Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on E-Learning Volume One ECEL2013

Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on e Learning e-Learning SKEMA Business School Sophia Antipolis France 30-31 October 2013 Volume One

Edited by MĂŠlanie Ciussi and Marc Augier

A conference managed by ACPI, UK www.academic-conferences.org

Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on e-Learning ECEL 2013 SKEMA Business School Sophia Antipolis, France 30-31 October 2013 Edited by MĂŠlanie Ciussi and Marc Augier

Copyright The Authors, 2013. All Rights Reserved.

No reproduction, copy or transmission may be made without written permission from the individual authors.

Papers have been double-blind peer reviewed before final submission to the conference. Initially, paper abstracts were read and selected by the conference panel for submission as possible papers for the conference.

Many thanks to the reviewers who helped ensure the quality of the full papers.

These Conference Proceedings have been submitted to Thomson ISI for indexing. Please note that the process of indexing can take up to a year to complete.

Further copies of this book and previous year’s proceedings can be purchased from http://academic-bookshop.com E-Book ISBN: 978-1-909507-84-5 E-Book ISSN: 2048-8645 Book version ISBN: 978-1-909507-82-1 Book Version ISSN: 2048-8637 CD Version ISBN: 978-1-909507-85-2 CD Version ISSN: 2048-8637

Published by Academic Conferences and Publishing International Limited Reading UK 44-118-972-4148 www.academic-publishing.org

Contents Paper Title

Author(s)

Page No.

Preface

v

Committee

vi

Biographies

ix

When Computers Will Replace Teachers and Counsellors: Heaven and Hell Scenarios

Aharon (Roni) Aviram and Yoav Armony

1

Planning and Implementing a new Assessment Strategy Using an e-Learning Platform

Rosalina Babo and Ana Azevedo

8

Authentic Learning in Online Environments – Transforming Practice by Capturing Digital Moments

Wendy Barber, Stacey Taylor and Sylvia Buchanan

17

Signature Based Credentials, an Alternative Method for Validating Student Access in e-Learning Systems

Orlando Belo, Paulo Monsanto and Anália Lourenço

24

Two-way Impact: Institutional e-Learning Policy/Educator Practices in Creative Arts Through ePortfolio Creation

Diana Blom, Jennifer Rowley, Dawn Bennett, Matthew Hitchcock and Peter Dunbar-Hall

33

Automated Evaluation Results Analysis With Data Mining Algorithms

Farida Bouarab-Dahmani and Razika Tahi

41

Language e-Learning Based on Adaptive Decision-Making System

Vladimír Bradáč and Cyril Klimeš

48

Barriers Engaging With Second Life: Podiatry Students Development of Clinical Decision Making

Margaret Bruce, Sally Abey, Phyllis Waldron and Mark Pannell

58

Tasks for Teaching Scientific Approach Using the Black Box Method

Martin Cápay and Martin Magdin

64

Blended Learning as a Means to Enhance Students’ Motivation and to Improve Self-Governed Learning

Ivana Cechova and Matthew Rees

71

Strategies for Coordinating On-Line and Face-To-Face Components in a Blended Course for Interpreter Trainers

Barbara Class

78

iBuilding for Success? iBooks as Open Educational Resources in Built Environment Education

David Comiskey, Kenny McCartan and Peter Nicholl

86

Facilitation of Learning in Electronic Environments: Reconfiguring the Teacher’s Role

Faiza Derbel

94

Effect of e-Learning on Achievement and Interest in Basic General Mathematics Among College of Education Students in Nigeria

Foluke Eze

101

Self-Organization of e-Learning Systems as the Future Paradigm for Corporate Learning

Gert Faustmann

106

An Online Tool to Manage and Assess Collaborative Group Work

Alvaro Figueira and Helena Leal

112

Design 4 Pedagogy (D4P): Designing a Pedagogical Tool for Open and Distance Learning Activities

Olga Fragou and Achilles Kameas

121

The Affordances of 4G Mobile Networks Within the UK Higher Education Sector

Elaine Garcia, Martial Bugliolo, and Ibrahim Elbeltagi

131

An Integral Approach to Online Education: An Example

Jozef Hvorecky

139

i

Paper Title

Author(s)

Page No.

Scaffolding in e-Learning Environment

Antonín Jančařík

149

Planning for Success in Introducing and Embedding Technology to Enhance Learning

Amanda Jefferies and Marija Cubric

156

Adopting Blended Learning – Practical Challenges and Possible Solutions for Small Private Institutions

Olga Kandinskaia

164

Evaluation of e-Learning Courses for Lifelong Learning

Jana Kapounova, Milan Majdak and Pavel Novosad

173

Interuniversity Collaborative Learning With Wiki Toolsets

Elisabeth Katzlinger and Michael Herzog

184

Something for Everyone: MOOC Design for Informing Dementia Education and Research

Carolyn King, Jo-Anne Kelder, Rob Phillips, Fran McInerney, Kathleen Doherty, Justin Walls, Andrew Robinson and James Vickers

191

Collaborative Learning Environment for Discussing Topic Explanation Skill Based on Presentation Slide

Tomoko Kojiri, Hayato Nasu, Keita Maeda, Yuki Hayashi and Toyohide Watanabe

199

Learning Potentials of e-Assessments: Developing Multiple Literacies Through Media Enhanced Assessment

Christopher Könitz, Jakob Diel and Jürgen Cleve

209

Methodology for Creating Adaptive Study Material

Kateřina Kostolányová and Jana Šarmanová

218

Using Twitter, Blogs and Other Web 2.0 Technologies and Internet Resources to Enhance Arabic as a Foreign-Language Reading Skills

Blair Kuntz

224

The use of Social Networks by Universities for Communication at Institutional Level

Wolfram Laaser, Julio Gonzalo Brito and Eduardo Adrián Toloza

231

Developing Active Collaborative e-Learning Framework for Vietnam’s Higher Education Context

Long Le, Hao Tran and Axel Hunger

240

Telepresence as Educational Practice in the Third TeachingRoom – a Study in Advanced Music Education

Karin Tweddell Levinsen, Rikke Ørngreen and Mie Buhl

250

An Empirical Study on Faculty Perceptions and Teaching Practices of Wikipedia

Josep Lladós, Eduard Aibar, Maura Lerga, Antoni Meseguer and Julià Minguillon

258

How to Motivate Adult Learners Through e-Learning: Some key Insights From Research Case Studies

Kevin Lowden, Rahela Jurković and Peter Mozelius

266

Training Teachers to Learn by Design, Through a Community of Inquiry

Katerina Makri, Kyparisia Papanikolaou, Athanasia Tsakiri and Stavros Karkanis

274

Usefulness of Feedback in e-Learning From the Students’ Perspective

María-Jesús Martínez-Argüelles, Dolors PlanaErta, Carolina Hintzmann-Colominas, Marc Badia-Miró and Josep-Maria Batalla-Busquets

283

Trust as an Organising Principle of e-Learning Adoption: Reconciling Agency and Structure

Jorge Tiago Martins and Miguel Baptista Nunes

293

Smart Environments for Learning – Multi-Agent Systems Approach

Peter Mikulecky

304

Assessment of Virtual Learning Environments by Higher Education Teachers and Students

Luísa Miranda, Paulo Alves and Carlos Morais

311

Learning by Building – the Lunarstorm Generation Constructing Their own ePortfolios

Peter Mozelius

319

Learning and Instruction in the Digital Age

Antoinette Muntjewerff

323

ii

Paper Title

Author(s)

Page No.

Effectiveness of Instructional Suggestions for Note-Taking Skills in a Blended Learning Environment

Minoru Nakayama, Kouichi Mutsuura and Hiroh Yamamoto

333

Evaluation of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) From the Learner’s Perspective

Bernard Nkuyubwatsi

340

In the Presence of Technology – Teaching in Hybrid Synchronous Classrooms

Anne-Mette Nortvig

347

Searching for the Ideal CLIL Course Design

Jarmila Novotná and Lenka Procházková

354

[Teaching Desktop] Video Conferencing in a Collaborative and Problem Based Setting

Rikke Ørngreen and Per Mouritzen

360

Challenging Pre-Service Teachers’ on Collaborative Authoring of Learning Designs in a Blended Learning Context

Kyparisia Papanikolaou and Evangelia Gouli

369

Technology-Enhanced-Learning and Student-Centeredness in a Foreign Language Military Class – a Case Study

Maria-Magdalena Popescu, Ruxandra Buluc, Luiza-Maria Costea and Speranza Tomescu

378

The Disruptive Potential of e-Learning in Academe and Beyond: A Futuristic Perspective

Ali Raddaoui

386

What Really Happens When Educators Make and Evaluate TEL Innovations?

Claire Raistrick

393

A Reality Check on Student Mobile Adoption and Content Creation in Resource-Constrained Environments

Patient Rambe and Liezel Nel

401

Student Perceptions on the Usefulness of Educational Technologies at a South African University

Patient Rambe and Liezel Nel

411

Digital Services Governance With AGIMUS

David Reymond

420

Functional Architecture of a Service-Oriented Integrated Learning Environment

Danguole Rutkauskiene, Rob Mark, Ramunas Kubiliunas and Daina Gudoniene

431

Using Social Network VKontakte for Studying Sociology

Daniyar Sapargaliyev and Assel Jetmekova

440

Automatic Creation of Semantic Network of Concepts in Adaptive e-Learning

Emilie Šeptáková

447

Gathering the Voices: Disseminating the Message of the Holocaust for the Digital Generation

Angela Shapiro, Brian McDonald and Aidan Johnston

457

Monitoring the Concept of e-Learning in Mind Maps of University Students

Ivana Šimonová

463

Impact of Internet Usage on Students’ Academic Performance

Florica Tomos, Christopher Miller, Paul Jones, Ramdane Djebarni, Oshisanya Oluwaseyi Olubode, Peter Obaju-Falade, Henrietta Eleodimuo Nkiruka and Tejaswi Asmath

470

An International Approach to Creative Pedagogy and Students’ Preferences of Interactive Media

Florica Tomos, Peter Mozelius, Olga Shabalina, Oana Cristina Balan, Christos Malliarakis, Christopher Miller, David Turner and Paul Jones

479

The Influence of the “Approach gap” Between Students’ and Teachers’ e-Learning Preferences

Nazime Tuncay

488

Tutoring and Automatic Evaluation of Logic Proofs

Karel Vaculík, Lubomír Popelínský, Eva Mráková and Juraj Jurčo

495

The Global Classroom Video Conferencing Model and First Evaluations

Charlotte Lærke Weitze, Rikke Ørngreen and Karin Levinsen

503

iii

Paper Title

Author(s)

Page No.

Social Media as an Educational Tool: Students’ Perspectives and Usage

Jan Wiid, Michael Cant and Corinne Nell

511

Teaching GHG Reduction for the Food Industry to Adult Learners Using Blended Learning

Stephen Wilkinson, Duncan Folley, Cathy Barnes, Philip Richard Scott and Quintan Thornton

521

E-Learning and Life-Long Learning: A Descriptive Case Study From a Teacher Educator’s Perspective: 1995-2013

Eleanor Vernon Wilson

531

Can e-Learning Identify Poor Performers in Medical School?

Hitomi Yukawa, Raoul Breugelmans, Takashi Izumi and Miki Izumi

537

A Novel Approach to e-Learning: Yasar University e-Learning System (YES)

Ibrahim Zincir, Melih Zeytinoglu, Ahmed Rana and Samsun Basarici

546

PHD Papers

553

Cultural Differences in Students’ Perceptions Towards Online Learning Success Factors

Armando Cortés and Elena Barbera

555

Visual Analytics by Animations in Higher Education

Jan Géryk

565

Strategies for Digital Inclusion - Towards a Pedagogy for Embracing Student Diversity With Online Learning

Baylie Hart Clarida, Milena Bobeva, Maggie Hutchings and Jacqui Taylor

573

GeoGebra in Teaching Linear Algebra

Veronika Havelková

581

E-Learning Based Preparation for Educational Activities Outside of School

Jiří Hoffman

590

Machine and Social Intelligent Peer-Assessment Systems for Assessing Large Student Populations in Massive Open Online Education

Cristian Jimenez-Romero, Jeffrey Johnson and Ricardo De Castro

598

Virtual Guide as a Means of a Tailored Tour of an Educational Exhibition

Lukas Najbrt

608

Online Interactive Module for Teaching a Computer Programming Course

Aisha Othman, Crinela Pislaru and Ahmed Impes

617

The Highs and Lows of Ubiquitous Mobile Connectivity Investigating Students' Well-Being

Michele Salvagno

626

Non Academic Papers

635

Development of a Fully Integrated Global Learning System in a Regulated Environment

Chuck Sigmund, Doug Wallace and Terry Kliever

637

PAOK – ICT Network for Upper Secondary Education

Riikka Vanninen, Matleena Laakso and Minna Helynen

643

Work In Progress Papers

647

Challenges in Medical Education by e-Learning

Elena Taina Avramescu, Dorin Popescu, George Ionescu and Georgios Antonopoulos

649

Activity-Based Choice of Connection and Device in e/mLearning

Cristina De Castro

354

The Digital Carrot and Survival Stick for Increased Learning and Teaching Agility

Sue Greener and Piers MacLean

659

Paradigm Shift - Engaging Academics in Social Media - the Case of Bournemouth University

Irma Kalashyan, Diyana Kaneva, Sophie Lee, David Knapp, Gelareh Roushan and Milena Bobeva

662

iv

Paper Title

Author(s)

Page No.

A Global Approach to Graduate Education and Research Training

Barbara Moser-Mercer and Barbara Class

666

OLAREX: Initiating Secondary Schools Teachers Into Online Labs Experience For Teaching

Ramona Georgiana Oros, Andreas Pester and Olga Dziabenko

670

Promoting Staff Engagement With Social Networking in Higher Education

Rebecca Rochon and John Knight

673

v

Preface

These Proceedings represent the work of contributors to the 12th European Conference on e-Learning, ECEL 2013, hosted this year by SKEMA Business School, Sophia Antipolis, France. The Conference Chair is Dr Mélanie Ciussi, and the Programme Chair is Dr Marc Augier, both from SKEMA Business School, Sophia Antipolis, France.

The conference will be opened with a keynote address by Prof Steven Warburton, Head of Department of Technology Enhanced Learning, University of Surrey, UK, on the topic of“Uncertain futures: adapting to rapid change through patterns and analytics“. The second day will be opened by Dr Viktor Dörfler, Director of the Management Development Programme, Management Science Department, University of Strathclyde Business School, Glasgow, United Kingdom on the topic of "Passionate Learners: Lifelong Learning in a Flux".

As usual the papers range across a very wide spectrum of issues, all of which are pertinent to the successful use of e-Learning applications. It is clear that the role being played by e-Learning in the pedagogical process is considerable and that there is still ample scope for further development in this area.

The ECEL Conference constitutes a knowledge hub for individuals to present their research findings, display their work in progress and discuss conceptual advances in many different branches of e-Learning. At the same time, it provides an important opportunity for members of the EL community to come together with peers, share knowledge and exchange ideas.

With an initial submission of 160 abstracts, after the double blind, peer review process there are 68 academic papers, 9 Phd Papers, 7 Work in Progress papers and 2 non academic papers in these Conference Proceedings. These papers reflect the truly global nature of research in the area with contributions from Australia, Austria, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Nigeria, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Tunisia, Turkey, UK, USA, and Vietnam.

A selection of papers – those agreed by a panel of reviewers and the editor will be published in a special conference edition of the EJEL (Electronic Journal of e-Learning www.ejel.org ).

I wish you a most interesting conference.

Mélanie Ciussi, Conference Chair and Marc Augier Programme Chair October 2013

vi

ConferenceCommitee Conference Executive Dr Mélanie Ciussi, SKEMA Business School, Sophia Antipolis, France Mini track Chairs Dr Mélanie Ciussi, SKEMA Business School, Sophia Antipolis, France Jorge Tiago Martins, University of Sheffield, UK Dr Jana Kapounova, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic Prof. Ali H. Raddaoui, University of Wyoming in Laramie , USA Dr Kim C. Long, Wiley College, Texas, USA Dr Rikke Orngreen, Aalborg University, Denmark Dr Marc Augier, SKEMA Business School, Sophia Antipolis, France Committee members The conference programme committee consists of key people in the e-learning community around the world. The following people have confirmed their participation: Ariffin Abdul Mutalib (Universiti Utara Malaysia, Malaysia); Dr. Siti aishah Abdullah (University Technology Mara, Kelantan, Malaysia); Babajide Abidogun (Faculty of Education, University of Plymouth, South Africa); Dr Wilfried Admiraal (Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands); Associate Professor Dr Zainal Abidin Akasah (Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia, Malaysia); Dr Ali Alawneh (Philadelpia University, Jordan); Shafqat Ali (University of Western Sydney, Australia); Prof. Dr. Maizam Alias (Universiti Tun Hussein Onn, Malaysia); Professor, Dr Abdallah Al-Zoubi (Princess Sumaya University for Technology, Jordan); Prof Antonios Andreatos (Hellenic Air Force Academy, Greece); Dr. Anca-Olga Andronic (Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Spiru Haret University, Romania); Dr. Razvan-Lucian Andronic (Spiru Haret University, Romania); Dr. Alla Anohina (Riga Technical University, Latvia); Sara Archard (University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand); Ezendu Ariwa (London Metropolitan University, Uk); Professor Mohamed Arteimi (Libyan Academy of Graduate studies, Tripoli, Libya); Dr William Ashraf (University of Sussex, UK); Dr Bunyamin Atici (Firat University, Turkey); Marc Augier (SKEMA Business School , France); Stephanos Avakian (Brighton Business School, University of Brighton,, UK); Dr Anders Avdic (Orebro University, Sweden); Simon Bachelor (Gamos, Reading, UK); Prof Alina Badulescu (University of Oradea, Romania); Dr Nimalathasan Balasundaram (University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka); Dr Joan Ballantine (University of Ulster, UK); Dr Trevor Barker (University of Hertfordshire, UK); Dr Josep-Maria Batalla (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain); Catherine Beaton (Rochester Institute of Technology, USA); Hans J.A Beldhuis (University of Groningen, The Netherlands); Professor Orlando Belo (University of Minho Campus de Gualtar, Portugal); Dr David Benito (Public University of Navarre, Pamplona, Spain); Andrea Benn (University of Brighton, UK,); Yongmei Bentley (University of Bedfordshire, UK); Daniel Biella (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany); Dr Radu Bilba (George Bacovia University,, Romania); Eric Bodger (University of Winchester, UK); Dr. Tharrenos Bratitsis (University of Western Macedonia, Greece); Dr Ann Brown (CASS Business School, London, UK); Dr Mark Brown (Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand); Mel Brown (Plymouth College of Art, UK); Giuseppe Cannavina (University of Sheffield, UK); James Carr (University of Newcastle, UK); Maggie Carson (Edinburgh University, UK); DR Antonio Cartelli (University of Cassino,, Italy); Rommert Casimir (Tilburg University , The Netherlands ); Dr Ivana Cechova (University of Defence, Czech Republic); Maria Celentano (University of Lecce, Italy); Dr Valentina Chappell (Friends University, USA KS,); Athina Chatzigavriil (LSE, UK); Dr Phaik Kin Cheah (University Tunku Abdul Rahman, Malaysia); Dr Esyin Chew (University of Glamorgan, UK); Dr Satyadhyan Chickerur (B V Bhoomaraddi College of Engineering and Technology, Hubli, India.); Dr Lucian Ciolan (University of Bucharest, Romania); Dr Melanie Ciussi (SKEMA Business School, Sophia Antipolis, France); Dr Barbara Class (University of Geneva, Switzerland); Prof. Dr. Jürgen Cleve (Wismar University, Germany,); Dr Lynn Clouder (Coventry University, UK); David Comiskey (University of Ulster, Northern Ireland,); Professor Thomas Connolly (University of West of Scotland, UK); Prof Grainne Conole (University of Leicester, UK, www.e4innovation.com); Sarah Cornelius (University of Aberdeen, UK); Dr Marija Cubric (University of Hertfordshire, UK,); Ken Currie (Edinburgh University, UK); Dr Valentina Dagiene (Vilnius University, Lithuania); Mark De Groot (Leeds Metropolitian University, UK); Antonio De Nicola (ENEA, Italy, Italy); Prof/Dr Carmen De Pablos Heredero (Rey juan Carlos University, Spain); Dr. Rajiv Dharaskar (GH Raisoni College of Engineering, Nagpur, India); Prof Vicenzo Di Lecce (Politecnico di Bari, Italy); Martina Doolan (University of Hertfordshire, UK); Dr Yanqing Duan (University of Luton, UK); Dr Jane Eberle (Emporia State University, USA); Dr Colin Egan (University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK); Dr. Ibrahim M. Elbeltagi (Plymouth University, UK); Dr Bulent Gursel Emiroglu (Eskisehir Yolu 20.km. Baglica Mevkii, Turkey); Foluke Eze (Federal College Of Education(Technical), Nigeria); Prof Liz Falconer (University of the West of England Bristol, UK,); Prof Gert Faustmann (Berlin School of Economics and Law, Germany, www.hwr-berlin.de); Prof Corona Felice (Faculty of Medicine and Surgery, University of Salerno, Italy); Rachel Fitzgerald (University of Northampton, UK,); Prof. Andrea Floros (Ionian University, Greece); Duncan Folley (Leeds Metropolitian University, UK); Dr Gabriele Frankl (Alpen-Adria-Universität vii

Klagenfurt, Kärnten,); Dan-Adrian German (Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing, USA,); Prof Itana Gimenes (Universidade Estadual de Maringá, Brazil); Dr. Katie Goeman (University of Leuven, Belgium (KU Leuven)., Belgium); Jetse Goris (University of Groningen, The Netherlands); DR Susan Greener (University of Brighton, UK); Dr. Michael Grosch (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany); David Guralnick (Columbia University and Kaleidoscope Learning, New York, USA); Dr Richard Hall (De Monfort University, Leicester, UK); Patricia Harvey (Greenwich University, London, UK); Thanos Hatziapostolou (International faculty of the university of sheffield, Greece); Dr Tali Heiman (The Open University, Israel); Alan Hilliard (University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK); Uwe Hoppe (Bildungswerk der Sächsischen Wirtschaft gGmbH, Germany); Dr Md. Fokhray Hossain (Daffodil International University (DIU), Bangladesh); Rob Howe (The University of Northampton, UK,); Stefan Hrastinski (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden); Dr Maggie Hutchings (Bournemouth University, England, UK); Dr. Eun Hwang (Indiana University of Pennsylvania, USA); Balde Idiatou (Noble Group Organised Solutions, Guinea); Dr. Olimpius Istrate (University of Bucharest, Romania,); Dr Antonin Jancarik (Faculty of education, Charles University, Czech Republic); Amor Jebali (University of Manouba, Tunisia); Dr Amanda Jefferies (University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK); Runa Jesmin (Global Heart Forum, UK); Dr John Jessel (Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom,); Aidan Johnston (University of Strathclyde, UK); Geraldine Jones (University of Bath, UK); Paul Jones (University of Plymouth, UK); Dr Jowati Juhary (National Defence University of Malaysia, Malaysia); Dr Michail Kalogiannakis (University of Crete, Faculty of Education, Crete); Clifton Kandler (University of Greenwich, UK); Catherine Kane (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland); Jana Kapounova (University of Ostrava, Czech Republic); Dr. Elisabeth Katzlinger (Johannes Kepler University, Austria); Dr Andrea Kelz (University of Applied Sciences Burgenland,Campus Pinkafeld, Austria); Kaido Kikkas (Estonian IT College + Tallinn University, Estonia,); John Knight (Bucks New University, UK,); Dr Jasna Kuljis (Brunel University, UK); Prof Sunaina Kumar (Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi, India); Dr. Swapna Kumar (University of Florida, USA); Blair Kuntz (University of Toronto, Canada); Professor Eugenijus Kurilovas (Vilnius Gediminas technical university / institute of mathmatics and informatics of Vinius University, Lithuania); Eleni Kyza (Cyprus University of Technology, Lemesos, Cyprus); Dr Yacine Lafifi (LabSTIC Laboratory, Guelma University, Algeria); Dr Maria Lambrou (University of the Aegean Business School, Greece); Andy Lapham (Thames Valley University, UK); Dr Mona Laroussi (Institut National des Sciences Appliquées et de la Technologie, Tnis and Lille, Tunisia); Jake Leith (University of Brighton, United Kingdom,); Kate Lennon (Glasgow Caledonian University, UK); Mariana Lilley (University of Hertfordshire, UK); Dr Jorgen Lindh (Jonkoping International Business School, Sweden); Dr. Gi-Zen Liu (National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan); Dr Ying Liu (Cambridge University, UK); Dr. Kim Long (Wiley College, USA,); Jenny Lorimer (University of Hertfortshire, UK); Ana Loureiro (Politechnic Institute of Santarem - School of Education, Portugal); Prof Sam Lubbe (University of South Africa, South Africa); Dr Robert Lucas (Keylink Computers Ltd, Kenilworth, UK); Dr Nick Lund (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK); Prof Zdena Lustigova (Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic); Dr Martin Magdin (Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Slovakia); Adnan Mahmood (University of Jinan, China); Dr. Chittaranjan Mandal (Dept of Computer Sc & Engg, IIT Kharagpur , India); Augostino Marengo (University of Bari, Italy); Dr Lindsay Marshall (Newcastle University, United Kingdom,); Dr Maria J Martinez-Arguelles (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain); David Mathew (University of Bedfordshire, England,); Erika Mechlova (University of Ostrava, Czech Republic); Dr. Cherifa Mehadji (University of Strasbourg, France); Rosina Merry (the school of Education The Universityof Waikatio, New Zealand);Linda Joy Mesh (Universita degli Studi di Siena, Italy); Jaroslava Mikulecka (Universityof Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic);Dr PeterMikulecky(Universityof Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic);Mike Mimirinis (Middlesex University, London, UK); Julia Mingullon (Universitat oberta de catalunya, Spain); Dr Ali Moeini (University of Tehran, Iran); Dr Jonathan Moizer(PlymouthUniversity, UK);Johann Moller (University of SouthAfrica (UNISA), South Africa); Dr. Begona Montero-Fleta (Universitat Politecnica de Valencia,Spain); Prof Lina Morgado (Universidade Aberta, Portugal); Kate Mottram (Coventry University, UK,); Peter Mozelius (Stockholm University,Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Sweden,); Prof RadouaneMrabet (ENSIA, Morocco); Dr Antoinette Muntjewerff (University of Amsterdam Faculty of Law,Netherlands); DrMinoru Nakayama (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan); Dr Michaela Nettekoven (WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria); Dr PaulNewbury (University of Sussex, UK); Professor Julian Newman (GlasgowCaledonianUniversity,UK); Emanuela-Alisa Nica (Center for Ethics and Health Policy and ,PetreAndrei University from Iasi, Romania); Dr Chetsada Noknoi (Thaksin University, Songkhla, Thailand);Dr Abel Nyamapfene (University of Exeter, UK); Sinead O’Neill (Waterford Institute of Technology ,Ireland); Ass. Prof. Dr Birgit Oberer (Kadir Has University, Turkey); Dr MaruffAkinwale Oladejo (Federal College of Education (Special), Nigeria); DR Kamila Olsevicova (Univeristyof Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic); Laurence Olver (Brighton Business School, University of Brighton, UK); Rikke Orngreen (Aalborg University, Denmark); Dr Abdul Jalil Othman (Faculty of Education, University of Malaya ,Malaysia); Dr Kutluk Ozguven (International University of Sarajevo, Turkey); Dr Ecaterina Pacurar Giacomini (Louis Pasteur University, France); Dr. Alessandro Pagano (Universityof Bari, Italy); Vasileios Paliktzoglou (University of eastern Finland, Finland); Dr StefaniePanke (University of Ulm, Germany); George Papadopoulos (University of Cyprus, Cyprus); Prof Kyparisia Papanikolaou (School of Pedagogical and Technological Education, Greece); Dr.Iraklis Paraskakis (South East European Research Centre (SEERC)Research Centre of the Universityof Sheffiled, Thessaloniki,Greece); Dr AngieParker (Anthem College Online, USA); Paul Peachey (University of Glamorgan, Treforest, UK); Dr Arna Peretz (Ben Gurion Univeristy of the Negev, Israel); Dr. Carmen Perez-Sabater (Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, Spain); Christine Perry(Universityof the Westof England, Bristol,UK); Dr. DonatellaPersico (IstitutoTecnologie Didattiochje-Consiglio Nazionale Ricerche,Genova, Italy); Dr Christopher Perumalla (University of Toronto, Canada); Professor Pit Pichappan (Annamalai University, India); Prof Mário Pinto (Polytechnic Instituteof Porto, Portugal); Professor Selwyn Piramuthu (University of Florida, Gainesville, USA); Dr Michel Plaisent (University of Quebec inMontreal, Canada); LubomirPopelinsky (Masaryk University, viii

