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Thursday, April 05, 2007

Repost from the AECT BlogTrack - Where To Next?

Keeping this as my regular Wednesday feature and concluding the series. This entry from the AECT BlogTrack is the first and only entry for the month of October and the twenty-second and final overall in the re-posts from this series.



At present I am currently finishing my dissertation study, which was a case study that looked at how a virtual high school was being implemented in one rural school. As a follow-up to that, I have copied below a section of a proposal that I wrote for a one year post-doctoral fellowship to continue research with this virtual school. I believe the proposal below is a good example of the type of research that is needed with virtual schooling. What do you think?

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Many of the early examples of distance education programs across North America were primarily designed for a select group of high school students, specifically those with higher aptitudes, higher achievement, and greater aspirations for postsecondary education. For example, in their second year evaluation of the Virtual High School (VHS), Espinoza, Dove, Zucker and Kozma (1999) stated that “VHS was serving a fairly narrow range of students, those who were academically advanced and college bound” (p. 48). Roblyer and Elbaum (2000) concluded, “only students with a high need to control and structure their own learning may choose distance formats freely” (p. 61). In distance education programs where student selectivity is not maintained, retention rates have decreased significantly (Ballas & Belyk, 2000; Barker & Wendel, 2001; Roblyer, 1999). These findings have led some to question whether web-based distance education is suitable for all secondary-level students (Mulcahy, 2002).

Cavanaugh (2001) found that there was “a small positive effect in favor of distance education” (p. 73). Given that distance education for high school students in North America had primarily served a more selective group of students, it should not surprise anyone that these early comparative studies in K-12 distance education yielded better results than most other comparative studies in other technology-based fields (Clark , 1983; Reeves, 2005). Interestingly, Cavanaugh, Gillan, Kromrey, Hess and Blomeyer (2004) reported a small negative effect size in their meta-analysis of an additional 14 studies representing over 7500 students from 1999 to 2004. It seems reasonable to conclude that this more recent sample of distance education comparative studies was conducted with a more diverse population of students.

The Centre for Distance Learning and Innovation (CDLI) in Newfoundland and Labrador came into existence in 2000 and offered its first courses during the 2001-02 school year. During that first year a limited number of enrollments were made available in an effort to field test the method of delivery and the content material that had been developed. Beginning with the 2002-03 school year, any student from across the province was given permission to enroll in any course offered by the CDLI. No longer was secondary distance education just for the elite students. Indeed, with their decision to develop a number of non-highly-academic courses, such as Art Technologies 1201, Communications Technology 2104/3104, and World Geography 3202, their student population has come to include students of all ability levels. Given these developments, the CDLI is an ideal context for conducting this research study.

An analysis indicated that over the four year period that the CDLI has been in operation there has been some fluctuation in both public exam scores and final course averages when delivery model and location are considered. However, little difference was observed in the overall performance of students on both performance measures based upon delivery model alone (Barbour & Mulcahy, 2006). Given the fact that some performance results of distance education students in Newfoundland and Labrador run counter to what is traditionally found in the literature, i.e., “no-significant differences,” discovering what factors account for these results is an important undertaking.

The purpose of my dissertation study, entitled What are they doing and how are they doing it? Student experiences in virtual schooling, was to examine the nature of web-based learning in Newfoundland and Labrador secondary education. Specifically, this qualitative case study examined how students at one rural all grade school interacted with their web-based courses and the process they undertook when they needed help. Two of the findings from this study were that the students’ use of their scheduled asynchronous learning time was often inefficient and that teachers’ nature of asynchronous instruction typically assigned practice problems from the textbook as asynchronous instruction. While there were some deviations from these patterns, overall there was regularly little more than independent seat work such as that assigned by the typical classroom teacher. This is troubling because the original model proposed for the CDLI was to be based upon the web-based model that was not “totally dependent on high bandwidth technologies [and have a] minimal reliance on synchronous communications, fixed schedules or other constraining elements” (Sparkes & Williams, 2000, p. 65). Students’ minimal reliance on synchronous communications is a concern and worthy of further research.

At present the model of delivery utilized by the CDLI includes anywhere from 30% to 80% of the students’ scheduled time (which is 10 one-hour periods over a fourteen day cycle) in synchronous instruction using Elluminate Live®, a real-time virtual classroom. One of the main differences between the CDLI and the majority of other virtual schools in North America is the CDLI’s high percentage of synchronous instruction. As the original proposal of minimal reliance on synchronous communications is still one of the overall goals of the CDLI, and one on which they hope to act in the near future, there is a concern that without more effective asynchronous teaching strategies, students in the CDLI will report the same achievement as students in other virtual schools – where only a select group of students are able to perform at levels comparable to their classroom counterparts, but these online learning opportunities will no longer be available to the majority of students because of this change in delivery model that relies on higher levels of internet access.
The purpose of this study is to identify effective asynchronous teaching practices and develop strategies that can be implemented by e-teachers within a context of secondary distance education. This general purpose lends itself to two primary research questions:
  1. What effective asynchronous teaching practices are currently in use?
  2. What asynchronous learning strategies do students find useful?

