. So, the first major learning for the professor was that all the login protection in this school resided in the computers themselves. The course participants coped adequately with sharing the one “presentation” computer during the class meetings, and the computer lab went unused in the time that was optionally available for access.

Technology Components The main “hardware” component that participants needed to procure was a set of audio-active headphones to facilitate their participation in Wimba

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(http://www.wimba.com/products/ wimba_ classroom/) sessions. Wimba is the software engine that drives the Live Classroom functionality in Blackboard (http://www.blackboard.com/). Blackboard is a learning management tool used by many colleges, as it is at the college in this case. Three “official” class meetings were conducted on Wimba, but, after the first whole class meeting, participants were encouraged to use Wimba to meet with their research partners at their own discretion to facilitate collaboration on the research project that each partnership devised. Participants were encouraged to buy an audioactive headphone set that did not incorporate a mute button. This advice was based on the experience of a professor in the CET who had found that participants in some of his Wimba sessions accidentally bumped “mute” and became frustrated when no-one could hear them. In this case, the only “can you hear me?” glitch arose when the professor did not emphasize sufficiently strongly that participants should “click and hold” on the “talk” button when they wanted to speak (The script of the first Wimba session is included in the Appendix A). In addition to Blackboard, a wide range of well-known downloaded software (e.g., Camtasia [http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp], Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Audacity [http://audacity.sourceforge.net/]), online software (e.g., ToonDoo [http://www.toondoo. com/], Animoto [http://animoto.com/], Wordle [http://wordle.com/], Twitter [http://twitter.com/], Google Docs [accessible from http://www.google. com/], Zoho [http://www.zoho.com/]), virtual reality sites such as Second Life [http://secondlife. com/whatis/], other sites such as Flickr [http:// www.flickr.com/] and Delicious [http://delicious. com/], special purpose Web sites such as Statistics Online Computational Resource [http://www.socr. ucla.edu/], and MathScience Innovation Center [http://msinnovation.info/index.html], and the professor’s own course Web sites were utilized to varying degrees by participants.

Instructional Leadership and Blended Learning

Pedagogical philosophy. It is important to note that the philosophy of this course envisages participants sampling from a “smorgasbord” of options. Participants were not expected to delve in equal depth into every learning opportunity that was orchestrated. Participants’ were continually directed to the course assessment items as the criteria of learning. These assessment items encouraged participants to construct their own meaning around the concept of blended instruction, and create blended curriculum units that accorded with their emergent concept, even while they were experiencing the professor’s approach to blended instruction. The philosophy in this course sits well with Dewey’s (2004) concept of the active sense of learning through experience. According to Dewey, “when we experience something we act upon it, we do something with it; then we suffer or undergo the consequences” (p. 133).

THE PROJECT The project involved utilizing digital technology to re-cast into a blended learning experience an existing doctoral-level course on the creation and evaluation of K-12 (elementary through high school) curriculum for the 21st century. This project challenged the fifteen participants to produce their own interpretation of a blended learning unit of instruction. In the first class meeting, participants were encouraged to share their thoughts about the major issues currently facing K-12 education. The issues emerging from this discussion grouped naturally under the “fundable research” headings of two major national grants agency, lending credibility to the participants’ suggestions. Further discussion led to the cogency of the generic position adopted by Christensen et al. (2008): learner-centered instruction that leverages the power of the Internet and emerging Web 2.0 tools has the potential for “disrupting” business-as-usual in education. This course was situated as an opportunity for partici-

pants to take both an active and passive role in exploring blended learning as an intermediate step between business-as-usual and the cutting-edge vision of Christensen et al. The legacy course structure envisaged eleven face-to-face, four-hour class meetings. The blended learning experience envisaged seven face-toface, four-hour class meetings, and two three-hour face-to-face class meetings (see below for details concerning the three-hour meetings). The two three-hour face-to-face class meetings were held subsequent to the introductory Wimba sessions (held on the preceding afternoon), providing for quick debriefing and problem-solving. For the remaining two scheduled meetings, one (the legacy sixth meeting) coincided with an unanticipated school district requirement (mentioned above) that about half of the participants had to be available at their respective schools that evening. This meeting was cast as an optional on-campus meeting in which Camtasia would be used to generate podcasts of the participants’ discussions, with the added option of students who remained off-campus participating real-time via Wimba. The podcasts were uploaded to the course Web site for later access by all participants. For the legacy eighth meeting, participants were expected to collaborate with their research partners. They were urged to collaborate online, since by then they were very familiar with Wimba. Although participants were encouraged to become stakeholders in guiding their own learning throughout the course by selecting from a wide range of online learning components, there were some compulsory components with which all were expected to engage. The three compulsory online components of this project were: (a) participation in two, one-hour Wimba “training” meetings online, (b) accessing the analysis of the course text (Christensen, Horn, & Johnson, 2008) from the course Web site, and (c) engaging in online dialog concerning the course text in the course blog, establishing and using their own personal

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reflective blogs, and contributing to specified colleagues’ blogs.

Participation in Wimba Meetings In the initial class meeting, participants were instructed to procure a set of audio-active headphones to enable them to participate in a Wimba session scheduled for the afternoon prior to the third class meeting. Scheduling this first Wimba session for the afternoon prior to a class meeting ensured as quick a face-to-face debriefing as possible, thereby preventing too much accumulation of frustration in the event of “glitches.” This first Wimba session was scripted (see Appendix A) to walk participants through some of the Wimba functionality in a non-threatening way. In the one-hour session which followed two weeks later, participants were invited to view a pertinent online video from within the Wimba environment, which proved to be an interesting exercise that exposed the deficiencies of the participants’ mental models of how Wimba worked. Following the initial one-hour Wimba meeting, the participants’ research collaborative pairings were given their own meeting rooms (with “presenter rights” for all), and encouraged to use this medium for collaboration. This two-pronged approach (combining compulsory short sessions for all with optional access to facilitate collaborative discussions) contributed to making the Wimba experience an educational one for about half the participants. The remaining participants battled with Internet bandwidth issues and/or their unease with the concept of a virtual classroom, and found Wimba frustrating to use. Overall, the Wimba experience in the context of this project was disappointing, since a trial project in the previous semester had resulted in all except two of a similarly sized group of participants operating with confidence in the Wimba environment and expressing enthusiasm for the concept. An intervening update to the Wimba engine within Blackboard may have impacted

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on the issues that this group experienced. Differing levels of comfort with the virtual classroom concept may also have accounted for some of the difference between the trial group and this group—at least one of the earlier trial groups was a “power user” of an alternative virtual classroom tool, and forthrightly endorsed the technology to her colleagues.

Increasing Engagement with the Course Text One of the points made strongly by Christensen et al. (2008) concerned the over-reliance of businessas-usual education on text-based materials, and how this reliance mitigates against learners with learning styles less amenable to text-based material. In response to this critique, this author decided to create a Web site on which each chapter of Christensen et al. would be précised and integrated with visually compelling graphics. Further, instead of conducting more conventional discussions in the face-to-face meetings, participants were encouraged to respond to the many questions incorporated into the text précis on a course blog, and/or on their own personal reflective blog. A deep level of engagement with the course text outside of the face-to-face meetings was evidenced in the way that many participants referred to ideas in the text as touchstones of good practice or counter-examples of points they were making, rather than as ideas they were encountering for the first time.

Online Dialog Throughout this course, participants were encouraged to perceive of themselves as growing into the role of public intellectuals. In this regard, blogs are integral to this course in that they empower a market-place of ideas. Participants’ initial experiences with blogs were very diverse—ranging from the majority who had not established a blog, through those who had established one but had

Instructional Leadership and Blended Learning

not really used it, through to some participants who were very much at ease with this medium (including one participant who maintained a wellpatronized, professional blog). In addition to participating on the course blog, participants were encouraged not only to establish and use their own blog, but also to contribute to the dialog on specified colleagues’ blogs. To facilitate this, each participant sought the collaboration of at least two others to respond to their blogs. In this way, every participant was assured of at least two different perspectives on the five blog entries they were required to write throughout the course. Participants were free to choose their own topics for their blogs, or, alternatively, write in response to any of the questions and issues raised concerning the course text on the course Web site.

“UNIT” DEVELOPMENT The unreservedly active part of this course required participants to develop a blended “unit” of instruction of their own in their field of expertise, based on their experience as learners in this blended course. The extent of the “unit” was deliberately left open. Two “deliverables” were required: (a) a scope and sequence storyboard, and (b) a unit of instruction incorporating the participant’s concept of blended learning.

Scope and Sequence Storyboard Again in deference to the Christensen et al. (2008) critique of text-intensive documents, participants were required to convey the scope and sequence of their blended unit of instruction in a storyboard. Participants were introduced to the concept of a storyboard using the actual storyboard developed by the New York-based advertising agency in the process of creating a television advertisement for well-known firm that produces condiments. (This author wishes to express thanks to the advertising agency executive for providing this resource. As

an added bonus, the actual television advertisement was airing on some local channels during this course.) The professor’s intention was that participants would produce their storyboard using the table functionality of Microsoft Word, but one of the participants (a “technology integrator” in a local school district) suggested the use of ToonDoo to produce the storyboard. This free, online software was used by all except two of the participants to produce storyboards that conveyed the scope and sequence of their units in a visual-intensive format. Figure 1, developed by the author of this chapter, shows the first page of a ToonBook (made up of three ToonDoo cartoons linked together by that software into a three-panel page). This page sets out the beginning of a scope and sequence description of a unit that envisages a set of students (the “dreamers”) reading the book Barkbelly (Weatherill, 2005) with a mentor, and then writing their reflections on a blog. Another participant discussed the potential for using the free online software available from Animoto for this same task. Animoto produces short videos (the free versions are 30 seconds long) which can also incorporate small amounts of text. (See the online resources in Appendix A.) ToonDoo and Animoto are examples of online software that teachers could well integrate into their teaching repertoire. In this instance, this software enabled course participants to produce scope and sequence documents that were relatively free of text, but their potential use by K-12 students in responding to higher-order prompts is clear. For example, one of the participants introduced ToonDoo to her Grade 5 class and was thrilled when one of her students spontaneously used it overnight to document the opening chapters of what she knew of the story of her adoption. As a further example, many of the participants found themselves initially “talking” to the students who would be potentially involved in learning from their unit in their scope and sequence products,

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Instructional Leadership and Blended Learning

Figure 1. The Opening Page of a ‘ToonBook’ Scope and Sequence Description

not the instructors (the latter being the traditional audience for scope and sequence documents). An unintended consequence of using a “text-light” scope and sequence product was a discussion of the subtleties of “voice.”