Czech Republic); Dr Maria Magdalena Popescu (Carol I National Defence University, Bucharest,Romania); Dr Francesca Pozzi (ITD-CNR, Italia);Andy Pulman (Bournemouth University, UK); Dr Muhammad Abdul Qadir (Mohammad Ali Jinnah University, Islamabad, Pakistan); Prof Ricardo Queirós (ESEIG/KMILT & CRACS/INESC, Portugal);Susannah Quinsee (City University,London, UK); Prof AliRaddaoui (University of Wyoming, Wyoming); Abdul Rafay (Asia Pacific University College of Technology & Innovation, Malaysia);Dr Liana Razmerita (Copenhagen Business School, Denmark);Hugo Ribeiro (University of Porto, Portugal); Dr Bart Rienties (University of Surrey, UK,);Dr Eleni Rossiou (University of Macedonia, Greece); Dr Florin Salajan (North Dakota State University, Canada); David Sammon (University College Cork, Ireland); Marie Sams (Coventry University, England,); Gustavo Santos (University of Porto, Portugal);Prof Vitor Santos (University of Trás-os-Montese AltoDouro (UTAD), Portugal,); Dr Venkat Sastry (Defence College of Management and Technology, Cranfield University, UK); Dr Guy Saward (University of Hertfordshire, UK); Brian Sayer (University of London,UK); Prof. Jeanne Schreurs (Hasselt University, Diepenbeek, belgium); Dr Jane Secker (London School of Economics,UK); Drfabio Serenell i (Università degli Studi Milano Bicocca, Italia,); Dr NimaShahidi (Islamic Azad University-Noorabad Mamasani Branch, Iran,); Zaffar Ahmed Shaikh (IBA Karachi, Pakistan); Angela Shapiro (Glasgow Caledonian University, UK); Dr Michael Shoukat (UMUC, USA); AileenSibbald (Napier University, Scotland,UK); Dr Petia Sice (University of Northumbria, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK); Prof Ali Simsek (Anadolu University, Turkey); Dr Gurmeet Singh (The Universityof The South Pacific, Suva , Fiji, Fiji); Professor Cees Th.Smit Sibinga (Academic institute for the international development of transfusion medicine, The Netherlands); Alisdair Smithies (Manchester Medical School, UK); Dr Keith Smyth (Napier University, Edinburgh, UK); Bent Soelberg (Copenhagen Business School, Denmark); Yeong-Tae Song (Towson University, Maryland, USA);DrMichael Sonntag (FIM, Johannes Kepler University,Linz, Austria);Dr Sonia Sousa(Tallinn University,Estonia,); Dr Rumen Stainov (University of Applied Sciences, Fulda, Germany); Dr. John Stav (Sor-Trondelag UniversityCollege, Norway);Iain Stewart (Glasgow Caledonian University, Scotland); Caroline Stockman (University of Leuven,Belgium,); Mag. Dr.Thomas Strasser (Vienna University of Education, Austria); Karen Strickland (Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland,); Dr Amanda Sykes (University of Glasgow,United Kingdom); DrRoxana Taddei (Université Clermont Ferrand 2,Montpellier, France); Yana Tainsh (University of Greenwich,, UK); Bénédicte Talon (Université du Littoral, France); Marian Theron (False Bay College, Tokai, South Africa); Dr. John Thompson (Buffalo State College, USA); Dr Claudine Toffolon (Universitédu Mans-IUT deLaval, France); Florica Tomos (South Wales University, Wales, UK); Dr Eulalia Torras-Virgili (OpenUniversity of Catalonia, Spain); Dr. Melih Turgut (Eskisehir Osmangazi University, Turkey); Christopher Turner (University of Winchester,UK);Karin Tweddell Levinsen (Aalborg University, Denmark); DrAimilia Tzanavar (University of Nicosia, Cyprus); Prof Huseyin Uzunboylu (Near East University, Cyprus); Dr LindaVan Ryneveld (Tshwane University of Technology, Pretoria, South Africa); Professor Carlos Vazde Carvalho (Porto Polytechnic, Portugal); Prof Andreas Veglis (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece); Dr Steven Verjans (Open Universiteit of The Netherlands,The Netherlands); Anne Villems (University of Tartu, Estonia); Bruno Warin (Université du Littoral, Calais, France); Fahad Waseem (University of Northumbria, Middlesbrough, UK); Garry Watkins (University of Central Lancashire,UK); Jaap Westerhijs (University of Groningen, Netherlands); Dr Anne Wheeler (Aston University, UK); Nicola Whitton (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK); Roy Williams (University of Portsmouth, UK); Dr Shirley Williams (University of Reading, UK); Dr Katherine Wimpenny (Coventry University, England,); Prof StanislawWrycza (University of Gdansk, Poland); Rowena Yeats (University of Birmingham, UK); Dr Panagiotis Zaharias (Open University of Cyprus, Greece); Dr/ProfQinglong Zhan (Tianjin Universityof Technology and Education, China); Mingming Zhou (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore); Chris Zielinski (External relations and Governing Bodies,World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland); Anna Zoakou (Ellinogermaniki Agogi, Greece)

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Biographies Conference Chair Dr Mélanie Ciussi is Professor of Education & ICT at SKEMA Business School, France, and also responsible for SKEMA’s Innovative Teaching and Learning projects, as well as a a researcher at I3M (Information and Communication Science). Her PhD focused on networks and communities of practice in virtual learning environments. A related domain of expertise is Mobile Learning, where she won the Apple Research & Technology Support programme prize in 2011. Melanie was also project head for a 2-year serious games initiative sponsored by the French ministry of research. Mélanie was previously employed

by French Riviera Chamber of Commerce where she was responsible for e-learning. She holds Masters Degrees in Marketing (1996) and Training & Multimedia (2002). Before moving into research, she worked for Marks and Spencer for 3 years as Assistant Personnel Manager across Scotland and Belgium.

Programme Chair Dr Marc Augier is the chair of the Organization and Information systems department at SKEMA Business School. He is also a Professor in Management ofInformation Systems in SKEMA Business School since 2001 and has a Doctorate (2005) in Information and Communication Science. His research focuses on the relationship between science, technology and society, centered on the implication of the usage of IT technology in pedagogy. Therefore he is interested in Digital documents and libraries, Online Communities, hypertext as a knowledge representation tool and Free Software. Before joining SKEMA he worked in IT and consulting companies like IBM and Accenture. He has a solid background in computer science with a Masters degree from CESTI (1985).

Keynote Speakers Dr Viktor Dörfler gained masters degrees in Mathematical Engineering, International Business Relations, Engineering Education and an MBA from Hungarian universities. He holds a PhD in Management Science from the Strathclyde University, Glasgow, UK. Before joining Strathclyde University, he worked as lecturer in managerial decision making, creative problem solving and information management at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary. Simultaneously he was an independent software development consultant specializing in intelligent systems. Viktor’s research is focused on two interrelated areas: the first covers the modelling of personal knowledge and knowledge increase in an organizational context; the second covers knowledge-based expert systems, in particular the Doctus KBS (www.doctuskbs.com), and related intelligent applications such as intelligent corporate portals and e-learning systems. Viktor’s research into personal knowledge informs his software development; using Doctus to support decision takers, in turn, helps him advance his research about knowledge. Viktor’s research, software development and consultancy are synthesized in his teaching. In his most recent research Viktor modelled levels of personal knowledge, with particular focus on the highest level of knowledge, for which he conducted 20 in-depth research interviews, including 17 with Nobel Laureates.

Professor Steven Warburton is the Head of Department of Technology Enhanced Learning at the University of Surrey and an Associate Research Fellow at King’s Learning Institute, King’s College London. He is also a Fellow at the Centre for Distance Education at the University of London International Programmes where he leads work within the research strategy group and chairs the annual Research and Innovation in Distance and Elearning Conference. He has worked on a range of national and European projects that have included: the development a methodology for abstracting design patterns through shared expert practice; explorations of teaching practice in virtual worlds; developing pattern languages in the domains of digital identity and social media tools. More recently he has been working on digital competences and digital fluency, mobile learning, digital publishing models, open educational resources and educational analytics.

Mini Track Chairs Dr Marc Augier is the chair of the Organization and Information systems department at SKEMA Business School. He is also a Professor in Management of Information Systems in SKEMA Business School since 2001 and has a Doctorate (2005) in Information and Communication Science. His research focuses on the relationship between science, technology and society, centered on the implication of the usage of IT technology in pedagogy. Therefore he is interested in Digital documents and libraries, Online Communities, hypertext as a knowledge representation tool and Free Software. Before joining SKEMA he worked in IT and consulting companies like IBM and Accenture. He has a solid background in computer science with a Masters degree from CESTI (1985).

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Dr Jana Kapounova is an associate professor at the Department of ICT, University of Ostrava in the Czech Republic. She teaches Educational Technology, ICT in Education and eLearning. She studied ICT in Education and holds bachelor, masters and Ph.D degrees. Her research field is eLearning and the evaluation of its quality. With her Ph.D students she works on the problem of approaches to personalised learning in different situations (at school, LLL, extracurricular activities etc.).

Dr Rikke Orngreen is Associate Professor (PhD) at the IT and Learning Design Lab in the Department of Philosophy and Learning, Aalborg University, Denmark. Her primary research interests are methods, tools and processes in the development, implementation and evaluation of IT supported learning and teaching processes. Of particular interest is the use of digital video conferencing and methods that support creative and reflective learning processes, as various co-production tools. Her research focuses on both the actual situation as it unfolds as well as on how to facilitate the learners, teachers’ competence development, as well as the organizational setup.

Dr. Ali H. Raddaoui, Graduate of Indiana University of Bloomington, Fulbright Fellow, Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and Arabic at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. Taught English, French and Arabic in UK, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the USA. Areas of interest and publication: Teaching English as a Foreign/second Language; Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language; Web 2.0 and education 2.0; best practices in language teaching and learning; ICT and language evolution; intercultural locution; translation, and creative writing.

Jorge Tiago Martins is a Lecturer in Organisational Informatics at the Information School, University of Sheffield, UK. He is a member of the Information Systems (IS) and Knowledge and Information Management (KIM) Research Groups. He is the author of circa 15 refereed articles published in books, academic conferences and academic journals. His research interests include educational informatics and the management and use of information technology in complex organisations, with particular emphasis on structures, cultures, work practices, behaviour, and change.

Biographies of Presenting Authors Sally Abey, since working with the University of Plymouth, has developed an interest in the use of mobile devices in the area of teaching and learning. She is registered as a PhD student to carry out action research into the placement area.

Paulo Alves – Ph.D. in Technology and Information Systems, University of Minho, Portugal, and Master in Multimedia Technology from the University of Porto, Portugal. Is e-learning coordinator and professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Bragança. The research interests include: e-learning, web development and multimedia.

Roni Aviram is Chair, Center for Futurism in Education, Ben-Gurion University, Israel. He is interested in the impact of ICT on education and society and its optimization in the light of Humanistic values, and in structuring theoretical and practical change processes in education. He has led R&D projects dedicated to designing virtual LLL environments for enhancing human development.

Rosalina Babo is a Coordinator Professor at the School of Accounting and Administration of Porto, Polytechnic Institute of Porto, Portugal. She is head of the Information Systems Department and was a member of the university scientific board for 12 years (2000-2012). E-Learning is one of her main areas of research.

Wendy Barber is the Director of the B.Ed. Program at the University Of Ontario Institute Of Technology in Oshawa, Canada.

Her research interests lie in Health and Physical Education, and Creating Online Communities. Dr. Barber is a passionate advocate for teacher education, teaches Authentic Assessment and Adult Education, and Psychological Foundations in Digital Technology.

Raymond Bell works as a senior lecturer in Mental Health at Coventry University. His clinical background includes clinical nurse specialist of community psychiatry, clinical manager of community mental health teams, early intervention and assertive outreach teams. Raymond has developed a Mental Health Wellbeing pack at Coventry University which has been integrated into the pastoral care of Facility of Health and Life Science student nurses. xi

Orlando Belo is an associate professor in the Department of Informatics of Minho University, Portugal. He is also a member of the ALGORITMI R&D Centre in the same university, working in Business Intelligence, with particular emphasis on data warehousing systems, OLAP, and data mining. His main research topics are related to data warehouse design, implementation and tuning, ETL services, and distributed multidimensional structures processing.

Diana Blom teaches music at the University of Western Sydney where she is Associate Professor. A published composer and pianist, research focuses on university music performance (inter-arts collaboration, assessment, interpretation) and the artist as academic. The five authors are a grant team researching the roles of ePortfolio and the creative arts in four Australian universities.

Farida Bouarab-Dahmani is a senior lecturer in computer science in the computer science department of Tizi Ouzou University, Algeria. She has a doctorate and HDR in knowledge representation and evaluation process for e-learning. Her research is largely related to computer science use in the education field such as: assessment, domain modeling, competency based approach, educational data mining, e-learning.

Vladimír Bradáč is an assistant professor at the Department of informatics and computers, Faculty of Science, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic. He teaches the English language focused on informatics. He also studies a PhD programme aiming at promoting and enhancing e-learning environment for language education.

Margaret Bruce has been enthusiastically involved in podiatric education for more than 25 years, mostly spent at the University of Plymouth. She has been engaged in the development, organisation and delivery of the curriculum and am focused on supporting learning in practice.

Sylvia Buchanan holds an Honours degree in Fine Art from York University in Toronto and completed a Master of Education degree in Digital Technology at the University Of Ontario Institute of Technology in Oshawa. Soon after, she obtained a graphic design diploma at the Digital Arts & Technology Training Institute in Sydney.

Martial Bugliolo, BA(Hons), is Design for Games Programme Leader and Extended Diploma in Interactive Media Course Leader at Plymouth College of Art. He is currently researching, investigating and developing areas such as blended learning and elearning to identifying future technologies and how to enhance them to suit curriculum planning and delivery to support student’s needs.

Mie Buhl, Professor, at Aalborg University, Copenhagen. Her research revolves around media, ICT and visual culture, with a particular emphasis on university education, teacher training and primary school. In this field she explores innovative designs of educational settings, in particular video and telepresence. She is one of the co-founders of Danish research in Visual Culture in education..

Martin Cápay is Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, specializing mainly in the theory of teaching informatics subjects, programming, behavioral of students in e-environment, and constructivist method of teaching informatics. He participates in the projects aimed at the usage of new competences in teaching and dealing with learning/teaching in virtual environment using e- learning courses.

Ivana Čechová, Ph.D graduated from the Faculty of Arts at Masaryk University with specializations in pedagogy, English and Russian language. She has worked as Head of Research and Deputy Head of the Language Department. Currently she works as a senior lecturer at the University of Defence. In 2010 she completed her Ph.D. degree.

Barbara Class is pedagogical advisor in distance learning issues at the University of Geneva, Interpreting Department since 2004. Her research interests include using technology for pedagogical purposes, tutoring support, active and collaborative learning in blended settings.

Jürgen Cleve is professor of computer science at the University of Applied Sciences in Wismar (Germany). His fields are artificial intelligence and data mining. He is the head of the e-learning centre at Wismar University.

David Comiskey is a lecturer in Architectural Technology at the University of Ulster. He is passionate about the use of technology in education and has received awards for embedding the use of technology in his teaching and learning. He was recently awarded a Distinguished Teaching Fellowship from the University of Ulster.

Armando Cortés is PhD candidate and researcher at the eLearn Center of the Open University of Catalonia. Prior to doctoral studies, he worked as an instructional designer at the University of Barcelona and the Online Business School; he has been

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teaching in online courses for 10 years. Armando’s research interests focus on understanding success factors in online teaching and learning in higher education.

Cristina De Castro graduated in Mathematics and received a PhD in Electronics and Computer Science. She is a researcher at IEIIT-CNR, National Research Council of Italy, Bologna, Italy. Her research themes are Smart Navigation and e/m-learning methodologies and architectures.

Faiza Derbel is Assistant Professor of English and Linguistics at the Faculté des Lettres, Arts et Humanités, University of Manouba, Tunisia. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in various areas of Applied Linguistics and is currently conducting research on technology and language pedagogy, teacher cognition, and collaborative intercultural communication.

Jakob Diel is working as scientific assistant at the e-learning centre at the University of Applied Sciences in Wismar, Germany.

In this context he is developing and organizing online courses and the practical implementation of video based eassessments.

Foluke Eze is running a doctorate programme in the faculty of Education, University of Nigeria Nsukka. She has been a lecturer in Federal College of Education (Technical) Omoku, Rivers state, Nigeria since 2001. Previously, she had taught further and general mathematics at both junior and senior secondary school for 2years.

Gert Faustmann studied Information Technology at the Technical University Berlin. From 1992 to 2001 he was a software developer (Siemens AG), researcher (Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering) and consultant ( debis later T-Systems). He is now professor in the division of business information systems at Berlin School of Economics and Law. Álvaro Figueira is a lecturer at Faculty of Sciences, University of Porto, and has been interested in e-learning, web-based learning, standards in education, and information mining. Lately, he has been serving as the FCUP’s coordinator in respect to e-learning. Prof. Figueira’s current research interests are in the area of learning analytics related with collaborative work.

Olga Fragou is an Instructional Designer in Educational Content, Methodology and Technology Lab, at Hellenic Open University and is Head of the Learning Activities Team. During 2005-2008 she worked as a PhD researcher in the Educational Technology Laboratory, University of Athens. She also has working experience in programs of adult education and European Projects.

Michelle French is a Lecturer in the Department of Physiology at the University of Toronto in Canada. She is interested in methods to foster student learning, critical thinking and communication skills. Michelle has received several teaching awards including an Excellence in Life Sciences Award: Undergraduate Teaching from the Faculty of Medicine at U of T. Elaine Garcia is Head of Blended Learning and Digital Development at Plymouth College of Art, Associate Lecturer at Plymouth University Business School and undertaking a part time PhD considering use of blogs in teaching and learning. Research interests include Web 2.0, Social Media, Blended and Technology Enhanced Learning, Blogs and Teaching and Learning.

Jan Geryk is a PhD student of Computer Systems and Technologies at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University Brno, Czech Republic. Jan has been employed as the university information system developer for more than 6 years. He is experienced in database systems and perl programming and his research interests include machine learning, data mining, especially educational data mining, and visual analytics.

Nina Raphaela Godson is a senior lecturer/leader in Clinical Skills at Coventry University with a background of medical nursing. She has studied to Master’s level in Clinical Education. She has published several books including a chapter on E-learning in Nurse Education and has developed interactive E-learning resources on Infection Prevention and Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation for pre-registration student nurses.

Sue Greener is Principal Lecturer at the University of Brighton Business School teaching Learning & Development, HRM, Business Context and Research Methods and has received a Teaching Excellence award from the University. She researches, advises and supervises in the fields of e-learning strategy, Technology Enhanced Learning and reflective learning. She is Editor of the academic journal Interactive Learning Environments, published by Routledge.

Baylie Hart Clarida is a first year PhD student at Bournemouth University in the UK, studying strategies for digital inclusion focusing on diverse students. She is a qualified teacher and has a BA (Hons) degree in Education and a Masters degree in ICT and Education.

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Veronika Havelková is a PhD Student at Charles University in Prague and lecturer of seminars ‘Use the GeoGebra in the Teaching of Mathematics’, ‘Mathematical Software‘, ‘Computer as an Assistant (not only) in the Teaching of Mathematics’.

Dissertation topic is The Phenomena Influencing the Efficiency of the Use of Dynamic Mathematics.

Michael A. Herzog is full professor for Business Management and IT at Magdeburg-Stendal University. His research is concerned with mobile systems, RFID-technology, knowledge management and e-learning. He founded several international operating IT-enterprises concerning media technology and software development. Michael holds a PhD in information systems and master's degree in computer science from Technische Universität Berlin.

Jiri Hoffmann is currently in his second year as a PhD candidate at the Department of Information and Communication Technologies at the University of Ostrava, Czech Republic. His main research activity is focused on technological competencies and out of school activities.

Jozef Hvorecky graduated PhD. in Computer Programming at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He is Professor of Computer and Information Sciences at School of Management in Bratislava, Slovakia. He is also Honorary Lecturer of the University of Liverpool. His research interests cover introductory programming courses, university management, and knowledge management.

Gloria Otito Izu holds a Bachelor Degree in Biology Education, a Researcher with Colleges of Education Academic Staff Union, Nigeria. Her research focuses on e-learning and science teaching methodologies.

Antonin Jancarik works as a senior lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Mathematics Education, Faculty of Education, Charles University in Prague. He is working in the areas of algebra, use of ICT in mathematics education and game theory.

Amanda Jefferies is a Reader in Technology Enhanced Learning at the University of Hertfordshire, where she leads the Technology Supported Learning Research group. Her interests relate to students’ experiences of using technology to support their learning and the development of supportive pedagogies. She was awarded a UK National Teaching Fellowship in 2011.

Cristian Jimenez Romero has a Degree in computer science and data systematization, University Antonio Nariño, Colombia.

Further BSc-Honours degree with emphasis in biological psychology and artificial intelligence from the Open University, UK. Cristian has worked as software engineer at Nokia-Siemens-Networks. He is currently doing PhD, at the Complexity science department, faculty of computing and mathematics, OU. Thesis “Intelligent assessment systems applied to massive open online education" Olga Kandinskaia is Assistant Professor of Finance and Director of Blended Learning at the CIIM (Cyprus International Institute of Management). She has 20 years of experience in teaching F2F courses in Cyprus, UK and Russia, and 3 years of experience with online/blended courses. Olga has an extensive record of publications, which include two books.

Elisabeth Katzlinger is assistant professor at the Department of Data Processing in Social Sciences, Economics and Business, Johannes Kepler University Linz (JKU), Austria. She has degrees in business administration and business education. Her research focus is in business education and technology enhanced learning. Early childhood education and game-based learning are another research interests Carolyn King is the Understanding Dementia Massive Open Online Course co-ordinator, a lecturer in the School of Medicine at the University of Tasmania, and a Wicking Centre Research Associate. She has a PhD in Neuroscience and her research interests include the biology of dementia, therapeutic approaches in dementia, as well as the scholarship of learning.

Tomoko Kojiri received the B.E., M.E., and Ph.D. degrees from Nagoya University, Japan, in 1998, 2000, and 2003, respectively. From 2003 to 2007, she was a research associate at Nagoya University. From 2007 to 2011, she was an assistant professor in Nagoya University. Since 2011, she has been an associate professor at Kansai University, Japan.

Katerina Kostolanyova works in the Faculty of Education, Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Ostrava in Czech Republic. She specializes in eLearning technology, especially adaptive eLearning. Her further professional growth focuses on students’ learning styles in the e-Learning environment. She is an author and co-author of almost forty professional articles and ten e-contents.

Blair Kuntz has been the near and Middle Eastern Studies librarian at the University of Toronto library since 2003. Before this, he studied Arabic for Foreigners at the Balamand University in Lebanon and Birzeit University in Ramallah, Palestine. He has also studied Farsi and Turkish at the School of Continuing Studies of the University of Toronto. xiv

Matleena Laakso (M.Ed.) works as an Educational Developer at PAOK - ICT Network for Tampere Region Upper Secondary Education, in Finland. Her main competences are e-learning, social media in education, and mobile learning. She has previously worked as an expert in problem-based and cooperative learning. Twitter: @matleenalaakso Wolfram Laaser is currently a consultant for Worldwide Education, Austria. Formerly he was Academic Director at Fern University Hagen, Germany. He was consultant for the ELBEP EU Grundtvig Project 2008/2009 and on the International Panel, Higher Education Distance Learning in Portugal, 2009. His field of expertise is the development of multimedia courseware.

Karin Tweddell Levinsen is Associate Professor at Aalborg University, Copenhagen. Her research circle around design for teaching and learning that involves IT in various forms and modalities, and emerging educational performance and practice.

Therefore formal and informal learning contexts, digital literacy, teachers’ competences, class room practice and process management are intertwined with design for teaching and learning.

Katerina Makri holds a Phd in the area of eLearning and teacher education. With a background in humanities and experience in teacher training and facilitation of teacher online communitites, she currently works as an associate at ASPETE (School of Technological and Pedagogical Education) and at the School of Philosophy of the University Of Athens, Greece.

Brian McDonald is Lecturer and Programme Leader in Games Software Developmen t. He teaches Video Game Graphics at Glasgow Caledonian University and has organised the Glasgow site of the Global Game Jam. He participated in and hosted Jamming for Small Change, MolyJam, Culture Hack and Gathering the Voices Jams. His research interests include Computer Graphics and Student Engagement with Software Development.

Peter Mikulecky, PhD, is full professor of Managerial Informatics at the Faculty of Informatics and Management, University of Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic. Head of the Department of Information Technologies, Director of Doctoral Study Programmes. The areas of his main scientific focus are: Intelligent Environments, Ambient Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Management, Intelligent Systems, and their applications.

Luísa Miranda - Ph.D. in Education in the area of Educational Technology and Master in Educational Technology, University of Minho, Portugal. Is Professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Bragança. The research interests include: educational technology and e-learning.

Carlos Morais - Ph.D. in Education in the area of Teaching Methodology of Mathematics and Master in in Educational Technology, University of Minho, Portugal. Is researcher at ICCS-Research Centre for Child Studies, University of Minho, Portugal.

Is Professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Bragança. The research interests include: educational technology, ICT applied to mathematics.

Per Mouritzen Implementation and evaluation of IT supported learning with focus on video supported learning and videoconference for cross campus teaching. Research focus on: video and videoconference development in teaching at higher education, including cross campus.

Peter Mozelius has been employed since 1999 as a teacher for the Stockholm University and the Royal Institute of Technology at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences (DSV) in Kista, Sweden. He is currently working as an IT-Pedagogue and researcher. His research interests are in the fields of e-learning, game-based learning and ICT4D. Antoinette Muntjewerff is Assistant Professor General Legal Theory University of Amsterdam. Studied Educational Science (MSc) and Law (LL.M.). PhD research involved theoretical and empirical studies into legal case solving and structured design of instructional environments. Her research is in modelling legal knowledge and legal reasoning for developing electronic materials for learning the law.

Lukáš Najbrt is a PhD student in the Department of ICT, University of Ostrava in Czech Republic. He works as a designer of educational audiovisual projects. Under the program of the Department of ICT, he is trying to extend the personalized learning field to the museum area, and has had several successful projects for museums and lifelong learning.

Minoru Nakayama is a professor at Human System Science and CRADLE, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan. He graduated from Tokyo Gakugei University in 1983 and completed the M.E. program in 1985, and received a Dr. of Eng. degree from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1989. His research concerns educational technology.

Corinne Nell is a lecturer in the Department of Marketing and Retail Management at the University of South Arica (UNISA).

She worked in the retail sector in South Africa for many years and developed an interest in retailing. Academic interests in-

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clude retailing with a specific focus on Visual merchandising and store atmospherics, consumer behaviour, social media and consumers’ perception.

Bernard Nkuyubwatsi is a PhD student at University of Leicester. He is researching OER, OEP and MOOCs for widening participation in Rwandan higher education. He was a faculty member at Kigali Health Institute and a member of the Task Force and Working Group on the University of Rwanda College of Open and Distance Learning.

Anne-Mette Nortvig is a PhD student at Aalborg University Copenhagen with a project concerning the role of e-learning in the development of professional identity in professional bachelor programmes with a case from physiotherapy e-learning program. She is a member of the ResearchLab: IT, Learning and Design in Copenhagen.

Jarmila Novotná is Professor at Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Education, Czech Republic; Her main fields of interest are Didactical conditions of transformation of students’ models of activities when grasping knowledge and skills; and Transfer of research results into practice.

Smart Odunayo Olugbeko holds a Master Degree in Language Education, a Senior Lecturer at Adeyemi College of Education, Ondo, Nigeria, where he teaches curriculum and language methodology courses Ramona Georgiana Oros – PhD degree in engineering and master in international business administration, working as junior researcher at Carinthia University of Applied Sciences in the field of remote technologies and online labs. Active part in several international projects like EICL, E-pragmatic, eScience, IC-op regarding e-learning and development of online laboratories.

Aisha Othman is currently a PhD student at the University of Huddersfield, UK. She has graduated the MSc course in Information System Management at the University of Huddersfield and was awarded BSc degree from University of Omer ALmukhtar, Libya. Her main research interests are on adaptive e-learning, simulations, virtual environments, asynchronous interaction, multimedia, online education.

Kyparisia Papanikolaou is Assistant professor at the Department of Education, School of Pedagogical and Technological Education (ASPETE), since 2008. Her primary research interests focus on the design of web-based adaptive learning environments (INSPIRE, MyProject), web-based education and blended learning, computer science education and teacher professional development focusing on Technology Enhanced Learning.

Maria Magdalena Popescu is an associate professor at Carol I National Defence University in Bucharest, Romania. With an ESL major, an MA in British Cultural Studies, and a PhD in Humanities, she is one of the military English blended learning initiators in the Romanian military. She has participated in two European funded projects-GALA.NoE –game and learning alliance and GEL-game enhanced learning.