The theoretical framework is focused on social constructivist learning theories (e.g., Vygotsky, 1962, 19 through a lens of increasing the instructors’ social presence (e.g., Tu, 2002) in an effort to minimize the transactional distance (Moore, 1973; Moore & Kearsley, 1996). Given the goals of this study, naturalistic qualitative approaches are appropriate. The specific case for this study will by the CDLI. I will conduct interviews with teachers to explore their current strategies for asynchronous instruction and students to determine what they do and their impressions of their scheduled asynchronous learning time. I will also use participant observations of both teachers using asynchronous learning environments, which include the course materials and assignments available to the students in their learning management system, and students engaged in asynchronous online learning, along with surveys of students as a means of triangulation.
The CDLI is an optimal choice as the site for this research study for a number of reasons. First, prior research (see Barbour & Mulcahy, 2006) indicates that CDLI students have had success despite their diverse range of abilities. Second, the researcher is familiar with this setting and has built a professional relationship with the organization in many facets over the past five years. Finally, the purpose of this study is well aligned with the second theme of the recent [description of an existing research grant secured at a post-secondary institution].

To date, much of the published literature on K-12 web-based distance education is based upon the personal experiences of those involved in the actual practice, while much of the research is only available in unpublished Masters’ theses and Doctoral dissertations. The results of this study will have useful implications for web-based distance education programs in other jurisdictions. Meta-analysis, such as the ones reported in Cavanaugh, 2001; Cavanaugh, et al., 2004; Ungerleider and Burns, 2003, do not go far enough in specifying design guidelines for practitioners. Research studies such as the one proposed here are clearly needed to examine in a systematic way best practices for these practitioners.

Bibliography and Citations

Ballas, F. A., & Belyk, D. (2000). Student achievement and performance levels in online education research study. Red Deer, AB: Schollie Research & Consulting. Retrieved on July 31, 2005 from http://www.ataoc.ca/files/pdf/AOCresearch_full_report.pdf

Barbour, M. & Mulcahy, D. (2006). An inquiry into achievement differences in traditional and virtual high school courses. Roundtable presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, CA.

Barker, K., & Wendel, T. (2001). E-learning: Studying Canada’s virtual secondary schools. Kelowna, BC: Society for the Advancement of Excellence in Education. Retrieved July 31, 2005 from http://www.saee.ca/pdfs/006.pdf

Cavanaugh, C. S. (2001). The effectiveness of interactive distance education technologies in K-12 learning: A meta-analysis. International Journal of Educational Telecommunications, 7(1), 73-88.

Cavanaugh, C., Gillan, K. J., Kromrey, J., Hess, M., & Blomeyer, R. (2004). The effects of distance education on K–12 student outcomes: A meta-analysis. Naperville, IL: Learning Point Associates.

Clark, R. (1983). Reconsidering research on learning from media. Review of Educational Research, 53(4), 445-459.

Espinoza, C., Dove, T., Zucker, A., & Kozma, R. (1999). An evaluation of the Virtual High School after two years in operation. Arlington, VA: SRI International. Retrieved on July 31, 2005 from http://ctl.sri.com/publications/downloads/evalvhs2yrs.pdf

Moore, M. G. (1973). Toward a theory of independent learning and teaching. Journal of Higher Education, 19(12), 661-679.

Moore, M. G., & Kearsley, G. (1996). Distance education: A systems view. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Mulcahy, D. M. (2002). Re-conceptualizing distance education: Implications for the rural schools of Newfoundland and Labrador. The Morning Watch, 30(1-2). Retrieved on July 31, 2005 from http://www.mun.ca/educ/faculty/mwatch/fall02/Mulcahy.htm

Reeves, T. C. (2005). No significant differences revisited: A historical perspective on the research informing contemporary online learning. In G. Kearsley (Ed.), Online learning: Personal reflections on the transformation of education (pp. 299-308). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications.

Roblyer, M. D. (1999). Is choice important in distance learning? A study of student motives for taking internet-based courses at the high school and community college levels. Journal of Research on Computing in Education, 32(1).

Roblyer, M. D., & Elbaum, B. (2000). Virtual learning? Research on virtual high schools. Learning & Leading with Technology, 27(4), 58-61.

Sparkes, R., & Williams, L. (2000). Supporting learning: Ministerial panel on educational delivery in the classroom. St. John’s, NL: Queen’s Printer for Newfoundland.

Tu, C. H. (2002). The measurement of social presence in an online learning environment. International Journal on E-Learning, 1(2), 34-45.

Ungerleider, C. S., & Burns, T. C. (2003). A systematic review of the effectiveness and efficiency networked ICT in education: A state of the field report to the CMEC and Industry Canada. Retrieved on October 26, 2005 from http://www.cmec.ca/stats/SystematicReview2003.en.pdf

Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and language (E. Hanfmann & G. Vakar, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychologist processes (M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, E. Souberman, Eds.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Repost from the AECT BlogTrack - We Don’t Get No Respect!

Keeping this as my regular Wednesday feature for until we conclude the series - I apologoze for all of the re-posted of simply collected content, but I have less than three weeks left to submit my dissertation. Hopefully once I have submitted it I'll be able to get back to some more original content. This entry from the AECT BlogTrack is the first and only entry for the month of September and the twenty-first overall in the re-posts from this series.



Okay, I’ve been sitting on some of these entries for a while in my Bloglines account, and since it has been a while since I posted here and since AECT is coming up in less than a month, I figured I should deal with them.
The first that I’ve wanted to chat about was an entry called Research in Distance Education in Canada that I found at e-Learning Acupuncture. Essentially the entry is about an article in International Review of Research in Open and Distance Education about that status of distance education research in my home country. The author of this entry goes on about the interesting things that can be found in this article (and I’m not disputing that) and somewhat of a commentary on the overall state of research in distance education in general. The problem for me is that when I look through IRRODE or any of the other main distance education journals, I see very little in the way of research that is focused upon a K-12 audience.