Unit of Instruction Incorporating Blended Learning Many participants produced exemplary units which effectively integrated digital technology and learning. Table 1, produced by Wendi Moss who was a participant in the course, shows one such unit, designed for “exceptional education” Grade 9 English students. The unit aims to engage students in a 21st century technology environment by utilizing Wordle, Twitter, and Animoto.

Outcomes and Feedback Throughout this project, participants engaged in educationally profitable ways with 21st century digital technology, and transferred their learning to the units that they, in turn, constructed in their individual fields of expertise. In this process, there were numerous instances of participants’ learning, as indicated by Gagné’s (1965) six performances associated with learning, with the emphasis on the

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higher-order performances. For example, there were few occasions on which specific responding was required, but much problem solving. One participant commented “I initially wanted to use only a CD (for presenting the unit), but, during our class discussions I realized I missed the point. This realization led me into a new direction with the integration of the Internet Web sites for a wonderful unit to teach general and exceptional education students.” This response attests to the type of conceptual re-alignment which the professor hoped to engender through this project. A couple of participants commented spontaneously on their encounter with the knowledge gap in practice. One referred to successful implementation in a classroom where students are more technologically adept as requiring a “cultural shift…on the part of the teacher—overcoming fear.” Another participant also spoke of the role that fear plays in hindering the “embrace” of technology. This participant went on to extend the reach of fear beyond the knowledge gap by referring to fear as a significant element that constrains “turning control (of their learning) over to the students.” Another participant referred to the parents’ knowledge gap in pointing out that “this learning experience will also be very new for parents…because of their previous school days.”

Instructional Leadership and Blended Learning

Table 1. A sample blended unit of instruction (Used with permission from W. Moss) Objectives: The student will… • Make planned oral presentations by using relevant detail to support main ideas. • Explain the relationships between and among elements of literature: characters, plot, setting, tone, point of view, and theme. • Describe the use of images and sounds to elicit the reader’s emotions. • Explain the influence of historical context on the form, style, and point of view of a written work. • Identify a position/argument to be confirmed, disproved, or modified. Activities: • Each student will write a short opinion of the book, The Watsons Go to Birmingham-1963 (Curtis, C. P. [2004], Thorndike Press). Students will include a list of at least 30 words that stand out to them in the novel. These words can be taken from the novel or can be words the student feels is appropriate in describing the novel. • Students will type their chosen words and opinions into <www.wordle.net> and create a graphic depiction of their words. • Students will, with a partner, pick a favorite scene from the novel and a character in that scene. They will log on to <www.twitter.com> and write a tweet from their chosen character’s point of view. Once they are finished with their tweet, they will read two other tweets and try to guess the scene about which others tweeted. • Students will search the internet for various images of segregation, Civil Rights movement, Flint, MI, Birmingham, AL, Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, etc. Once students have compiled their images, they will use them to create a music video on <www.animoto. com>. • Students will present their Wordle creations as well as their music videos to the class. Students must be prepared to defend their creations.

Students found the Wimba experience both exciting and frustrating—sometimes for the same participant. For example, one participant commented that “I found the Wimba sessions to be the most valuable (of the course).” However, the same participant went on to describe as “frustrating” the participant’s research partnership’s attempts to collaborate online, commenting that “after an hour of trying and emailing back and forth, we had to give up.” Another participant commented that “I like the concept of Wimba. I didn’t like the technical difficulties.” Another participant provided an assessment that “I can see how (Wimba) could be extremely effective when functioning at peak and (this is) certainly an area worth investigation for future use.” Participants found blogs to be of mixed value. One participant offered a theoretical perspective that “teacher blogging is a very valuable endeavor because (blogs) provide a medium for reflection and community building with stakeholders in all areas of education, including the media and policymakers.” At the practical level, the response was that “I was excited during the creation of my personal blog, but disappointed about the usage.”

One participant was really enthused about the potential of podcasting, and appreciated the power of Camtasia. This participant commented: “I would love to use (Camtasia) in my classroom as a way to (record) PowerPoints and presentations (for) absent students.” A range of insightful comments were submitted in response to the prompt regarding blended learning as an instructional medium. Using the concept of disruption in the sense employed by Christensen et al. (2008), one participant highlighted the existence of the knowledge gap directly as an issue to be addressed: “This (experience) has been disruptive, in (the) sense of moving from a monolithic, structured perspective to a flexible ‘let’s try it’ perspective. The disruption came in the form of being overwhelmed and concerned that the technological advances have not been distributed equally throughout the school (districts).” While local preferences with regard to the prominence given to technological advances would be expected, the above comment clearly focuses in on the crux of the knowledge gap. This resource availability issue was also evidenced in a number of other comments including this: “I think part of the issue is the availability

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within my school (district)” of Wimba (the virtual classroom tool) and other online resources—a number of which were “blocked” by particular school district Internet use policies. The availability issue was also evident in a comment that reflects the blog entry quoted in the introduction to this paper: “Sometimes I feel like in my job I am not given the time to explore the new technologies so that we can use them in our current settings.” This comment raises a negative outcome of this particular session in that there was a sense among the participants: “I have learned many useful and innovative tools that I am excited to work with in my classroom.” While this is a welcome comment, it focuses on the practical application of the technology rather that exhibiting the enthusiasm for developing a research agenda that would be more appropriate to participants in a doctoral level course. However, given the makeup of the group, this tendency to focus on the practical is not unexpected, but it is something that needs to be taken into account by the professor. Overall, while a couple of participants referred to themselves as initially “overwhelmed,” there was a strong consensus that blended learning is destined to play a role in the future of education. One participant nicely captured this line of thought in commenting, that “the methods used for instruction will need to find ways to compete with current technological innovations that vie for attention through bold advances in graphics and audio.” The lone, self-described pessimist among the participants commented that “although I see the value, the constraints of time, money, and utilization have been a barrier for many quality ideas, theories and practices.” In response to the “big picture” question about the future of blended learning as a concept, one participant chose the “path of inevitability” approach. I think that many educators have no choice but to turn to blended learning in order to reach this new generation of learners. Many of them are

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so engrossed with video games and online chat rooms, that it makes sense to incorporate this into their curriculum. We talked tonight about cultural relevance. If these students think that computers and technology are the norm, why not use them as teaching tools. A more nuanced “bottom line” comment also emerged from the specifically human concerns in education, suggesting that “the main power of blended learning (is) in its power to connect people across divides and in its social capacities, not in its ability to create learning....(because) programs will never be as nimble as real people trying to communicate in person.” Finally, two enthusiastically supportive comments will serve to nicely round out this feedback section. The first again picks up on the role played by effective instructional leadership in providing an environment in which the integration of technology and education can flourish—from equitable access, through provision of adequate pre-service education, to the provision of time and resources. Blended learning will continue to evolve as new technology is invented, existing technology is improved upon and perfected, and technology is made accessible for everyone. Because of this, it is imperative that colleges and universities evolve their teacher preparation programs to keep up with the emerging technology. The technology is often not used because teachers do not have time or do not have the resources to learn on the job. The second enthusiastic comment is more in the visionary realm, but foresees the tension inevitable as parents who expect schools to look like it did when they attended wrestle with the implications of blended learning for the way schools are organized. The future blended unit will be completely student directed. The classroom teacher will serve as

Instructional Leadership and Blended Learning

a facilitator for students. Initially, the younger students will require more support, but eventually they will become very independent. This learning experience will also be very new for parents to understand because of their previous school days. Even though this project on blended learning was not devised as a test case, it bears strongly on the current challenge which the Educational Leadership Department (of which the professor is a member) has given itself.

CURRENT CHALLENGES The Department of Education for the state in which the professor’s university is situated has recently released a set of performance standards for educational leaders. The impetus behind the development of these standards was a desire to make it clear that the successful completion of a certain number of hours of coursework was not necessarily a strong indicator of the potential of an aspiring educational leader. The Educational Leadership Department of which the professor is a member has recently set itself the task of endorsing the spirit of the state’s new performance standards by essentially setting out to “disrupt” (Christensen et al., 2008) its own traditional post-masters-level leadership endorsement program that is based on a set number of courses, each with a set number of hours. The new program the Department is envisaging will be learner-centered. This implies that, at the outset, the level of proficiency of each future participant on each of the standards will be assessed, with the participant then being directed to tailored instructional units. Further, the intention is to deliver this tailored instruction in a blended learning modality that fully leverages online, 21st century learning tools. In addition to the technological complexity of creating such a program, there are other challenges. For example, at the state Department of Education

level, there appears to be some shifting of ground from the original intention of those who advocated a performance-based approach (but who have since moved out of the roles they once held). There is clearly more political security in stipulating a set number of hours in a set number of courses than in supporting a truly performance-based approach. In this sense, adopting a performance-based approach would truly disrupt business as usual. A procedural challenge arises from the conundrum that, according to Christensen et al. (2008), to be successful, a disruptive innovation should not attempt to usurp the established order. According to Christensen et al., the niche most conducive to the endurance of a disruptive innovation involves providing something for those who otherwise have nothing. The niche for such an online blended leadership endorsement program would involve potential leaders in school districts that are geographically remote from the Department’s established centers. The advantage of this niche from the disruptive innovation perspective is a disadvantage for those developing the program in that the very remoteness of the participants exacerbates the ill-effects of the missteps that are not unexpected in the development of a new program. Thus, for more effective program development, the participants should be in the local area—within the range of the established centers. The professor’s department is certainly not the first university department to develop online course offerings. The pool of instructional leadership offerings based on performance rather than course-work completion is more restricted. As the professor’s department develops its online presence in this direction, the experience gained from the project on blended learning described here provides valuable insights. As one of the project participants commented, the blended learning project was an approach to “understanding leadership from a learning perspective.”

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CONCLUSION The concept of blended learning represents an intermediate step between business as usual in education (an approach which seems destined to exacerbate the knowledge gap), and the “far horizon” perspective espoused by Christensen et al. (2008). In a world in which the impact of digital technology is profound, educational leaders wrestle with a number of intractable issues. It is imperative that those who will be making the decisions that will bear on the design and implementation of curriculum in school districts have the experience and confidence to advance a realistic agenda for education in the 21st century. A strong contribution to future leaders’ accruing of appropriate credibility involves their engagement as learners with appropriate settings that will afford them with the opportunity to cycle through a sequence of action, feedback, and reflection. In this context, the setting incorporated blended learning in the supportive environment of a professional learning community. The outcome of this initiative was encouraging.