Claire Raistrick is a Senior Teaching Fellow at University of Warwick and an educational researcher in the Department of Educational Research at Lancaster University where she is a doctoral candidate (PhD in e-research in TEL). She is Principal Investigator researching educators’ self-evaluative practices when making technology enhanced learning innovations.

Patient Rambe (PhD.) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Computer Science and Informatics and a former Assistant Director of International Academic Projects at the University of the Free State, South Africa. His research interest is the innovative pedagogical use of social media and appropriation of emerging Web-based technologies in resourceconstrained academic environments.

David Reymond Is Associate Professor at the University of Toulon. He works in the informetrics discipline, and he is specialized in webometrics. From 2009 to 2013 he was attached to the Mission Numérique pour l'Enseignement Supérieur (MINES) to assist the Ministry in the construction of a tool aimed to provide indicators of digital services usages.

Gelareh Roushan-Easton is the Associate Dean for Education in the Business School and theme leader for Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) in Bournemouth University’s Centre for Excellence in Learning. She is an avid enthusiast of TEL and believes emerging technologies offer innovative approaches in engaging students in learning.

Danguole Rutkauskiene is Associate Professor within the Department of Multimedia Engineering at Informatics faculty at Kaunas University of Technology, President of National Association of Distance Education. Member of EADTU Management Committee, researcher in Advance Learning technologies, e-methodology, coordinator of great number of scientific projects; author and co-author of 26 books and 153 scientific publications.

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Michele Salvagno is a PhD student in psychology at Bournemouth University (UK). He has a Degree in Psychology (University of Padua, Italy) and a Degree in Psychotherapy. He has worked for years as a teacher and tutor in e-learning projects. His research interests include psychological issues and practices to foster well-being in online learning contexts.

Daniyar Sapargaliyev is deputy director of the Center for research and development at International Academy of Business in Almaty. He received his PhD from Eurasian National University. His research interests include mobile learning and using mobiles in education. He has written articles in refereed books, journals and conference papers.

Emilie Šeptáková has been teaching the theory of databases, information systems, and web programming at university and has participated in several national research projects in the area. She is currently working in the introduction of semantic network of terms in adaptive e-learning system.

Angela Shapiro, Senior Lecturer adopts academic literacies pedagogy, working with students from the School of Engineering and Built Environment, Glasgow Caledonian University. She is a founding member of the Gathering the Voices Association.

Her research interests are evaluating the effectiveness of online learning in supporting students and eLearning approaches in teaching about the Holocaust.

Ivana Simonova, PhD, has been at the Faculty of informatics and Management, University of Hradec Kralove, CR, since 1997.

Research focus on ICT-supported process of instruction, distance education. Latest research projects: Evaluation of modern technologies contributing towards forming and development university students´ competences; A flexible model of the ICT supported educational process reflecting individual learning styles Florica Tomos - BSc (Econ), Diploma in Management & Semiotics, PGC (MA) Management & PD, PGD Accountancy & Costs, PGCE /MSc. Educ. (50%), PhD Student – HP Lecturer – Business Research, South Wales University, Wales, the United Kingdom.

Nazime Tuncay has a degree in Mathematics and Computer Education, MSC in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science and PhD in Computer Education and Instructional Technology Department in Near East University in North Cyprus. Her research interests include e-education, u-education, virtual education, vocational education, game-based education, special education, web tools and distance education.

Karel Vaculík is a PhD student of Informatics at the Faculty of Informatics Masaryk University Brno, Czech Republic. His research interests include graph mining and educational data mining. He is a member of Knowledge Discovery Lab FI MU. Stephen Wilkinson is a Principal Lecturer and Teacher Fellow at Leeds Met University; he is the course leader for the Masters in Advanced Engineering management. He has a Masters in Blended and online Education (BOE) and has co-authored 2 books in the field of Manufacturing Technology. His research has covered many areas from augmented reality in surgery to automation and control of manufacturing systems.

Eleanor Vernon Wilson is an Associate Professor of Curriculum, Instruction and Special Education in the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. Her primary teaching and research activities focus on preparing elementary pre-service candidates for classrooms, both in the US and internationally. She currently directs a study abroad program for pre-service students in the UK. Hitomi Yukawa is a member of staff of the e-learning section of the Medical Education Promotion Center, Tokyo Medical University, Japan.

Ibrahim Zincir is a lecturer in the Department of Computer Engineering at Yasar University in Izmir, Turkey. His main research and teaching areas are data mining, mobile network security and web programming. Dr Zincir holds BSc from Middle East Technical University (METU), Turkey, and MSc and PhD from University of Plymouth, UK.

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When Computers Will Replace Teachers and Counsellors: Heaven and Hell Scenarios Aharon (Roni) Aviram and Yoav Armony The Centre for Futurism in Education, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel roniav@bgu.ac.il yoav.armony@ness.com Abstract: The paper starts by describing and analysing some the recent dramatic developments in Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence and connected technological areas. It then extrapolates from these developments a prediction: that as machines are getting so intelligent and human‐like, it is very probable that, over the next two decades, sophisticated Smart Assistances (SA) will gradually "conquer" many of , what up until now was considered to be "necessarily" human functions of teaching. Furthermore, such "Educational SAs" will be able to understand humans ‐ "read" their emotions and thoughts and guide or control them ‐ to extents that human have never had. It ends by arguing that these developments may have positive, as well as negative consequences, and that ensuring a positive outcome demands requires consorted macro‐strategic efforts by researchers, decision makers and developers.

Keywords: humanistic pedagogy, technology, teachers, counsellors, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, agent, mentor

1. Introduction Khan Academy (www.khanacademy.org) is perhaps the best known initiative to date in the field of eLearning, incorporating thousands of lessons on a wide range of subjects (over 4,000 courses in 2013). Their objective is to help students understand the material being studied. The format of a lesson at Khan Academy is similar to that of a classroom lesson: it includes a green board on which the lecturer writes using an electronic pen, as his voice in the background explains the subject matter being discussed in the lesson. Coursera (www.coursera.org) which is an online initiative of dozens of universities around the world also uses a format which is very similar to that of classroom teaching, in which, in most of the cases, the lecturer delivers a frontal lecture using slides, homework and tests. The advantages of Khan Academy and Coursera are the availability of lessons, free, all over the world, at any time and in a range of languages, as well as the ability to gather data about the student or the class in order to better understand those points that require improvement in the learning process. Khan Academy and Coursera are just two of the hundreds of initiatives that were created over the last three decades in an attempt to implement eLearning such as Moodle, Time to know, K12, TED talks, Blackboard, Edmodo, Desire2Learn, eCollage.

Almost all these initiatives reflect the basic assumptions that have guided eLearning during this period that the meaning of the letter "e" indicating the digital aspect of learning, and is limited to the technical aspects of teaching, which include, for example: improving presentation by using images, clips, and other such electronic pyrotechnics; enabling distance learning which bridges geographic distances and time differences, thus allowing studying anywhere and at any time; providing data gathering tools which allow for the creation of a statistical picture on the progress of the student and class, as well as to evaluate the quality of the material presented. Today, even when executed as interactively and personally as possible, it is still strictly a technical tool, while creativity, imagination, innovation, a sense of humour and aesthetics are all still in the hands of the lecturer. The reasons for this are many and include among others the limitations of present day technology, fear of change and a fear that technology might take over. In practice very little thought has been given to the possibility that in the future a digital system might effectively replace the educational functions of the teacher, including the more demanding educational tasks such as consulting or tutoring. Even less thought has been given to the impact such a development would have on teachers, students and society as a whole.

However, the world of technology does not stand still and is developing at an ever quicker pace. Technology and mainly various "smart agents" and robots have become increasingly "smarter", and each day we hear of another function or activity that up until a very recent time had been considered a solely "human" activity that has been taken over by machines. Factories and production lines, banks and financial institutions, medical surgery and driverless cars, army and service companies are all make use of robots and smart agents. Thus it

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Aharon (Roni) Aviram and Yoav Armony does not sound absurd anymore to suggest that we are not far from the day in which robots or smart agents will be able to perform complex intelligent activities within the education system.

This scenario becomes even more reasonable when we become aware of those who argue that the rate of progress in technological developments is speeding up exponentially. Technological progress does not just satisfy itself with improving the power of computers and the capacity of disks, but takes over many tasks that were exclusively human until recently. We have already today : machines you can talk to, that understand a sense of humour and sarcasm and reply with intelligent answers, machines that know how to find their way, machines that can think, see, hear, feel and perhaps most importantly can learn by themselves (Machine Learning). All these improvements are based on technologies that just a few decades ago sounded like science fiction: robots and artificial intelligence, virtual reality and holograms, nanorobots and nanomotors, fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and BCI (Brain‐Computer Interface), quantum computers and molecular computers, cloning and genetic manipulation, are all technologies that are still at the start of their way, and are expected to continue the accelerated development of changes in our live span. We have chosen to focus on virtual reality technology combined with artificial intelligence as they are likely to enter the educational system and replace at the near future some of the important tasks of the teacher.

These development increases for many the anxiety expressed among others in the horror scenarios presented in films such as The Truman Show, Matrix and in the classic book Brave New World in which the machine becomes too clever, takes control of man and makes him redundant, or the machine is commanded by a small group of people and helps them to take advantage of all other members of society. While certainly reflecting possible "hell scenarios" this fear is enhanced by the natural anxiety about change that technology has always created. Both are a factor in limiting (or at least have limited so far) the entry of technology into the education system, and even more fundamentally – prevent rational thinking about it aimed to enhance the chances of "paradise scenarios" to be realized rather than hell ones.

Our aim is to make a small first step in the direction of enhancing the awareness of the need for such rational thinking and strategic planning in its light. In what follows we will first shortly describe the present and excepted development the Virtual Reality technology (VR) support by artificial Intelligence (AI) and one implementation of their combination: Smart Agents (AS). We then proceed to present two scenarios showing that these technologies can serve both a Paradise scenario and a hell one. (In light of Humanistic values.)

2. The emerging technologies Virtual reality ‐ A number of technologies are expected to impact in the future the field of education. As claimed, in this article we have chosen to focus first and foremost on the technology of virtual reality. The technology is only in its early stages, but has the potential in the future to become part of our everyday living environment. Virtual reality has existed for thousands of years in the form of stories, painting and sculpture, or with the help of hallucinogens, religious rituals, hypnosis and "revelation". Over the last hundred years "mechanical" virtual reality has started to develop, including elements from the field of communications and the media, such as telephone, radio and television. Using these it is possible to create a virtual experience that involves the viewer or user. In the last couple of decades "digital virtual reality" has been developed, which includes such elements as the computer and smartphone, and is assisted by components of artificial intelligence and knowledge from the Web that creates an environment which not all its components exist in reality.

Like every technology, virtual reality too stands on a very broad base and its development is contingent on the development of other technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, visualization and nanotechnology. It is forecasted that the use of virtual reality technology in combination with artificial intelligence and other advanced means of illustration is expected to increase and within twenty years to become an integral part of the daily life of mankind in general and of the education system in particular.

Researchers and futurists (Blascovich, & Bailenson, 2011; Hall, 2010; Hammond, 2012; Kako, 2011; Kurzweil, 2005) estimate than within ten to twenty years the use of virtual images will be widespread and natural to everybody. Individual will actually "live in the Web", where they will communicate, play, work, learn, fall in love, make love, and save their memories and genetic codes. It will be hard to distinguish between Virtual reality and Physical reality. For the digital babies born in the last few years this will be most natural and a

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Aharon (Roni) Aviram and Yoav Armony person's geographical location will become totally irrelevant. In addition, machines will be humanized so they resemble human in their activities and capacities. It is probable to assume that human beings will be able to develop real emotions to them such that the machine will be taken as equal partner in a game, conversation, work interview etc. There are indeed researchers (Heim, 1993; Hofstadter, 1999) who claim that notwithstanding all the efforts invested; we will never achieve a state in which machines will have all human capacities not to speak about higher level ones. We believe that even if they are right the technology will come close enough to human capabilities to be able to replace also intelligent part in the education field The field of virtual reality can be divided into two levels: The sensory level –refers to machines ability to impact people's sensory system, sight, hearing, feel, smell and taste, and to communicate with human beings' brain (the sixth sense). The environmental level refers to the creations of a virtual environment such as: Virtual World (VW) – Imaginary environment, includes living creatures, artefacts, social and commercial networks, such as World of Warcraft (www.warcraft.com) or SecondLife (www.secondlife.com); Mirror World (MW) – Projection of elements from the reality (maps, pictures, businesses, traffic jams or products) such as Waze (www.waze.com); Augmented Reality (AR) ‐ combine elements from the real world with virtual elements such as in Google Glass.

Artificial Intelligence ‐ In this article we will not discuss what artificial intelligence is, apart from noting that there exists today a tendency to assess artificial intelligence not just by its ability to perform better than humans (since already today the computer outperforms humans in many fields), but that the activity should include such components as logic, emotion, beauty, humour, creativity and the ability to distinguish between good and bad (Hofstadter, 1999; Hall, 2007, 2010). Artificial intelligence includes dozens of sub‐categories such as pattern recognition, image processing, computerized vision, data mining, emotional intelligence, games theory, decision making in uncertain conditions, common sense, neural networks, language processing, collective intelligence, and robotics. In order for artificial intelligence to reach the level that competes with human intelligence, it has to base itself on developments in a range of fields, such as:

Alternative computer systems ‐ parallel computers, network computers (Ingrid, 2012) or quantum‐based computers (ARDA, 2012), which will facilitate reaching processing speeds that are not possible today.

Machine learning ‐ the computer ability to identify patterns by itself and realties new subjects to these patterns, for example, Watson of IBM ‐ a system that can play Trivia.

Robots ‐ intended for a wide range of applications: industry, military, treatment, service.

Natural language processing ‐ ability to understand a natural language (including translation such as Google Translate (translate.google.com)and the understanding of content, for example, Apple's Siri).

Understanding the way the human brain works ‐ using technologies such as fMRI that maps brain activity and allow the decoding of the functioning of the brain; the knowledge on the subject doubles annually (Kurzweil, 2005).

Acquisition of human characteristics – ability to acquire a range of artificial emotions, to understand such emotions and to react to them (Levy, 2009).

Brain‐computer interface (BCI) ‐ carrying out non‐touch actions (that is, by thought only), today used mainly for the disabled for example Emotive (www.emotiv.com).

Acquisition of human senses – the ability of the machine to see hear, feel, smell and taste.

The future of virtual reality based on artificial intelligent ‐ researchers and futurists (Aviram, 2012; Blascovich, & Bailenson, 2011; Freitas, 2011; Hall, 2010; Hammond, 2012; Kako, 2009, 2011; Kurzweil, 2005) address VR technology in the near future and predict the technology's future. Several common lines can be seen among all these predications:

Timetables: During the coming twenty or thirty years, the extent of the use of virtual reality, will be similar to the extent of the use of the Internet today.

Basic functionality: A combination of reality with virtual reality to create Augmented Reality; use of remote communications so that a real person and virtual person will be able to converse as though they were in the same room; display of information and images on the environment and use of holograms to create an environment that in integrated in physicals reality; virtual characters (assistant / accompanist) that will recognize the person and help him with a range of activities.

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Mode of use: A person will move regularly and sometimes unknowingly between activity in physical reality and in virtual reality.

Quality of the technology: Virtual reality, which will make use of all the senses, will be of a higher level so that it will be hard to differentiate between it and physical reality.

Technology in use: Displayed on glasses or contact lenses and use in detachable accessories, such as a projector, to project onto the surroundings, camera with earphones. At later stage nanorobots located within the body to identify information and even to change the information if necessary.

If most of these predictions (relying on extrapolation from development that exists already) will come true it is reasonable to suppose that in twenty years‐time there will exist machines that will be able to recognize the user and his/her personal profile, will be able to communicate using speech, behaviour or thought, will be aware of the environment the individual is in, will understand situations that are taking place around the individual, and will be able to advise the user about future actions

On the assumption that the above technology will indeed develop, it is possible to expect that educational systems will also gradually but increasingly implement the technology. It is thus reasonable to except that smart assistants based on VR and AI will replace human teachers in increasing number of functions while schools and maybe entire educational systems can gradually change into virtual to varying levels. If we focus on the first point, SAs might be used for turning teaching‐learning much into more flexible and personalized process in terms of methods, forms, places, groups, and time of learning in accordance with the student's learning styles, interests and capacities. They will also manfully facilitate the combination of learning activity with real life activities. It is reasonable to suppose that every student will be accompanied by a smart assistant that will help in carrying out actions and in taking decisions, and will act as advisor in various areas of learning education and life more generally. The same technology will replace the technical work of the teacher such as supervision, managerial work, as well as some of his intellectual activities such as marking, homework and classwork, advice to the student, explanations about new material, support for the student and identifying his strong and weak points etc. It will have the ability to observe the student all the time and the activity he is involved with. It will have intelligent abilities that will allow it to analyse the combination of all information items and to locate meaningful correlations. Thus it will be able to discuss with the student and to agree on specific tasks to perform. These will allow SAs to reach very high level and detailed knowledge of the students, his interests, capacities, learning and performance styles and his worldview. No human will ever be able to compete with such abilities. Thus as paradoxical as it might still sound today, there are good reasons to believe that especially when deep knowledge of the learner is required no human being will be able to ever compete with an SA.

3. Hell and paradise scenarios When thinking about education based on these technologies in light of Humanistic values, one can imagine continua of scenarios ranging from utopian ones to horror scenarios. We have chosen to present two extreme scenarios, the first being an "ideal" or "Paradise" scenario in which the machine is used to enhance the individual autonomy including his ability to better know himself in order to personalize his modes of learning and activities in light of interests abilities, performance styles and world‐view and thus reach much higher levels of meaningfulness, motivation and wellbeing as well as improve his learning and development. The second scenario is the "Horror" scenario, in which the machine takes control of the student, manipulates him on behalf of the interests of whoever controls it.

From the perspective of the capacities of future technology both scenarios require the same basic technology development which we shortly indicated above and which we take to be probable. Our main claim here is that given the growing powers of machines and the fact that they will accompany us everywhere and take crucial roles in our daily decisions, they will have meaningful impact on our development and life. From this perspective we might be standing in very crucial bifurcation in human history, since they may impact us in light of various and opposed values reflecting the explicit or tacit values of their developers or owners.

To illustrate the scenarios, we will make use of the work of Aviram on the subject of "school as communications centre" (2010a) and the desired school (2010), and assess to what extent it is possible to make use of future technology to realize Aviram's humanistic pedagogical utopias in the ideal and horror scenarios.

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Aharon (Roni) Aviram and Yoav Armony Aviram combines humanistic and futuristic approaches to analyse the cultural and organizational significance of the educational system, and claims that "the educational system must change from a total institution that is responsible for educational activities and resources, into an organization that is open to the environment whose main task is the creation of links between students and the processes, organizations and individuals who are likely to be a resource for their experiential processes" (Aviram 2010a, p.9). The assumption therefore is that activities and resources likely to contribute to a school are to be found in many places and not just within its walls, including virtual activities. It is for the educational process to incorporate all the activities in order to obtain the maximum positive impact, and to minimize the negative effects they might cause.

According to Aviram, the educational activity in liberal democracies should be led in light of three Humanistic ultimate guiding values: development of personal autonomy, dialogical belonging and morality in students.

Personal autonomy: An autonomous person is endowed with self‐knowledge, i.e. he/she is aware of the basic personal profiles (relating to one's interests, capacities, activity styles, worldview) and self‐directed.

Educating for autonomy requires a person to explore real life situations in all life main aspects, make decisions related to them, finding optimal modes of action that best fit the combination of his profile and external reality

Dialogical belonging: A person endowed with dialogical belonging is motivated and capable of being part of a social group or culture and be committed to their objectives and values. At the same time the person is committed to making his voice heard whenever he thinks changes are needed in the group or culture norms or values

Morality: A moral person is one who is motivated and capable of respecting others’ rights to act as autonomous individuals. Such an individual has the motivation and ability (cognitive and emotional) to help others when in need

To educate someone to autonomy, dialogical belonging and morality, several conditions are necessary:

Exposure to a range of possibilities and experiences: The existence of many alternatives is a fundamental condition for the development of autonomous individual, since one cannot reach self‐knowledge, self‐ direction and hence self‐fulfilment with an externally imposed process of exploration.

Freedom to choose: There is no point in being exposed to many potential experiences if one hasn’t got the freedom to choose among them.

Physical and emotional security: Without an continuous experience of personal security one will lack the energy and resoluteness in experiment

Continuous professional mentoring: The above conditions, even if fully implemented, will not lead to the desired developmental processes without the accompaniment of the person in the voyage of exploration by a professional mentor. The mentor has several goals: to ensure that the environment conditions prevail, to legitimize the individual's explorative process, to empower the individual and boost his self‐ confidence and self‐esteem in times of failure or crucial dilemmas. Most importantly the mentor role should consist of mediating to the individual the language and methodology of focused reflection which does not exists today. (Aviram, 2010a; see also: Aviram 2010)The

Paradise Scenario ‐ This utopian educational process when relying on future technology will allow for:

Large and open ended range of experiences: Using virtual reality technology the student is exposed to a range of experiences, some real (tour of the moon), some imaginary (a tour of a heuristic park), some taking place in the past (dinosaurs), some belonging to the present (repairing a bicycle), and some meant to take place in the future (living in an era in which life expectancy is the age of 250). The student will meet colleagues and experts from a range of different ages, geographies and areas of interest, and will be able to experience a range of activities, professions and situations.

Freedom and personal choice: The digitized reality already now put very few obstacles the way of free search and exploration. Once the educational institution’s regulations will not obstruct this freedom, the unlimited freedom and possibility to experience, both virtually and actually, will also make for very open ended and reach exploration.

Security: The technology will let the student perform activities independently, but with support. This can shield young people from much of the social pressure that can hurt his security.

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Personal Mentor: All the previous characteristics could have been achieved, in various degrees in the last two decades if there would have been a desire to form educational processes that support the humanistic foundational values of liberal democracies (Actually Aviram was engaged in such a process: Aviram 2010).

Still, twenty or even ten years ago it would be impossible to find as many mentors as are needed, not to speak about supplying each one of them with the very required skills needed for helping the student to get to know his profile. A mentor needs to be able to closely accompany the young people in their explorative voyages and while developing reflective dialogue with them. Guiding such a reflective dialogue requires detailed knowledge of the person and the circumstances as well a set memory and cognitive and analytic abilities that human simply not have

Thus the main and most revolutionary contribution which virtual reality and artificial intelligence can be put to in the ideal scenario is a smart mechanized mentor; we call it "Smart Companion". The device will help the user (student) get gradually to know himself better in regard to all personality parameters that are relevant for his development, and make meaningful decisions. The Smart Companion as we conceive it now relies on the value ad methodology of Self Fulfilments and is based on several empirical fields of research and theories as Self Determination Theory, Identity Formation Research, Positive Psychology, and Interests research. The Smart Companion will probably be connected to the user’s body and will be present in the interactions of the user with other people or the environment and track his emotional behavioural and verbal reactions to them.

Then the Smart Companion will match this information with parameters relating to the various relevant elements of the self, such as, interests, capacities, activity styles and worldview. Since directed by the humanistic values it will not use the information to decide for the user or direct him. It will rather converse with the user in order to enhance his willingness and ability to use the knowledge accumulated by it in order to get to know himself and direct himself better.

Horror scenario – In order to make it simple we used the same parameters as described in Aviram's educational utopia to describe the horror scenario. In this case the use of the parameters was manipulated in the implementation using the same technology in the interests of others.

Range of experiences: The system will determine in advance what the area of required experiences is (for example, computers and business admiration ‐ yes, dance and religious study ‐ no), and limit the student’s ability to experiment only in the required range. Using the control system that the technology provides, it will be possible to identify when the student starts to be interested in subjects not on the list and nip that in the bud.

Freedom, personal choice and the ability to locate meaningful activity: Since the system accompanies the student all the time and knows him personally and in depth, the student will become used to having the system help him in the decisions process or even direct him to the desired decisions. In a more sophisticated version, it will manipulate the student to believe that he is free to take decisions for himself while as a matter of fact it will make them for him

Security: The technology will give the student a sense of security that his actions and thoughts are kept to himself, whereas this is in fact an illusion, since the system will limit in advance his avenues of exploration and transfer conclusions, acts or even thoughts to the higher level system, which will supervise the selected solutions or the thoughts experienced. In some cases in which the regular manipulation or positive rewarding methods, the system can shake the user's self‐confidence.

Personal mentor: The technology will act as a personal agent (as distinguished from "mentor' or "companion") following the student everywhere. The agent will recognize the student personally, in all relevant parameters. It will use this knowledge in order to better manipulate the student to act in light of the interest of those who will control it.

4. In conclusion The two scenarios are based on the same technology and refer to the same aspects of the student’s life. Still they are totally opposed to each other in the values and interest that the technology serves in them and hence in the nature of developmental process it enhances in the student. Whereas the first scenario describes how the Smart Agent encourages the student's autonomy and self‐fulfilment, the second describe how a smart assistant can closely control of the student and manipulate him for the benefit of those who control it. While the first one encourages the search of the individual for activities meaningful for him and thus enhances his

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Aharon (Roni) Aviram and Yoav Armony chances for wellbeing, the second dictates for him the desired (for the system) fields of activity and manipulates him to believe he chose them by himself.

It might be the case that the scenarios that will take place in reality in ten or twenty years will be "mixed" or somewhere in between the above two extreme scenarios. Still whoever are in charge of the adaptation of future technology for educational use, should keep in mind that whatever functions are, they can serve different and opposed systems values. Democratic society as a whole should be mobilized to make sure that these values are Humanistic ones and not such that can lead to enhancement of the horror scenarios.

References ARDA, (2012) Quantum Computation Roadmap, [online], http://qist.lanl.gov/qcomp_map.shtml Aviram, A. (2010) Navigating Through the Storm: Reinventing Education for Postmodern Democracies, Sense, Rorterdam.

Aviram, A. (2010a) School as Communication Centre: an Introduction for an Optimistic Humanistic Education, Pardes, Tel Aviv.

Aviram, A. (2012) e‐Learning 2022: Four Levels of Challenges, A paper presented at EDEN conference, Porto, June 6‐9 2012.

Blascovich, J. & Bailenson, J. (2011) Infinite Reality: The Hidden Blueprint of Our Virtual Lives, William Morrow, Santa Barbara.

Freitas, A. R. (2011) Nanosensor Technology, Nanomedicine, [online], Vol. 1, Basic Capabilities, section 4.1, nanomedicine.com/NMI/4.1.htm.

Hall, J. S. (2007), Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine, Prometheus Books, NY. Hall, J. S. (2010) The age of Virtuous Machines, [online],www.kurzweilai.net/the‐age‐of‐virtuous‐machines.

Hammond, R. (2012). The World in 2030, 2012 edition, [online], rayhammond.com/The%20World%20In%202030%20(2012%20Edition).pdf.

Heim, M. (1993) The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. Oxford University Press, NY. Hofstadter, D. (1999) Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Brain. Basic Books, NY. Ingrid, R. (2012) Neural Networks Module, [online], uhaweb.hartford.edu/compsci/neural‐networks‐history.html.

Kako, M. (2009) Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel, Random House, NY. Kako, M. (2011) Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100, Random House, NY. Kurzweil, R. (2005) The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Viking, NY. Levy, D (2007) Love and Sex with Robots. HarperCollins publications, NY.

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Planning and Implementing a new Assessment Strategy Using an e‐ Learning Platform Rosalina Babo1 and Ana Azevedo1, 2 1 Polythecnic Institute of Porto/ISCAP, Porto, Portugal 2 Algoritmi Research Center, University of Minho, Guimarães, Portugal babo@iscap.ipp.pt aazevedo@iscap.ipp.pt

Abstract: One of the most difficult issues of e‐Learning is the students’ assessment. Being this an outstanding task regarding theoretical topics, it becomes even more challenging when the topics under evaluation are practical. ISCAP’s Information Systems Department is composed of about twenty teachers who have been for several years using an e‐ learning environment (at the moment Moodle 2.3) combined with traditional assessment. They are now planning and implementing a new e‐learning assessment strategy. This effort was undertaken in order to evaluate a practical topic (the use of spreadsheets to solve management problems) common to shared courses of several undergraduate degree programs. The same team group is already experienced in the assessment of theoretical information systems topics using the b‐learning platform. Therefore, this project works as an extension to previous experiences being the team aware of the additional difficulties due to the practical nature of the topics. This paper describes this project and presents two cycles of the action research methodology, used to conduct the research. The first cycle goal was to produce a database of questions. When it was implemented in order to be used with a pilot group of students, several problems were identified.

Subsequently, the second cycle consisted in solving the identified problems preparing the database and all the players to a broader scope implementation. For each cycle, all the phases, its drawbacks and achievements are described. This paper suits all those who are or are planning to be in the process of shifting their assessment strategy from a traditional to one supported by an e‐learning platform.