This is probably best evidenced by the article described by Darren in his entry on A Review of Research on Teaching Courses Online over at Teaching and Developing Online. This was a recent Review of Educational Research article that we read as a part of our group last year. A comprehensive look at online distance education. Not one mention of the K-12 environment.

Now I understand that virtual schooling has only really be around for a decade, but distance education at the K-12 level in North America has been common in rural areas for the past thirty to thirty-five years. Even online distance education at the K-12 level has been around (although not as extensively) for the past fifteen to twenty years. So, why is the K-12 environment alays dissed?

Maybe it is partly our own fault. I’m only a doctoral student, so I haven’t been at this trying to be an academic thing for that long a period of time. But most of that time my interests have been squarely focused upon distance education at the K-12 level and, specifically, on virtual schooling. For example, I came across this article this past week:

A Comprehensive Look at Distance Education in the K–12 Context
Kerry Lynn Rice
Read more…

And given that I am working on my dissertation and I was sure that if I didn’t include something like this in my chapter two, I’d never be given the chance to defend, I downloaded a copy of it and began to read.
To be honest, I was a little disappointed. The comprehensive look wasn’t that comprehensive at all. The title of the article, and even the abstract, imply that all forms of distance education at the K-12 level would be considered, but the majority of the article looked at online forms of distance education with a real focus on virtual schooling. But even more disappointing than that was in looking through the bibliography and seeing how much was missing.

So I ask, are K-12 distance education researchers partly to blame for the fact that everyone else ignores us, particularly when we also tend to ignore much of our own area of interest?



This was actually one of the few entries that received some discussion.

Kerry Rice Says:
September 28th, 2006 at 3:49 pm

Part of the problem is inherent in the nature of the beast – distance education (DE) as it appears now is vastly different than DE of the past and continues to mutate into forms that we never would have conceived of. Unfortunately, emerging technologies and quickly changing delivery mechanisms result in old terms being used to define new paradigms. (This disconnect itself is quite often illuminated in the research.) Perhaps the use of “virtual” or “online” would have been more appropriate in the title of the article, but my use of the term “Distance Education” was intentional; I was looking at varying models of virtual schools and did not want to give the impression that I was only looking at schools that delivered curriculum through the Internet. Although most do, not all virtual schools use technology to deliver curriculum. For example, Connections Academy, a provider of services for managing virtual schools, uses a text-based curriculum but courses are managed electronically. So we have a conundrum. “Online” and “virtual” are too restrictive and “Distance Education” is too broad.

Another part of the problem, in my opinion, is a missing theoretical construct that is uniformly embraced by the DE research community for framing our work. A theory provides the underlying foundation by which a field is defined and supported. Do we work under the old theories of DE or is our work guided by emerging theories of teaching and learning in this new context of Internet and web-based instruction?

Finally, a part of the problem is simply in the amount of space allotted within a journal. Unfortunately, we are limited in words – in fact for this review I asked for special permission to submit a lengthier article than usually accepted (over twice the number of words). I would argue that the references included in this literature review are quite extensive and present a comprehensive picture of the current state of K-12 distance education…virtual education…e-learning…online education…

mkbvs Says:
September 28th, 2006 at 4:26 pm

Dr. Rice,

Glad that you have joined the conversation (and I welcome you to it whole heartedly), I don’t disagree with a single comment you have made. And since I have you hear, I was hoping to ask you a few questions about your article.

I agree with your comments that a comprehensive look at K-12 distance education would never fit into the confines of most journals and then how one defines online learning or virtual schooling can be problematic because there hasn’t been a lot of consistency in the literature. With regards to this explanation, I was wondering why some of this wasn’t teased out in the article to provide the reader with the realities of the challenges that you were facing with this task. As a doctoral student who has devoted much of the last three years to looking at this topic, I believe that my thouht when reading the title was how will she accomplish that in 3500 words or less, but for someone who hasn’t been in this literature before, they could easily finish your article without the understanding of the caveat that you have just provided.

While you didn’t raise it in your comments, I would argue that another limitation of your task was the nature of how research into distance education at the K-12 level is dissiminated in general. If I used virtual schooling or cyberschooling as an example. A quick search in ProQuest for dissertations containing “virtual school” or “cyberschool” in their title or abstract gives me almosta hundred instances. Yet, in the journals that you list in your introduction I can only think of three articles that have been pubished that have been included. For that matter, if I expand the net to all peer reviewed journals that I know of, I can still only think of about a dozen and a half articles that have been published that would have “virtual school” or “cyberschool” in the title or abstract (and most of those have been by two authors).

When I look at my own literature review for my dissertation, the vast majority of items that I have used related to “virtual school” or “cyberschool” have come from book publishing the experiences of those engaged in providing these oportunities, external evaluations of existing entities, or research sponsored and published by educational laboratories. Where are the articles detailing sound research studies in the American Journal of Distance Education, the Journal of Distance Education, Educational Technology: Research and Development, the Quartlery Review of Distance Education, Open Learning, Distance Education, International Journal of Distance Education, the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, etc.? Unfortunately there simply isn’t much there - which I think was my larger arguement, that the research that is being done isn’t getting published and what is getting published, because there is little conformity in the language and such difficulty in figuring out exactly what is out there, isn’t inclusive because of where it is being published.

However, if someone who was ot familiar with this reality were to pick up your article, I’m not sure they would put it down with the same conclusions.

MKB

Kerry Rice Says:
September 28th, 2006 at 5:38 pm

You raise some very good questions and I honestly wish I had the time necessary to answer each as thoroughly and completely as I would like. Let me say though, that I do make mention of the confusing state of research in the field in my article, but it was my feeling that a long discussion was not appropriate in the context of that journal and would better be served in a different forum.