REFERENCES Arizpe, A. (2008). Teacher’s productivity hampered by technology: No love. Retrieved January 14, 2009, from http://www.43folders. com/forum/2008/01/27/teachers-productivityhampered-technology-no-love Bennett, S., Maton, K., & Kervin, L. (2007). The ‘digital natives’ debate: A critical review of the evidence. British Journal of Educational Technology, 39(5), 775–786. doi:10.1111/j.14678535.2007.00793.x Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The. (2007). Basic classification description. Retrieved November 11, 2008, from http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/classifications/index.asp?key=791

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Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI). (2008). Trends shaping education: 2008 edition. OECD Publishing. Retrieved January 14, 2009, from http://213.253.134.43/oecd/pdfs/ browseit/9608081E.PDF Christensen, C. M., Horn, M. B., & Johnson, C. W. (2008). Disrupting class: How disruptive innovation will change the way the world learns. New York: McGraw-Hill. Curtis, C. P. (2004). The Watsons go to Birmingham-1963. Waterville, ME: Thorndike Press. Dewey, J. (2004). Democracy and education. Mineola, NY: Dover. (Original work published 1916) Gagné, R. (1965). The conditions of learning. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Glickman, C. D., Gordon, S. P., & Ross-Gordon, J. M. (2007). Supervision and instructional leadership: A developmental approach. Boston, MA: Pearson. Howell, W. G., West, M. R., & Peterson, P. E. (2008). The 2008 education next-PEPG survey of public opinion. Retrieved August 13, 2008, from http://www.hoover.org/publications/ednext/26380034.html Joyce, B., & Weil, M. (2004). Models of teaching (7th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson. National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). (2008). Fast facts. Retrieved July 8, 2008, from http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=65 Picciano, A. G., & Seaman, J. (2007). Online learning: A survey of U.S. school district administrators. Needham, MA: The Sloan Consortium. Prensky, M. (2001a). Digital natives, digital immigrants. Horizon, 9(5), 1–6. doi:10.1108/10748120110424816

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Prensky, M. (2001b). Digital natives, digital immigrants, part II: Do they really think differently? Horizon, 9(6), 1–6. doi:10.1108/10748120110424843 Salaway, G., Caruso, J. B., & Nelson, M. R. (2008). The ECAR study of undergraduate students and information technology, 2008. Boulder, CO: EDUCAUSE. Shapira, I. (2008, July 24). For more N.Va. students, the classroom is on the computer. Wahington Post. Retrieved July 25, 2008, from http:// www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ article/2008/07/23/AR2008072301180.html Singleton-Rickman, L. (2008, November 15). Next year, students must take distance learning course to graduate. TimesDaily.com. Retrieved November 20, 2008, from http://www.timesdaily.com/ article/20081116/ARTICLES/811160343/1011/ NEWS?Title=Next_year__students_must_take_ Internet_course_to_graduate Song, J. (2008, August 13). L. A. Unified college prep goal sees little progress. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved August 15, 2008, from http://www. latimes.com/news/education/la-me-classes132008aug13,0,1234916.story?track=rss Tichenor, P. J., Donohue, G. A., & Olien, C. N. (1970). Mass media flow and differential growth in knowledge. Public Opinion Quarterly, 34(2), 159–170. doi:10.1086/267786 Weatherill, C. (2006). Barkbelly. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Web 2.0. (2008, November 7). Retrieved November 11, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Web_2.0 Zandberg, I., Lewis, L., & Greene, B. (2008). Technology-based distance education courses for public elementary and secondary school students: 2002-03 and 2004-05. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics.

ONLINE RESOURCES Animoto.http://education.animoto.com/ Delicious. http://delicious.com/ Flick. http://www.flickr.com/ Google Docs. ttps://www.google.com/accounts/ ServiceLogin?service=writely&passive=true&n ui=1&continue=http%3A%2F%2Fdocs.google. com%2F%3Fhl%3Den%26tab%3Dwo&follow up=http%3A%2F%2Fdocs.google.com%2F%3 Fhl%3Den%26tab%3Dwo<mpl=homepage& rm=false MathScience Innovation Center. http://www. msinnovation.info/index.html Statistics Online Computational Resource. http:// www.socr.ucla.edu/ ToonDoo. http://www.toondoo.com/ Twitter.http://twitter.com/ Wordle. http://www.wordle.com/ Zoho. http://www.zoho.com/

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APPENDIX A Script of Initial Wimba Session Welcome to Wimba Type the above welcome message on the eBoard, along with: If all else fails, close Blackboard and try again. Click and hold the “Talk” button to talk. In this session I will walk you through some of the capabilities of Wimba by asking you to interact with me as we use them. I’m not going to try to tell you everything about Wimba —just enough to give you a working knowledge of what gives. Look at the whiteboard (called the eBoard in Wimba) where I wrote the welcome message. The presenter can write here with the mouse (Write “HI”) But, as you can see, it is ugly. So it’s best to type. (Type “HI”) You can’t see how I did that, because you aren’t presenters in this room. I will share this tool with you a little later in this session. At present, you know it exists. The next thing to look at is the window down the bottom headed “People” with my name in red at the top. You should also be able to see your name on this list, though you might have to scroll down to see it. At the bottom of this window, there are a number of icons. Click on the check mark, and see what happens. A check mark appears against your name under the column headed with the check mark and cross. This gives you a way of saying “I agree” or “Correct” or, by clicking on the “x” you can say “I disagree” or “Wrong.” The next icon is a little hand. Click on it and see what happens. A little hand appears against your name under the column with a little hand on top of it. This gives you a way to tell me that you have a question, and automatically puts you in order to get an answer. YOU HAVE TO CLICK ON THIS AGAIN when we have dealt with your question TO LOWER YOUR HAND. Even if you have a question right now, please click to lower your hand. I’ll take questions in a minute. Directly above this class list box is a horizontal bar. At the left hand end is the button with TALK on it. Don’t talk right now. As in any classroom, if everybody tries to talk at once, bedlam ensues. Raise your hand, and I’ll invite you to comment in order. Don’t forget to lower your hand after you have commented. Somebody please raise your hand and make a comment or ask a question when I call on you. Look again at the list of icons under the class list. The fourth button from the left gives you a dropdown menu with what are called “emoticons” on them. This gives you a way of telling me how you are feeling. Click on the “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” emoticon and observe that your choice shows against your name in the column with the smiley face above it.

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Next click on the “Options” button and see what your options are. Notice the one to lock your talk button. At present, that won’t work for you because I didn’t give you that option in this room. I have my microphone locked on—which is why I can talk over the top of whoever is talking—like in a phone conversation. When you get your own room I will enable that option because there will only be two of you (or three) and you can dispense with the hand raising procedure. In the bottom left hand corner there is an area which probably reads “Connected to server…you have connected successfully…” This is the text message area. Underneath this text message area is a very small box to the right of where you see a dropdown box which reads “Main Roon.” Click in the box, type a short message like “Hi” and hit the “return” key on your keyboard. This gives you a way to interact with each other and me on a stream of consciousness plane. The secret is to type very few words before you key “return,” and then develop a tolerance for getting a full message which is split up by lots of other part messages. If you wait to type a full sentence, often the “conversation” will have moved on by the time you chime in. This is definitely an acquired skill—and not one that I claim to have acquired fully yet. I still find it quite demanding. The presenter can disable this text message area. Let’s try to use the functionality we have discussed so far. Look at the eBoard area again. Supposing I have a graphic that I have come across that I want to share with you. I will import it so you can see it. Please give me a check sign when you can see the graphic. Send me a smiley face if you are following. Now take your smiley face off. Please raise your hand if you have a question or comment. Don’t forget to lower your hand when your question or comment has been addressed. This graphic represents the learning gains of students of different socio-economic status over a number of years of primary school. What do you conclude? Please raise your hand if you have a question or comment. Don’t forget to lower your hand when your question or comment has been addressed. For the following, I will use the tool bar which, at present, you don’t have. I will turn it on for you shortly. Supposing I wanted to highlight some part of this graphic. I could use the ellipse tool. If I make a mistake, I just click on erase and whatever I added goes away. Or I could click on the arrow, and then click on the graphic to draw your attention to what I’m talking about. Again, just click the eraser to make the arrows go away. I could also click on the upper-case T and type in the box. I can see what I type as I go in grey. What I type turns black and you can see it after I key “return.” Send me a smiley face if you are following. Now take your smiley face off. Please raise your hand if you have a question or comment. Don’t forget to lower your hand when your question or comment has been addressed. Now I’m going to enable the tool bar for you to see. I will describe the functions for you and then call on each of you to use a tool. Please don’t all use a tool at once, or no-one will be able to tell which mark is theirs.

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“Enable” everybody. Describe the tools. Call down the list for Watch while he/she uses the tool bar. Now I’m going to disable everybody. When you are in your own rooms, everybody will be presenters, which also means you can lock your talk buttons on. This isn’t a problem with just two or three people, so you can do away with the hand raising process too. The next two functions you also need presenter rights to be able to see, so I am just going to demonstrate them so you know this functionality exists, and I will show you more in class. If I wanted to preserve what this slide looks like before we move on, I would click on the “Save” button in the tool bar, and the slide with all the annotations would be saved in a “Snapshots” folder, which you will be able to see to the right in a drop-down menu when you have presenter rights. Let’s do that. Now, to clean the whiteboard, I click “Clear slide” and everything goes away. Let’s get the whole screen back. Look at the right hand side where there is a dropdown button beside a box that reads “Default Content Folder.” Click the dropdown button and select “Snapshots.” Then click on “Go” to make it happen. Select the slide you want to get back and presto—it is on the whiteboard. Send me a smiley face if you are following. Now take your smiley face off. Please raise your hand if you have a question or comment. Don’t forget to lower your hand when your question or comment has been addressed. The last thing I want to do today is to show you that you can use a PowerPoint presentation in Wimba. In fact, this is one of the best ways to share and discuss information in Wimba. Again, you need presenter rights to do this. Let’s load last week’s Session PP. I browse to it, and choose the option to display it in the eBoard. Click on “Import.” If all goes well, you will see a set of little squares being filled up as the upload proceeds. If it doesn’t work, just try it again. In the right hand window, you will now see the PP with each slide in the PP listed separately. Click on the one you want to appear on the eBoard and use the tool bar tools to help you discuss whatever you want on it. Send me a smiley face if you are following. Now take your smiley face off. Please raise your hand if you have a question or comment. Don’t forget to lower your hand when your question or comment has been addressed. Send me a hand clap if you are following. Feel free to sign off now and thank you for making it to our session today. If you want to ask some more, or practice what we did above, then stay online.

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Chapter 4

Blended Learning in a Creative Writing Program: Lessons Learned from a TwoYear Pilot Study Chris Morgan Southern Cross University, Australia Janie Conway-Herron Southern Cross University, Australia

ABSTRACT This case study reports on the results of a two-year pilot study in blended learning in an undergraduate creative writing program at Southern Cross University in Australia. It documents the development and implementation of a blended delivery model that dispenses with outdated divisions between face-to-face and distance modes of delivery, creating a converged, blended learning experience for all students. Findings from the pilot provided important data in relation to student satisfaction, pedagogical considerations, institutional constraints, teaching technologies, faculty workload issues, and costs associated with blended learning. These findings will contribute to a University-wide move to converged, blended learning in 2009.