Keywords: e‐learning, e‐assessment, team work, organizational processes, higher education, LMS, Moodle

1. Introduction Since the first Correspondence Course Learning, from the mid‐nineteenth century, until the contemporary e‐ learning courses, a long path was followed concerning distance learning courses. Nowadays, to describe this type of learning process the most used terms are e‐learning and b‐learning, considering it is over Internet (Folden, 2012).

E‐learning processes are widely supported by Learning Management Systems (LMS). LMS usage had grown throughout the last years and nowadays LMS are very popular and vastly adopted in several organizations, including Higher Education Institutions (HEI) (Babo, et al., 2012)b (Cerioli, et al., 2012) (Kruse, et al., 2012) (Omar, et al., 2011; Salas‐Morera, et al., 2012). Several LMS are available (Babo & Azevedo, 2009), presenting a myriad of tools/functionalities, for example, announcements, assignments, blogs, chat, content delivery, content sharing, discussion, e‐mail, tests/exams, FAQs, forums, glossaries, gradebook, group work, learning paths, mailing lists, news, podcast, pools, schedule/calendar, self‐assessment, student portfolio, student tracking, surveys, syllabus, tasks‐exercises, videoconference, wiki, whiteboard (Llamas, et al., 2010; Lonn, et al., 2011). Similarly to other aspects of LMS platforms, online assessment is naturally gaining popularity, and is being sustainably adopted. Assessment is one fundamental aspect to consider and an abundant volume of research can be found in the literature (Stödberg, 2012).

The research presented in this paper took place at ISCAP, the School of Accounting and Administration from the Polytechnic Institute of Porto. The information systems department teachers used LMS Moodle long ago, exploring some of the available functionalities, including quizzes for summative tests. Tests were, so far, used mainly to assess theoretical topics with multiple‐choice questions, in the format of Moodle Quizzes. As a result of this research it is intended to assess a practical topic, namely the use of a spreadsheet, with multiple‐choice questions through Moodle quizzes.

One of the main difficulties identified in traditional project management is the organization of the work team (Schwalbe, 2010) (Meredith & Mantel Jr, 2011). This research project was not an exception. Thus a reflection about team organization and leadership was necessary and is included in this paper.

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Rosalina Babo and Ana Azevedo Two cycles of the action research methodology were developed. The first cycle comprises the development of a database of questions, afterwards used to generate the tests (Moodle quizzes). The second cycle comprises the resolution of the problems identified in the first cycle, and the application of the tests to assess the students. Each phase is described, the main problems are identified in each of the phases, and the encountered solutions are presented.

The novelty of this paper is to present the implementation of a new way of doing the assessment of practical topics, relating it with the important issue of organizing the team work, which was found to be a great difficulty. Its main contribution is to show that it is possible to implement the assessment of practical topics using Moodle quizzes, considering some constraints.

The structure for the rest of the paper is the following. Firstly, related research is presented, namely assessment using learning management systems, and team group organization. Following, the research development is presented, starting with the Action Research methodology, continuing with planning an assessment strategy using a LMS and Implementing and monitoring an assessment strategy using a LMS. The paper concludes with discussion and future research directions.

2. Related research In this section some of the related research is presented. This consists mainly in two topics, namely, Assessment using Learning Management Systems and Team Group Organization.

2.1 Assessment using learning management systems As a consequence of the adoption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in education and learning, e‐assessment is being increasingly adopted in Higher Education Institutions (HEI), and has been attracting attention from researchers worldwide. Some researchers develop specific environments to perform e‐assessment (Llamas‐Nistal, et al., 2013) (Dascalu & Bodea, 2010) (Boticki & Milasinovic, 2008).

Another approach to assess higher education students which is gaining momentum as time goes by, is the use of Learning Management Systems (LMS). In the literature several research examples can be found. For instance, starting from the definition of a taxonomy for question design, a formative assessment was implemented by Burrow (Burrow, et al., 2005). A new teaching method which includes e‐assessment, both formative and summative was successfully developed and implemented by Salas‐Morera (Salas‐Morera, et al., 2012). This new method uses several tools included in LMS platforms, such as forums, quizzes and tasks.

One important topic of research intends to ascertain the effectiveness, validity, and quality of e‐assessment comparing it with traditional assessment (Prakash & Saini, 2012) (Ventouras, et al., 2010). Commonly, those studies’ conclusions suggest promising results for e‐assessment applications either for specific environments as for LMS.

According to (Stödberg, 2012), the majority of the research in the topic of e‐assessment focus on formative purposes, but research focused in summative purposes can as well be found. Also according to (Stödberg, 2012) most of the research focus on closed‐questions based e‐assessment, mainly including multiple‐choice questions.

Thus, one of the most widespread kinds of e‐assessment consists in the use of multiple‐choice question tests.

Triantis & Ventouras (Triantis & Ventouras, 2012) present an interesting approach to multiple‐choice question tests introducing a new penalty method in order to avoid the main drawbacks of this type of tests.

This paper focus on summative e‐assessment supported by a LMS (Moodle) using multiple‐choice questions tests.

2.2 Team group organization A project is a temporary group activity undertaken to produce a unique product, service or result (Schwalbe, 2010) (Meredith & Mantel Jr, 2011) (PMI, 2013). A project is “constitute by teams within or across organizations to accomplish particular tasks under time constraints” (Wikipedia, 2013). According to

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Rosalina Babo and Ana Azevedo Macapagal (2010), the vital factors which impacts on the quality and speed of the project are people, process, and technology. The relationship among these elements ”can result in projects optimum performance” (Macapagal, 2010, p. 4).Through all the paper, process and technology factors are presented and discussed.

This section is about people, namely about the teamwork organization.

In any project it is important to have an “understanding of stakeholders, their behavior, and its effect on success to be able to manage project (...) effectively and efficiently” (Beringer, et al., 2013, p. 2). Also, it may be taken into consideration that “heterogeneity or diversity among employees may lead to intra‐ organizational tensions” (Arvidsson, 2009, p. 99). The group leader must be one of the members of the staff, and a member of management, may be one of the senior staff, being an acknowledged member of the system under change (Fowler & Rifkin, 1990).

During the development of a project, task and tasks timing should be clearly defined and allocated in order to avoid misunderstandings, delays, and tensions inside the team. (Meredith & Mantel Jr, 2011) (Schwalbe, 2010) (Arvidsson, 2009) (Beringer, et al., 2013).

The use of pilot groups revealed to be useful in projects involving many people, due to the risk of not achieving the of goals, and the consequent effect on the organization. Small groups are easier to monitor in order to identify and resolve problems as soon as they occur. Some other successful research can be found using pilot groups (Beevers, et al., 1995) (Bindl & Schuler, 1988).

All these aspects were taken into consideration in the selection and in the definition of individual responsibilities and tasks on the project described in this paper, accordingly to each of the intervenients know‐ how.

3. Research development In this section the developed research will be presented. Firstly, introducing the Action Research methodology, continuing with planning an assessment strategy using a LMS and following with implementing and monitoring an assessment strategy using a LMS

3.1 Action research methodology According to Baskerville and Stage “action research assumes that complex social processes cannot be reduced for meaningful study. A complex social process is best studied by introducing changes into that process and observing their effects.” (Baskerville & Stage, 1996, p.14). Regarding the researcher role and citing Avison, “the action researcher is directly involved in planned organizational change. (...) the action researcher is concerned to create organizational change and simultaneously to study the process” (Avison, et al., 2001, p. 28).

Considering the research and researcher characteristics, Action Research (AR) was chosen as the most adequate research methodology. The five phases cyclical process proposed by Baskerville, for AR in the information systems area (Baskerville, 1999) (Baskerville & Wood‐Harper, 1998), was adopted. The first cycle consisted in the production of a database of questions tested with a pilot group. The second cycle consisted in solving the problems that were identified in the first cycle. Table 1 presents each of the five phases in both cycles, and in the next sections the research is presented in more detail.

Table 1: Phases of the two action research cycles Phase Diagnosing

First Cycle Primary problems: Necessity of continuous assessment Limited computational resources Need to create several different tests for various student shifts, several times through the semester Difficulty to assure that all the exams assesses the same

Action Plan

Definition of a task force group of teachers Meeting with the task force group

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Second Cycle Primary problems: Slow access of the client computers to the server, due to the demanding characteristics of the Moodle 2.3. version Problems with the questions (lack of questions in some categories, low quality of some figures, figures missing in some of the questions, questions not accordingly to the defined standards) Meeting with the task force group Definition of an iterative plan to solve

Rosalina Babo and Ana Azevedo Phase

Action taking

Evaluating

Specifying Learning

First Cycle Definition of a pilot group of students Necessity to define standard categories of questions Necessity to cross‐validation revision of the questions Definition of categories to include each question Elaboration of a set of example questions Definition of rules for elaborating the questions Meeting with all the teachers for explaining and involving them in the project Developing the database of questions Implementation of one test Not enough questions to generate a random test with Moodle Difficulties in accomplishing the deadlines and the defined rules, by all the team Technical problems related with the upload of the test by each student Focus on technical issues analyzing why did they happen Importance of the design guidelines in order to complete, to improve, and to delete errors in the database of questions Improve procedures to monitor the workflow

Second Cycle the problems with the design of the questions Decision to use Moodle version 2.1, previously tested Revision of the questions in the database, accordingly to the agreed plan Migration of the questions to Moodle 2.1. version platform Implementation of a second test

Still not enough questions to extend the project to all the students/courses Observation of some resistance to the extension of the project to all the students/courses Focus on meeting all the forecasted technical needs before starting any project Redefinition of the way to extend the project Understanding of how the behavior of internal stakeholders influence the project success

3.2 Planning an assessment strategy using a learning management system ISCAP is the Business School of the Polytechnic of Porto that offers undergraduate and graduate studies with different programs involving, in the academic year 2012/2013, about 3778 students and 274 teachers. The offered undergraduate degree programs are: Accounting and Administration, International Commerce, Administrative Assistance Translation, Business Communication, Management of Tourism Activities and Marketing.

The Information Systems and Technology department is transversal to all the degree programs teaching courses, supporting the ICT teaching in all of them. The use of spreadsheets to solve management problems is one of the topics included in the curricula of six degree program courses taught to a sum of 1196 students by 20 teachers who belong to the Information Systems and Technologies department.

Since 1999, accordingly to Bologna agreement, students have been continuously assessed. One of the components of the assessment consisted in accomplishing several tasks using a spreadsheet tools. This procedure reveals to be a tough workload for the teachers due to several reasons. First of all, being necessary that students’ assessment involves a computer per student and considering that ISCAP only have around 120 available computers, it implies several shifts and consequently as many different exams as the number of shifts. Secondly, this procedure is repeated several times through the semester. Finally, due to the different number of exams, it is difficult to assure homogeneity, which means to assure that all the exams has the same degree of difficulty, and assess the same. Consequently, a process that helps the teaching group to develop a more efficient assessment is the challenge.

This group of teachers is already expert in the use of an e‐learning platform – Moodle – to assess theoretical topics, through mini test of multiple choice questions, using the Moodle quizzes tool. Thus, the use of Moodle to solve this issue arises naturally. However, the use of spreadsheets to solve management problems’ topic is of a practical nature, asking for a different approach comparing with the other already assessed topics.

Being aware that it would not be a good strategy to start implementing such a big project with the entire group (6 courses, 1196 students, 20 teachers), and based on the literature (see section 2.2), it seemed to be

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Rosalina Babo and Ana Azevedo wise to start the project with a small pilot group. However, as this project is to be implemented futurely to the entire workforce group (20 teachers) it is needed that all are involved since the beginning.

The head of the information systems department who intentionally is the team leader, in order to develop the project and to assure the involvement of all the stakeholders, organized several preparatory meetings with a smaller but significant group of teachers. The participants in those preparatory meetings were namely, the responsible for the Moodle platform that is also a chair of one of the courses, and the chairs of the other two courses (each one running in different semesters) that usually are attended by the biggest number of students and consequently involve the biggest number of teachers. Afterwards, the first meeting with the formed task force group took place. This group was composed by the team leader plus the six courses’ chairs.

Consequently, the task force agreed to develop the project and decided to choose just one course, one teacher and one subset of students belonging to the chosen course/teacher as the pilot group. The chosen course is part of the Marketing Degree, the teacher is the team leader, and 84 students were under this assessment project.

The next step consisted in developing the database of questions. First of all, it was necessary to define categories to include the questions to be designed. The first strategy was to use a course syllabus as a guide to the categories. However, as there are some differences among the several courses’ syllabus, a different standard was defined. This standard was defined based in the content of a commonly adopted book which 1 author is one of the teachers .

Secondly, it was identified the need to design some example questions to facilitate the subsequently communication with the whole teachers group. Each one of the six member of the task force group designed two example questions which were reviewed by another task force group member.

Some guidelines were defined for the questions design:

each question should have five different optional answers. One of these answers should be “None of the other answers is correct.”. This kind of answer prevents any inadvertent error either in the question or in the four possible answers.

there is only one correct answer assigned with 100%;

there is at least one completely wrong answer assigned with ‐20%;

as it is desired to design answers with different accuracy levels, i.e. not only correct or incorrect answers, it was decided that each teacher could decide a weight between ‐20% and 95% to each answer.

Regarding the extension of the project to all the teachers a planning document was prepared including the following:

A code was assigned to each category. The code consisted of the initials of the category designation, for instance FM stands for “Funções Matemáticas” (portuguese for Mathematical Functions)

The explanation of the question codification methodology. The code for each question was obtained by the concatenation of a two digit sequential number at the end of the respective category code, for instance, FM01, FM02, FM03,etc.

The number of necessary questions for each category was defined. The questions were distributed equitably among the teachers.

To each author was assigned a reviewer to warranty the accuracy of the work.

A schedule was defined with all the tasks and due dates. (design the questions and send to the reviewer; after receiving the revision proceed to the suggested revisions and insert the camera ready version in Moodle; validation of the questions previously introduced in Moodle)

Following, a meeting with all the teachers took place to present the project and to start implementing it.

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Rodrigues, L, 2011. Utilização do Excel 2010 para Economia & Gestão. Lisboa: FCA ‐ Editora Informática.

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Rosalina Babo and Ana Azevedo

3.3 Implementing and monitoring an assessment strategy using a learning management system The Moodle version in use was 2.3. When all the development phase was considered completed the project team leader attempted to create a quiz test.

During this attempt several problems were found out limiting the number of well‐designed questions. As there was a chronogram to accomplish with the students and a test was scheduled, the option was to select the questions one by one, instead of allowing Moodle to randomly generate them, thus assuring a well‐designed quiz test.

The students answered the test and several problems occurred. The main problem was related with the slow access to the server where Moodle was allocated, and the demanding characteristics of the new Moodle 2.3. version, and consisted in: slow display of the quiz and images, and impossibility to close the quiz text because it seems to be going into an infinite loop as it kept hanging. Unfortunately, some students had to repeat the quiz test.

The grades were not shown after finishing the quiz to prevent that something could go wrong since it is a pilot experiment. Students were asked to answer two questionnaires to evaluate this new way of assessment. The first one was answered the day after the quiz and the second one was answered after the students being informed about the grades.

Due to all the occurred problems, the trust and the reliability of the final result could have been compromised.

Hence, in the end of this first phase it is the moment to evaluate, identify constraints and develop strategies to solve the problems, preparing an enhanced future assessment moment.

Two types of problems were identified.

The first one cannot be easily solved by the team. It is a technical problem related with the server low performance when running Moodle 2.3. A solution could be the acquisition of a new server not possible at the moment. Therefore, it was decided to return to a previous Moodle version (2.1) used in the past with acceptable results. This migration can cause other estimated issues (for example: loss of images path) which can be solved simultaneously with the other type of identified problems.

The other type of problems concerns questions’ design. These problems were: lack of questions in some of the categories, missing or low quality figures in some of the questions, questions with seven answers instead of the five previously defined, and inaccurately designed questions.

Consequently it was necessary to do a new revision of the questions, mainly performed by the task force members. A new category, called “draft”, was created to allocate the questions with problems. Each member of the task force was in charge to review a fixed number of questions. The following iterative action plan was adopted:

each task force member reviews the assigned questions identifying the faults;

questions with faults were moved to the DRAFT category;

the authors were informed about the respective questions’ faults and the deadline to correct them;

after correcting the faults in the questions the authors should notify the reviewer (task force member) about the accomplishment of the task;

when the process is finished the reviewer move the question from the Draft folder to the correspondent category folder.

After the completion of the revision process a second quiz was created. These two different moments of students assessment were estimated in the course agenda and were related with different spreadsheet topics.

The second quiz was generated still with some constraints due to the few number of available questions.

Regardless this point everything went smoothly because the questions were at this point very well designed without any errors or problems.

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Rosalina Babo and Ana Azevedo During the second assessment session no technical problems were verified. The server performance was quite good and every detail occurred according to the plan.

4. Discussion and future research ISCAP’s information systems department developed a new challenging project in order to use Moodle platform to assess a practical topic, namely, the use of spreadsheets to solve management problems. This group of teachers was by that time expert in the use of Moodle platform to assess theoretical topics. However, the assessment of practical topics introduces other challenges.

As real problems were intended to be solved and both researchers were involved in the “planned organizational change” and simultaneously were studying the process, Action Research methodology was used to structure this research (Avison, et al., 2001, p. 28).

With the objective of implementing the new assessment strategy the researchers adopted the following process implementing structure which can also be used by those who are or are planning to be in the process of shifting their assessment strategy from a traditional to one supported by an e‐learning platform:

Identification of a group leader

Definition of a task force group

Well‐designed project management: clearly define tasks, timing for tasks achievement, and who will perform action

Involvement of the whole team

Assure the necessary resources (technical – servers, client‐computers,… ‐, human – time to develop the tasks)

Start with a well‐chosen pilot group

Apply the project to the pilot group

Evaluate the results

Solve the drawbacks

Iterate 7, 8 and 9

Apply to an extended group

Evaluate the results

Solve the drawbacks

Iterate 11,12 and 13

The main contribution of this paper is to show that is possible to implement multiple‐choice questions tests in Moodle to assess practical topics considering there should be a:

special focus on technical issues analyzing why did they happen;

clear definition of the procedures in order to complete, to improve, and to delete errors in the database of questions;

definition of the procedures to monitor the workflow;

focus on meeting all the forecasted technical needs before starting the project;

clear definition of the way to extend the project;

understanding of how the behavior of internal stakeholders influence the project success.

One of the main issues during the project development was related with one identified vital factor in any project management ‐ the teamwork. It was difficult to achieve the commitment of some members of the teamwork with the project, jeopardizing the desired quality of the final results.

ISCAP is a public Polytechnic University. Consequently, their workers are governmental workers. The careers definitions and all the hierarchies at governmental institutions as well as all the last 40 years of institutional

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Rosalina Babo and Ana Azevedo culture promotes the lack of responsibility and the absence of consequences to those who do not carry out their tasks. On the other hand it is difficult or impossible to reward those who works hard and are always willing to improve the system. In authors opinion this is one of the reasons for the difficulties with the teamwork.

In the future, it is planned to improve the database of questions two‐fold: creating different difficulty level for questions, and raise the number of questions in the Moodle database. Doing that, the project can be adequately extended. Firstly, extend the project to all the teachers and students of the same course. Secondly, extend the project to all the degree programs teaching courses that use the spreadsheet to solve management problems. It is also intended to extend the application of assessing practical topics to different courses, such as the use of database management systems.

During this phase of the project two questionnaires were answered by the students in different moments. The analysis of the implications of this new form of assessment from the point of view of the students is an important issue to be developed in a next work.

Like Stödberg, we “believe that e‐assessment will be increasingly used in higher education, (…) as soon as the higher education sector has the confidence to take the plunge” (Stödberg, 2012, p. 602).

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Rosalina Babo and Ana Azevedo Lonn, S., Teasley, S. D. & Krumm, A. E., 2011. Who Needs to do What Where?: Using Learning Management Systems on Residential vs. Commuter Campuses. Computers and Education, 56(3), pp. 642‐649.

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Authentic Learning in Online Environments – Transforming Practice

by Capturing Digital Moments Wendy Barber, Stacey Taylor and Sylvia Buchanan University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Oshawa, Ontario, Canada Wendy.barber@uoit.ca Stacey.taylor@uoit.ca Sylvia.buchanan@gmail.com

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to examine the specific techniques and teaching methodologies that enabled the authors to create authentic online learning experiences in undergraduate and graduate courses. Using both synchronous and asynchronous methodologies, the authors examined the highs and lows of translating meaningful face to face practice to the online environment. The paper examines teaching strategies used in a six week online graduate course using Adobe connect, Blackboard LMS and synchronous weekly meetings. While the digital world speaks in a language of one or zero, pedagogy cannot be reduced to such simple terms. It is a complex, dynamic, and creative process. This paper discusses how the richness of human connections traditionally experienced in face‐to‐face learning environments can be easily transmuted to an online class. Through the use of unique strategies such as “digital moments” and embracing creative thought, an authentic, constructivist community was created. The authors’ journey to developing this authenticity, their online pedagogical style and an innovative, safe learning community has been chronicled using narrative qualitative inquiry in this paper. The writers’ use of digital moments empowers students to create and have ownership of their own online community. While it is important to note that there as many differences in online courses as there are in f2f environments, it is clear that the human aspects of fundamentally good teaching remain untouched. For both the authors and their students, previous experiences with distance education had been impersonal and disengaging. That alternative, a group of utterly disengaged and inexorably bored students was unacceptable. The old style of traditional distance learning held no particular draw from a humanistic perspective. The authors discovered that there are ways to embrace creativity, and develop the kind of collaborative learning environment that they designed in their face‐to‐face classrooms. This paper articulates their journey into the abyss of digitizing themselves as teachers; it examines the specific techniques used for best practice in online learning, while simultaneously celebrating the splash of colour that is essential to brighten digital learning environments.

Keywords: digital pedagogy, online communities

1. Introduction In recent years the popularity of online education has increased significantly. This is in part due to its accommodation for anywhere, anytime learning, but it is also owing to a greater selection of high quality courses, as well as the emergence of more engaging learning management applications. With online education becoming an integral part of academic institutions and corporations worldwide, support for such endeavors can be critical to the growth and development of an organization, thus making educators who are well versed in the complexities of e‐learning a valuable commodity. Although the growth of online learning is quite substantial, there are still many who believe that electronic courses are inferior to those that offer face to face contact. This endemic belief can stem from an appalling experience with online learning or simply because it is a non‐traditional format that for some may invoke fear, anxiety or even complete disdain for that which is different.

What follows is a narrative exploration of the writers’ journey through teaching an online course, and the queries, struggles and victories that ensued along the way. Far from being separate from the digital environment, this paper reveals that our humanity remains front and centre amidst the online world. We are neither married to the technology nor divorced from it, but we emerge from it changed as teachers and learners. This story demonstrates also, that when teacher becomes learner, students find the courage to express themselves in a myriad of ways, including the powerful use of “digital moments”. Authentic practice emerges; students immerse themselves in the digital tools and become the actors who choose which tools are best to guide the learning process.

2. Rationale of the study In a digital world, technophiles often crave precision and logical rational answers. But our humanity can be both inconvenient and messy; unlike computers we are not often fixed with re‐booting. This human – machine interface requires us to acknowledge that human stories tell a broader picture of how the digital journey

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Wendy Barber, Stacey Taylor and Sylvia Buchanan affects and changes us. While this method does not generate precise, reproducible results, social scientists can accept that narrative accounts of individual case studies are valuable sources of data (Merriam, 1998). Story‐ telling casts the learner as the heroic protagonist who creates and re‐creates the meaning of learning as he/she goes. Teaching and learning do not exist in a vacuum or in a sterile digital environment devoid of human emotion. Thus, the sharing of these stories through digital moments, along with their raw feelings and sentiments, may be the best measure of the narrators’ evolution as digital learners.

Qualitative research approaches based on narrative methodology and story‐telling are effective means through which theoretical constructs such as digital learning environments and adult education can be observed. Several authors, (Schon, 1987; Kilbourn, 1999; Eisner, 1998; Hunt 1987) discuss various facets of using these qualitative research methods to assess learning from the perspective of stories told by the self. A common thread among these authors is the knowledge of self as a professional practitioner through reflection on learning.

Literature on narrative study reveals that this kind of writing is an appropriate method to make connections that transform our knowledge as teachers. It is by examining the stories of individual teachers in the context of their environments, digital or otherwise, that we can gain insight into the professional expertise of teachers.

Connelly and Clandinin (1990) state that “the central value of narrative inquiry is its quality as subject matter.

Narrative and life go together and so the principal attraction of narrative as a method is its capacity to render life experiences, both personal and social, in relevant and meaningful ways” (p. 10). Bullough & Pinnegar (2001) state that “writing about teacher education practice may be best expressed in story form, where linearity gives way to a different sense of time, where emotion drives action” (p. 18). As such, the teaching strategy of digital moments allows the emotion to drive the learning and puts the students squarely at the centre of the process. Ultimately, the critical question of how pedagogy is transformed to an online learning environment is an evolving story which can be brought forward into a public discourse through sharing of digital moments.

3. Methodology This project occurred in three phases and was used to test the effectiveness of using “digital moments” as a teaching strategy to create authentic online communities. The challenge of creating an online community given a compressed timeline during a short spring term and the brief synchronous amount of time in class was daunting. Each week students and instructors submitted and shared a “digital moment” through pods in adobe connect. These digital moments could represent an emotion, a moment from their week, a quotation, you‐ tube clip or art work. While the technique was simple, it was an extremely effective way to create online community. Digital moments allowed the participants and the instructors to share their stories, to bring their humanity to the learning environment in a safe and respectful way. Each person sharing a digital moment was telling their narrative, a method of educational qualitative inquiry that has a long history in educational research.

Phase 1 was a pilot project to try this new digital teaching strategy and it occurred over one term of teaching a graduate online course entitled “Authentic Assessment”. Participants in the pilot phase were 21 graduate students and the instructor who was an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education. Classes met three times a week for three hours over a four week period in the summer term. Anecdotal reflections from students recorded in Blackboard chat rooms, audio recordings of Adobe classes, and journal notes from the professor were used to reframe and improve the strategy.

Phase 2 involved using the same digital moment teaching strategy in an undergraduate course entitled “Psychological Foundations and Digital Technology – Adult Education Focus”. Participants in phase 2 were 26 rd undergraduate students in a Bachelor of Adult Ed Digital Technology degree in their 3 year, the instructor, and a tutorial assistant. Students viewed two hours of video podcasts created by the instructor each week, prior to meeting in Adobe connect for tutorial for one hour per week over a twelve week period. Anecdotal reflections from students recorded in Blackboard chat rooms, audio recordings of Adobe classes and journal notes from the professor and tutorial assistant were used to reframe and adjust the strategy.

Phase 3 involved re‐visiting the use of the “digital moment” strategy in a second term of the graduate course “Authentic Assessment”. Participants in phase 3 were 23 graduate students and the professor. Classes met for

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Wendy Barber, Stacey Taylor and Sylvia Buchanan three hours per session twice a week over a six week period in the spring term. Anecdotal reflections from students recorded in Blackboard chat rooms, audio recordings of Adobe classes, and journal notes from the professor were used to analyze the effectiveness of the strategy in developing a sense of online community.

Student participants in the study gave informed consent and were given permission to withdraw from the project at any time. Digital moments were collected by a tutorial assistant and kept in an e‐folder for future reference.

This paper uses qualitative methods to chronicle the journey of 23 students in Phase 3 of the project, the lead professor and tutorial assistant through their six week online graduate course.

4. Data collection Data were collected via online chats and classes in adobe connect were recorded for review. Recordings were kept on a secure server located at the university. Audio and text data were used to analyze how well the strategy worked in terms of students’ perceptions of their online community. Students were asked to maintain weekly comments in Blackboard chat rooms and use this as a journal format to record their observations about their online community. It is also worthwhile to note that after the experiment had completed, several of the graduate students, themselves employed as teachers, continued to journal with the professor and began to use the “digital moment” strategy in their own public school classes.

5. Sample comments It’s so emotional At the beginning I was so nervous and kind of cynical, so I thought “ok here we go” but now I really look forward to finding my own digital moment for the week and seeing everyone else’s I loved it!

I never thought I would get to know people online so easily Doing this every week makes me actually ask myself how I am doing I like guessing who puts what in their Digital Moment I just started using this strategy with my own class and they loved it! Grades 5‐6 students really opened up and I used it on the smart‐board This is a great way to get students to express how they feel without words I think it helps to decrease the kind of stereotyping that you can get when you meet people face to face It’s really weird finally meeting classmates face to face and feeling like you already know them super well When I used it with my own class it really helped me as a teacher to track where the kids were at It’s a safe way to express how you are feeling inside, sometimes I think technology is less personal but this was really personal I actually shared with my peers, which I usually don’t do in face to face settings I found it interesting that you got to know people’s sense of humour, without any real cues like you would get in a f2f environment, like body language My friends reached out to me on weeks when I was struggling It levelled the field for me as the teachers did it too, so we could see who they were as people, which made me want to contribute more Really valuable! Best course I’ve taken in this degree One week my digital moment was about a family member who had died, but she really had inspired me to go back to school so, it was really good to share it with the group I am amazed at how well I got to know my colleagues in this class; I’ve had some awful online experiences and this was a refreshing change

6. Findings Three key elements for building online community emerged as the study progressed. 1. Building relationships, 2. Risk‐taking and valuing mistakes, and 3. Sharing our own narrative stories through weekly Digital Moments.