Regarding the lack of availability of quality research –

First, once again we get into the terminology debate. If you expand your search to include “distance education”, “distance learning” or any of the other descriptors outlined in my introduction, you will undoubtedly generate more articles.

Second, this is a relatively new field and although you may have located “almost a hundred” dissertations concerned with virtual or cyber schools the general research community has simply not caught up. I think we’re in agreement on this point but, although I think research is being done, I don’t believe it’s being conducted on a large scale – the field is simply too new. I also know from personal experience (as do you) that there are very few journals addressing this specific research topic, with the majority decidedly committed to adult distance education.

Third, an interesting discovery that I made during my search for relevant research (and this is something you alluded to as well) was that large educational laboratories like NCREL (Learning Point Associates) and SREB are managing research initiatives in this field and publishing the results within their organizations rather than through the traditional channels. I’m not sure if this is because of the lack of appropriate outlets or if this is the wave of the future.

This has been an interesting discussion and I appreciate the opportunity to contribute my “two cents.” Thanks and I wish you well with BlogTracks!



Care to add your own comments?

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Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Repost from the AECT BlogTrack - Is Being A Digital Native A Good Thing?

Okay, let's try and make these a regular Wednesday feature for the next few weeks and that should be enough to conclude the series. This entry from the AECT BlogTrack is the third and final entry for the month of August and the twentieth overall in the re-posts from this series.



Since we started this Blog Track, I’ve written a fair amount about digital natives (see More On Digital Natives) for the most recent entry. Most of what I have written about has focused upon whether or not there is such a thing as digital natives. This past week I’ve read some entries posted by Ian Jukes at the The Committed Sardine Blog that have me asking a different question. The entries that caught my attention were:

So, assuming that digital natives exist (and if you haven’t read the earlier stuff I think that they do) my new and I think more important question is:

Is the fact that our children today are hard wired differently today a good thing?

I ask because much of the thought behind being a digital native rests on this notion of constant passive attention. Is this constant passive attention manifesting itself in negative ways, doing more harm to our children than good.

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Saturday, March 17, 2007

Repost from the AECT BlogTrack - Struggling with Virtual Schooling Issues

A busy week this week in terms of posting. This entry from the AECT BlogTrack is the second entry for the month of August and the nineteenth overall in the re-posts from this series.




A colleague of mine, Derek Wenmoth, has posted an entry to his blog (see Derek’s Blog) which I think is particularly interesting. The entry, Tackling online learning in our secondary schools, talks about some thngs going on down in New Zealand in K-12 online learning and then proceeds to ask a long series of questions to specific groups of individuals involved in almost every aspect of K-12 schooling. His questions include:

General Issues
  • Is what we are doing truly learner-centric?
  • Are we simply replicating the practices of the f2f classroom?
  • How can we get policy change to provide the flexibility we require?
  • Is our view of the technology future-proofed?
  • Where is the evidence that what we are doing is supporting the claims we are making?

Policy issues

  • How can student funding be shared between schools?
  • How can staffing, including management units, be shared among schools?
  • What evidence needs to be gathered to demonstrate the worth of this?

Technology issues

  • Connectivity and interoperability – who sets the standards?
  • Networks – VPNs or MUSH etc?
  • Bridging – what is required? What technologies must be supported?
  • Scheduling – enable direct access and school level control?

Curriculum issues

  • assessment – developing consistency in approach
  • reporting – enabling a unified student report from several ‘schools’ etc
  • modularisation – a different view of ‘course’
  • RPL – includes recognising the value of informal learning

Staffing issues

  • Creating more flexibility in recognising teacher roles: e-teachers, m-teachers, c-teachers
  • How to involve those with real subject expertise as mentors, hotseats etc?

Pedagogical issues

  • “personalisation” – what does it mean? How do we make it happen?
  • staff training – how to train a large group of the teaching force in these new approaches?

Leadership and coordination issues

  • Where does the leadership come from?
  • What form should leadership take?
  • What coordination is required nationally, locally etc?

Learning Resource issues

  • How best to provide resources for learning to support teachers in this environment?
  • Learning objects, repositories, search tools – who provides them, who manages them etc?
  • How to cater for user-generated resources?
  • Copyright and IP issues – how are these to be managed?

Quality issues

  • What is best practice?
  • What are quality indicators?

What is most interesting about this list of questions/issues is that even though Canada and the United States are about a half a decade ahead of New Zealand and Australia when it comes to K-12 online learning or virtual schooling, I don’t think that we have really tackled many of these issues on this side of the Pacific pond yet either.

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Friday, March 09, 2007

Repost from the AECT BlogTrack - Virtual Schooling Evaluations

Well, I had hoped to get this out earlier in the week, but oh well... This entry from the AECT BlogTrack is the first entry for the month of August and the eighteenth overall in the re-posts from this series.




One of the more commons ways that research has been conducted on virtual schooling has been through the process of conducting evaluations. In May and June I posted a series that outlined the research studies that I have conducted with virtual schools, specifically the Centre for Distance Learning and Innovation. In that discussion I failed to mention one of the more recent evaluations that I conducted. While it was two years ago now that it began and about a year ago that it concluded, it is worth mentioning here and discussing what I found.

Evaluation of the Illinois Virtual High School Course Development Process

The purpose of this evaluation was primarily formative, i.e., to provide the client with the reliable information needed to improve the course development process utilized by the IVHS. When the IVHS was first established, it relied heavily on packaged courses from external vendors to quickly populate their course offerings. Over the past five years, the IVHS has continued to rely on external vendors but has also developed courses, using teachers as subject matter experts and course authors, and external design and production staff (eCollege) to support their efforts.