INTRODUCTION This chapter documents the results of a two-year pilot study in blended learning in an undergraduate creative writing program at Southern Cross University (SCU) in Australia. The pilot study was conducted over three semesters, between 2006 and 2008, with formative and summative evaluation points, and was completed in July 2008. Drawing from the evaluation data, this chapter will report

in detail upon both the successes and problems encountered in the transition to blended learning, along with lessons learned along the way. It will also report on ways forward for this program in the light of pilot evaluation results.

BACKGROUND SCU is located along the east coast of Australia with three campuses spread over a distance of 600

DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-880-2.ch004

Copyright © 2010, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.

Blended Learning in a Creative Writing Program

kilometers. It is a relatively small university with a current enrolment of around 12,000 students. The student population is predominately mature aged and is generally drawn from a comparatively low socio-economic grouping. Approximately one half of the students study via distance education, while the other half attends one of the three campuses for face-to-face education. There is a strong expressed need for flexible learning in a variety of formats to meet the needs of mature students often with heavy competing family and work commitments, and a wide geographic spread. The subject of this pilot study was the undergraduate creative writing program. The program was established in the mid-1990s and has been offered in traditional ‘dual mode’ delivery – students either enroll as internal students and attend traditional weekly lectures and tutorials on campus, or as distance education students, and undertake a combination of print-based home study supported by online activities and interactions. However, the division between on-campus and distance students has not always been entirely clear-cut. On-campus students have always been encouraged to access the distance study materials and online discussion to assist their study, and conversely, distance students have been encouraged to attend classes wherever possible. With the addition of newer technologies, such as videoconferencing, Web conferencing, and lecture podcasting, the boundaries have further blurred, and the duplication of teaching in the separate modes has proliferated (Oliver, Omari, & Herrington, 1998; Samarawickrema & O’Reilly, 2003).

locations at key times in semester, supported by print-based study materials, Web conferencing, and a variety of asynchronous online activities and interactions. Students were encouraged to make their own decisions about how they would interact with the program, given their own preferences, learning styles, and other life commitments. The weekly traditional on-campus lectures and tutorial classes were significantly reduced. The pilot project was funded by SCU to explore new models of blended learning and report to SCU community on its methodologies, strengths, weaknesses, obstacles, and potential ways forward for other programs wishing to proceed down this pathway.

A New Blended Delivery Model Blended learning is often conceptualized as the addition of a variety of computer-mediated learning options to face-to-face teaching (Graham, 2004). In this instance, the ‘blending’ also ensured that there were no longer any separate internal and distance categories of students, each with their own entitlements. Rather, a new single flexible mode of delivery, with a variety of study choices, was available to all students irrespective of location. Converged modes of delivery have long been the ‘holy grail’ of distance education providers (Tait & Mills, 1999); yet it has only been in relatively recent years that technologies have become sufficiently pervasive to be accessed by the vast majority of students, regardless of socio-economic status and location (Challis, 2005). The blended delivery model was designed with the following ideas and principles in mind:

SETTING THE STAGE • It was decided, therefore, in 2006 to blend the on-campus and distance students into one, flexible mode of delivery, offered in the same manner to all students irrespective of location. The learning encounter comprised intensive one day face-to-face traveling workshops held in multiple

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to eliminate any unnecessary or duplicated teaching activities that were not considered to be particularly productive (e.g., the lecture/tutorial format); to develop and strengthen the key pedagogical tools in the program (e.g., the writers’ workshop);

Blended Learning in a Creative Writing Program

•

•

•

to ensure that all students, irrespective of location, have equitable access to program teaching and resources; to provide as much choice as possible to the many mature students who are struggling to balance work, family and study commitments; and to develop expertise in and evaluate the efficacy of new teaching technologies in the context of this program.

•

Planning Key issues to be addressed in the planning phase included: •

•

•

•

•

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pedagogy – how to reconfigure delivery strategies in the program to engender the best possible learning outcomes for all students. What to keep? What to discard? What to blend? What to re-develop? sustainability – how to cost new arrangements and ensure that teaching budgets and workloads are appropriate and sustainable student satisfaction – how to create and fulfill appropriate and realistic expectations in students who are experiencing altered delivery arrangements technological capacity – what interest and capacity exists with the student body to move towards more technologically mediated forms of learning institutional culture – how to inspire staff who are resistant to change and reticent to let go of traditional ‘tried-and-true’ delivery patterns administration – how to navigate through administrative structures and systems which are not currently geared for this kind of delivery

Major activities in this planning phase included:

•

•

•

Consultation with stakeholders – Key stakeholders were initially consulted, including teaching staff in the writing program, the Head of School andAdministrative Officer, Student Services, the Library, and the Information Technology Committee. Discussions focused on practical issues in designing and conducting the pilot studies, including enrolment categories, use of new teaching technologies, and a consideration of the range of blended options that could be offered to students, along with associated costs and workload issues. Investigation of other convergence or blended learning activities within the higher education sector – A survey of all writing courses in Australia was conducted by telephone and email. While twelve other universities were delivering writing programs in distance or dual mode, no universities had plans for converged or blended delivery. It alerted us to a competitive advantage for SCU in attracting students who wish to study creative writing in a flexible mode, but with many more options and attractions than just traditional print-based distance education. Investigation of literature and reported studies of convergence – While there is a significant international body of literature on blended learning, which focuses on the use of information and communication technologies to enhance or replace face-toface instruction, there is only a very modest literature in relation to convergence of distance and on-campus modes in higher education There are very few studies that exemplify the kinds of complex convergence required here with large external enrolments blended with face-to-face teaching commitments on multiple campuses. Student needs analysis – There was no formal student needs analysis conducted before commencement of the pilot studies.

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•

However, the issues of student needs and preferences in relation to study modes, as well as interest in and capacity for greater use of technology in learning (e.g., Web conferencing, podcasted lectures, and asynchronous online workshops) were central to the pilots, the feedback provided by students, and the cyclical development of the blended learning model over the three semesters of piloting. Course demographics analysis- Course demographics were analyzed along with other sources of data such as student feedback, enrolment, growth and lecture attendance patterns. A principal concern in this analysis was the existing inequity in resources between on-campus and distance delivery: Although on-campus students consisted of about one-third of the total enrolment, it was calculated that they consumed approximately 80% of the course resources, when costs of lecturing by full-time staff are included. And yet, in recent years, the on-campus enrolments have been marginally in decline, while distance enrolments represent the program’s best growth potential. This prompted a consideration of ways in which we could make a more considered investment in the learning experience of the cohort as a whole.

The needs and patterns of existing on-campus students were also considered. Although weekly face-to-face delivery is still clearly regarded as a first option by many students, the reality of attendance patterns tells another story. Attendance at weekly lectures in writing often falls away dramatically as semester progresses, as students struggle with balancing work, family and study commitments, and the often significant costs associated with driving to a campus from outlying regions. It suggested to us that internal students are also, to varying degrees, seeking more flexible delivery options.

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Clarifying pedagogical principles and developing a new delivery model– For the purpose of this exercise, we considered pedagogical issues under three key headings as follows:

Content Provision A primary pedagogical principle in the design of the blended units for this pilot was to use each medium for its particular strengths in meeting students’ learning needs. It was considered that the existing high quality print-based materials very effectively provided the content of the unit. Previously, internal students experienced a mixture of weekly lectures and tutorials; however, weekly lectures were mostly repeating what was already contained in the printed distance materials and could therefore be dispensed with. The printed material was therefore made available to all students free of charge, and the additional costs of this were factored into the delivery mix.

Interaction and Dialogue Workshopping is the primary pedagogical strategy in creative writing. Students come together, either online or face-to-face, to present drafts of creative work for discussion and feedback from peers and the teacher. Face-to-face workshops had previously been available to internal students only – those studying at a distance workshopped online using asynchronous discussion threads. Distance students had commonly expressed some dissatisfaction with online workshops, concerned that it entailed a lot of reading on screen at night, that it was passive, and not nearly as engaging as its face-to-face counterpart. It was therefore decided to expand and strengthen this face-to-face component by the use of traveling writers’ workshops. An analysis of student demographics revealed that approximately 75% of students lived along the eastern seaboard from Brisbane to Sydney and were within com-

Blended Learning in a Creative Writing Program

muting distance of at least one of the three SCU campuses, or a Sydney destination. In addition, the Sydney destination provided an inexpensive opportunity for those located in other parts of Australia to fly in for a one-day intensive. Utilizing cost savings from the deletion of weekly lectures, the traveling writers’ workshops were introduced as a key component of the new delivery mix. For those students unable or unwilling to attend a writers’ workshop, the online version was still available. Weekly on-campus workshops were also discontinued, in favor of the same one-day traveling workshops. In effect, this created a single, flexible, equitable mode of study for all students, with significantly increased opportunities for students formerly categorized as ‘distance.’

Assessment and Student Support Although there was no necessity to significantly alter assessment tasks, it was necessary to consider how effectively students would be supported to fulfill assessment requirements given the changes in the delivery mix. We expected that the printbased study guide, which includes activities and prompts, combined with workshops and online interactions, would provide an adequate basis for student preparation and support for assessment. However, we were aware that on-campus students, who had previously experienced weekly lectures and workshops, would feel the loss of that structure and weekly interaction. It was decided to schedule a weekly un-facilitated drop-in time, in a designated room, where on-campus students could meet, discuss issues and assessment work-in-progress. This time also coincided with the faculty student consultation time, in which students could consult in person about any issues or difficulties.

Evaluation Design A mixture of qualitative methods were employed in gathering data from the pilots, including focus groups of students during and after the travel-

ing workshops, and extensive individual phone interviews with those unable to attend. Teaching staff involved in the delivery of the relevant units were also interviewed at the end of each teaching period providing detailed feedback on perceived successes, problems, issues to be addressed, and overall impressions of the new delivery mix. Quantitative data (such as distribution of grades, student satisfaction data, and attrition statistics) was analyzed at the end of each teaching period to provide further insight into student performance and satisfaction with the altered delivery mix. Evaluative data was gathered and analyzed to allow cyclical improvements during the course of the pilots, and to enable lessons learned to be incorporated into the design and planning for the next iteration of the pilot.

CASE DESCRIPTION Pilots of the new converged mode of delivery were conducted in four units over three semesters, from Semester 1, 2007 to Semester 1, 2008 inclusive. These included two upper level units and two introductory first year units. Pilot details are as follows:

Pilot 1 (Semester 1, 2007) The advanced unit Writing from the Edge was selected for the first pilot. In previous years it had been offered as a conventional dual-mode unit; internal students offered weekly lectures and workshops, and externals receiving a print-based study guide, set of readings and online interactions. In the new converged mode, students were encouraged to make their own decisions from the following flexible mix of resources and events: • free supply of print-based study materials; • a one-day workshop at choice of four locations (attendance at one strongly encouraged);

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• • •

online workshops for those unable to attend; online discussion and support for all students; and a weekly un-facilitated drop-in space oncampus for students to enable social interaction and group work.