The interplay of these three factors was critical to understanding the lenses we each brought to the digital environment. The online community developed easily by sharing our humanity and vulnerability through weekly sharing of our Digital Moments.

6.1 Building relationships During the course of our six weeks of classes together, the online chat room became a place where students could share their personal stories through digital moments. This is what Connelly and Clandinin (1995) refer to

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Wendy Barber, Stacey Taylor and Sylvia Buchanan as “collaborative story‐telling: in our story telling, the stories of our participants merged with our own to create new stories, ones that we have labelled collaborative stories; a mutually constructed story created out of the lives of both researcher and participant” (p. 12). The value of story‐telling enabled us to learn more about each other. Sticking to “the content” was important, but straying to the personal became equally important to the learning experience. The affordances of Adobe allowing the class lecture, presentation and simultaneous live chat mirrored the informal learning that occurs in a face‐to‐face environment. In fact, it was ameliorated by the fact that the instructor was privy to all of the chat, so while it was challenging to attend to both, the formal and informal learning portions were seamlessly integrated. In a face‐to‐face situation, this may not have occurred as the instructor would not hear all side conversations. During the course, students became new parents, started new jobs, and shared stories of travel and what presented in their daily lives despite being in locations around the world. We said simultaneously good morning and good night to students in various time zones. And thus, through the use of digital moments, we shared our personal and emotional lives; real relationships developed. Beatty (1995) refers to this as the construction of personal professional practical knowledge. Each week a highlight of the class was having students arrive with enthusiasm to find out which digital moment would be shared by peers. Students new to the online environment were assigned a “buddy” to help them with any specific questions they had. In addition, giving students Adobe “host” responsibilities increased their empowerment and the sense of trust in the group. The inevitable mistakes did occur, with files magically disappearing or reappearing, but over the term the classroom became their own.

This sense of ownership over the learning environment was essential to students taking risks in presentations and assignments. Teachers in online environments should not underestimate the importance of investing in community building activities, much as they might do in a face‐to face‐setting; in the digital setting, this is a virtual, and mostly sedentary learning space, so keeping students in the ‘mental ready position’ is essential to keeping them engaged and on task.

6.2 Risk‐taking and finding courage Understanding and accepting the important roles of failure and mistakes are keys to developing a successful online pedagogy. Students arrive with a wide variety of backgrounds, not only in the course content but also in technological skills. Thus, the development of confidence in the value of our mistakes, and the expectation to make mistakes are important. As Schon reveals, we feel like failures “whenever learning a new competence requires unlearning deep‐seated theories‐in‐use or whenever in situations of uncertainty feelings of vulnerability and ‘knowing what to do’” evoke a failure response” (1987, p. 290). It is important to cultivate our errors as sources of important information and pivotal learning moments. As athletes and other high performers do, analyzing our errors can be an important touchstone from which we can move forward. If students “hold unrealistically high expectations for their performance, once they become aware of their error, they believe they should produce complete and perfect interventions. They see error as failures and a blow to self‐esteem” (Schon, 1987, p. 291). Learning from mistakes is a pattern followed by the best performers across professions. As sport psychologist Terry Orlick attests, failure can be instructive more quickly and accurately than any other learning experience (2000). Here again, using digital moments creates a safe and supportive learning community within which risk‐taking is encouraged resulting in significant personal growth and innovative thinking in students.

That being said, our tolerance of mistakes is directly related to our ability to maintain focus and enthusiasm for learning. Monitoring the energy and engagement of online learners can be key to their success. This may mean tailoring assignments to their current skill level, rather than assuming that all students will perform at the same level and in the same way. It also means allowing for creativity and ownership of assignments, so that students can choose to demonstrate what they know in the way that makes the most sense to them, using the technology that best fits their usage. This level of meta‐teaching is not unique to the online environment, but it is essential, since one of the lessons that students should leave with is the ability to choose which technological tool best suits their purpose; they should be able to critically analyse which ones work best and why, and they should have the confidence to use peer support to learn new modalities that they had not tried before. Again, the importance of a learning community, based on human interactions and relationships, can provide a foundation from which mistakes are no longer feared, but celebrated. Innovations are not products, but points on a continuum within which students can operate flexibly, based on their level of online skills. In a world where our access to information is becoming overwhelming, a discerning student should be able to select wisely the tool that is appropriate to answer the questions they pose. This, again, puts the curious

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Wendy Barber, Stacey Taylor and Sylvia Buchanan student in the driver’s seat, reduces fear of errors, decreases perfectionistic tendencies to produce a “finished product” and emphasizes the advantages of working together through our inevitable stumbles and errors.

6.3 Finding humanity in digital moments While the challenge of transforming oneself to an online pedagogue was daunting, certain shifts in my thinking and values had to occur. This dissonance was both cognitive and emotional, and is described by Whitehead (1993) as a ‘living contradiction’. Trying to mould old ways of teaching into an online format does not work; there was no quick translation, since the transmission of information is no longer enough for ‘real’ and meaningful teaching. Truly authentic and transformative teaching and learning required certain elements that could, and would emerge in the online class. Group work, activities, and getting to know one’s students still occurred, they merely appeared differently. Ultimately, it was only upon using digital moments online through adobe connect that my pedagogical approach shifted, and I was able to create and observe the development of a rich online learning environment.

Becoming ‘real’ online was a journey fraught with highs and lows, like any good adventure. It is clear that digital classrooms can provide uniquely human learning experiences. The gaps that I had anticipated in getting to know students, creating relationships between students online and designing a safe environment for taking personal risks in learning were not as scary as previously thought. Prior to teaching in this environment, I believed that “authenticity in teaching” would be more difficult online. In some respects, it is, but in our unfolding global world, perhaps we need to use this venue for reaching out to learners across the world. The technology was a powerful tool, but the humanity in the classroom remained untouched as the real driver of the learning experience. It is important to remember that the teacher‐learner relationship cannot be replaced, nor does it need to be replaced by high tech solutions. The two must be woven together in an authentic and meaningful way, with both parties deciding how, when and why to use online environments. Margery Williams’ classic children’s tale of the Velveteen Rabbit sums up this notion: “What is real”, asked the rabbit, “does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick out handle?” “Real isn’t how you are made” said the skin horse, “it’s a thing that happens to you. It doesn’t happen all at once. You become. It takes a long long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges or who have to be carefully kept.

Generally, by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand” (1991, p. 32).

A further addition to successful online pedagogy is the preservation of what can only be termed “gumption” (Pirsig, 1974; Atkinson & Claxton, 2000). Our enthusiasm for learning in a digital space must be nurtured and maintained. It is a level of energy in class that can be transformed for the benefit of both instructors and learners. However, it is important to maintain this quality when faced with the inevitable fact that, well, the technology does not always work. Pirsig states this succinctly: Gumption is a reservoir of good spirits that can be added to or subtracted from; it’s the result of the perception of Quality; a gumption trap consequently can be defined as anything that causes one to lose sight of Quality and thus lose one’s gumption for what one is doing. Watch out for gumption desperation, in which you hurry up wildly in an effort to restore gumption by making up for lost time. It’s time for that long break (1974, p. 276).

Monitoring the level of gumption is a key component of online teaching success. Because we generally lack the face‐to‐face interactions, some elements of body language that might indicate disengagement cannot be perceived. Thus, the instructor must continually keep an eye on the level of energy and take as many breaks as needed to keep everyone focused and fully engaged. Using digital moments levels the learning field, and can successfully help both teacher and learner to maintain enthusiasm and ‘gumption’. While this implies a level of trust in our teaching instincts, Atkinson and Claxton concur that this “indefinable but desirable quality of gumption” (2000, p. 54) is essential to good online pedagogy.

7. Discussion Several features emerged as key components of a good online community. First, there is critical importance to developing relationships and a sense of trust. Second, it is essential to create a learning environment where

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Wendy Barber, Stacey Taylor and Sylvia Buchanan both the instructor and learner are taking risks. Third, there is great importance to injecting a human element to each class, including humour, grace, and emotion. And finally, it is important to address students’ pre‐ conceptions and fears of using new technology. This, in itself can be a barrier which needs to be overcome.

Digital moments were an extraordinarily useful strategy for humanizing the digital learning space.

The author’s initiation into the world of e‐learning began by transforming a face to face course in Authentic Assessment to that of a digital platform. As is the case in most programs of study the participants enter the class with differing backgrounds, experiences, and levels of expertise, but ultimately it is how the instructor addresses these differences that determines student outcomes. By using digital moments, the style of teaching emerged seamlessly integrated from its use in a physical space to that of a virtual one, which was well suited to multi‐modal learners and effortlessly connected that which made us different.

Moreover, the author’s use of icebreakers and the sharing of personal information were methods used to establish interaction, as well as initiating dialogue between members of the class. These activities were essential in building personal connections, encouraging students to adopt the role of mentor, and in becoming sources of inspiration for one another. As the course evolved these initial activities along with hosting privileges in Adobe connect fostered greater independence and gave students a sense of empowerment. By the same token, our acknowledgment that failure can be a highly instructive tool helped to minimize the burden on students who often see mistakes as a purely negative measure of their abilities.

It is the author’s conviction that exploiting the human element in cyberspace is not only possible, but should be essential, something that can be accomplished through the exploration of relationship building exercises, as well as the utilization of assorted tools employed in building communities of practice. These findings, supported through observation, group activities and the deployment of online tools such as chat rooms, discussion boards, and breakout rooms allow for the facilitation of large and small group discussions, thus providing the instructor with an overview of all that is happening in the virtual class.

8. Conclusion The journey to developing an online pedagogical style has been chronicled in this paper. But the outcome of the struggle still must be student success. At the end of this course, students produced original work, combining their creative skills and unique talents with the appropriate piece of technology to demonstrate they had mastered the concepts. One student constructively used her life experiences in travelling, her photographic arts and her background in art to assemble a video which was truly inspiring. Her ability to use the technology as a vehicle through which she could express her learning, her way, is the best barometer of success a teacher can have. Another student, with seven years of teaching experience and new to the program, expressed distaste for and a lack of comfort using written text. He integrated the literature on the course to a video which is a model of alternative means of assessing students in digital environments. While a few of the students produced assignments with traditional modes (written work), the predominant feature was that once one student had done something original, the others wanted to learn how to do it. Students taught students; they taught their instructor. As a teacher, my barometers for a successful class in a face‐to‐ face environment were not that different than online: the creation of supportive meaningful learning experiences: human interaction and sharing of the vital emotional components of learning; valuing and cherishing our mistakes and the important learning that emerges therein: and finally, the best of all, wanting to come back for more.

While technology is a wonderful tool, the use of digital moments can be an effective strategy to bring humanity to the online learning environment. One may conclude that the relationship between teacher and student is an important element in e‐learning that cannot be easily replaced with high tech tools. By embracing this journey through the telling of our stories using digital moments, we share emotion and empathy; it serves to remind us that when working with technology or beginning something new one can feel both intense frustration as well as sheer exultation. Instructors must embrace these often strong emotions in themselves and their students with courage and conviction.

It is important to note that both co‐authors experienced this teaching style as students with the lead author.

Their inclusion in this paper is testament to the power of digital moments to create lasting relationships in online environments. They too are advocates for creative expression, multi‐modal learning, and the inclusion

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Wendy Barber, Stacey Taylor and Sylvia Buchanan of alternative forms of assessment. Besides the large body of research attesting to the merits of a more creative approach to learning, it also nurtures multiple intelligences and allows the more timid or those left behind to ultimately find their voice. Moreover, there are some things that just cannot be articulated through text, and words cannot always convey what you wish to say. So perhaps it is time to not only transform one’s digital pedagogy, but to also transform academia’s traditional shades of grey with a little splash of colour in every digital moment.

References Atkinson, T. & Claxton, G. (2000). The Intuitive Practitioner: On the Value of Not Always Knowing What One is Doing.

Philadelphia.PA: Buckingham Open University Press.

Beattie, M. (1995). Constructing Professional Knowledge in Teaching: A Narrative of Change and Development. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Bereiter, C. & Scardamalia, M. (1993). Surpassing Ourselves. Peru, IL: Open Court Publishing.

Bullogh, R. & Pinnegar, S. (2001) Guidelines for quality in autobiographical forms of self‐study research. Educational Researcher, 30(3), 13‐21.

Connelly. M. & Clandinin, J. (1990). Stories of experience and narrative inquiry. Educational Researcher, (June‐July), 2‐14.

Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Eisner, E. (1998). The Enlightened Eye: Qualitative Inquiry and the Enhancement of Educational Practice. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice‐Hall.

Hunt, D. (1987). Beginning with Ourselves. Cambridge, MA: Brookline Books.

Kilbourn, B. (1999). For the Love of Teaching. London, ON: Althouse Press.

Merriam, S. (1998). Qualitative Research and Case Study Applications in Education. San Francisco: CA: Jossey‐Bass.

Orlick, T. (2000). In Pursuit of Excellence. Windsor, ON: Human Kinetics.

Pirsig, R. (1974). Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. New York, NY: Bantam Books.

Schon, D. (1987). Educating the Reflective Practitioner. San Francisco, CA: Jossey:Bass.

Williams, M. (1991). The Classic Tale of the Velveteen Rabbit. Philadelphia, PA: Courage Books.

Whitehead, J. (1993) The Growth of Educational Knowledge: Creating Your Own Living Educational Theories. Bournemouth, UK: Hyde Publications.

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Signature Based Credentials, an Alternative Method for Validating Student Access in e‐Learning Systems Orlando Belo1, Paulo Monsanto1 and Anália Lourenço2 1 Algoritmi R&D Centre, Department of Informatics, University of Minho, Portugal 2 Department of Informatics, University of Vigo, Spain obelo@di.uminho.pt, paulomonsanto@yahoo.com analia@uvigo.es

Abstract: e‐Learning systems are today one of the most used tools in student’s life. Every time a student uses an e‐Learning system he initiates a pre‐defined, and often implicit, set of clicks, which somewhat characterizes his interests. The navigation habits of students can be revealed easily through a conventional usage profiling process. In most cases, these profiles are used to optimize the organization of e‐Learning systems, to tune its services, or simply to reallocate resources and services in better access places. In this paper, we analyse student profiles with a different, less‐conventional goal: to identify improper and anomalous accesses to e‐Learning systems requiring user credentials (login and password).

Keywords: e‐learning systems, signature‐based systems, signature based credentials, usage profiling, service personalization

1. Introduction Nowadays, e‐Learning is a well‐established commodity in academic instruction. An increasing number of education institutions and corporate training facilities offer courses online. As in any other business, e‐ Learning platforms have to address customers’ needs, but then again, the primary goal is anticipated: to improve teaching, learning processes, and their accessibility. To maximise customer satisfaction, i.e. the achieve students’ learning goals, institutions invest in encompassing an adequate set of contents (including contents organisation and interconnection) and learning student navigation patterns. Web usage mining and profiling are penetrating educational research and, in particular, online learning, because it has the potential of improving teaching (Romero et al., 2010). These techniques are very common in e‐Commerce, where it is used to study the patterns of consumers with the aim to improve the services in accordance with consumer preferences (Liu et al., 2011). Web usage mining in education is a potentially important research tool through which one can learn about how the online learning platform is used, on the one hand, and about the students themselves, on the other (Cohen and Nachmias, 2011).

Generally, user navigation patterns are recorded in history aggregates known as Web sessions ‐ a set of user clicks framed at a short interval of time (typically less or equal to 30 minutes). Regardless implementation specifics, user sessions are collected and recorded in the log files of the Web platform. Web usage mining techniques make use of these files to automatically extract non‐trivial, implicit information about the navigation patterns of students. The most common usage mining goal is to improve the learning platform, provide clues on how to re‐organise contents and optimise accessibility (Psaromiligkos et al., 2011). A less‐ reported, but equally important analysis goal is the identification, preferably as early as possible, of dubious and presumably unauthorised and fraudulent logins, i.e. someone using curricular unit resources from a student with his credentials. The usage mining process is basically the same in that mining techniques are issued to learn about usage patterns. The difference is that fraud detection requires a somewhat historical analysis of the navigation patterns of the user throughout multiple Web sessions, in order to assess if a particular access is out of the ordinary or not, i.e. if an observed behaviour conforms to the user learnt behaviour (Dash et al., 2011). In this work, we address user access validation in e‐Learning platforms by introducing a special profiling method based in the concept of usage signature. This concept has already been used successfully for anomalous detection in many areas like credit card usage (Wong et al., 2012), network intrusion (Shafi and Abbass, 2011), and in particular in telecommunications fraud (Ferreira et al., 2006). In this paper we will present a tool with the ability to verify and authenticate student credentials when accessing to a e‐Learning platform. Its basic services and functionalities are discussed, especially the ones related to credentials association, maintenance and validity using student temporal signatures reconnaissance. The paper ends by reviewing the process of signature creation, showing and explaining the way we use it to detect anomalous accesses to a specific login account in a typical e‐Learning platform.

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Orlando Belo, Paulo Monsanto and Anália Lourenço

2. User signatures Commonly, a usage signature is defined as a set of feature variables that were considered relevant (or somewhat indicative) about the navigation behaviour of a user ‐ for example, in a Web system, the number of contents areas usually visited, the average number of pages visited per contents or the average duration of a session. A signature has the potential to reveal how a student has conducted himself in a specific curricular unit during a certain period of time, which allows us to identify and characterize student’s temporal exploration patterns, revealing usage profiles and being quite useful to identify and analyse their variance over time. Like other methods and techniques, signatures can be extracted from students’ navigation sessions every time they access to a curricular unit site that we selected as target for analysis. When defined, a signature reveals a standard behaviour for a specific student – one student, one signature. Strong variations in a student signature reveal a behaviour change, which potentially is an alarm for a potential improper access (i.e. someone using curricular unit resources from other student with its credentials). A signature can be something as unique as your login input or as something more generic as context information. Background information is information that may be directly or indirectly assigned to the user and which derives his activity from Web system access. Typical examples of user activity (Cvrcek and Matyas, 2004) may be the time that normally he remains connected to the website, the average session time, or the type of content that he tends to see, among others. For instance, a Web user signature may be characterized by a set of attributes (or characteristics) that allow his identification within the application context of a Web site. Signatures have emerged as a key concept allowing for answering new needs of information that are sometimes demanding in real time. With statistical information, a profile or the behaviour of a user can be more effectively predicted, “knowing”, in advance, its future behaviour. The choice of a signature depends largely on the application.

Default user profiles can be used in applications for detection of intruders, where deviation from what we call a regular behaviour can be regarded as an intrusion in the system (Yeung et al., 2002). In fraud detection programs, a behavioural pattern of a customer can be characterized using several pieces of data such as account access times or the date and type of transactions, being a significant deviation of an usage pattern a possible indication of fraud (Cahill et al., 2000). For example, the signature of a cyber attack of denial‐of‐ service can be defined as a high number and almost consecutive TCP connections to one or more IP addresses without the recognition of a server. The setting we give to the signature is quite relevant for the comparison to be made at the level of usage patterns that were found. In a fraud detection analysis applied to telecommunications customers, the signature may correspond to a vector of variables, obtained in a given period of time. The choice of such variables may be influenced by several factors such as its complexity, data availability data or the degree of computation required to perform its calculation (Ferreira et al., 2006). Other notions of signatures exist, supporting by cryptographic schemes that using user's attributes to provide additional features that can be used be used for security mechanisms. Signatures based on attributes extend a user signature that is based on their identity (Shamir, 1984). With that, a user will be identified not only by a set of characters that make up the signature, but also with a set of attributes. These attributes will have to be certified by a competent authority, ensuring that the user has a certain type of features that can be used in any system for verification or authentication. This type of signature has many uses, one of which is the possibility of anonymous authentication, where a user does not have the need to present any kind of credentials. The system will only check if the user has the necessary characteristics to access to system’s services and resources. A variant of attribute‐based signatures are group signature schemes that are based also on attributes (Khader, 2007). A schema of a group signature is a type of group signature (Delerablée and Pointcheval, 2006) in which the certification of the identity of a member of a group can be invoked by something or someone, answering the signature of that member to a given set of characteristics.

3. User signatures definition and preparation 3.1 The characteristics of a signature To demonstrate the application of signatures in the definition of usage profiles and in the detection of unauthorized access to restricted areas of operation, we used an e‐Learning site from a Portuguese university.

Users are registered in the e‐Learning platform as students or teachers. Each one of them has different permissions and functionalities depending on the type and services of each curricular unit. After logging into the curricular unit’s site, a student has access to a broad range of general resources, such as areas of contents or discussion groups, and specific resources related with the activities usually performed in the unit, as the curricular unit’s dossier or the evaluation of pedagogical works. The system uses several means for storing information relating to access and operations conducted by its users, namely: physical files stored directly in

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Orlando Belo, Paulo Monsanto and Anália Lourenço the operating system, and activity records in two databases within the e‐Learning system. In this work we used only data concerning the history of activities developed within the e‐Learning system. For sampling purposes, and given the volume of existing data in our data source, we decided to collect data for just one‐month history. This sample integrated about 15 million records relating to the activities of users in the e‐Learning platform, taken from a general universe of more than 40000 users and almost 5000 university curricular units.

From this sample was designed and implemented a multidimensional database, supported by a dimensional star‐schema, containing a fact table hosting all the detailed activity records, and four regular dimension tables, namely “DimTime”, “DimUserType”, “DimUser” and “DimSession”. The latter two dimensions are degenerate dimensions (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The physical star‐schema of user’s activities All table dimensions receive specialized information that supports the main analysis perspectives of the system administrator and analyst concerning e‐Learning platform’s service requests. The “DimUserType” table stores information about the class of the user. Based on system’s requirements we created just four different classes: ‘student’, ‘teacher’, ‘other’ and ‘unknown’. All activity records involving the use of system’s services or resources that were generated by users that we don’t want to trace are labelled with ‘other’. The second dimension table – “DimTime” – that figures in the schema is mandatory in all dimensional schemas keeping temporal data values in order to ensure system’s activity temporal analysis. The "TFActivity" table is the fact table of the system, which means that it contains the records of all activities carried out over the period of analysis that was considered. This table is essential in the process of construction of user signatures. For anonymity purposes, the real identity of the user has been replaced by a surrogate key. Table 1 shows the description of the attributes that make up the basic structure of this table.

Table 1: Description of the attributes of the fact table “TFActivity” Attribute PK TimeStamp UserType IDUser IDSession AccessType Operation

Description Primary key.

Date and time of the activity.

User type.

User surrogate key.

Session identifier.

Access type identifier.

Operation performed.

PageView

Indicates if occurred or not a page view.

Description of the curricular unit that was accessed.

Course

Example 129705980 2011‐01‐01 00:00:19.270 U 47051 15253311 Page/ Module/ Login/…

Users list/ Curricular unit contents / Task scheduling/ …

Yes/No This curricular unit covers all the aspects concerning…

The choice of attributes to characterize a signature was based on the objective outlined for the application of access and security measures, namely the determination of variations in usage patterns on the e‐Learning platform. So, the attributes to be chosen should be so sensitive as possible in order to allow for the detection of changes in the behaviour of the users in the most precise way. A variation in a usage pattern may have, essentially, two main reasons, which are more or less evident, namely: a real change in the user profile, or an anomaly that when occurred might have caused a change in user behaviour.

The choice of the feature variables of a signature can be affected by several factors, such as working and validation goals, system behaviour and dynamics, and the complexity of feature variables themselves. In our

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Orlando Belo, Paulo Monsanto and Anália Lourenço case, we chose a set of 12 feature variables that was influenced by the nature and availability of data involved, and by the experience of the managers and analysts of the e‐Learning platform used. Additionally, these variables can be better expressed through an average/standard‐deviation parameter, which simplifies not only the task of signature processing but also the one related with signature deviation analysis. As we know, the signature of a user must be unique. The possible variation that a given signature may suffer is stored over time in the signatures table (“TFSignature”), which receives all the values recorded for the already referred feature variables ‐ a description of this table can be found in Table 2. One way to determine the variation of a signature is by temporal analysis of the operations that a user is carrying out over time on your working area inside the e‐Learning platform. In our case study, all operations were recorded, whether they have been considered as regular or not. As regular operation we considered all internal events captured and stored by the platform that had not access to a restricted or privileged source, that is, whose origin is not a reserved area for certain types of users – e.g. access to content of courses or areas that are used for discussion or announcement services. These internal events were also typed in a special way, so they can be distinguished from other events.

Table 2: Description of the attributes of a user’s signature – “TFSignature”

Nr 1

2 3 4 5 6 7

8

Feature Variable Identifier NrOfRegularOperations

NrOfControlPanelOperatio ns NrOfAdministratorPanel Operations NrOfPortalAdministrator Operations NrOfTotalPageViews NrOfRegularSchedulePage Views NrOfOffSchedulePageView s

9 10 11

DistinctNrOfCourses Accessed TotalNrOfSessions MediumSessionTime AccessPeriod

12

FirstOperation

Description Number of regular operations not accessible from the control panel, administration functions or site administration tasks.

Number of operation done through the control panel of a curricular unit.

Number of administration operations done in the platform.

Number of operations done through the control panel of the administration platform.

Number of page views requested.

Number of page views requested in a regular period of activity – 9:00am to 5:30pm.

Number of page views requested out of a regular period of activity – 0:00am to 8:59am and 5:31pm to 11:59pm.

Number of distinct curricular units accessed.

Total number of sessions.

User medium session time.

Time between the first and the last access in a working day.

The first operation.

3.2 Signature processing life cycle Having defined the table to receive signatures (Table 2) and the means to collect the necessary data to populate it, we can proceed to calculate the variation of user signatures. As mentioned before, this process allows verifying users behavioural changes. This verification of changes in user profiles could serve also to support other purposes in the future, as the implementation of dynamic changes in the portal structure and organization, or even to be used on the detection of unauthorized accesses in the e‐Learning platform. To identify potential unauthorized access we perform repeatedly a specific set of operations in order to identify potential occurrences of anomalous access and take consequently the most appropriated action. The process of a signature identification and validation involves always five distinct operations: gathering data, filtering and conforming data, storing data, processing signatures, and analysing signatures variation.

4. Validating user accesses 4.1 Signature processing and validation From the daily log of activities performed by students we extract all values necessary to fulfil the characteristics of a student signature (Table 1), the basis for its definition. For each usage day, we recorded the results of the definition process of signatures from all students enrolled with a particular curricular unit that is

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Orlando Belo, Paulo Monsanto and Anália Lourenço available in the e‐Learning platform. In our case, we stored data concerning with a usage period of 15 days.

Users’ signatures values were then calculated accordingly the following formula: userSignature ← (5*NrOfRegularOperations) + (5*NrOfControlPanelOperations) + (5 * NrOfAdministratorPanelOperations + (10*NrOfPortalAdministratorOperations) + (3*NrOfTotalPageViews) + (3* NrOfRegularSchedulePageViews + (5*NrOfOffSchedulePageViews) + (3*DistinctNrOfCoursesAccessed) + (1* TotalNrOfSessions) + (1* MediumSessionTime);

The weights assigned to each signature’s feature variable are directly proportional to their importance in the process. In this case, all the weights were defined based on the experience of the analysts and managers of the e‐Learning platform. If we generalize the signature process, we can say that the value of a signature is computed from the sum of the average of the signature feature variable values multiplied by its importance coefficient, which is:

After defining the formula for calculating users’ signatures, we started the design of the process for detecting unusual usage patterns that could be found in the information gathered on every usage session performed by students. Thus, for a given period and for each registered user, the signature process collects all the values for the variables that characterize user sessions and checks if current values are within the range of values that were predefined and assumed as normal. If the value of the signature goes outside that range we will launch a process especially designed to generate operational alerts. The severity of these alerts will be as greater as the distance between the current value of the signature and its corresponding previously defined value. Figure 2 shows the algorithm in pseudo code that we used to implement such process. list

User_List ← LoadUsers(Date);

foreach (User in User_List) begin List List_User_Signature_Variables ← Load_User_Signature_Variables(User,Date); User_Daily_Signature ← CalculateUserSignature(List_User_Signature_Variables); List List_Previous_User_Signatures ← CalculateUserPreviousSignatures(User,Date); User_Signature_Average ← CalculateAverage(List_Previous_User_Signatures); User_Signature_StandardDeviation ← CalculateStandardDeviation(List_Previous_User_Signatures); LowerLimit ← User_Signature_Average – 2 * User_Signature_Standard_Deviation; UpperLimit ← User_Signature_Average + 2 * User_Signature_Standard_Deviation; if (LowerLimit

< User_Daily_Signature > UpperLimit)

then Issue_Alert(); end

Figure 2: Evaluating users’ signatures Basically, the evaluation process of a signature begins loading the information about users (“LoadUsers”) that are registered in the system and have done some kind of activity inside the e‐Learning platform during the period of time considered for analysis. After, the process puts in memory all the signature’s features variables (“Load_User_Signature_Variables”) (Table 1) for a specific user (“User”). Those values were defined as key elements to evaluate the variation of a signature. Having all this information in memory the process proceeds to calculate the signature (“CalculateUserSignature”), computing the current value for the user signature (according to the equation presented before), taking into consideration the importance coefficients and the current values of each feature variable. The process continues with the execution of the function “CalculateUserPreviousSignatures”, which makes the calculation of the value of all the signatures of the user before the date considered for analysis keeping it in a list so that it can be compared with previous signatures

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Orlando Belo, Paulo Monsanto and Anália Lourenço of the same user. Then, the process compares the calculated signature with the average and standard deviation referential values provided, by functions “CalculateAverage” and “CalculateStandardDeviation”, respectively. As previously mentioned, these functions take into account the value of the signature of the day as well as the values of the signatures calculated in previous cases for calculating the mean and standard deviation. The values set as lower and upper signature variation limits – “LOWERLIMIT” and “UPPERLIMIT” ‐ are those that were used in the previous presented formula, i.e. the mean value of the signature +/‐ twice its standard deviation value. The values that are obtained and positioned outside of this range are considered anomalous variation values and thus giving origin to some kind of operational alert.