Unfortunately, there was great variability between each of IVHS’ offerings. The productized nature of vendor-based courses led to uniform navigation, interface, and instruction but only within a single vendor’s offerings; IVHS’ multiple vendors deployed different models. Also, despite the shared experience of the design tutorial and the support of a core team, IVHS course authors’ development was executed with more of a course-by-course approach, introducing even greater variability. Over time, IVHS has worked to alter the course development process and deliverables and provide greater design support to course authors. As the IVHS begins to develop more of its courses internally, particularly using this new tool, and its total number of course offerings continue to grow, consistency within and between courses will become more important.
Overall, course developers are pleased with their experience in developing courses for the IVHS. The IVHS has had fourteen of their thirty-three developers design more than one course. A majority of those developers who were surveyed would develop yet another course if asked and would also recommend course development to a friend or colleague. This is indicative of the fact that the developers are generally pleased with their course development experience.

The IVHS course development process is fairly open-ended with a lot of room for developers to create the kind of course that they want to create. Compared to the course development process of other virtual schools, the IVHS is very open-ended. Developers with the IVHS are given pretty much a carte blanche for the structure and style of their courses, whereas developers with other virtual schools are typically expected to work within a structured template. This reality has resulted in many different “looks” and “feels” to the IVHS courses, to the point where there is so little consistency between courses that it is entirely possible for a student to feel like they are actually taking courses from two separate entities. In addition, the IVHS appear to provide their developers with guidance from both the IVHS and eCollege on an ad hoc or as needed basis and payment is made upon completion of the course, whereas the contracts for development utilized by other virtual schools spell out specific deliverables by specific dates for a specific portion of the overall payment (which is actually two to three times the amount offered by the IVHS).

Also, the vast majority, if not all of the course developers for the IVHS are former or practicing teachers with little experience in the design and development of structured learning activities outside of their own classroom. While this has been a positive aspect of the course development process, as these individuals bring a wealth of classroom experience into the development of their virtual courses, it is also provide many challenges for these developers. Many of the developers expressed concern about the lack of guidance provided by both the IVHS and eCollege in terms of how to go about creating their courses to what to include in their courses to formatting issues. However, many of the developers also commented on the helpfulness of the people at the IVHS and eCollege in their course development process.

Approximately half of the IVHS courses were developed by a team of two or more developers and this has worked well in some instances and not so well in others. From 2001-02 to 2003-04, the IVHS has fifteen of their thirty-seven courses developed by a team of developers. In instances where the two or more developers got along, the partnership appeared to work well and even some of the individual developers commented on the usefulness of having more than one developer. However, there were instances where a team of developers simply did not get along or they had differences of opinion in terms of what the course should include. In these instances, the two parts of the final course were very different in their style and substance, and even in the nature of the content of the course. In addition, these teams did not benefit from the act of two professionals coming together to develop a shared product.

The course developers for the IVHS were trained as teachers and unable to utilize the technology of the web to its fullest capacity. It was state earlier that the vast majority, if not all of the course developers for the IVHS are former or practicing teachers with little experience in the design and development of structured learning activities outside of their own classroom. Many of these individuals also possessed few of the technical skills that could be used to really enhance their courses by taking full advantage of the medium of the World Wide Web. In other course development processes technical experts were hired in addition to subject matter experts to develop the courses. In these course development systems, a course developer who had shown themselves as capable with the technology could be offered a full contract, while others who were only able to handle the content were offered two thirds of a contract with the remaining third going to someone to specifically design the multimedia content of the course.

Overall, the course developers reported to having a relatively positive experience in designing their courses for the IVHS, however, there were also a number of suggestions for improvement in the system. There were five main recommendations that came from the data generated as a part of this evaluation.
  1. Create a structure for the course development process so that the IVHS, eCollege, and the developer are under the same impressions when it comes to the nature of the assistance that can be provided and the expectations of all parties within the specific deadlines of the course development process.
  2. Divide the course development process into timed segments that describe the nature of the deliverable due at the end of each period, with partial payment for the successful delivery of each of the segments.
  3. If the IVHS continues to use a team of developers for a single course, determine a method of select team members that will work well together.
  4. Provide training in multimedia software for course developers or split the course development process so that technical developers can add multimedia components to courses after the content has been developed.
  5. Any tool used to guide the development of course developers needs to be open enough to allow for the creativity of the developer.
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Friday, March 02, 2007

Repost from the AECT BlogTrack - More On Digital Natives

This entry from the AECT BlogTrack is the third and final entry for the month of July and the seventeenth overall in the re-posts from this series.



Continuing on this theme of digital natives (see What Are Virtual Schools Doing For Digital Natives? for the most recent post), let’s get back to this issue of whether or not they exist and how they are defined. When I look around the blogsphere I see entries like:

One of the more interesting blog entries I’ve seen comes from the horse’s mouth, Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants: Origins of Terms from Marc Prensky’s Weblog.

Even in my own writing, in a recent manuscript that I am working on I wrote (and please excuse the notes to self included):

The covers of Time and Newsweek for the last week of March and first week of April 2006 read “Are Kids Too Wired for Their Own Good?” and “Putting the ‘We” in Web” respectively. The idea that today’s students are somehow different than previous generations and these differences are caused by access digital technology, such as the Internet and cell phones, is becoming common theme in both the popular media and is even being introduced in the academic literature (although there has been little actual research reported or conducted into these perceived differences). One of the first to discuss this in the literature, Tapscott (1998) labels these students the Net Generation. Basing his categories on David Foote’s 1996 book Boom, Bust, and Echo, Tapscott includes the echo generation or those born after 1977 as being a part of this Net Generation. While Tapscott acknowledges that not all of those born during this time frame have access to the Internet yet, he claims that they all have “some degree of fluency with digital media” (p. 3).