Students undertaking this unit were a mix of second and third year students with considerable existing academic skills and were therefore judged capable of a reasonable level of autonomy without the need to be ‘driven’ by weekly lectures and tutorials.

Written Texts and Introduction to Creative Writing. These two units work with a complimentary focus that provides foundation reading and writing skills for beginning creative writing students. The units are pre-requisites for all other writing units and the cohort in each is generally large (100+ students). Special care was taken when introducing the converged learning mode to these first year students: (1) to ensure introductory units had enough face-to-face contact to provide optimum learning conditions for novice students; and (2) to ensure that commitments were met for those who had enrolled as face-to-face students. The following delivery design was arrived at:

Pilot 2 (Semester 2, 2007) • A further unit Writing Project was piloted in converged mode in the second semester of 2007 with similar delivery arrangements to Pilot 1. Writing Project is an upper level unit designed to be the last unit in the writing major. It is significantly self-directed and has only ever been offered in distance mode. As a variation to the traveling workshop, we designed a one-day intensive workshop held at a key location to which all students were invited. The workshop was scheduled in the period between the submission of the first draft and the final draft of a significant creative piece. The piloted unit consisted of: • • • •

free supply of print-based materials to all students; a one-day workshop available to all students (but not compulsory); online workshops for those unable to attend the workshop; and online discussion and support for all students.

•

•

•

•

all students received a full set of printbased study materials; all students had access to online workshops, staffed by casual(short-term contract teaching/ lecturing staff) and/or permanent staff; there were no lectures, but 3 hour seminars were delivered in each unit that included both writers’ workshops and tutorial-style discussion. These workshops were held in four locations and were run four times during the semester for both units; Web conferencing (Elluminate) sessions were also provided for those students who were are unable to travel to the centers where the workshops were held; and the Study Guide exercises and assessment were shaped to support the four seminars with a modular approach to the material that fitted with the workshop schedule.

Findings from the Pilots

Pilot 3 (Semester 1, 2008)

Theme 1: Student Satisfaction with Blended Delivery

In the first semester of 2008, we piloted two introductory units in the writing major Introduction to

Although there were minor thematic variations in the evaluative data between the three pilots, there

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were clear and consistent patterns of student feedback on the blended learning experience. Students who would have normally experienced weekly classes on campus felt somewhat cheated by this experience. There was a spectrum of responses from these students but the majority felt that they were being ‘turned into distance students,’ and that the motivation declined without the weekly stimulus of lectures and workshops. On the other hand, students who would normally be classed as distance students, and who now had access to face-to-face workshops found the experience to be quite transformational, and greatly appreciated the opportunity for attendance. Clearly students are alert to a shift in resources, and the politics of ‘who gets what.’ While oncampus students in the unit understood and even supported the principle of equitable delivery and improved services for distance students, they were actively opposed in principle to any diminishment in their own ‘entitlements.’ Distance students, in contrast, found the opportunity to attend traveling workshops as a significant improvement to their prior status as ‘second class citizens’ of the program. The polarity of these results is not surprising. The pilots have significantly interrupted an established delivery pattern and learning culture for students whose expectations are already firmly set. Current enrolment categories do not provide for a ‘converged’ or ‘blended’ mode of study, and so the students were enrolled in the piloted units, at random, as ‘internal’ or ‘external,’ only to discover their particular delivery arrangements in Week 1. This resulted in some initial confusion among on-campus students and a lingering dissatisfaction that was very difficult to ameliorate during term. However, student preference for regular faceto-face contact is a perplexing one. Despite their vocal demands for maintenance of a traditional face-to-face experience, the on-campus students’ attendance at the four scheduled half-day workshops during Pilot 3 was unexpectedly poor. When

asked about non-attendance, a variety of reasons were given including other commitments such as work or holidays, lack of transport, and some students simply forgot. It seems there is a distinction to be drawn between students’ ‘in-principle’ demands and the reality of their lives. However, we also acknowledge that the writing program contains a highly diverse student body with seemingly endless varieties and combinations of motivation, needs and preferences in relation to their study. This student body included a certain percentage of students who needed and wanted a rich oncampus experience, at least in their first year of study, with all the structure, direction and social interaction that this entails.

Theme 2: Pedagogical Considerations The Traveling Workshop Almost all students who attended the writers’ workshops, irrespective of location, found it to be a highly rewarding experience and well worth the effort of attendance (which in some cases was considerable). This reaffirmed our belief that, in Creative Writing, the intensive workshop is the best way in which to provide a face-to-face experience that is immersive, interactive and highly developmental for students, not only in relation to their writing skills, but other graduate attributes such as peer- and self-review, and interpersonal communications. Attendance at workshops, however, was significantly below expectations at all sites. During the pilots we experimented with different scheduling options to allow part-time distance students (the majority of students in the program) maximum choice in relation to attendance. Student feedback revealed a plethora of issues in relation to timing, competing commitments, travel expenses, and an unexpected theme: a fear of attendance and exposure of one’s creative work in a public space. Efforts were made to accommodate these issues, and to create a ‘buzz’ around the workshops

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that would encourage distance students to participate in greater numbers. Yet it seems that in the same way that some students will need and demand a highly directed on-campus experience, so too will some demand a ‘purely distant’ experience and will choose not to attend scheduled events unless they are made compulsory. The Printed Study Packages Students were almost universally very happy with the quality and role of the print-based study guides. On-campus students were very happy to be accessing them free of charge. Students generally found the study materials to be engaging, stimulating and relevant and provided good direction and support in relation to the assessment tasks. Online Participation and Online Workshops There were typically three functions within the online component of the units: (1) threaded discussion of key unit issues and themes; (2) a help forum in which questions could be posed for a tutor’s response; and (3) online workshops of creative writing drafts for those who did not attend a writers’ workshop. Students’ responses to the online components were typically mixed – those distance students who were familiar with the format and protocols of online interactions were essentially satisfied, whereas on-campus students who were experiencing it for the first time found it of limited value, particularly when considered as a substitute for face-to-face interactions. Common concerns included: too much reading on screen; a lack of spontaneity that comes from face-to-face interactions; and too much irrelevant ‘chat’ between students. For many, the online components function as an integral part of their teacher and peer communications and workshops, while for others it is a minor, almost irrelevant aspect of their study. Web Conferencing It was proposed that the synchronous Web conferencing software (thus Elluminate) be employed as

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another tool for student interaction and workshop, particularly for those who were unable to attend live workshop events. Initial trials proved to be problematic for both faculty (who required more staff development to be able to run a sophisticated Web conferencing session) and students who experienced a range of technical difficulties in getting started. While we are optimistic that Elluminate will prove to be a useful addition to the flexible delivery mix, it requires more time and investment than we were able to give it in these pilots. Summary Despite the variety of issues that arose in relation to each of the components of the delivery mix, we felt that the range of options provided students with a sound pedagogical structure to their study, and a reasonable series of choices associated with how they engaged in the learning. Despite the evident discontent of the on-campus students, there was no greater than normal attrition rate from any of the units offered as part of these pilots (attrition hovered typically around 20%, which came largely from part-time distance students who tend ‘drop-in and drop out’ of study). Significantly, there was no noticeable difference in relation to quality of work produced for assessment during the pilots, when compared with previous years.

Theme 3: Institutional Constraints Institutional Timetabling Reform to current timetabling approaches is essential to the delivery of units that adopt a blended and converged learning mode and current moves towards a more user-friendly timetabling system is required, particularly with a whole-of-university approach towards more flexible modes of course delivery. •

Room allocation and event attendance: With the move away from standardized weekly scheduling of lectures and tutorials,

Blended Learning in a Creative Writing Program

•

to a more event-based schedule of intensive workshops, event attendance and room allocation proved inordinately difficult. Timetabling: Classes offered outside of the standardized weekly patterns of delivery pose particular problems with booking rooms that are utilized on an irregular basis. Moves to student-centered online booking and more flexible systems of timetabling will improve this situation, but the challenge is still there to move away from the mindset that still privileges lecture/tutorial format.

Enrolment Categories It has been very difficult to conduct these pilots in the absence of a formal enrolment category that gives legitimacy and effectively describes to students this mode of delivery. By default, students must enroll in either on-campus or distance mode, even though there is no practical distinction between the two. We considered offering the piloted units in ‘distance only’ mode, however this was not an accurate descriptor given the rich face-toface options on offer, and we feared a significant exodus from the program if students perceived they could only study in this mode. The expectations of students upon enrolment in programs and units are directly linked to their ongoing satisfaction with the program. The oncampus/distance divide immediately sets up false expectations in students’ minds, particularly for those who enroll on-campus, which then must be quickly dispelled when term commences. This creates considerable risk for faculty, who will need to contend with student confusion, complaints, and highly variable student feedback.

Theme 4: Teaching Technologies The move towards blended learning is intricately connected to new teaching technologies such as Web conferencing, Web-based discussion, online submission of tasks, online assessment and feed-

back, podcasting, Webcasting, and videoconferencing. Although most of these technologies were employed at some point during the pilots, in at least an exploratory way, there is still much to be learned from both a teaching and learning perspective. Student feedback from these pilots indicates that interest in and uptake of new learning technologies is highly variable and generally conservative. We need to know much more about students’ current technological capacity and learning preferences before we can confidently make a serious investment in particular technologies. It should be recognized that teaching in a converged mode makes complex demands on teachers, and requires confident mastery of a range of technologies. Although staff development opportunities at SCU are growing in relation to new technologies in teaching, a more systematic approach is required if these are to move into the mainstream. The issue of staff development for casual and sessional staff is particularly critical, given the volume of teaching that they conduct and the minimal current allocations for staff development.

Theme 5: Workload Issues A key motivation for this pilot project was the elimination of unnecessarily duplicated teaching practices that is now inherent in dual-mode delivery. While historically on-campus and distance have been separate, parallel modes, technology has enabled us to significantly bridge the divide. In this program, there is no longer any point in delivering lectures when the content is fully explicated in study guides available to all. Similarly, there is no point in limiting the writers’ workshops to on-campus students, when it could be readily made more widely accessible. There is no longer any logic in restricting online forums to distance students only, when all students are seeking greater flexibility. A considerable amount of duplication in teaching can eliminated, while strengthening and giving new vigor to the pedagogical strengths of the program.