4.2 Signatures variation analysis Let us consider a very concrete example of a rather anomalous variation in the value of a signature (Figure 3)a)). In this figure we can see that on January 14, 2011 was issued a warning with severity level ‘yellow’ to the user with the ID 39832 based on data provided by the system service "DETECT Anomalies". Then, we need to analyse why the issuance of this alert. To do this we use another system service that was implemented specifically for this type of analysis: "GET SIGNATURE VARIATION". With this service we can get all the values of the variation of the signature (and their respective attributes) of the user that provoke the alarm for the time period defined to the date: "Date to process". In Figure 3)b) we can see the results when running this service with the data for the period starting at 15th of January 2011. The service calculated the variation of the signature of the user who triggered the alert, from the 1st to the 15th of January 2011.

a)

b)

Figure 3: a) Anomalous deviations of a signature, and b) Results of a signature variation analysis In the Figure 4 we can observe the variation of the signature of the user that provoked the alarm for the first fifteen days of 2011, as well as the result of the partial values of the mean and standard deviation for each of the days in that period ‐ Figure 4 shows more effectively the referred variation. The warning issued on day 14 is clearly visible in the graph of Figure 4, where the value of the signature clearly outsides the defined range of values. Let us see now, how this alarm was analysed. For the 14 January, the three most weighted attributes of a signature ("NrOfControlPanelOperations", "NrOfAdministratorPanelOperations" and "NrOfPortalAdministrator Operations") have zero values and so they were excluded from the analysis process.

Then, repeatedly, we analysed the attributes "NrOfRegularOperations", " NrOfOffSchedulePageViews " and "MediumSessionTime", respectively.

The attribute “NrOfRegularOperations”, which represents the number of normal operations for a given day, was the first to be analysed. In the values we got for this attribute we detected a case outside normal patterns on days 1, 2, 3, 10 and 15. However, on day 14, the value that was obtained was 25, which was slightly above the average. This only indicates a greater activity in the e‐Learning platform, but yet within the range considered as normal. In Figure 5 we can see the values we got for the attribute " NrOfRegularOperations ".

With them we identified a significant increase in user activity on the platform on the 15th but not the 14th day of the period in study. Thus, this attribute could not be responsible for the abnormal value detected on day 14.

In this case we needed to continue the analysis process.

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Orlando Belo, Paulo Monsanto and Anália Lourenço

Signature’s value

Mean

Mean – 2 x Std. Deviation

Mean + 2 x Std. Deviation

Figure 4: Analysis of the deviation of a signature

Attribute’s value

Mean

Mean –Std. Deviation

Mean + Std. Deviation

Figure 5: Analysis of the variation of the attribute “NrOfRegularOperations” Next, we examined another attribute with a considerable weight in determining the value of a signature: "NrOfOffSchedulePageViews". In Figure 6 we can see that the values recorded for this attribute, on days 1, 2 and 5, are a little bit out of the normal range, while the value of the day 15 is clearly outside this range. This simply confirms that on day 15 the user had been particularly active on the platform outside normal hours, indicating the completion of work out of hours. However, on day 14 the value recorded was of 204 page views, which is a value quite normal since it’s within the range between 60.92 and 244.01.

By analyzing these figures, we see that this attribute was not responsible for the abnormal value presented by th the user's signature on the 14 day. Later, when analyzing the attribute “MediumSessionTime” (Figure 7), we noticed that it was this attribute the responsible for the abnormal variation of the signature for that day. We found that because we have recorded a value of the average session time of 11 939 seconds. This value corresponds to an average session time of about 3 hours. Clearly unusual, considering the fact that the average value for this attribute recorded in the period in question was 2166 seconds, which is a little bit more than 1‐hour session. This variation contrasts with the results obtained for other days and was sufficient to cause a variation in the user signature on day 14. In some situations, this abnormal variation of the values of the attribute “mean time of the session” could indicate a potential change in profile. However, through the analysis that we have done such thing didn’t happen. In fact, the system detected correctly this anomalous variation. However, a more careful analysis revealed that on the 14th day the user activity on the platform was not so far from its regular activity. But, indeed, on the 15th day that happened, since there was an effective increase on the activity of the use. On day 14, despite the abnormal value of the average time session, all other attributes had normal values.

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Orlando Belo, Paulo Monsanto and Anália Lourenço The anomalous variations detected were mostly caused by high values in variables such as the “MediumSessionTime”, “NrOfTotalPageViews” and “TotalNrOfSessions”. All the values of these variables indicate changes in the activity of users on the e‐Learning platform in a few number of sessions. In fact, they are real changes in the behaviour of the user, but they are not sufficient to establish a different use profile from that previously established. It was not detected any abnormal variation in the three most weight attributes that characterize a signature, namely "NrOfControlPanelOperations", "NrOfAdministratorPanel Operations " and "NrOfPortalAdministrator Operations "), reinforcing the idea that the detected anomalies revealed no more than increases specific activity on the platform by users. From the detected variations and anomalies that were considered, the latter were always framed in yellow and green levels. None red level variation was detected.

Attribute’s value

Mean

Mean–Std. Deviation

Mean + Std. Deviation

Figure 6: Analysis of the variation of the attribute “NrOfOffSchedulePageViews”

Attribute’s value

Mean

Mean–Std. Deviation

Mean + Std. Deviation

Figure 7: Analysis of the variation of the attribute “MediumSessionTime”

5. Conclusions and future work The current work provided a tool based on Web log analysis for conducting real‐time monitoring and containment of unauthorised accesses to e‐Learning platforms. Basically, traditional control access mechanisms rely on Web access logs to identify abnormal user accesses. This can be a very complex and laborious task, even with various tools available in the market. In this work a new approach was explored. Even though the data source continues to be the various logs provided by the system, the analysis is made based on a signature concept. By means of log based measurement, specifically the calculation of usage signatures, decision makers may learn about content usage and student behaviour and thus, timely detect masquerade accesses to the platform. This paper offers a description of a course analysis in which the Web‐based tool was implemented. It was our test bed to demonstrate the adequacy and efficiency of using a signature based method for establishing student usage profiling and, more specifically, validating student accesses in e‐

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Orlando Belo, Paulo Monsanto and Anália Lourenço Learning platforms. This tool may help system’s administrators to support their decision‐making and analysis of quality of service. It can also analyse processes in a certain year or compare them over the years to get a comprehensive picture of these processes rather than a current state snapshot. In this paper we applied the signature concept on unauthorised accesses but other areas of analysis can be explored, such as tracking learning patterns on the various courses on an e‐Learning platform. In a near future, we intend to approach several subsets of courses, analyzing them in order to evaluate different types and modes of Web‐supported courses. Signature analyses can be conducted per course, per faculty or any other parameter. They can serve as a basis for e‐Learning platforms improvement and rationalization of resources, as well as for a simplified return‐on‐investment analysis and to support decision makers according their needs and goals.

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Cohen, A., Nachmias, R. (2011). What Can Instructors and Policy Makers Learn about Web‐Supported Learning through Web‐Usage Mining. Internet and Higher Education.

Cvrcek, D., Matyás Jr., V. (2004). Pseudonymity in the Light of Evidence‐Based Trust. Security Protocols Workshop 2004: 267‐274 Dash, S.K., Reddy, K.S., Pujari, A.K. (2011). Adaptive Naive Bayes method for masquerade detection. Security and Communication Networks, 4(4), pp. 410–417.

Delerablée C. e Pointcheval D. (2006). Dynamic fully anonymous short group signatures. In VIETCRYPT 2006, pages 193– 210.

Ferreira, P.G., Alves, R., Belo, O., and Cortesão, L. (2006). Establishing Fraud Detection Patterns Based on Signatures. In Proceedings of Industrial Conference on Data Mining. 526‐538.

Khader, D. 2007. Attribute based group signatures. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2007/159 Liu, B., Mobasher, B., Nasraoui, O. (2011). Web Usage Mining. Web Data Mining: Data‐Centric Systems and Applications, pp. 527‐603. Springer.

Psaromiligkos, Y., Orfanidou, M., Kytagias, C., Zafiri, E. (2011). Mining log data for the analysis of learners’ behaviour in web‐based learning management systems. Operational Research, 11(2) pp. 187‐200.

Romero, C., Espejo, P. G., Zafra, A., Romero, J. R. and Ventura, S. (2010), Web usage mining for predicting final marks of students that use Moodle courses. Comput. Appl. Eng. Educ..

Shafi, K., Abbass, H.A. (2011) Evaluation of an adaptive genetic‐based signature extraction system for network intrusion detection. Pattern Analysis & Applications, pp.1‐18.

Shamir A. (1984). Identity‐based cryptosystems and signature schemes. In CRYPTO'84, pages 47‐ 53,1984.

Wong, N., Ray, P., Stephens, G., Lewis, L. (2012). Artificial immune systems for the detection of credit card fraud: an architecture, prototype and preliminary results. Information Systems Journal, vol. 22, issue 1, pp. 53–76.

Yeung, D., Ding, e Yuxin (2002). User Profiling for Intrusion Detection Using Dynamic and Static Behavioral Models. In M.‐S. Chen, P.S. Yu, and B. Liu, editors, 6th Pacific‐Asia Conference, PAKDD 2002, Taipel, Taiwan, Springer‐Verlag 2336, 1 (May), 25‐30.

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Two‐way Impact: Institutional e‐Learning Policy/Educator Practices in Creative Arts Through ePortfolio Creation Diana Blom1, Jennifer Rowley2, Dawn Bennett3, Matthew Hitchcock4 and Peter Dunbar‐ Hall2 1 University of Western Sydney, Sydney, Australia 2 Sydney Conservatorium of Music, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia 3 Curtin University, Perth, Australia 4 Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia d.blom@uws.edu.au Jennifer.rowley@sydney.edu.au d.bennett@curtin.edu.au m.hitchcock@griffith.edu.au peter.dunbar‐hall@sydney.edu.au

Abstract: While tertiary institutions in Australia are embracing e‐learning and urging, or making compulsory, some use by academics, it is often the educators themselves who engage with innovative e‐learning approaches. These approaches, in turn, influence others in the institution and the institution’s thinking on e‐learning. This paper focuses on the introduction or extension of ePortfolio usage into four creative arts departments in Australian universities. Each creative arts educator adopted the ePortfolio for a different purpose – music performance, theatre performance, music technology, music teacher training, professional writing ‐ and in doing so has influenced, or at least is being monitored by, their university. All four projects have resulted in growth, development and enrichment of teaching and learning because of the ePortfolio’s facility to engage students in such activities as reflection, ongoing student‐teacher dialogue, collaborative essay writing, peer evaluation, identity formation, long‐term career planning, and, in doing so, to influence institutional curriculum design and e‐learning policy. The researchers wanted to assess the use of ePortfolio for creative arts students in how they could appropriately document skills, competencies and graduate attributes learnt during their degree programs for career readiness. Literature notes institutional interest in ePortfolios for purposes including career preparation (Reese and Levy, 2009); demonstrating and assessing student learning (Jafuri, 2004); academic advising (Reese and Levy, 2009); and addressing public accountability concerns (Lorenzo and Ittelson, 2005a) by facilitating internal and external departmental review and accreditation (Reese and Levy, 2009). Within the four creative arts departments of our study the two‐way impact between institution and educator is discussed. The findings of this study will inform future development of curriculum, policy and practice for creative arts students and academics in a variety of tertiary institutions. ePortfolios provide an efficient and transparent means to archive and access student work, and facilitate internal and external departmental review and broader institutional assessment.

Keywords: e‐learning policy, ePortfolio, creative arts, curriculum enhancement, reflexive practice

1. Introduction This paper explores the two‐way impact, between institutional policy‐makers and academics teaching undergraduate students, of ePortfolios in four Australian universities. The authors are part of a teaching and learning grant on ePortfolios in the creative arts ( http://capaeportfolios.ning.com/page/aboutus) funded by a national body, the Australian Office of Teaching and Learning (http://www.olt.gov.au/project‐eportfolios‐ creative‐arts‐music‐and‐arts‐students‐australian‐universities‐2011). The paper focuses on the use of the ePortfolio in creative arts departments, each educator/researcher adopting different platforms for different purposes. This use and its influence on the institution, plus each university’s ePortfolio policies and planning, are discussed.

2. Literature review Uses for ePortfolios

Institutional ePortfolio policy and practice varies considerably across Australian universities. ePortfolio use within a university originates from different departments or faculties and is adopted for a variety of reasons (Reardon, Lumsden and Meyer, 2005). Institutional policy may reflect these reasons which include career preparation (Reese & Levy, 2009); demonstration and assessment of student learning (Jafuri, 2004); academic advisement and choosing the type of ePortfolio carefully to suit needs (Reese and Levy, 2009); and addressing

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Diana Blom et al. public accountability concerns (Lorenzo and Ittelson, 2005a) by facilitating internal and external departmental review and accreditation (Reese and Levy, 2009).

Institutions must also decide which type of ePortfolio best suits their needs (Lorenzo and Ittleson, 2005a) ‐ homegrown or proprietary software; open source software; commercially available software; and software generated, or web‐authoring tools (Lorenzo and Ittleson, 2005b; Stefani, Mason and Peglar, 2007). Other factors for consideration by the institution include: licensing conditions; development and maintenance expenses (Hallam et al., 2008); whether the ePortfolio is a stand‐alone activity or part of another experience such as an internship; and how, when, and by whom the portfolio will be evaluated (Buzzetto‐More and Alade, 2008).

Institutional policy – top down

Several writings acknowledge support at the policy level within universities as crucial to successful ePortfolio implementation and practice (Cosh, 2008; Reese and Levy, 2009). Academic managers require “a broad understanding of the benefits and value that ePortfolios can bring to the learning, teaching and development processes, so that an ePortfolio culture becomes an integral aspect of the academic environment…[Benefits include contributing] to contribute to student‐centred learning strategies, transparent learning outcomes and the relevant employability skills for graduates” (Hallam et al., 2008: 15).

Commitment to, involvement in, and support of, ePortfolio implementation by high‐level administrators has been shown to contribute to successful implementation and utilisation of ePortfolios through lending credibility and giving visibility across campuses (McCowan, Harper and Hauville, 2005; Reardon, Lumsden and Meyer, 2005). Further, a study on ePortfolio use by university students in Australia, conducted by Hallam et al., (2008), states that strong alignment between strategic, tactical and operational areas of academic management is required for successful implementation. Effective practice is supported by clear communication within and across the institution; a common, collaborative language; strategic and technical leadership that provides examples of good practice; a cohesive approach to management and funding responsibilities; investment in staff development; and reward and recognition for staff in both academic and professional areas.

Two provosts in USA universities see the ePortfolio as presenting information in ways which are both “certifiable and practically useful” (Plater, 2006: 64). One certifiable aspect will allow the transference of student records from institution to institution – college to university bachelor degree – providing a “true seamless transfer” (Henry, 2006: 55), allowing better advice to be given to the student regarding placement and with potential to “supplant the traditional transcript and replace the degree” (Plater, 2006: 63). Another certifiable issue is the use of random samples of ePortfolio work to monitor the quality of an institution’s academic program and “determine areas of improvement” (Henry, 2006: 60). Once in a university program, the ePortfolio can, practically, “trace student progress” (55), help students plan and think ahead to choose a major area of study and track their own progress, resulting in graduates who have a “demonstrated mastery of learning outcomes” (55). For Henry, students’ fascination with presenting themselves and their own work will provide “the hook for students and ePortfolios” (57). However, Plater acknowledges the importance of the need for a collective will in the institution to put these changes in place, otherwise the provost has a lonely and uncertain path ahead.

An ePortfolio policy for all ‐ horizontal

In considering implementing significant educational change, Hall and Hord (2001) state that “Although top‐ down and bottom‐up change can work, a horizontal perspective is best” (10). They acknowledge that change mandated from administration may be effective if accompanied by support, training, and an understanding of the change process. A horizontal approach to implementing change includes administrator support and assistance in securing resources, as well as commitment from those involved in implementing the change (Strudler and Wetzel, 2005). Heinrich (2008) argues that if ePortfolios are to support lifelong learning, the institutional role should be one of support, rather than control, and suggests that the advantages of institutional types of ePortfolio may be maintained by hosting an ePortfolio system with an external provider.

Shared governance in higher education is a recent tradition evolving as faculty professionalized, gained power and sought delegated authority in decision‐making on key issues such as curriculum, students, and teaching

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Diana Blom et al. and learning in areas of their expertise (Kezar and Sam, 2012). While faculty participation in institutional governance is considered to be both desirable and important in the field of higher education, Jones (2011) also found that faculty are rarely satisfied with their level of involvement in governance. Within an institution, multiple interests may also be represented in the development of ePortfolio policy and practice, as various parties envisage different usages (Hallam et al., 2008). To this end, Jafari (2004) notes that different functional requirements of ePortfolios may be perceived by provosts, deans, chairs, career centres, faculty, students, accrediting bodies and professional organisations. Hallam et al. (2008) recommend open dialogue and collaboration across a range of contexts that include the learner, those involved in teaching and learning, and those involved in academic policy, government policy and technical standards.

3. Methodology A case study, or multiple case studies, explores a “bounded system…bounded by time and place” (Cresswell, 1998: 61). This takes place “through detailed, in‐depth data collection involving multiple sources of information rich in context” (p.61). The four institutions at the heart of this paper offer multiple case studies from two predominant sources of information ‐ the e‐learning/ePortfolio policy and application of each university, and the ePortfolio use by four academics in the creative arts. In doing so, the multiple case studies aim to “probe deeply and to analyse intensively the multifarious phenomena that constitute the life cycle of the unit [ePortfolio policy and use] with a view to establishing generalizations about the wider population to which that unit belongs” (Cohen and Manion, 1994: 106‐107). The participant observer engages in “the very activities they set out to observe” (107) and in our study, the researchers are the academics active in using ePortfolio in their respective creative arts departments. Exploring creative ways in which university music educators are engaging with emerging practices in music teaching and learning, editor, Clements (2010), offers “personalized case studies” (ix) in which the researcher/writer is often the active participant and facilitator.

She notes that “these models of successful alternative approaches can be replicated in a variety of school, university, or community settings” (ix). Because the literature review of our study notes a lack of research on ePortfolio use in the creative arts in universities, findings may establish some issues for the wider creative arts population or be able to be replicated in other universities.

4. ePortfolio case studies – institutions and academics 4.1 Sydney Conservatorium of Music – The University of Sydney Institutional policy

At the University of Sydney, eLearning is a unit within the DVC Education Division and the university‐wide e‐ learning strategy is part of the division’s strategic plan. However, each faculty is expected to develop their own Teaching and Learning Plan which must be aligned with the University's strategic plan. The eLearning aspect of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music (SCM) Learning and Teaching Strategic and Operational Plan: 2011‐15 actions technology to be used “appropriately and consistently so as to support multi‐modal learning”, part of which is to “trial the development of e‐portfolios”.

Impact on the academics

For the academics working with ePortfolios, the impact of this directive and the specific action point has been that, firstly, staff had to establish eLearning sites (most using Blackboard, with a few on Pebble Pad) so that course outlines are available via the Learning Management System. Although staff use of ePortfolios across the university is low, Rowley and Dunbar‐Hall have used the eLearning policy as an incentive and encouragement to trial ePortfolio in their classes.

Academic ePortfolio use

Only students in music education had begun using ePortfolios before the current project and this was the result of an internally funded institutional grant introducing ePortfolios into the four‐year, undergraduate professional Music Education degree program in 2009‐2011. Pebble Pad was the platform selected by the University of Sydney for all its students. Acting as capstone objects in the music education program, ePortfolios were intended for use in job applications and designed to address the requirements of professional teacher accreditation. Their implementation was analysed for their advantages to student learning and self‐

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Diana Blom et al. reflection (Rowley, 2011), implications for curriculum design, IT requirements (Taylor, Dunbar‐Hall and Rowley, 2012), and their relationships to assessment (Rowley and Dunbar‐Hall, 2012) and accreditation.

The current project transfers understandings about uses of ePortfolios with music education students into other areas of tertiary music study ‐ composition, musicology, and performance. Findings demonstrated differing levels of student engagement with ePortfolios, ambiguities over their efficaciousness in music as a profession, a range of student desires to engage with ePorfolios and the technology required to work on and through them, and a spectrum of possibilities for their use.

Impact on the institution

Both the process and the product of the three year internally‐funded project acted as a model for ePortfolio development in the Music/Arts Faculty and the wider institution. Results of research from this project were published in articles and presented at conferences, one of these to a university audience at the invitation of the university’s eLearning office. The summary of the project was presented to the SCM and students described their ePortfolios to the 2011 Faculty Learning and Teaching annual forum. This internally funded project became the basis for a successful government‐funded grant across four Australian institutions, of whom the researchers in this paper are team members.

5. Queensland Conservatorium – Griffith University Institutional policy

While there is currently no individual policy on ePortfolios, Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University (Griffith) has a range of policies and statements which pertain to engaging in online learning and teaching strategies including the Blended Learning Strategy. The blended learning environment at Griffith is characterised by:

Strategic and systematic use of technology in association with a quality face‐to‐face environment to support student learning;

Enhanced interaction between students, staff, peers and the learning community;

Creation of collaborative, distributed learning environments;

Increased capacity for student‐managed learning;

Learning that takes place at students' discretion in terms of time and place; and

Flexibility in terms of implementation at the program and course levels.

Impact on the academics

Griffith has supported the development of online and distance learning strategies for well over a decade with support aimed almost entirely at a uni‐directional models that focussed on delivering materials and information to students. Academics considered early‐adopters of technology were spearheading moves to create bi‐directional online strategies that placed emphasis on students’ ability to generate, upload and edit their own content. It was not until the late 2000s that the impact of these early adopters around Griffith University gained traction to the point of influence.

Top‐down approaches have achieved overall acceptance and uptake of technology for student‐centred learning, including learning management systems such as Blackboard, real‐time communication strategies such as video conferencing and Wimba Classroom, and video capture and delivery of lectures for student consumption. Hitchcock has noted however that these one‐size‐fits‐all strategies require a heavy centralised commitment from the University in time, money, technological support and manpower, thereby limiting the number of ‘top‐down’ directives via a form of natural selection. Impact on an institutional level is certainly slow in coming. While this has been frustrating for many academics, given the size and bureaucratic weight of each institution and the financial commitment involved, this is hardly surprising.

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Academic ePortfolio use

Academic ePortfolio use is completely driven by staff interest at Griffith. There are no current plans (or indeed perceived demand) for institutional‐wide integration of ePortfolios. Use of ePortfolios in the Music department came because music technology is largely driven by hard‐copy portfolios, similar to many creative arts sectors such as photography and art. For students, creating portfolios in this area: is a process of creativity in establishing identity, potential and evidence of skills, reflective ability and professional capability; is a career object because of traditional use throughout the professional sector; is evidence‐based; depicts personality & aesthetic character (uniqueness and identity) reconfigurable for different contexts; displays understanding and potential not just outcome and should collate rich media in different forms; is often bulky and costly to produce (and share/reproduce/update); and encourages wide dissemination in network driven industries where most jobs are not advertised, as opposed to the inherent impediments of traditional hard‐ copy material.

Work with ePortfolios was reinvigorated at Griffiths in music technology by the funded project of which all authors are members. Hitchcock chose to use only open source web‐software, with six issues as the basis for the decision: i) not to be tied to any single solution (distributed component architecture, cloud components); ii) should be intuitive to learn and be situated in real‐world contexts; iii) it needs to have defined place(s) to start embedded support through stages; iv) be sufficiently frustrating to provide challenges including peer recognition and benchmarking; v) needs to build desire to repeat and improve leads to regular (staged) rewards; and vi) be customisable enabling a sense of personalisation and ownership. Hitchcock has a history of working collaboratively toward successful innovation and technological advancement within the institution leading to uptake by others and served on the eLearning committee, bringing his experience to the committee and in turn, influencing fellow academics.

Impact on the institution

While these are early stages in this new project, technocentric thinking has been minimized with a view to raising potential for other interested academics to embrace ePortfolios with low technological barriers to engagement. Hitchcock has observed that some of the technological learning aspects now appearing as top‐ down directives in 2013 were instigated by bottom‐up activities in the early 2000s. The music technology area at Griffith trialled ePortfolios as core learning objects in various guises in the 2000s. The main impediments to broader uptake by students and therefore by staff were seen as: firstly, the ePortfolio being difficult to maintain in‐house – for example, university networks at the time were not devised to allow student upload of material thereby creating a unidirectional staff‐to‐student information flow; secondly, the commercial sector was not ready for online portfolios and were perceived as not always being prepared to deal with the unusual, or possess the inclination to do so; thirdly, student resistance to uptake of the platform in relation to workload and cutting edge concerns; fourthly, bandwidth issues overall including costs, consistency and reliability; and finally, cross platform and browser issues including coding inconsistencies, formatting inconsistencies, accessibility issues, proprietary vs open source content, ownership and long‐term storage.

5.1 Curtin University Institutional policy

An ePortfolio platform, ‘iPortfolio’, was developed at Curtin University in 2009/2010 for use by staff and students and released for general use in 2010. The platform’s development was championed by an academic whose efforts led eventually to university‐wide support. One year after its introduction it had more than 17,000 users (von Konsky & Oliver, 2012). At Curtin, flexible learning in all its guises comes under the Deputy Vice Chancellor Education. In the 2011 Flexible Learning Policy and Procedures, the iPortfolio is one of the approaches “that facilitate effective student engagement through the provision of appropriate online environments” (http://policies.curtin.edu.au/findapolicy/docs/Flexible%20Learning%20Policy%20and%20Procedures%20‐ %20Oct%202011.pdf).

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Impact on the academics

The impact on academics has varied according to uptake by schools and faculties, determined in part by whether the iPortfolio was embedded within programs. A distinct advantage for Curtin academics has been that the platform was fully developed and centrally supported, which has meant that engaging with an ePortfolio is very easy, requiring minimal technological skills and no new design or development. Beyond the practical implications, the most impactful aspect has been that the iPortfolio was designed to “encourage student reflection on ‘lifewide’ experiences that enhance employability and augment learning within the formal curriculum” (von Konsky and Oliver, 2012: 67). This includes space for students to evidence each of their graduate attributes as well as the three main aspects of the University’s ‘Triple I curriculum’, which incorporates Industry (graduate employability), Indigenous, intercultural and international (global citizenship), and Interdisciplinary experiences (Curtin University, 2010). A future‐oriented focus, such as this, necessitated a commitment by the university to give students lifelong access to their portfolio, which is becoming more problematic as the number of users increases over time.

The iPortfolio’s emphasis on ‘self and career’ has enabled academics to ‘house’ within a student’s portfolio the results of career development activities such as work‐integrated‐learning. This has led to its use in many programs. Popular features include an app, which enables users to photograph evidence with their smartphone and upload it directly to their iPortfolio; and the ability to incorporate multimedia files, which are used to evidence multiple artefacts including video résumés, 3‐dimensional design work and film.

Academic ePortfolio use

Given the complex nature of careers across the creative sectors, the development of employability skills is a high priority. What the students tend not to consider is the relevance of this learning to their future lives and careers; in an already overcrowded curriculum there is little space for this discussion. As the Curtin project set out to discover whether an ePortfolio could be a means of exploring possible future selves within and beyond the professional world of the arts, one of its intentions was to assist students in making the transition from students to graduate professionals. Bennett involved 1st year Performance Studies students enrolled in a core performance course, and third year Professional Writing students in a work placement course, in a project which challenged them to think about the role of undergraduate study in their future lives and careers, and to begin to compile evidence within their portfolios of a broad range of skills and abilities.