Similar to Tapscott, Howe and Strauss (2000) have also given the next generation a label based on a specific date of birth: millennials. [Add in sentence or two about the millennials once I get that recalled book] On the other hand, Dede (2005) groups these students – which he calls neomillennials – based upon a set of learning characteristics and can include the next generation of students that we now see in our educational institutions, but also baby boomers, Generation X’ers, or the children of the echo. The learning characteristics that he believes makes these students different include:

  • fluency in multiple media and in simulation-based virtual settings,
  • communal learning involving diverse, tacit, situated experience, with knowledge distributed across a community and a context as well as within an individual,
  • a balance among experiential learning, guided mentoring, and collective reflection,
    expression through nonlinear, associational webs of representations, and
  • co-design of learning experiences personalized to individual needs and preferences. (¶ 2)

While these various labels have been introduced over the past decade, most have not caught on outside of their immediate fields, with the exception of the label “digital native”.

Prensky (2001) has dubbed this next generation digital natives, as he feels that they “are all ‘native speakers’ of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet” (¶ 5), with those of us who are not native to this digital language are considered digital immigrants. Today’s teenager has grown up with digital technology (e.g., cell phones, video games, computers, DVD players, video cameras, MP3 players, etc.) around them since birth, and according to Prensky (2006) the average kid by the time they have graduated from college has “spent fewer than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but often more than 10,000 hours playing video games, another 10,000 on their cell phones, and more than 20,000 watching television” (pp. 27-28). While he doesn’t provide a specific date, like Tapscott, Howe, and Strauss, Prensky alludes to the fact that this generation of digital natives began at a specific time – in the same way that an immigrant is one who comes to an existing place, these natives were born during the digital age.

So, I guess this boils back down to some fundamental questions:

  1. Are today’s students actually different than previous generations?
  2. Are these differences physical (i.e., are they actually wired differently)?
  3. How do we define these differences?
  4. What do we do about these differences?

Selected Bibliography (University of Chicago formatting):

Dede, Chris. “Planning for Neomillennial Learning Styles,” EDUCAUSE Quarterly 28. (2005): http://www.educause.edu/pub/eq/eqm05/eqm0511.asp

Foote, David K. and Daniel Stoffman. Boom Bust & Echo: Profiting from the Demographic Shift in the 21st Century. Toronto, ON: Stoddart Publishing Co., 2000.

Prensky, Marc. “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants – Part II: Do They Really Think Differently?,” On the Horizon 9, no. 6 (December 2001): http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/default.asp.

Prensky, Marc. “Don’t bother me mom – I’m learning!” (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2006), 27-28.

Tapscott, Don. Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (New York: McGraw Hill Inc., 1998), 3.

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Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Repost from the AECT BlogTrack - What Are Virtual Schools Doing For Digital Natives?

hThis entry from the AECT BlogTrack is the second entry from the month of July and the sixteenth overall in the re-posts from this series.



Okay, first of all I apologize that it has been two weeks since my last post (i.e., June Non-Research Entries) - it won’t happen again.

This evening I was checking my e-mail and on daily Yahoo! alert for cyber school alerted me to a news item that I found interesting.

MasterNewMedia.org Tue, 18 Jul 2006 1:22 AM PDT

“Teaching and learning are changing with the Internet. Students are by and large vastly more digitally literate than many of their instructors. This is a generation that was born to and came of age online. The Internet and technology, in many cases, appears second nature for most. Therefore, setting learning outcomes and educational objective must be concomitant with student behavior. We have…
This is what I saw, listed among a dozen other news items that had nothing to do with cyber schooling (one of the unfortunate features of the Yahoo! alert - that is searches for cyber and school, not “cyber school”).
In any regard, this particular news item got me thinking back to previous posts that I have made on the topic of digital natives (see Do Digital Natives Exist? and Research on Digital Natives). In this news item, which actually describes a series of entries from a class blog for a public journalism class, he makes the statement:

“how important it is that the new academics leverage new communication technologies to meet and challenge students in their new natural habitat: the online world.”
I have to wonder if that is what virtual schooling is doing. Let’s forgot about the automatic assumption that digital natives do exist and that all of the students we have in our classrooms and schools today are included into that category and ask the question, are cyber and virtual schools leveraging new communications technologies when they challenge their students?

I don’t know… I mean one would think that virtual schools would be ideally suited to do this, but it has been my experience that they haven’t. For example, the North American Council for Online Learning (NACOL) is the professional organization for those involved with virtual schooling. They have recently created a blog, TOTOL NACOL, where one of the first entries was a question to their member: What are the most useful tools you have discovered in your online learning experience? What happened when you started to use them? In reading the responses thus far, I see: availability of the instructor, using an asynchronous discussion forum, simply simulations, digital literacy, maximizing resources and access, providing school-based support, instant messaging, and an inviting instructor.
While I don’t want to be insulting to some who are actually fellow colleagues, but other than instant messaging, what from that list couldn’t be done in a traditional classroom with the students that we have these days (I mean how many classroom-based college courses utilize a WebCT discussion forum)? I the original article I referenced, the author talked about things like blogs, wikis, podcasts, video blogs, screencasts, and RSS feeds. Even when I look at Prensky’s work, as he was the one who termed the label digital native, he talks about cell phone and instant messaging usage, along with gaming (particularly these massive multi-player online games).
So, I guess that brings us back to two basic questions:
  1. Do digital natives exist (and if so, how do we define them)?
  2. Given their unique position of being in the digital world, what are virtual schools doing to cater to these digital natives?