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Yet there is a range of stumbling blocks apparent in current workload models that create significant disincentives for staff to become more flexible in their teaching: •

•

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Workload models: Current workload models represent very traditional notions of teaching. Lecturing is still accorded a privileged status over a cluster of activities referred to as ‘facilitation of learning’ – workshops, online teaching, Web conferencing sessions, one-on-one phone support, and so on. Yet in flexible learning these activities are primary, higher order and comprise the substance of the learning encounter. They need to be undertaken with considerable professionalism and expertise to engender student engagement and satisfaction. While these activities retain their lower order status in the hierarchy of teaching, academics will have little incentive to re-conceptualize their teaching. Lectures will remain the cornerstone of teaching, irrespective of its pedagogical appropriateness. Sessional staffing and payment: In dualmode programs, casual and sessional staff are often corralled into distance teaching, as these activities (e.g., online facilitation, Web conferencing sessions, and phone contact) can be outsourced most cheaply. It reinforces the now quite artificial divide and the inequities between on-campus and distance provision. Ironically, sessional staff may find that under flexible learning arrangements their pay drops, yet expectations of them in terms of time and expertise is greater than ever. If moves towards flexible learning represent a diminished return for sessional staff, as was sometimes the case in this pilot, it will be difficult to retain their goodwill, energy and expertise.

Theme 6: Comparative Costing An important principle in the move to blended delivery is to work within existing budgets. Clearly blended learning will not deliver any wholesale cost savings to SCU, but we need to ensure that any new arrangements are no more expensive than the existing modes and will not create additional cost burdens. All new delivery arrangements in these pilots, including travel, accommodation, hire of facilities, and staffing were costed in advance and were approved by the Head of School prior to implementation. However it is very difficult to quantify how these altered arrangements, in total, compared with standard costs of running a unit in traditional dual mode. While it is recognized that money was saved by withdrawing the weekly delivery of lectures and workshops on-campus, and at least some of those savings were passed on to blended delivery arrangements, the final balance of cost is still very unclear. This situation highlights the difficulties faced by faculty when altering their delivery mix in the absence of clear guidelines in relation to the cost of various existing and new elements. We see particular advantage in being able to make a strategic investment in certain units in the program, such as core and first year units, with less intensive and therefore less expensive delivery patterns in upper level units, where students may be expected to be a little more self-directed.

CURRENT CHALLENGES It is clear from these pilots that blended learning provides a vehicle for universities to make a generational leap in relation to flexible delivery of courses. It is apparent that older forms of delivery such as traditional face-to-face and distance education no longer suit our students well and are becoming increasingly unsustainable from a teaching perspective.

Blended Learning in a Creative Writing Program

The following implications are discussed in relation to a more widespread institutional move to blended learning:

and learning that requires a whole-of-institutional effort to reform.

Sustainability of Blended Learning An Institutional Vision of Blended Learning It was apparent in this study that student perceptions of what constitutes a ‘university experience’ are very closely linked with their responsiveness to and satisfaction with blended learning. Student perceptions and expectations, we have found, are relatively traditional in nature, and are culturally formed long before entry into higher education. Any erosion of traditional forms of teaching, such as lectures and tutorials, in favor of technologically-mediated delivery, will be met with skepticism and dissatisfaction unless the new arrangements are demonstrably and readily meeting their needs, both academically and socially. Universities need move away from ‘ivy league’ images and actively promote these new kinds of learning and engagement patterns as part of the university experience of the 21st Century. Students need to understand, upon entry, that old forms of didactic teaching and delivery have given way to a new set of standards in relation to student engagement and the ways learning is mediated. They need to understand that learning is now a lifelong responsibility requiring a skill-set that includes the ability to use a variety of contemporary technologies to advance their self-management of learning. Universities, for their own part, must be able to remove institutional impediments to blended learning. In this study, institutional impediments to the widespread adoption of blended learning were considerable and included a range of issues such as academic workload models, staffing patterns, recognition for innovation, and administrative issues such as timetabling systems, enrolment categories, and classroom allocations. Much of the SCU’s infrastructure, it was realized, is predicated on very outdated notions of teaching

Blended learning can potentially burden the teacher with an ever-increasing array of new teaching commitments to add to an already over-burdened teaching role. This pilot was enacted with the principle that there was no extra money or staff time available to do more teaching. If something is added into the delivery mix, something else has to go. This principle provoked some productive ongoing discussions amongst both teachers and learners regarding the components of the delivery mix that offered the best value, best aided learning, was sustainable, and ultimately produced the most effective learning outcomes. These are complex issues and are not easily resolved. It was considered in this study that iterative experimentation and evaluation was the only way to really shed light on these issues, accepting that both students and teachers need time and experience to familiarize themselves with new technologies employed and to be able to form a considered view on their efficacy. Having experimented for three semesters, we feel that there are still further adjustments to make in achieving a sustainable balance in relation to affordability, quality learning outcomes and student satisfaction. During this pilot, some faculty members expressed suspicions that blended learning is a cost cutting exercise by stealth: a way of cutting back on teaching and delivery costs and associated infrastructure. In this pilot, the costs associated with the new blended delivery model proved to be significantly more than normal arrangements, both in terms of staff time and expenditure. However, in the longer term, the aim is to finesse the delivery model to the degree that blended learning is essentially revenue neutral. Certainly, there are few, if any, opportunities in a quality blended learning model such as this to actually reduce costs when

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compared with normal arrangements, nor was there any pressure from any quarters to do so.

Quality Pedagogy It is clear that there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ pattern of blended learning that can be generalized across a particular university, or discipline, or sector. We realized that decisions made about the particular components of the delivery mix are very context dependent, and related to variables such as: the student context and demographics; the demands of the discipline; the socio-economic context; the technological literacy of teachers and learners; the learning preferences of students; the teaching preferences and strengths of staff; to name but a few. To achieve quality pedagogy, blended learning models should grow from the ground up, having regard to the needs of and interactions between teachers, students, the curriculum, and the discipline. Some faculty expressed concerns during the pilots that the move to blended learning represented an attack or an erosion of face-to-face teaching, at the expense students who become more isolated in their study. From the results of this pilot, we firmly believe that face-to-face teaching remains centrally in the mix of delivery methods, recognizing the important motivational and inspirational qualities of fine lecturing, along with the spontaneous interactions that may arise. Yet much of one’s lecturing is perhaps a little more routine than this, and certainly students report a range of experiences in their lectures from the sublime to the ridiculous. Blended learning, we argue, provides faculty with the opportunity to step back from the routines of teaching, and to examine methods such as lecturing from a fresh perspective. What are their strengths as a teacher? What is the value of the lecturing they are undertaking? What do students think of it? We argue that it is important to retain the richness of quality face-to-face

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teaching, particularly when it is appropriate for the subject matter and aligned with our teaching and learning objectives. Yet much routine lecturing – those grinding monologues of content delivery – could be re-conceptualized with the use of blended learning to more engaging, interactive events, enabling students to become a little less spoon-fed and a little more self-directed in their acquisition of knowledge.

Staff Development We learned that ongoing and systematic staff development is critical to the success of an institutional move to blended learning. This pilot revealed the need for two layers of staff development as follows: To enable planning for a move to blended learning, a first phase of staff development is required to develop an understanding of: • • • •

contemporary student needs and preferences in relation to study; changing student demographics and the mix within programs; current student technological preferences and capacity; and pedagogical strengths and weaknesses of elements available in the blended learning mix.

This phase of staff development is relatively generic and can be conducted on a universitywide basis. A second phase of staff development relates to actual hands-on skills development in selected technologies and new delivery elements, and requires iterative, just-in-time support. This staff development should be situated at the ‘coal-face,’ with maximum use of techniques such as staff learning circles and peer support, where best practice is identified, and expertise is incrementally developed and shared among staff over time.

Blended Learning in a Creative Writing Program

CONCLUSION Blended learning initiatives are by no means new to the higher education sector in Australia or internationally. However, the form of blending undertaken in this study, which removes outdated divisions between on-campus and distance students, and draws together disparate and far-flung cohorts of students into a single, equitable mode of study, is still relatively uncharted territory. We have concerns that, among the student cohort, there are winners and losers. Clearly, the winners are students who would formerly have been disadvantaged by the isolation of distance education, and who now have access to a significantly expanded set of study options, including attendance at specialized face-to-face events and a new array of computer mediated events and communications. The losers are students who expect and need a traditional on-campus education with scheduled weekly face-to-face tuition. While there is a reduction of weekly teaching on campus in this model, and a developing reliance on independent learning for all students, it is vitally important that we don’t erode the ongoing vitality of a campus experience, and we must retain a viable core of on-campus teaching that provides structure, engagement and motivation for those who need it, particularly in their first year of study. In the light of these pilot results, it is intended that SCU move gradually to a fully blended and converged model of delivery across all its programs. Above all, it is considered that the entrenched inequities between distance and on-campus students are no longer necessary or conscionable. However, there is much reform at the institutional level to successfully make this move, and we have learned that universities cannot ‘dabble’ in converged or blended learning. At SCU, the current institutional constraints, such as enrolment systems, workload models, staffing arrangements, and inadequate staff development will cause enthusiastic faculty to revert, chastened, to conventional delivery arrangements. It requires

a whole-of-university approach, underpinned by a vision for the university as a ‘next generation’ flexible delivery provider, and actively promoted to students, to bring this to fruition.

REFERENCES Bonk, J., & Graham, C. R. (Eds.), Handbook of blended learning: Global perspectives, local designs. San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer. Challis, D. (2005). Eroding distinctiveness: Blurring the boundaries between on- and off-campus students by the adoption of learning management systems. Open and Distance Learning Association of Australia Forum Conference Proceedings 2005. Retrieved February 10, 2009, from http://www. odlaa.org/events/2005conf/referred-papers.htm Graham, C. R. (2004). Blended learning systems: Definition, trends, and future directions. In C. Oliver, R., Omari, O., & Herrington, J. (1998). Developing converged learning environments for on and off-campus students using the WWW. Conference proceedings of the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (ASCILITE) 1998. Retrieved February 10, 2009, from http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/wollongong98/asc98-pdf/ ascpapers98. html Samarawickrema, G., & O’Reilly, J. (2003). A converged learning environment to support all learners. 16th Conference Proceedings of the Open and Distance Learning Association of Australia Forum Conference – Sustaining Quality Learning Environments, 2003. Retrieved February 10, 2009, from http://www.odlaa.org/ publications/2003Proceedings/abstract.html Tait, A., & Mills, R. (Eds.). (1999). The convergence of distance and conventional education: Patterns of flexibility for the individual learner. London: Routledge.