Impact on the institution

Curtin’s iPortfolio has 30,000 users at the time of writing, the majority being students. The activity level on each these accounts, however, is not known. Given growing concern that many higher education students feel unprepared for the workplace and have not had career‐related discussions as part of their studies (AUSSE, 2010), it is likely that the use of iPortfolio as a career and life‐development tool will continue to increase. In the case of this study, Bennett and her colleagues have noted increased career awareness among the students and the engagement with portfolios will be formally assessed and reported late in 2013.

5.2 University of Western Sydney Institutional policy

The University of Western Sydney (UWS) feels that “the push towards greater flexibility of learning, supported by existing and emerging technologies, is substantially being driven by students who increasingly seek to engage in learning when and where they choose” (http://www.uws.edu.au/qilthub/qilt_hub/blended_learning 14 5 13). Because many student learners are “digitally literate, frequent users of mobile devices, and seeking highly interactive, visual, immediate, and socially engaging learning”, the university is adopting a “strategic and systematic approach to combining times and modes of learning, integrating the best aspects of face‐to‐face and online interactions for each discipline, using appropriate ICTs”, through a Blended Learning Quality Framework, currently being implemented by Schools. While the Blended Learning website lists several approaches to online learning (http://www.uws.edu.au/qilthub/qilt_hub/blended_learning/using_technology_for_blended_learning) no mention is made of ePortfolios, however a trial is now underway.

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Impact on the academics

UWS began a trial of Pebble+, an ePortfolio platform, in 2012 with four academics in music, medicine and engineering taking part. The confluence of two events – looking at CareerHub as a possible career professional ePortfolio component of a professional practice unit, plus an invitation to join the OLT funded ePortfolio grant – introduced Blom to the idea of embedding an ePortfolio platform into her Music teaching of group music performance and a professional practice, final undergraduate year, capstone unit in which students take their arts practice into the community.

Academic ePortfolio use

In a second year music performance unit focused on group rehearsal and performance, the ePortfolio offered a collaborative platform for essay writing in pairs, drawing in video and audio clips for deeper analysis and discussion. Through Blackboard (2012) and Pebble+ (2013) students individually reviewed two in‐house concerts of professional performers, often accompanied by video footage taken by students on a mobile phone, and at the end of the semester, peer reviewed the essay of another collaborative writing pair, with guided criteria to focus their comments. This e‐written task, plus the ability to type comments in real time for assessable rehearsal and performance events, sending marks and comments immediately to students, has drawn the ePortfolio deeply into the teaching of this real time activity, music performance.

The third year professional practice capstone unit required students to take their music practice – performing, organising, recording, music criticism, music survey, teaching, among others – into the community. Through the ePortfolio platform, a summary of this practical project – written, edited visual and audio ‐ plus a professional career portfolio of CV, photo, letter of introduction, is available, in theory and in practice, for a potential employer to view, on invitation.

Impact on the institution

The four academics on the Pebble+ trial are being monitored through an annual questionnaire seeking student and teacher responses to using the platform. At the end of 2012 a summary report noted the need for ongoing workshops for both students and staff , a ‘user guide’ approach to “unit‐specific instructions for completing and submitting tasks” through the portal, and ‘careful consideration’ as to whether this was the most suitable platform for the outcome, especially in relation to students working in group and sharing within teams, as Pebble+ is “much more a Personal Learning Environment more suited to individual development” (Black and Rankine 2012: 8).

Data has been gathered from students on several ePortfolio uses and findings will be disseminated through articles and conferences.

6. Conclusions and discussion Across the four case studies, a spectrum of two‐way relationships between institution and teaching academics emerges in relation to the ePortfolio as an eLearning approach. These range from early adopters influencing the institution; academic served on the institution’s eLearning policy‐making committee; a platform designed specifically for the institution with feedback from staff and students; an influential trial being adopted by other disciplines in the institution; to a monitored trial of an ePortfolio platform for possible purchase and adoption.

Within this spectrum, platforms range from homegrown one‐size‐fits‐all, through commercial ePortfolio/eLearning platforms, to open source. Use of ePortfolio platforms facilitate student reflection; collaborative essay writing; peer evaluation; ability to house multiple artifacts; representation of multiple interests; and the relevance of learning for future lives for career development and employability and lifelong learning. Academics impacted on the institution by being a member of the institution’s eLearning committee and informing potential online learning and engagement strategies; use of an ePortfolio platform encouraging other disciplines to trial and adopt; taking part in a monitored trial of an ePortfolio platform adopting divergent multiple learning strategies; internally and externally funded grants; plus conference presentations and published papers disseminating information. The researchers of the personalised case studies support the notion that institutional leadership must be bi‐directional, where people at the ‘coal‐face’ of teaching and learning challenge their institutions to engage in different ways and on different levels, including policy debate,

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Diana Blom et al. and where institutions demonstrate leadership through a balance of autocratic decision‐making and a willingness to be challenged from the bottom up.

References AUSSE ‐ Australian Council for Educational Research (2010) Australasian Survey of Student Engagement, http://www.acer.edu.au/ausse

Black, E. and Rankine, L. (2012) Pilot Evaluation Report – PebblePad, Part 1: Spring 2012. University of Western Sydney in‐house document.

Buzzetto‐More, N., and Alade, A. (2008) “The pentagonal e‐portfolio model for selecting, adopting, building, and implementing an e‐portfolio”, Journal of Information Technology Education, 7, pp 184‐208.

Clements, A. C. (2010) Alternative Approaches in Music Education: Case Studies from the Field, Rowman & Littlefield Education, Lanham, MD, USA, pp ix‐xv.

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Hallam, G., Harper, W., McCowan, C., Hauville, K., McAllister, L., Creagh, T., van der Lee, J., Lambert, S., and Brooks, C. (2008) ePortfolio use by university students in Australia: Informing excellence in policy and practice. Final project report, August 2008, QUT Department of Teaching and Learning Support Services, Queensland.

Heinrich, E. (2008) “Contrasting approaches: Institutional or individual ownership in ePortfolio systems”, Proceedings ascilite Melbourne, pp 410‐413, http://cms.ascilite.org.au/conferences/melbourne08/procs/heinrich.pdf Henry, R.J. (2006) “ePortfolios thinking: a provost perspective”, Handbook of Research on ePortfolios (eds) Al. Jafari and C. Kaufman. Idea Group Reference, Hershey, PA, USA, pp 54‐61.

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Lorenzo, G. and Ittelson, J. (2005a) “An overview of E‐Portfolios”, Educause Learning Initiative, http://www.pgce.soton.ac.uk/IT/Research/Eportfolios/ELI3001.pdf Lorenzo, G. And Ittelson, J. (2005b) “Demonstrating and assessing student learning with e‐Portfolios”, Educause Learning Initiative, Paper 3, http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eli3003.pdf McCowan, C., Harper, W., and Hauville, K. (2005) “Student e‐Portfolio: The successful implementation of an e‐Portfolio across a major Australian university”, Australian Journal of Career Development, 14, pp 40‐51.

Plater, W. M. (2006) “The promise of the student electronic portfolio: a provost’s perspective”, Handbook of Research on ePortfolios (eds) Al. Jafari and C. Kaufman, Idea Group Reference, Hershey, PA, USA, pp 62–73.

Reardon, R. C., Lumsden, J. A., and Meyer, K. E. (2005) “Developing an e‐portfolio program: Providing a comprehensive tool for student development, reflection, and integration”, Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice, 42, No. 3, pp 630‐642.

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Automated Evaluation Results Analysis With Data Mining Algorithms Farida Bouarab‐Dahmani1 and Razika Tahi2 1 The Computer science Department, FGEI faculty, University of Tizi‐Ouzou, Tizi‐Ouzou, Algeria 2 The Laboratory for the Electrification of industrial enterprises, Department of Economics, University of Boumerdes, Boumerdes, Algeria farida.bd2011@Yahoo.fr raztahi@Yahoo.fr

Abstract: One of the challenges of research on Technology for Human Learning (THL) and the competency based pedagogy is the personalization of learning. This customization begins with the design of educational systems, applying the strategies defined to monitor and assist the learner in his learning by evaluating his knowledge, skills and detecting and analyzing errors. In this respect, formative evaluation is the process used to capture data on the strengths and weaknesses of a learner during a learning period. These data, to be useful, must be objectively analyzed so that they can be used to manage the following sessions. Data mining is a field at the intersection of statistics and information technology (databases, artificial intelligence, learning etc) whose goal is to discover “interesting” knowledge structures from a set of data.

Following our research work on evaluation process and THL, applied to e‐learning systems [2] [3] [4], we discuss in this paper a learning cycle with feedback loop integrating formative evaluation followed by the application of data mining algorithms after each learning session. We experimented with a set of tests, the exploration of learners' errors, obtained from a self e‐learning by doing tool for the algorithmic domain. We particularly present, in this work, the results given by the application of the C4.5 algorithm for classification and the A Priori one for association rules deduction. These two algorithms were executed via the tool Weka after a data preparing process integrating a relational algebra calculation and format adjustment actions to get adequate input data for Weka algorithms. The results given by these experiments have proved interesting knowledge to complete the learner’s profile and facilitate decisions about further learning / teaching / tutoring particularly in the case of distance education.

Keywords: data mining, e‐learning, formative assessment, a priori algorithm, C4.5 algorithm, educational data mining

1. Introduction The exploration of data collected in the education systems commonly called Educational data mining (Romero, C. and Ventura, S., 2007) is an area of research where appropriate methodological research and technical means are experienced to produce useful knowledge from different types of data (marks, errors, data on the learner, log files ...). These data come from face to face teaching / learning or from e‐learning like the study outlined in (Romero & al., 2008).

On the side of educational science, the competency‐based approach knows great enthusiasm in media education. The value of a competency‐based approach in our new world of global economy and advanced technologies is obvious. However, mistrust and reluctance of teachers, often observed when it comes to the application of this approach in the field, are justified by the difficulty in assessing skills. Indeed, this new approach is individual oriented monitoring, which requires more work for everyone in the educational institutions. With the introduction of the LMD (LMD: License, Master Doctorate) system in universities, for example, the competency‐based approach have to be applied by individually tracking each student‐ a tedious task when the number of students is large.

In this paper, we propose to study this problematic related to the possible add‐ons of data mining tools to the competency approach application. We are interested in data mining algorithms for knowledge extraction starting from data, the formative and automated evaluation results’ based on learners’ errors developed in our previous works on the ODALA approach (Bouarab‐Dahmani F., 2010)( Bouarab‐Dahmani F. & al., 2011).

The Knowledge gained will be used to manage learners’ progress from different points of view: pedagogical, acquisition of knowledge, acquisition of skills, teaching, monitoring, certification...

Among, the data mining algorithms, we consider to test the feasibility and the interest, in our context, of the C4.5 and A Priori algorithms for respective classification and deduction of associative rules.

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Farida Bouarab‐Dahmani and Razika Tahi We first give an overview about the needs of knowledge extraction in our context composed of the ODALA approach for formative evaluation and the competency based pedagogy. After that, in the third section, we present the use of data mining algorithm for classification and associative rules deduction. Before the conclusion, we discuss some constraints about the integration of a knowledge extraction module to Computer Environment for Human Learning (CEHL).

2. ODALA approach, competency based teaching and the needs of data mining A competence is related to profession, a status, or a social baseline. It combines knowledge, skills and attitudes closely related (Berbaum J. & al., 1998). According to (Gillet, 1991), a skill is "a system of knowledge, conceptual and procedural ones organized into operating plans and allow, within a family of problem situations, the problem identification and resolution through effective actions."

One of the challenges of research in the domain of CEHL and for the competency based teaching is the personalization of learning. This customization begins with the design of educational systems, implementing strategies defined to monitor and assist the learner in his learning, by assessing his knowledge, skills and detecting and analyzing his errors. For that, formative evaluation is used to capture data on the strengths and weaknesses of a learner during a learning period. These data, to be useful, must be objectively analyzed to get knowledge that will be used to manage the sequence of learning.

Data mining is a field at the intersection of statistics and information technology (databases, artificial intelligence, machine learning, etc) that gives tools to discover structures, "interesting" knowledge and patterns in large data sets. It can be also defined as the set of algorithms and methods for the exploration and analysis of (often) large computer databases to detect in the data: rules, associations, unknown trends ... that can enhance decision systems (I.H. Witten and al., 2011). The knowledge extraction process from data that commonly uses data mining algorithms is a succession of three main steps (see Figure 1): data pre processing, pattern recognition and interpreting results.

Figure 1: The knowledge extraction from data process (from www.knowledgeminer.net) The use of data mining within CEHL is to extract knowledge from learning sessions, to guide the education system and to facilitate and improve learners’ progression and teaching. This fact is one of the main objectives of the competency‐based approach. Three application areas have received special attention in the field of educational data mining:

To improve the learner’s model and provides detailed information about his characteristics such as knowledge, motivation or attitudes.

To use the data mining process in modelling individual differences among learners (Baker & al., 2008).

To discover or to improve, in their areas of application, the models concerning the structure of contents or the taught domains such as in (Shih, B., Koedinger, K.R., Scheines, R., 2008).

To study educational support provided by the CEHL systems, a third key element in the application area by studying how each type of instructional support can improve learning. Among the works on this problem, we state (Beck, J.E., Mostow, J., 2008).

We found too few research works on knowledge extraction from an automated and formative evaluation based on errors detection in learning by exercises mode. In this paper, we focus on improving learner’s model based on knowledge extraction process, using data mining algorithms and data from formative evaluation results’ according to ODALA approach.

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Farida Bouarab‐Dahmani and Razika Tahi The ODALA (Ontology Driven Auto‐evaluation for Learning Approach) evaluation approach (Bouarab‐Dahmani F., 2010) proposes a methodology and techniques for the development of an evaluation system based on the teaching domain or discipline ontology Onto‐TDM. It is based on the learners’ potential errors classified into different types (semantic, lexico‐syntactic ...) in the case of learning by doing. The content to teach, that we call teaching domain, is represented by domain ontology where the main concepts are: notions composed of sub‐notions and knowledge items, evaluation units, errors, examples. The ODALA process (Bouarab‐Dahmani F., 2010) (Bouarab‐Dahmani F. & al. 2011) contains: form analysis of learner’s solutions, semantic analysis, marking process and learner’s model update. After different ODALA cycles, we get in the learning system, a set of data about the learner’s learning and behaviour. In addition, the ODALA process is compatible with the competency‐based approach (Bouarab‐Dahmani F , 2012) and can assist the quality of training assurance (Bouarab‐Dahmani F. & Tahi, R., 2012) especially if the process of data analysis is developed.

In this paper, we discuss also, a learning cycle with feedback loop incorporating formative assessment followed by application of data mining algorithms after each training session (see Figure 2). The derived knowledge from the data mining process is injected into the module that handles the management and monitoring of the learner in an appropriate format to facilitate appropriate decisions for the future of learning.

Learning Activity (Exercises résolution, quiz, …)

Formative Evaluation with ODALA (Error diagnosis, Marking, …)

Learner ‘s Management and Monitoring

Knowledge Extraction (Data selection, preprocessing, datamining algorithms application, interpreting)

Figure.2. Learning cycle integrating formative evaluation and knowledge extraction Among the learner’s management and monitoring objectives, we have:

The recommendation of learning content (courses, exercises ...)

Identification of attributes that characterize patterns of disparity in performance between different groups of learners

The discovery of relationships between errors and exercises, errors and learner profiles, ...

In the context of our current research, we are interested in studying algorithms and data mining tools in order to see the possibilities of using them in the exploration of formative evaluation data results based on ODALA approach. We experimented with a set of tests, the analysis of some results got from learning sessions such as learners’ errors after exercises resolution. In this case, we used data mining algorithms implemented by the Weka tool (Ian, H. W., Eibe, F., 1999) which is a Java library in open source, developed at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. The next section gives an illustration of these tests with a limited set of data to make visible the results of the application of C4.5 algorithms for classification and a Priori one for association rules discovery.

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3. A Priori and C4.5 algorithms for exploration of data on learners 3.1 Background and assumptions In addition to the ontological model of the domain to teach, data about the learner (from the learner’s model) and the applied pedagogy (scenarios, parameters, … from the pedagogy model), we made recourse to other structures about the learning sessions where data about the learning activities (such as the exercises done, the detected errors, the pages visited, ...) are stored. This data is the most important to analyze. It expresses semantic rules represented in the database as tables and used in the tests described in this paper to extract knowledge. For example we have these rules:

A student can be enrolled in one or more sessions,

each exercise can have more than one solution,

an exercise can evaluate different knowledge items,

an error refers to one knowledge item,

a learner can perform different errors in a session when solving an exercise.

The relational tables considered in the tests are given in Table 1 with only the attributes used in the experiments.

Table 1: Extract from the relational diagram of a CEHL database Relationship ‐ Learner (Id_learner, Name, E‐mail, level)

Commentary Belongs to the learner’s model

‐ Session (session_id, start_date, Session of a learner end_date, id_learner) ‐Exercise (id_exercise, exercise‐type, Exercises’ table statement) ‐Error (id_error, label_error, type_error, Table of potential errors. Id_ic is the identifier of the knowledge item, a id_ic) granular component of the domain, to which it corresponds ‐Know_Item ( Id_ic, Label_ic) Table of Knowledge items, the granular components of the field to teach ‐Com_Error (session_id, id_error, Table of the errors committed by a given learner at a given session id_exercise, Nb‐occ) when solving a given exercise. ‐Evaluates (id_exercise, id_ic, Association between knowledge items and exercises with indication of importance‐ degree) the degree of importance of the knowledge item for the exercise

The approach followed for each test, where data is analyzed by a data mining algorithm implemented in Weka tool, is composed of the following steps:

Setting of a goal

Selection of the relational tables involved

Pre processing of the selected tables by algebraic calculation (application of relational algebraic operators such as: selection, natural join …) and translation to the adequate data format (the .arff format in the case of input data for algorithms implemented in Weka).

Choice of the appropriate algorithm

Execution of the algorithm from the tool Weka and/or from a JAVA application using the Weka API

Analysis and interpretation of the results.

We tested different algorithms on different input data and for different objectives. The C4.5 algorithms for classification and A Priori one for association rules discovery have attracted our attention during the various trials, for readability and relevance of their results. We report, in the following some comments about the tests related to each of the two.

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3.2 Classification of learners with the C4.5 algorithm The C4.5 algorithm (Quinlan, J.R., 1993) is an extension of the ID3 algorithm proposed by Quinlan for decision tree construction. One of the most attractive of decision trees aspects lies in the interpretation and construction of decision rules. The confidence of the rule is the proportion of records in the leaf node to which the decision rule is true. If confidence is 100% (= 1), the leaf node is pure and the decision rule is perfect.

We use the J48 algorithm which is an implementation of the C4.5 with the data collected during the execution of the WebSiela system (Bouarab‐Dahmani F., 2010), a prototype we developed for algorithmic learning with an automated correction of solutions freely built by learners to open questions. The input data table for the data mining process is deduced from a combination of the relational tables given in Table 1. We chose a very simple example concerning the classification of students according to the level that can be good, average or bad. This classification will clarify the relationship between a class (a level) and the number of errors (deduced from the input data).

To test the reliability and usability of the algorithm, we conducted disturbances input data and observations of the reactions of the algorithm. In most cases, the results generated were adequate to the inputs. For example, ‐ At the test1, a learner is misclassified; he is ranked within good level when he has a number of errors equal to 12. This is shown in the decision tree result sheet bad decisions (3.0/1.0) as seen in Figure 3. So the algorithm can detect anomalies in our classification. For this case, we find the choice of two levels (3 and 4) perfectly adequate for the input data.

Figure 3: A result of a J48 algorithm execution under the tool Weka where a misclassification is detected

For test 2, there are no misclassifications. We just added occurrences that might change the classes’ thresholds (number of errors). As result, the threshold for the "bad" class increased to 10.

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Test 3 showed a case of misclassification with the replacement of errors number for learners. The algorithm had evolved with the data, gave new adequate thresholds and detected the misclassification.

According to the different results of our tests on different input data, we deduced that the C4.5 algorithm is an interesting one for predictive classification of learners based on errors. The algorithm is flexible enough (one can change the criteria and select different attributes) so that it could suit different objectives.

3.3 Discovery of association rules with the A Priori algorithm A Priori algorithm (Agrawal R., Srikant R., 1994) is based on the fact that all common elements have subsets of common elements together. Indeed, if the set {A, B} is frequent in the database, the sets {A} and {B} are themselves frequent in the database. This algorithm generates rules involving correlated data. We have just to point out the set of attributes concerned by the analysis.

The objective chosen in this case was to look for correlations between the exercises, learners and errors detected in a learning session. The data to be included in the input table of the A Priori algorithm, called input_base2 is obtained by algebraic calculus on the two tables: Session, com‐Error.

We ran the algorithm directly on the three attributes: id‐learner, id_exercise and id_error to extract all possible rules (the rule is given as if ... then form)

Also, we put on different disturbances in the input data, for example: At the test1, we got a rule (Rule 1 in the screenshot of Figure 4) that we interpreted as: “regardless of the learner, the resolution of exercises 3 and 4 gave no error or the error number 4”. The change in some instances at input_base2 gave a significant change in the generated rules. For example, we no longer had the rule 1 of test1 on exercises 3 and 4. After different tests, we deduced that the use of this algorithm could be of great help to enrich the formative evaluation, to get a global evaluation from the CEHL after a good interpretation of the derived rules.

Figure 4: A result of A Priori execution under the tool Weka

4. Discussion We have deducted, after the tests described above, the interest of some data mining algorithms for formative evaluation results’ analysis such as the C4.5 and the A Priori algorithms. The question, after that, is “How to integrate such algorithms in the CEHL?” We have studied this problematic for the case of WebSiela system and the Weka API. We have developed two alternatives: The first one is a simple access interface to Weka tool from WebSiela with recovery of results. In this case, the interpreting step will be done by a human expert. The second alternative is related to the development of a module for the knowledge extraction process calling data mining algorithms with possible integration of an automated pre processing and interpreting. We just

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Farida Bouarab‐Dahmani and Razika Tahi implemented, at this level of our research, the execution of algorithms from the Weka API. In both cases, the portability problems of existing data mining or knowledge extraction tools in the existing CEHL could be an obstacle to integrate data analyser because it will urge complicated programs creation. However, as result of our experiment, we found interesting the information that could automatically be generated from data mining for global formative evaluation, personalization and recommendation ... and other activities for the learners’ management and monitoring, particularly important in the case of competency based approach.

5. Conclusion We explored the tools and techniques of data mining within the CEHL adopting competency‐based approach.

By the execution of some algorithms implemented in the Weka tool, we tested on a limited set of data and after that with data collected in the WebSiela system, the use of these algorithms to explore the results of a formative evaluation based on ODALA approach. The observed results, especially through the execution of predictive classification with the C4.5 algorithm and the associative deduction rules with A Priori algorithm, are interesting to track learner progress.

Among research perspectives in the field of educational data mining starting from the work presented in this paper, we have the development of an automated and reusable filter and interpreter of the associative rules given by the A Priori algorithm and the study of the learners’ clustering based on the detected errors using data mining tools.

References Agrawal R., Srikant R., 1994. “Fast Algorithms for Mining Association Rules in Large Databases” Proc. of the 20th Int’l Conf. on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB). June 1994, p. 478‐499. IBM Research Report RJ 9839.

Baker, R.S.J.d., Corbett, A.T., Aleven, V. (2008) “More Accurate Student Modelling Through Contextual Estimation of Slip and Guess Probabilities in Bayesian Knowledge Tracing” Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, 406‐415, 2008.

Beck, J.E., Mostow, J. (2008) “How who should practice: Using learning decomposition to evaluate the efficacy of different types of practice for different types of students” Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, 353‐362.

Berbaum J., Raynal F., Rieunier A. (1998) “Pédagogie : dictionnaire des concepts clés“, Revue française de pédagogie, 1998, vol. 125, n° 1, pp. 164‐165“ Bouarab‐Dahmani F. (2010). Modélisation basée ontologies pour l’apprentissage interactif ‐ Application à l’évaluation des connaissances de l’apprenant. DOCTORATE thesis in computer science of Mouloud Mammeri University, Tizi Ouzou, Algeia, 2010.

Bouarab‐Dahmani F., Si‐Mohammed M., Comparot C., Charrel P. J.(2011) “Adaptive Exercises Generation using an Automated Evaluation and a Domain Ontology: The ODALA+ Approach”, International journal of emerging technologies in learning, IJET, Vol.6, Issue 2, June 2011, 4‐10.

Bouarab‐Dahmani F. (2012). “Utilisation du Numérique pour l’Enseignement et l’Evaluation des Compétences à l’Université“, 1er Colloque International sur «l’Usage du Numérique dans l’Enseignement Supérieur», Es‐Sénia ‐Oran university, Algeria, 3 and 4 July 2012.

Bouarab‐Dahmani F., Tahi R.(2012) “Evaluation Formative comme base de l’Assurance Qualité des Formations Universitaires“. Séminaire nationale sur la qualité de formation. Tizi Ouzou university, 16 and 17 of October 2012.

Gillet, P. (1991). Construire la formation : outils pour les enseignants et les formateurs, Paris, PUF. Ian, H. W., Eibe, F. (1999). Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques with Java Implementations.

Morgan Kaufmann, October 1999.

Quinlan, J.R. (1993). C4.5: Programs for Machine Learning. Morgan Kaufmann 1993.

Romero, C. and Ventura, S. (2007) ”Educational data mining: A Survey from 1995 to 2005. Expert Systems with Applications“, (33), pp. 135‐146.

Romero, C., Ventura, S. and Garcia, E. (2008) “Data mining in course management systems: Moodle case study and tutorial”. Computers & Education, vol. 51, no. 1, pp. 368‐384.

Shih, B., Koedinger, K.R., Scheines, R. (2008) “A Response‐Time Model for Bottom‐Out Hints as Worked Examples”.

Proceedings of the First International Conference on Educational Data Mining, 117‐126, 2008.

Witten I.H., Eibe F., Hall M.A. (2011). Data Mining, Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques. Third edition published in January 2011 by Morgan Kaufmann Publishers (ISBN: 978‐0‐12‐374856‐0).

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Language e‐Learning Based on Adaptive Decision‐Making System Vladimír Bradáč and Cyril Klimeš Department of Informatics and Computers, Faculty of Science, University of Ostrava, Ostrava, Czech Republic Vladimir.bradac@osu.cz Cyril.klimes@osu.cz

Abstract: A model of adaptive e‐learning system which is in the focus of this paper is created for significant optimisation of language learning with the primary focus on the English language, which is based on using Learning management systems (LMS). In comparison with traditional “static”/”rigid” models of e‐courses, which actually offer a uniform content to all students, the proposed model offers its users/students adaptation in the area of their knowledge level and learning style (their combination respectively). In addition, the model is supported by automated decision‐making processes, which are the most significant tool for optimising language learning. Automation of such decision‐making processes is required in several areas where the decision‐making processes are entered by input information in order to be appropriately processed to obtain desired outputs for ideal progress in further steps of student’s learning process. Such input information provided by the student carries a certain extent of uncertainty, thus it is necessary to base the decision‐making processes on IF‐THEN rules supported by a fuzzy‐modelling tool. Adaptation and automated progress are achieved by dividing the progress into four basic processes ‐ (M1) acquisition, completion and evaluation of the input information about the student; (M2) definition of language learning objectives and admissible solutions for their achieving; (M3) modelling the progress of individual proposed solutions; (M4) approving one of the proposed solution as the best variant to achieve the learning objectives. Each individual process is dealt with by the expert system individually, when the system evaluates the input information of the given process using a knowledge base, which is individually created for every step.

The knowledge bases are defined by an expert/tutor. Process (M1) contains two basic subprocesses dealing with acquiring information about the student: their learning style based on a questionnaire inquiry and their language level based on a didactic test. Correct setting of the expert system in process (M1) enables the system to proceed to processes (M2), M3 and (M4). Information evaluated by process (M1) enters process (M2). This process is a step when the system, based on the defined objectives of the language learning, selects suitable learning objects which will be presented to the student in further steps. Such objects must be appropriately matched with the given learning styles and purposefully lead to the defined objectives. Process (M3) then models the proposed objects into a sequence in which they will be presented, their time requirements as well as evaluation of the overall study progress both from the point of view of didactics and time.

The two processes are very closely related and their successful evaluation by the system leads to student’s successful passing the course, which is represented by step (M4). Therefore, the adaptive system for decision‐making support will enable automated creation of study variants which are suited to each individual student’s needs, which current learning management systems do not enable.

Keywords: e‐learning, expert system, learning management system, adaptive learning, language education

1. Introduction “A major challenge we face today is to create a desire in people to learn; and to foster and facilitate this desire throughout their lives.” (Holmes. 2006).