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Friday, February 09, 2007

Repost from the AECT BlogTrack - Achievement Differences Between Students in Traditional and Virtual Courses

This entry from the AECT BlogTrack is the first entry from the month of July, the seventh in the series where I described the research work that I have done to date in virtual schooling, and the fifteenth overall in the re-posts from this series.



This study was actually a follow-up to a study that I had conducted a couple of years ago that only considered students in the Advanced Placement program in Newfoundland and Labrador. This particular study is also being used as a foundation for my dissertation study, as my dissertation is looking at what online learning looks like for these students, especially given the lack of student selectivity in this virtual school and their competitive results when compared to classroom-based students.

The purpose of the study was to examine the student achievement in standardized public exams and final course scores in the province between different delivery models to determine whether or not students are succeeding in the virtual high school environment at the same rate as their classroom counterparts. The final course scores and the standardized public exam scores for every student in the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador for the school years 2001-02 to 2004-05 were obtained and combined with information from the High School Distance Education Course Report.

When considering the students final course scores, the data indicated that for each of the first three years that the CDLI was in operation students from rural areas in the web-based courses and during the fourth year students from both the rural and urban web-based performed as well or better than any of their other counterparts. A similar pattern was found with the annual analysis of public exam scores. Like the final course averages, during the 2002-03 the web-based students in rural areas performed as well as any other group of students (excluding a single urban student who was enrolled in a web-based CDLI course). However, during the 2003-04 school year the performance of both rural and urban students in the web-based courses scored lower on their public exams that students who received their instruction in a traditional classroom. This past year this trend was reversed, with both rural and urban students in web-based courses scoring higher on their public exams than classroom-based students.

While annual comparisons of the students’ public exam scores and final course averages are useful, a comparison of the total four year period is also in order. Table 1 provides such a comparison.
Table 1. Students’ scores based upon delivery model and location (note sure why Blogger formats it like this)


Public ExamFinal Course Average
Web delivered rural61.7 (n = 826)69.3 (n = 3,452)
Web delivered urban65.7 (n = 11)66.3 (n = 81)
Web delivered total61.8 (n = 837)69.2 (n = 3533)
Classroom delivered rural62.3 (n = 15,384)68.5 (n = 90,190)
Classroom delivered urban63.1 (n = 23,080)67.7 (n = 115,029)
Classroom delivered total62.8 (n = 38,464)68.1 (n = 205,219)
# of missing cases1,029 (2.6%)5,650 (2.6%)
Total # of cases40,330214,402


This combined analysis indicated that over the four year period the CDLI has been in operation there had been some fluctuation in both performance measures when both delivery model and location are considered, but little difference in the overall performance of students based upon delivery model on both their public exam scores and final course averages. (For more information, see Barbour and Mulcahy, 2006)

Selected Bibliography

Barbour, M. & Mulcahy, D. (2006). An inquiry into achievement differences in traditional and virtual high school courses. Roundtable presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, CA.

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Thursday, February 01, 2007

Repost from the AECT BlogTrack - Students Perceptions of Web-Based Design

This entry from the AECT BlogTrack is the sixth and final entry from the month of June, the sixth in the series where I described the research work that I have done to date in virtual schooling, and the forteenth overall in the re-posts from this series.



This study was a follow-up to the teachers and designers perceptions of web-based design study that had been conducted the previous year (see Teachers and Designers Perceptions of Web-Based Design). Like the previous study, this is one that I have yet to publish on - although I do have a fairly good findings section created so I hope to build around that over the summer and get something out the door by or early into the Fall semester.

This study involved interviews and focus groups with six students from rural schools. The interviews were conducted via telephone during May 2005 and the focus group was conducted in June 2005 using the Elluminate Live software. Like the previous study, the goal for this study was to determine characteristics of an effectively designed web-based course perceived to be important by these secondary students.

Based upon an analysis of the interview transcripts, students initially indicated that they don’t use the web-based content that much. However, when I began to discuss each of the individual components of the template it did come out that they did use the content more than they initially let on. It should be noted that this level of usage was still not as high as the CDLI wanted, or even as high as was believed by the teachers and course designers that had been interviewed a year earlier. One of the barriers to using the web-based content is the amount of work assigned during offline time. Students simply reported having to complete too much seat work to spend more time using the web-based content. Other barriers included how little the e-teachers actually used it and the fact that students did not necessarily trust that the content was accurate.

When the students were discussing web-based design they confirmed many of the perceptions that had been exposed by the teachers and course developers in the earlier study. For example, the students indicated that they didn’t like text and preferred multimedia be used to explain concepts and provide information. The students also indicated that they wanted to have a good set of notes. Contrary to the belief by teachers and course developer’s that the students simply clicked on random radio buttons and hit “submit” when completing the “Test Yourself” quiz feature, students actually expressed that they found the review questions quite useful. One point that was consistently raised by the students that wasn’t a theme in the earlier study was that while students enjoyed the various media that the Internet was able to offer, in many instances they were unable to access it outside of school – limiting their ability to use the web-based course materials at home.

There were many other trends (e.g., dealing with institutional and school-based tutoring, challenges students experienced, expanding learning communities, the use of the synchronous content, the nature of their online learning) that were generated from these interviews, but were not germane to the research questions for this particular study which may prove valuable in future research projects.