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Chapter 5

Blended Learning for Adaptation to Needs Joan E. Aitken Park University, USA

ABSTRACT Blended learning is an instructional method that opens the channels of communication in the learning process so that there are increased communication strategies. This chapter discusses two different approaches to using blended learning as a way of adapting to program needs. In one example, pharmacy instruction is provided by top faculty to distance sites. In another example, blended learning is used to reduce instructional costs and increase student enrollment in a graduate program in the humanities. The differences in approaches are because of the different purposes for the use of blended learning. Blended learning can be useful in this time of dwindling resources and budget constraints as a method for improving instruction designed to reach more students and distance locations.

INTRODUCTION Blended Learning may be the traditional learning method of the future. Blended learning has been called a “total mix of pedagogical methods, employing a combination of diverse learning strategies, both with and without the use of technology” (Verkroost, Meijerink, Lintsen, & Veen, 2008, p. 499). In essence, blended learning combines traditional learning methods with technological support. Some educators believe that blended learning can DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-880-2.ch005

be a way to optimize effective instruction (e.g., Balram & Dragicevic, 2008; Ho, Lu, & Thurmaier, 2006; Mason, 2005). Blended learning—sometimes called hybrid or web-assisted learning—is as diverse as the faculty and institutions that support the combination approach (e.g., Lee, Yeh, Kung, & Hsu, 2007; Schober, Wagner, Reimann, & Spiel, 2008). Typically, one or more technological elements—individualized e-instruction, self-paced e-instruction, asynchronous e-instruction, synchronous e-instruction—are combined with face-toface instruction. For the discussion in this chapter, blended instruction is defined as teaching that uses

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Blended Learning for Adaptation to Needs

a combination of traditional face-to-face and computer-mediated communication. The purpose of this chapter is to present ideas about how to employ blended learning to adapt to the particular instructional context. By considering examples, implementation possibilities for blended learning are discussed. In one example context, a professional program in pharmacy uses blended learning so that faculty and staff can offer the program on another campus. In another example context, a graduate program in the humanities uses blended learning to adapt to student needs and increase student enrollment in a new and growing program. In both examples, the use of blended instruction has offered a valid approach in a time of fewer resources to hire fulltime faculty. The chapter includes an explanation of the type of technology used, the way blended learning has been configured, and questions about the future applications of blended learning. The chapter offers answers to this question: How can students, faculty, and administrators adapt blended learning to achieve goals for their particular contexts?

BACKGROUND This section will consider historical information that has led to blended learning. In the professional pharmacy example, technology use has evolved over many years through the leadership of Information Technology (IT) and Academic Affairs. In the graduate humanities example, the university developed two administrative branches of instruction—onground and online—which operate separately. Blended learning has become a challenge that requires collaboration between two different administrative units. Across higher education contexts around the world, the lack of institutional support and financial restraints have prompted universities to seek ways to improve and transform education (Vega-Jurado, Fernandez-de-Lucio, & Huanca,

2008). Given the global economic crisis, more institutions may turn to blended learning. Sometimes blended learning is considered little more than a way of updating education, while in other cases, it is considered a way to provide financial support to an institution (Boyle, 2005). Clearly, blended learning is more than the old distributed learning modes of correspondence courses or televised courses and more than the one-way teacher lecture course. Optimally, blended learning should improve both face-to-face and online instruction. The model of blended learning--which uses technological support rather than replacement of traditional instruction—holds promise for student learning (Condie & Livingston, 2007). Enrollment in distance education courses is exploding (DeNeui & Dodge, 2006), sometimes to the point of seeming out of control with limited faculty training or supervision, faculty beyond of their comfort zone, and other concerns. So in a time when the quality of e-courses is sometimes questioned, blended learning has become an increasing popular way of improving the quality of online instruction (e.g., Boyle, Bradley, Chalk, Jones, & Pickard, 2003; Oravec, 2003; Schweizer, Paechter, & Weidenmann, 2003). Concurrently, resources for education are dwindling during the economic hard times, so blended learning may be a stimulus that takes advantage of the resources available, encourages faculty creativity, and adapts to students with special needs (Marschark, Sapere, & Pelz, 2008). From the perspective of the communication scholar, technology channels are intertwined with potential for new ways for faculty and students to interact. Scholars in other fields conceptualize the concept of communication differently from scholars of communication (Fraser & Schalley, 2009), but for people who study communication, everything about mediated learning includes opportunities to improve communication. E-learning has changed communication in education, for example, particularly from the standpoint of so-

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cial interaction (Slevin, 2008). Blended learning uses more channels of communication than does face-to-face instruction. When one considers the communication devices involved in blended learning, the approach seems to be about blended communication. In blended communication, the professor and students can use multiple interactions, which include the following: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Blog Chat and instant messaging Course management system Electronic course environment Electronic files Email Listserv Podcasting Social networking software Teleconferencing Video Web page Wiki

The variety of communication options may help students to feel engaged in the learning process through a sense of connectedness. This connectedness comes through the immediacy and interpersonal nature of online communication. Face-to-face instruction in a traditional classroom is often public communication, but online interaction is more similar to interpersonal communication than other types of communication (Wang, Walther, & Hancock, 2009; Walther, 1992). This interpersonal nature is what gives the potential for informal and personal communication in these learning situations. In some cases, the communication is similar to intrapersonal communication or self-talk (Smith & Kurthen, 2007), as when the computer acts as a second self (Turkle, 1984). Sometimes online journaling, for example, engages a student intrapersonally. The journals of bloggers seem to share the feeling that their communication allows them to develop self-identity and expression (McCullagh, 2008).

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In addition, blended communication may use the Internet to communicate information, values, and ideas through technology. In some ways, this communication through a blended learning approach may make the acquisition of knowledge easier. If one considers learning preferences, for instance, blended communication allows the instructor to provide adaptive instruction that can reach all students (Wall & Ahmed, 2008). Thus, we can conclude that blended communication involves communication process of expressing, sharing, gathering, disseminating, and collaborating online. Some students like computer learning. In fact, they may consider the conventional oneway communication of traditional classes to be old fashioned or boring. Although faculty have complained about the television and video game generation’s shortened attention span of students for years, the Internet may take the problem to a whole new level (Jackson, 2008). Students may be very adept at using technology and distracted during online learning by “50 million Web sites” and “75 million blogs” (p. 13). Other students may be reluctant to use new technologies. Understandably, student attitude can affect the success of using technology in learning (Lee, Yeh, Kung, & Hsu, 2007). In the traditional one-way face-to-face course, some students may have difficulty engaging actively in the learning process. Of course, most faculty use an array of face-to-face learning approaches, but one potential way for increasing active classroom involvement is to use laptop computers for e-discussion during oral discussion. This kind of approach can encourage students to engage in communication channels that make them feel comfortable in the learning process. Consistent with research on the topic, technology provides diverse channels of communication for educators (Verhoeven & Graesser, 2008). By way of illustration, a student may feel embarrassed if the professor thinks an oral answer is wrong, but feel reassured after checking with a classmate through instant mes-

Blended Learning for Adaptation to Needs

saging. This observation is consistent with a study by Shen, Wang, and Pan (2008), which found that blended learning in classrooms may increases student engagement and interactivity. In their analysis of real-time blended learning, they found mobile support increased student questions and suggestions. Effective communication seems difficult in the best of circumstances, so adding to the communication channels during the educational process of blended classes seems like a potentially useful idea. In addition to the difficulty of asynchronous conversation, the online format for communication may affect the depth of conversation. People expect emails to be short and quick to read, which also may transfer into online instructional assignments. A 750 essay assigned to be posted for peer response may seem long in the online format, when students skim and speed read posts. This expectation for brevity may affect the depth of thought and conversation in mediated environments. Motteram (2006) discussed the importance of engaging students for depth of discussion online, however, and how success is more a function of the nature of the conversation and less with the method of conversation.

SETTING THE STAGE In this section, the adaptive use of technology for the two example programs is discussed. Technology may be seen as a way of supporting students and faculty, and the investment in equipment and software may grow out of concern for good instruction and effective adaptation to students. To illustrate how blended learning can improve learning, the method can motivate teachers to change and improve their instructional practices (Owston, Sinclair, & Wideman, 2008). Blended learning also can improve collaboration, which may be one of the most effective learning strategies for the widest number of students (Lim & Yoon, 2008). Because of the demands on nontraditional

students, programs for graduate students may be more popular if they use an approach that provides online collaboration and less classroom time (Cox & Cox, 2008). Using blending learning to adapt to the context is consistent with research about e-learning, which has demonstrated creative approaches in virtually every field of academics (e.g., Black, Beck, & Dawson, 2007; Knobel & Lankshear, 2008; Michinov & Michinov, 2008; Rush, 2008). A fundamental element in creating blended learning may be the course environment software, such as Blackboard, WebTycho, First Class, and eCollege. The course environment provides content, testing, group, chat, and other e-options. As DeNeui and Dodge (2006) explained: One of the main benefits to students is the unfettered access to virtually anything an instructor presents in the classroom. For example, access to syllabi, course notes, interactive demonstrations, handouts, audio or videotaped lectures are all possible via this interface. (p. 256) Even if course environment software is not available, there are other options for blended learning. Faculty can create tutorials, which they put on external Web services. In addition, teachers can use many free Internet services in their classes. Faculty can use Facebook.com, for example, and set up a Facebook group to add another dimension to the course. With the graduate program example, faculty and students used the following free online Internet services: Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, SurveyMonkey.com, Glogster.com, Dandelife.com, Secondlife, Squidoo.com, Blogger.com, Squidoo.com, YouTube.com, PBwiki. com, Code.Google.com/p/YouTeach, and Video. YouTeach.de. These kinds of communication strategies can enhance instruction and are consistent with research on the topic. In a study by Vaughan (2007), students indicated that they found more time flexibility through blended learning. Fur-

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ther, students believed their learning improved in the blended context. That finding supports the idea that the blended approach may enhance a variety of instructional approaches so that they better adapt to student needs. The faculty in the Vaughan study thought that a blended learning approach improved chances for faculty to interact with students. In the graduate program example, some students used a combination of learning approaches, including face-to-face, blended, and totally online instruction. These students could fit the instruction to their needs and improve flexibility in ways similar to the students of the Vaughan study. Similarly, although the blended approaches required considerable work, faculty were willing to provide the instruction to meet student needs and increase class size in a growing department.