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Thursday, January 25, 2007

Repost from the AECT BlogTrack - Student Perceptions of Online Learning

This entry from the AECT BlogTrack is the fifth entry from the month of June, the fifth in the series where I described the research work that I have done to date in virtual schooling, and the thirteenth overall in the re-posts from this series.



This was the first study that I conducted after joining the online learning research group that Dr. Hill had established here at the University of Georgia - yes, this is the same group that is sponsoring this BlogTrack. The actual research projet was one that had been originally conducted by Liyan and Ernise Singleton (Higher Education) with a group of online students in one of our Master’s programs. This was first replicated by Frankie Jones (Corporate Settings) in a corporate setting in the United States and then by Myung Hwa Koh (Trends & Issues) in a corporate setting in South Korea. So my version of the students was the fourth different population.

Over the years we have talked about writing up something that compares the findings of the four different studies (I believe that Frankie and Myung Hwa did this with their two corporate versions), however, I suppose before that can happen I will need to actually present or publish the findings from my study - which I hope to have written into manuscript form and submitted somewhere over the summer.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the perceptions of students who have completed courses from the CDLI on helpful and challenging components of web-based learning, specifically to explore web-based learning from the secondary student’s perspective to inform the creation of strategies that can be implemented to assist web-based learning designers. A mixed methods approach, using both quantitative (survey) and qualitative (interview) data collection methods, was adopted. Eighteen different schools, representing all four school districts in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, agreed to participate in this study. During the 2004-05 school year, a total of thirty-eight participants completed the survey and eight participated in a follow-up interview.

While a complete analysis of the data is still being conducted, some of the preliminary results from the survey portion indicate that overall students are fairly pleased with their web-based learning experiences. When asked “overall, I am satisfied with taking web-based courses,” 87% of the students indicated they were. This is a particularly positive result, given that two thirds of the students who completed the survey had only taken one or two web-based courses. As a possible explanation for that satisfaction, one of the themes from the interviews was the ability of students to access courses that had previously been unavailable in their school. This increased access was seen by the students as the greatest benefit of the CDLI. In addition to this, students also mentioned factors such as being able to interact with students from different parts of the province, the ability to increase their technology skills, and the opportunity to become more independent in their learning as other benefits.

The two initial challenges identified in the survey data were a lack of time and technical problems. Half of the students who completed the survey indicated that there was generally a lack of time to get everything that was required in their web-based course completed by the assigned deadlines. To re-enforce the first of these, one of the themes from the interviews was that students were simply unable to complete all of the seat/practice work that is assigned to them and often submit their graded work after the assigned deadline. Also, more that two third of students expressed that technical problems was the main challenge faced in their web-based learning. This was also a theme from the interviews, technical problems were common when it comes to the hardware, and particularly the software used for synchronous classes. In addition, many students expressed difficulties with being able to complete work at home due to the lack of necessary software or the fact that much of the asynchronous content is designed to be used at higher bandwidths than is typically available in these rural areas.

Finally, when asked which factors are important for success in a web-based course students selected well-organized content, motivation, and time management as the most important factors. Other factors that were seen as important were clear objectives, exercises, quizzes, technology comfort level, although not to the extent as the first three. Interestingly, students indicated that feedback was the least important factors in their success in this web-based learning environment.

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Friday, January 19, 2007

Re-Post From The AECT BlogTrack - Teachers and Designers Perceptions of Web-Based Design

This entry from the AECT BlogTrack is the fourth entry from the month of June, the fourth in the series where I described the research work that I have done to date in virtual schooling, and the twelvth overall in the re-posts from this series.



This was the first study that I conducted as a doctoral student at the University of Georgia. It started as a project that I did for my qualitative research courses, that I would expand upon later - see one of the future entries on Student Perceptions of Web-Based Design.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the characteristics perceived to be important for an effectively designed web-based course for secondary school students by those who have designed courses for this population of students. The data collection process involved 30-60 minute telephone interviews. These interviews were conducted with different six course developers, e-teachers and individuals who have held both roles for the CDLI, after twenty-eight of the thirty-two CDLI course developers and teachers were contacted. All interviews occurred from June to August of 2004.

From an analysis of the interview transcript, I identified seven thematic categories which I refined into guidelines for developers. When designing web-based content for secondary school students, course developers should:
  1. prior to beginning development of any of the web-based material, plan out the course with ideas for the individual lessons and specific items that they would like to include;
  2. keep the navigation simple and to a minimum, but don’t present the material the same way in every lesson;
  3. provide a summary of the content from the required readings or the synchronous lesson and include examples that are personalized to the students’ own context;
  4. ensure students are given clear instructions and model expectations of the style and level that will be required for student work;
  5. refrain from using too much text and consider the use of visuals to replace or supplement text when applicable;
  6. only use multimedia that will enhances the content and not simply because it is available; and
  7. develop their content for the average or below average student.
One of the interesting developments from this study was that the guidelines listed above had little similarity to online learning guidelines for instructional designers found in the literature, which further underscored the differences between the ways adults learn and how adolescents learn. (For more information, see Barbour, 2005a; Barbour, 2005b.)

Selected Bibliography

Barbour, M. (2005a). Perceptions of effective web-based design for secondary school students: A narrative analysis of previously collected data. The Morning Watch, 32(3-4). Retrieved November 04, 2005 from http://www.mun.ca/educ/faculty/mwatch/win05/Barbour.htm

Barbour, M. (2005b). The design of web-based courses for secondary students. Journal of Distance Learning, 9(1), 27-36.

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