Responsible Parties Involved At both example universities discussed in this chapter, they are considering changes in their use of courseware as a cost saving measure. One university is considering using an open source courseware such as https://open.umich.edu/ or http://ocw.mit.edu/ Faculty are upset at the prospect of the changes this approach will require. The other university is considering passing the course environment costs directly to the student. In both universities, these cost saving measures are being made at the upper administrative level. Regarding the way blended courses are taught, developed, and support within the School of Pharmacy at the one university, the process is controlled by the faculty. At the other example university, the way blended courses are taught, developed, and supported takes place primarily within an administrative unit separate from the academic departments and separate from the IT department. In this second case, both administrative units are responsible. First, the academic department is responsible for content. Second, the online learning department is responsible for (3)

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making sure certain types of content is present, (1) supervising faculty, (2) seeing that course content is uploaded into master courses, and (4) coping the appropriate classes. An online learning instructional designer is knowledgeable about putting the materials into the course shell. The idea is that the designer will work with the individual faculty member, who supplies the course content. There are online learning supervisory staff members who are responsible for administrative tasks related to working with the online courses. The program director is responsible for the program in the department. The director selects faculty to provide course content. At the end of the process, the director can review the course and approve content before the instruction begins. There are academic administrators involved in encouraging online courses and overseeing the process. Faculty involved in the process may be full or part-time. The faculty are hired by the program director, who then turns the process over to the online learning department. As Boyle (2005) explained about using a course development team: The design/development team needs to have an appropriate mixture of roles, and in academic settings, clarity about the commitment of people working part-time on the project. There should be a clear plan for tackling the design and development tasks. The plan involves breaking the overall problems into sub-tasks and allocating these to groups and individuals within the group. There needs to be regular group meetings to discuss the progress against targets. Good design requires a creative and motivated group. (p. 228)

CASE DESCRIPTION In this section, the blended learning adaptations of the two example programs are described. The programs are (1) a professional program in pharmacy and (2) a graduate program in the humanities. Both programs are about three years old. The

Blended Learning for Adaptation to Needs

professional program has used a blended approach from the beginning. The graduate program still has not decided if or how blended instruction will be used long-term in the program.

Example One: Launching a New Professional Program in Pharmacy A state university with a well-established school of pharmacy decided to launch a professional program at other state universities. Blended learning research suggests the approach is appropriate in health care education (Duque, Roberts, Hui, Posel, Fleiszer, & Chiu, 2006; Espey, Ogburn, Kalishman, Zsemlye, & Cosgrove, 2007). This program required substantial investment in new facilities which contained large lecture halls with built-in projection screens and recording facilities. A few faculty members are located at the distance campuses, but nearly all of the faculty are located at the main campus site. The faculty provide lectures and academic guidance to students, but staff are hired for advising functions. In addition to using a course environment with extensive peripheral supports, the faculty teach synchronous courses to students. A large lecture hall contains multiple screens, a microphone for every two students, and an onsite video-operator. The lecture is Internet-broadcast to the distance campuses, where students can see the projected images and interact with the faculty member. The video-operator at the main campus location records the professor and any students who interact in that space. The video-recorded lectures are then made available to students as podcasts. The information technology services provide an open-instructional lab for faculty once a month. Faculty can receive individualized, face-to-face instruction on any software or hardware they desire. The online supports show the kinds of add-ons available for course environments. 1.

Blogs and wikis software is added to the course environment.

2.

Course environment management system software is available for all course delivery, staff training, and organizational collaboration. This system contains a request function so that instructors can make special copying requests or create a new organization site. 3. Some classrooms with special technology have technology for large lecture classroom interactivity through quiz formats, attendance-taking, learning games, and student answers to synchronous questions. 4. Instant messaging is available inside the course environment software. 5. Learning Object Creation enables various media resources, such as document scanning and video streaming. 6. Listserv electronic mailing list use L-Soft’s LISTSERV software to provide communication lists to any interested people, including faculty and students. 7. Podcasting is available for recording in many classrooms. In addition to videorecording faculty lectures and PowerPoints, students can use a search function based on PowerPoint content. The system allows multi-way audio, video, application sharing, polling, and content display. 8. Test-making software allows transfer from commonly used software to the course environment. The software also allows test security so that students cannot print tests or go to another URL during the exam. This process is particularly valuable during proctored exams. 9. The courseware provides collaboration software available to the university community. In addition, VideoPresence life-size, highdefinition meeting abilities are available. 10. Turnitin is a plagiarism detection and prevention system available to the university community. 11. A voice board is available for learning oral language, vocal instruction, collaboration, and coaching Voice Board allows students

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to post and listen to voice messages within discussion boards. Voice Email-send allows audible email. There are also voice recorder, podcasting, and presentation services available.

Example 2: Launching a New Graduate Program in the Humanities Based on program goals, courses were developed for both online and onground formats. Typically, a faculty member would teach the course onground, create materials, and then develop the course in an online course environment shell. The courses were developed so that the content can be used by other faculty. Both part-time and full-time faculty develop the courses. For this program, experimentation with the blended approach enabled more flexibility for onground students and allowed for both distance and local students to attend a class together. In a new program--where not every course would have enough students to make, the idea was to see if distance (online) and local (onground) students could work together in a blended class format. In this example, the professor tried three blended approaches. A multiple course trial of this approach was implemented as a way to adapt to program needs and student needs. First, the professor used synchronous blue tooth telephony with an online course shell. In some courses, the faculty member arranged to use a telephone call-in service. While meeting with some students face-to-face, other students telephoned in through a conferencing system. Probably the main disadvantage of this approach was the inability of all students to hear the students on the phone. The communication was primarily one-way from the professor to the students. When students tried to interact in discussion, the professor was the only one who could hear distance students. The administration ended this approach because of the high cost of the telephone conferencing system.

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In the second trial, the professor used synchronous Skype.com voice-over freeware. In their instructional study using Skype, Pan and Sullivan (2005) found that student reaction toward the system was positive. The study suggested that students were better able to better work with abstract topics. Skype worked well to augment group interaction. Typing is not needed, so students can focus their mental energy on the topic, which helped them stay motivated and on task. Skype seemed particularly effective with virtual teams, including immediate input and feedback (27-30). They provide the following recommendations for using Skype: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Divide students into groups of four for conference calling. Encourage headsets and other useful tools. Encourage tools such as Blackboard Chat, which record conversations. Organize a pro-class training session for a subset of the entire class. Provide protocols for disconnects. Schedule the students’ Skype subscription in the class orientation.

This study was consistent with case here, adding support to the idea that Skype can be a useful learning tool (Jaya, 2008). Thus, Skype and the course environment system were used to provide a video connection between the onground and online course. The University supplied a motion-activated camera for the classroom. This approach allowed freedom lecture and discussion as usual. Although the approach worked, it seemed a temporary and haphazard solution. In the third trial, the professor used asynchronous online instruction combined with face-to-face instruction. In other words, shortened face-to-face class meetings were supplemented by course environment software use between class meetings. One configuration of this approach includes coordination between two universities. In fact, a blended approach can work well when developing

Blended Learning for Adaptation to Needs

an international instructional program (Mathur & Oliver, 2007). The two universities have decided to work together in a program where students in one country will receive a graduate degree from both their own and a US university. A key advantage of using international students or multinational locations in e-learning is that students learn effective international public discourse. Students from the other country will be taking online courses and faculty from the other country will be teaching students from the e-courses developed by US faculty. Further, by having students from both countries in the classes, faculty hope to use online technology in collaborative learning as it has been done successfully elsewhere (Cho & Lee, 2008). The courses will be conducted in English, and the faculty believe that the questions of training faculty, recruiting students, creating community, and cultural differences may necessitate some kind of blended approach. E-learning has taken shape according to cultural and national expectations (e.g., Thomas, 2008; Van Bauwel, 2008), so requires adaptation to the opportunities and styles in both countries. The cost of flying faculty and students back and forth has become prohibitive, so the need for adaptation to international faculty and students is a major consideration in this case.

CURRENT CHALLENGES FACING THE ORGANIZATION In this section, the needed problem-solving for the example programs in this case are synthesized. To make the examples relevant to other contexts, they are discussed in a general way, so they are consistent with research findings on the topic. After a general overview of challenges, relevant questions will be considered. Clearly, e-learning is a complicated process with paradoxical ups and downs, pros and cons, strengths and needs regarding e-communication during course instruction (Shedletsky & Aitken, 2001). If students, faculty, and administrators are

using available communication technology to enhance instruction and learning, blended learning may be successful. A key challenge, however, is finding ways to use these complicated communication channels so they enhance the educational process. One challenge in using blended learning is that it requires careful planning and practices (McAndrew, 2006). When perceived as a way to bring better resources to students—as in the pharmacy school example—all parties seem onboard. When perceived as a power grab by a technical or academic unit—as in the humanities program example—a transition to blended learning may develop slowly, if at all. Another challenge in using technology in education may be the focus on technical details that take away from an academic focus on theoretical issues (Slevin, 2008). Academics may have to become experts on communication technology in addition to course content. Nearly any faculty member can give examples of students asking them technical questions about the communication technology instead of asking Instructional Technology staff. Some students may expect their faculty to know it all. Although a way of saving money in some cases, blending learning may be quite expensive too. The professional pharmacy program in this case had extensive planning, cost, and technology requirements. These costs are less than setting up a second program at another campus, however. With a financial crisis requiring cost cuts, both example programs in this case are trying to find new ways to pay for the communication technology they want to use in instruction. Thus, similarly related to the financial restraints of challenging economic times is whether or not communication technologies are affordable. Determining whether technology investments will pay off may be a challenge. Blended teaching can be a way of repurposing resources (Davis & Fill, 2007), which may be needed when resources are limited.

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Another challenge of using blended learning is faculty resistance to change (Vaughan, 2007). A study conducted in Australia and Canada suggested that there are many similarities between teaching philosophies of online and onground faculty, which may mean blended learning is a valuable trend (Stacey & Wiesenberg, 2007). Yet in the humanities example, there is a sense of competition, where the online faculty pay the bills and the onground faculty are the content experts. Perhaps in a time of dwindling resources, faculty will need new ways of working together and adapting to change. Universities may need to find ways to help students adapt to the communication technologies they will use in their course work. Some students may have troubling keeping motivated and up-to-date with their work in a blended approach. The advantage for students of flexibility and increased learning has the challenge of time management and learning complicated technologies (Vaughan, 2007). Many full-time faculty see their work expectations and responsibilities expanding. Enticing faculty to do the work of adopting new technologies and teaching methods for blended instruction can be difficult (Davis & Fill, 2007). Thus, full faculty participation in blended learning may be a challenge. It tends to be administrators and students—more than faculty—who believe in the ability of blended learning to improve instruction and student access to education (Condie & Livingston, 2007). Faculty may have concern over some of the work-intensive elements—time, resources, and course redesign--of providing instruction through both the online and face-toface formats. The examples in this chapter are consistent with research that suggests that faculty and administrators have many issues to solve regarding using technology, including how to use social networking, games, and mobile services (Milliron, Plinske, Noonan-Terry, 2008). Staying up-to-date with continually changing technology can increase work and stress.

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CONCLUSION The pharmacy program example in this case clearly sees blended learning as a viable learning approach. The humanities program example seems to lack clear direction for using blended learning because the online and onground approaches remain distinctly different. The different results suggest that the complexities of organizations, faculty, staff