Such an idea should be on minds of creators of e‐learning platforms and e‐courses. To meet it, however, means to be open to all interested in this form of study and to transform their interest into satisfaction with what is offered by e‐courses – not only from the content point of view, but from the form point of view as well. Technologies are already at our disposal, they are used, but both users and creators of e‐courses are not still satisfied. “The new technologies provide opportunities for creating learning environments that extend the possibilities of “old” —but still useful—technologies—books; blackboards; and linear, one‐way communication media, such as radio and television shows—as well as offering new possibilities. Technologies do not guarantee effective learning, however.” (Bransford, 2003). Technologies themselves cannot guarantee effectiveness and satisfaction. E‐learning must be given a more personal look by making the user‐system cooperation more adapted to users – their needs, level of knowledge, learning preferences, etc. There are attempts to personalise language learning (El‐Hmoudová, 2012) or (Juřičková, 2012), which do not incorporate all expectations from an e‐learning system in one, though. A possibility how to achieve this compact system is to use an adaptive system enabling exactly what is currently needed. Other authors have made efforts to implement Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) in e‐learning and their results are promising even for our research. (Heilman, 2006) makes use of the REAP reading tutoring system focused on teaching students vocabulary. (Virvou, 2000) and (Virvou, 2001) also implement an ITS into language learning, this time concerning teaching the passive voice. Their research clearly shows that these efforts bring benefits to

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Vladimír Bradáč and Cyril Klimeš students’ learning performance. However, we consider these efforts still limited, i.e. their tutoring systems focus on a very narrow segment of language learning. What is more, their approaches are significantly different from ours. For example, Virvou (2000) rather focuses on diagnosing students errors when constructing a sentence using the Passive voice, which should be done automatically by the system. Our decision‐making system does not perform such tasks, at least for the time being. On the contrary, our decision‐ making systems is constructed to design an individualised course, using learning objects from a given database, for each out of a group of students with different input level to achieve the same output level.

Therefore, our concept of an adaptive system is seen differently, i.e. as a compact system consisting of several related modules which contain all features necessary for the purposes of language education in its wide scope of interest, not only teaching vocabulary or tenses, passive voice, or any other language elements separately.

2. Adaptive and decision‐making systems Generally, an adaptive e‐learning system can be characterised as decision‐making, planning, coordinating and communicating, consisting in collecting, storing, evaluating and classifying information with the aim to replace manual work of a human with an automated system using adaptive elements. In order that a system could substitute or assist a human in any of the above‐mentioned activities, it must be able to provide high‐level communication with a human as well as offer tools which will directly support these activities.

Simulation of decision‐making processes is determined by the following peculiarities:

decision‐making is not based only on analytical information, but primarily on knowledge represented by a cognitive and abstraction process (which is a prerogative of brain activity);

decision can be made by several approaches depending on how many individuals will be assessed;

it is very difficult to aptly formulate the algorithm of decision‐making procedure;

a great deal of information in decision‐making is of an external origin with respect to the already established and known database of the decision‐making issue.

3. Proposed model of adaptation The model of adaptation stems from a model published in [3].

In order to be able to identify the structure of a decision‐making process, and thus to create prerequisites for finding effective procedures for its algorithmization, we have to deal with decision‐making processes from a wider point of view, primarily from a methodological point of view.

One of the characteristic features of decision‐making processes is the fact that they often work with uncertain and non‐metric information, which often stems from the fact that the input values of these processes are provided by a human on the basis of their estimations, experience, opinions, etc.

Inaccuracy, insufficient definition of these processes respectively, also has its own structure, which enables to use appropriate tools for work with a given type of incompleteness. When analysing inaccuracies occurring when solving a given decision‐making process, it is frequently found out that the given inaccuracy is also insufficient information, thus its cause can lie in student’s “inability” to define their knowledge, i.e. what they know or not. However, testing itself cannot reveal all information on student’s knowledge. Insufficiency is basically represented by describing knowledge in all areas of the language in one test – e.g. if a student can use the present continuous tense in two out of its several possible ways of using, does it mean that the student knows the tense or not, or only partially? The second type of insufficient information is using natural language which enters the decision‐making process with a human and which describes the decision‐making process itself and its functioning. The insufficiency consists in the fact that the human is forced to use a finite set of words in a finite time to describe an infinite range of possible situations. Such fact necessarily results in a situation when most of verbal utterances have more or less wide range of their meaning. These uncertainties of the word semantic field are caused by both semantic synonymies of words and primarily certain blurriness (fogginess, fuzziness) of the meaning of the key words. This blurriness then becomes the ultimate cause why classical mathematics and exact sciences were not able to adequately cope with linguistically‐defined situations. The situation has changed in the last decade when a so‐called fuzzy mathematics was established, which enables to effectively work with such verbally described situations.

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Despite the fact that the process contains a whole range of uncertainties, its structure can be fairly easily defined. What’s more, elements of a decision‐making process can be divided into the following groups:

set of student’s input knowledge;

set of all (admissible) objectives describing output student’s knowledge;

set of all admissible solutions to achieve the given objectives;

set of all levels of existence (probabilities) of steps to achieve al admissible objectives;

set of all evaluations of the given solution;

time interval.

The decision‐making process is represented by various representations between these sets. It primarily concerns the following processes:

(M1) acquisition, completion and evaluation of the input information about the student, i.e. selecting information which is relevant for language learning;

(M2) definition of language learning objectives and admissible solutions for their achieving, i.e. formulating objectives of the language learning based on the description of the given situation and formulating admissible solutions;

(M3) modelling the progress of individual proposed solutions – each admissible solution is assigned a set of situations and their time sequence which arises from the given solution;

(M4) approving one of the proposed solution as the best variant to achieve the learning objectives based on the effects of the admissible solutions.

The whole decision‐making process is created by a gradual composition of individual processes, as depicted in Figure 1.

Student Input information

Input to process of adaptation

M1

M2

Expert knowledge on language teaching

M3

Output from process of adaptation

M4

Figure 1: Decision‐making process The input information is crucial for further decision‐making processes (M2‐M4). Correct setting of the first process (M1) lays the highest importance on the knowledge base and fuzzy rules which will be used in this phase. Process (M1) will then have to be studied from the point of view of LSs, i.e. selecting the most suitable theory out of the wide range of modern theories in this field. Secondly, structuring the didactic test will also play a vital role in assessing student’s level. Tutors can be inspired by computer‐based learning, where there are already several forms in use – let’s mention Cambridge ESOL or TOEFL. The output of the whole system should be a set of all possible solutions represented by the following features:

Suitability of the next step in language learning expressed by:

real content of the lesson;

time requirements;

Recommendation to get supplementary information from other sources designed for language learning.

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Vladimír Bradáč and Cyril Klimeš While making decisions, the adaptive system will use expert knowledge structured into the following areas:

minimum and “ideal” knowledge in individual steps of learning;

time interval necessary to achieve the output knowledge from the level of minimum input knowledge;

time available for the studies.

3.1 Analysis of process M1 Process M1 consists of several individual steps, as depicted in Table 1. All of the information acquired from such steps represents the input data for further processing by the adaptive system in subsequent steps, see Fig. 1 above.

Table 1: Composition of information acquired in process M1 Individual steps Standardised computer‐based questionnaire: finding out student’s LS (16 standardised questioned)

Computer‐based didactic assessment test: testing student’s level of language skills

Composition of individual step Question 1 Question 2 …

Question 15 Question 16 Question 1 Question 2 Question 3 Question 4 Question 5 Question 6 …

Time necessary for completing the didactic and LS test

Additional information to each individual step Answers to the 16 questions provide data for assessing student’s LS preferences (see Section 3.1.1 below); the system automatically assigns appropriate learning objects.

The questions are matched with corresponding grammatical categories. Based on evaluation of the didactic test according to the correct and incorrect answers for each category, the system automatically assigns appropriate learning objects.

LS questionnaires with irrelevant time score (primarily too short to be appropriately completed) will be discarded.

Didactic test will be analysed as a whole as well as for each question category.

3.1.1 Student’s learning style Finding out an appropriate learning style (LS) for each student will be done using 16 standardised questions designed to follow Fleming’s methodology (Fleming, 1992) of LS division. This methodology has been selected out of a range of other possible choices, primarily introduced by Felder (1988) or Kolb (1984). The reasons why Fleming’s methodology was selected are as follows:

it has only four dimension – it is not extensive;

there is an established taxonomy and its testing has been standardised;

learning objects in an e‐course can be easily assigned to appropriate category (sound, text file, images, tables, videos, etc);

it can be easily processed, i.e. the ratio expressing student’s match with each given dimension (there are 23 combination of the VARK model (Fleming, 2001);

all of the above‐mentioned facts fit to electronic learning environment.

Based on the above‐mentioned criteria, 103 students of the bachelor study programme Applied informatics at the Faculty of Science, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic have been tested. Figure 2 shows average preferences of all students.

Analysing individual respondents, we obtain different results for each respondent. More specific information on this issue is to be found in (Bradáč, 2013).

3.1.2 Didactic test The second most important step is to identify student’s level of language skills. Out of the language competences that are defined (speaking, listening, reading and writing), a computer‐based test (CBT) can best assess reading comprehension and listening comprehension, which are, in fact, input skills and enable closed

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questions. A CBT must be able to automatically assess and grade the answers as manual grading would put enormous load on the tutor.

Figure 2: Preferences of individual LS dimensions Tutor’s most important, though demanding, work is to elaborate and describe a didactic CBT fitted to the purposes of the e‐course that is going to be prepared (focus, required input knowledge, expected output knowledge). Based on the answers provided by the student, the system will automatically assess the results using a knowledge base.

Let’s present an example of such a test. For our purposes, we can use a standardised placement test that is provided by the Cambridge University (Cambridge University, 2010). In general, placement tests begin with simple questions for beginners gradually bringing the grammatical issues to higher levels. The aim of a placement test is to identify student’s level according to the Common European Framework (CEFR) (Council of Europe, 2011). The levels are divided into levels A1‐C2. The sample placement test covers division A1‐C1, see Table 2.

Table 2: Placement test results according to CEFR levels

Score

Pre‐ Starter Elementary Intermediate A1 A2 A2+ 0‐15

16‐35

Intermediate B1

36‐55

56‐75

Upper‐ Advanced Intermediate C1 B2 76‐95

96+

Evaluation of the placement test as a whole does define the level of student’s knowledge, but it does not say anything about where the student has made the mistake, which areas he knows and where he falls behind. It means that the tutor/system does not have information on which study materials to offer.

Thus, it is necessary to analyse individual questions according to their grammatical focus. In our case, the placement test of 120 questions covers a wide range of grammatical issues.

Individual questions have been subjected to an analysis and sorted out according to grammatical categories.

Table 3 shows those categories and questions which they include. Some questions are included in several categories as we will need to identify both correct and incorrect answers – each question has more choices to select from and, if relevant, it is necessary to analyse which incorrect answer has been selected.

Table 3: Classification of questions into categories and areas Area A1 A1 A1 A1 A1 A1 A1 A1 A2 A2

Category C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C6 C7 C8 C9 C10

Grammar: Present perfect simple Past simple Present simple Present continuous Future tenses Past continuous Present perfect contin.

Past perfect Prepositions Conjunctions

Question number: 37,42, 44, 48, 54, 61, 63, 120 16, 20, 37, 39, 42, 44, 56, 61 9, 12, 24, 31, 33, 34, 39 31, 33, 39, 61,120 33, 34, 64, 97 44, 61 72, 120 83 7, 11, 13, 15, 43, 74, 76, 85, 86, 102, 112 8, 14, 59, 73, 87, 92, 113

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Category C11 C12 C13 C14

Grammar: Determiners Pronouns Modal verbs Vocabulary

C15 C16 C17 C18 C19 C20

Phrasal verbs Forming questions Conditional clauses Verb patterns Passive voice Adjectives

Question number: 2, 10, 27, 29, 35, 38, 55, 58 5, 6, 19, 22, 30, 71 24, 36, 46, 49, 62, 67, 75, 84, 88 3, 4, 17, 18, 25, 26, 28, 40, 45, 47, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 94, 96, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 114, 115, 117, 119 66, 78, 89, 93, 95, 105 1, 9, 13, 20, 23, 34 51, 60, 68, 90 57, 65, 69, 116 52, 107 32, 50

Division of the questions into individual categories enables us to analyse the test into depth. Individual steps are ordered in a sequence as they should be processed:

1. Identifying grammatical categories included in the test.

2. Sorting out the questions into corresponding categories.

3. Identifying questions hitting more grammatical categories.

4. Identifying in/correct answer A,B, C, or D respectively (D from question 41) with subsequent assigning the given answer to corresponding grammatical category.

5. Joining categories into areas.

6. Defining rules for completing the image of student’s knowledge.

The output is assessment of the need of further studies of the given grammatical category.

The placement test has been divided into categories C1‐C20, see Table 3, and areas (A1‐tenses, A2‐joining words, A3‐determiners and pronouns). Not all categories are assigned to some area as they do not relate to other categories. Sample representatives can be questions 44, 61 and 120:

44 The last time I … Joanna was in Paris.

A have seen B saw C see D was seeing 61 I … outside the cinema when suddenly a police car arrived.

A stood B was standing C have stood D am standing 120 The number of turtles on the island … by 70% over the last decade.

A has declined B has been declining C has been declined D is declining

These three questions overlap categories C1, C2, C4, C6 and C7 area A1.

3.1.3 Assessing the need of further studies in individual categories Sorting out the test itself is the beginning of the assessment process. Individual categories will be subjected to an analysis assessing the need of further studies in individual categories in the given e‐course. The analysis will be performed by a software tool LFLC (Habiballa et al, 2003), which was designed for work with indefinite information.

The process of analysing individual categories considers the following input variables expressed by linguistic expressions:

number of correct answers (V1) – low, medium, high

weight of correctly answered questions (V2) – low, medium, high

number of difficult questions (V3) – low, medium, high

Importance of the category for further study (V4) – very low, low, medium, high, very high

Time spent on questions of the given category (V5) – low, medium, high

The output variable is expressed as follows:

Need of further studies of the given category (V6) – extremely small, very small, small, more or less medium, medium, big, very big, extremely big.

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The knowledge base used for analysing this part of process M1 might contain up to 405 rules. An example of student’s result is given below. The rules were created according to “expected” results that the sample student could have achieved based on criteria for entering course ANGI2, see Section 3.1.4. The rules are provided below. Visualisation of the output serves a human to better grasp crucial categories (Walek, 2012). Figure 3 graphically shows which categories are strongly (dark grey) moderately (light grey) and weakly (white) recommended to be offered in further studies.

Figure 3: Recommendation for further studies 3.1.4 Structuring the didactic test The above‐mentioned placement test is only for demonstrative purposes. The difference between levels A1 and C1 is several hundreds to thousands of study hours. In real, e‐courses have much limited time period – e.g. a university semester. When structuring a didactic test, each course tutor must define grammatical categories which will be assessed, both the input ones, which should be already known, and output, which are going to be learnt.

For instance, an example of such a course can be a course taught at the Department of Informatics and Computers, Faculty of Science, University of Ostrava – English for specialisation degree 2 (ANGI2). The time period is 13 weeks (requiring 60 hours). The course follows up course ANGI1, The students should then have knowledge of: present tenses, past tenses, numerals, sentence structure. ANGI2 follows with: present perfect tenses, adjectives, passive voice, modal verbs, verb patterns.

If a student enters ANGI2, he must take the didactic test, the answers are analysed and student’s knowledge is evaluated according to what is expected to be known well (the student could have skipped ANGI1 and entered ANGI2 directly) as well as grammar and vocabulary which will be taught in ANGI2. There is no need to offer the student to go through what he knows, but to offer him a very brief revision and rather to focus on what he does not know. A student of distance studies must save time for information that he is not familiar with rather than browsing through pages of materials that he already knows.

The didactic test will then include categories listed in ANGI1 (expected knowledge of all the subject matter) and ANGI2 (not expected knowledge of all the subject matter).

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Vladimír Bradáč and Cyril Klimeš It is possible that the analysis reveals that a student entering ANGI2 does not possess enough knowledge to enter this course, the student would then have a very difficult position at the beginning of the course because he does not have bases to build on. There are two possibilities:

to offer the student a course of a lower level (ANGI1)

to allow the student to enter ANGI2 and use materials from ANGI1 to catch up. This possibility is only allowed if it is time manageable. But this step is dealt with in processes M2‐M4.

3.1.5 Completing process M1 Process M1 is completed when the input data has been analysed and described. It means that three steps have been done: identification of student’s LS by a combination of individual VARK dimensions; assessing didactic test on the basis of existing IF‐THEN rules with respect to individual questions; evaluation of both total and partial time spent on the didactic test and LS questionnaire. All these outputs are inputs into process M2.

3.2 Analysis of process M2 Next step in the process is processing the data obtained from M1 in order to determine objectives for each student individually. If student’s knowledge level has been identified (see Fig. 3), the study objectives are settled.

Out of all partial study objectives, the system will select only those relevant for the given student (based on data from M1). The set of all the objectives will be larger or smaller depending on student’s knowledge. Thus the student does not have to go through the materials that will not bring him anything new. At the end of the whole study process, those partial objectives, if met by the student, will compete the set of other partial objectives and thus create a unified set of all study objectives which all students must achieve.

3.2.1 Competing process M2 Process M2 is completed when all relevant partial study objectives have been identified for the given student, see Fig. 4.

Information on student’s knowledge M1

Study objectives

Selection of relevant objectives - M2

Expert knowledge on language education

Relevant objective

Figure 4: Process M2

3.3 Analysis of process M3 Creating possible sequences for student’s progress through the course is the next step in establishing individual student’s study plan.

The sequences are formed by several factors influencing their final form:

set of all partial student’s study objectives;

set of all study objects assigned partial student’s study objectives;

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continuity of individual study objects respecting language learning methodology;

time requirements of individual study objects;

student’s learning style preference (multimodality).

The above‐mentioned points must be taken into consideration when creating a personalised study plan because the student has:

limited time for the study;

limited set of study objects for study in the given course;

The sequences of study objects must primarily respect methodology of language learning, i.e. what and when should be learnt. In addition, the system must consider student’s learning style, thus learning objects preferred by the student will be primarily offered, if there is no the most preferred type, the system will offer the second most preferred, etc. In case the system disposes of more file formats for one topic (e.g. explaining tense usage in pdf, ppt, video or sound file) and the time allows, the system can offer all of them.

3.3.1 Completing process M3 Process M3 is complete when each partial study objective is assigned a set of relevant study objects. Those are placed in a sequence as they will be offered to the student. Time necessary for completing each study objective and all study objectives is also counted, see Fig. 5.

LO1 + LO2 + LO3 + … + LOn = SO1 SO1 + SO2 + SO3 + … + SOn = RSO

LO1 + LO2 + LO3 + … + LOn = SO2 LO1 + LO2 + LO3 + … + LOn = SO3

LO – study object SO – study objective RSO – relevant study objectives LT – learning time TLT – total learning time CTS – course time specification

LTSO1 + LTSO2 + LTSO3 + … + LTSOn = TLT ≤ CTS

Figure 5: Process M3

3.4 Analysis of process M4 The final phase of the whole decision‐making process consists in selecting the “most optimal” variant for passing the course. Such a variant is selected out of the proposed sequences created in M3. However, the “most ideal” variant at the beginning of the study process does not have to appear as the most ideal later, during the study itself. Student’s progress through the course is monitored and data about time and results are stored and continuously evaluated by the system. If necessary the system can adjust the study plan, thus comes back to M1 and creates an updated study plan – either cuts the study short in the case of good results or make the study longer in the case of bad results. Cutting the study short or making it longer is meant as removing or adding study objects. Thus the loop of the decision‐making process is complete, see Fig 1.

4. Conclusion The paper dealt with a model of adaptive e‐learning system for personalisation of a learning process of the English language. The model has been described as a whole with subsequent analysis of its phases. Key areas of all four processes have been identified as well as the methodology how these key areas will be processed and which of them will use IF‐THEN rules to work with indefinite information. Appropriate and correct setting of individual areas will lead to a suitable choice of learning objects for each student (with respect to their LS preference and language level), thus it will bring effective usage of e‐learning courses for personalised education.

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Vladimír Bradáč and Cyril Klimeš This conception will bring into life a fully‐fledged running decision‐making system to support e‐leaning of the English language

References Bradáč, V. (2013) Adaptive model to support decision‐making in language e‐learning. International conference on th education and new learning technologies ‐ proceedings, 5 ed., Barcelona, pp. 4036 – 4045, ISBN: 978‐84‐616‐3822‐2 Bransford, J. (2003) How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, Expanded Edition, National Academy Press, Washington D.C. Cambridge University Press (2010) Available online at: http://www.cambridge.org/servlet/file/store7/item6039736/version1/EnglishUnlimited_All_Test_WrittenTest.pdf Council of Europe (2011) Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. Council of Europe. Available at: http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/Cadre1_en.asp El Hmoudová, D., Milková, E. Garant: G. (2012). Computer‐based testing in the field of foreign language assessment.

Efficiency and responsibility in education 2012 : proceedings. Prague : Czech university of life sciences, 10p. ISBN: 978‐80‐213‐2289‐9 Felder, R., Silverman, L. (1988) Learning and teaching styles in engineering education. Journal of engineering education . 78, pp. 674‐681 Fleming, N., Mills, C. (1992) Not Another Inventory, Rather a Catalyst for Reflection. In To Improve the Academy. vol. 11, p.

137. ISBN 80‐705‐6482‐1.

Fleming, N. (2001) official website. Available online at: http://www.vark‐learn.com/english/page.asp?p=categories Habiballa H. et al. (2003) Using software package LFLC 2000. 2nd International Conference Aplimat 2003, Bratislava, pp.

355‐358.

Heilman, M. (2006) Language Learning: Challenges for Intelligent Tutoring Systems. 8th International Conference on ITS, pp.

20‐29, Taiwan Holmes, B. (2006) E‐learning Concepts and Practice, Sage Publications, London, ISBN 978‐1412911115 Juříčková, R. (2012) Optimizing the teaching of a foreign language in regards to student learning styles and e‐learning. 9th International Conference on Efficiency and Responsibility in Education. pp. 203‐2012 Klimeš C. (2011) Model of adaptation under indeterminacy. In Kybernetika. 47, vol.3, pp. 355‐368 Kolb, D. (1984) Experimental Learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, ISBN 0‐13‐295261‐0 Virvou, M. (2000) Student Modelling in an Intelligent Tutoring System for the Passive Voice of English Language. In Educational Technology & Society 3(4), ISSN: 1436‐4522 Virvou, M. (2001) Web Passive Voice Tutor: an intelligent computer assisted language learning system over the WWW. Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, Madison, pp. 131‐134, ISBN: 0‐ 7695‐1013‐2 th Walek B., et al. (2012) Creating component model of information system under uncertainty. 18 International Conference on Soft Computing Mendel 2012, Brno, pp. 221‐226.

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Barriers Engaging With Second Life: Podiatry Students Development of Clinical Decision Making Margaret Bruce1, Sally Abey1, Phyllis Waldron1 and Mark Pannell2 1 Faculty of Health, Education and Society, Plymouth University, Plymouth, UK 2 Department of Technology Enhanced Learning, Plymouth University, Plymouth, UK mbruce@plymouth.ac.uk

Abstract: The aim of the study was to evaluate the experiences of podiatry students when using ‘Second Life’ (SL) simulation to enhance their learning. SL as a teaching environment for healthcare students is not a new endeavour and there are increasing uses of this real‐world platform internationally providing training to medical and health students.

Students of podiatry at the Plymouth University (PU) are required to undergo periods of placement within the National Health Service clinics situated throughout the South West region of the UK. They are able to experience authentic practice opportunities where theory can be integrated with the practical skills required of a podiatrist. This clinical placement totals 30 weeks over a three year period. Alongside the clinical educators, and to help to develop safe and effective patient management while the student is away from the university, distance learning methods such as electronic learning materials can be a valuable resource. The research team, PU lecturers in podiatry, developed the learning resource using SL in collaboration with podiatry lecturers at University of East London (UEL). A qualitative research design was used and students of podiatry in their third year of study were recruited. They were asked to engage with patient‐based scenarios in SL to assess patient suitability for minor surgery. The experience and utility of SL was evaluated in phase I of the study using pre‐ and post‐hoc online questionnaires to assess how effective this was as a learning resource to the participants.

The responses were then used to inform phase II of the study. This involved a focus group and face‐to‐face interviews in order to evaluate the barriers to using SL. Framework analysis was used in order to analyse the data. The findings have revealed that for the podiatry students, a desire to engage with what they perceived as a ‘cool’ ‘exciting’ ‘intriguing’ project was moderated by factors such as lack of time due to demands of the programme, technological incompetence, inadequate technology, distractions within the SL environment and rejection of the use of the ‘virtual patient’ as a substitute for a real person. This study has provided valuable information in relation to the realities and complications of engaging podiatry students with an experiential learning environment in ‘Second Life’.

Keywords: Second Life, framework analysis, experiential learning environment, podiatry students, barriers, patient‐based scenarios, clinical placement, clinical decision making, healthcare students

1. Introduction As educationalists, offering students a range of pedagogical opportunities can be advantageous in attempting to meet the variety of learning styles with which we are presented (Benner et al 2010). Experiential learning should be placed at the center of education (Kolb et al 2002) and virtual worlds such as SL can be well suited to enable this by the development of problem based learning (Chittaro & Ranon 2007).

In recent years there has been a growing use of virtual worlds in health care education as they can provide an effective setting for scenarios to engage learners. (Atkinson 2008) The potential of the use of SL for the education of health professionals has been widely recognised (Beard et al 2009). There have been increasing international uses of this platform to enhance training for medical and health students both at undergraduate and postgraduate level. The Virtual Respiratory Ward at Imperial College London is used for medical training (Toro‐Troconis and Partridge 2008), and there is SL in dental education at the University of Maryland Dental School (Phillips and Berge, 2009), however there have been no developments of such materials for use by podiatry students.

Students can actively immerse themselves in a virtual world scenario. This can have a direct influence on their ability to cope with professional challenges they meet in the real world. Students have reported when using such platforms that the ‘three dimensionality’ increased the sense of reality and sense of being immersed in the environment, which enriched their learning (Jarmon et al 2009).

It does however take a great deal of careful planning to integrate the use of SL into the more passive learning experiences provided by most academic institutions. The creation of such e learning packages is highly complex and often difficult to set up (Chowa et al 2012).

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In order to engage students in e‐learning, evidence suggests that motivation is an important factor and this can be influenced by their understanding that its use could have positive outcomes for their learning, and that it will be easy to use (Chowa et al 2012). Other factors that enhance motivation include perceived enjoyment and quality of technical support (Elbeltagi et al 2005). Each student’s level of self‐efficacy with technology is an important aspect which will influence the likelihood of them agreeing to engage (Campeau and Higgins 1995).

There are recognised barriers that impact on the learner’s commitment to engaging with e‐technology. Moule et al, (2010) identified several including lack of IT skills for both student and academic; resourcing; computer and internet facilities; and a lack of time (Moule et al 2010). SL is sometimes viewed by students as being awkward to use and ‘cumbersome’ (Jarmon et al 2009). Student centred learning is achieved by their control of the avatars in the virtual clinic. Initially the students are required to set up accounts, register, choose avatars and complete a training session in order to be able to navigate within the SL environment to find their target destination. This can be time consuming (Skiba 2007).

2. Aims The initial aim of the project was to explore the utility of SL as a teaching tool to enrich the clinical development of the podiatry students on practice placements. However, there was limited response from participants and from the initial feedback received from those that did engage, via the online questionnaire, it was clear that there were significant issues emerging that impeded their experience of Second Life. It was decided to change the focus of the project in order to understand the drivers for engagement and non‐ engagement with the clinical environment within Second Life.

3. Method This research study represents part of a larger collaborative project with the University of East London (UEL).

The School of Health & Bioscience at UEL purchased an island, UEL HABitat (Heaney, 2009) with a complex of virtual clinics and science laboratories. This includes a ‘polyclinic’ which offers facilities for physiotherapy as well as other health related professions. The collaborative project has worked towards developing the podiatry area with virtual patients and this has required a high degree of collaboration between academic/researchers and learning technologists from UEL and UP. The clinical environment with the polyclinic was developed by staff from the Department of Technology Enhanced Learning at UP experienced in ‘web‐editing’ in collaboration with the technology staff at UEL.

4. Design The patient cases were developed by the authors working closely with the web editors to produce a virtual clinical environment in which patients would be interviewed and assessed by students. The scenario focused on a minor surgical procedure, total and partial nail ablation with phenolisation under local anaesthesia, which sits within the scope of podiatric practice. The PU team worked upon the effective assessment of the patient to establish suitability of the patient for both local anaesthesia and the procedure, whereas the UEL team developed the scenario in Second Life so the student could actually undertake the procedure on the ‘patient’.

The student was required to enter the portal on the island and navigate their way to the ‘polyclinic’. Once they had arrived they would find their way to the podiatry clinic where the ‘patient’ was waiting for them. The ‘patient’ was already in the chair and the student was able to interact with them via text chat to establish whether they were a suitable candidate for nail surgery and local anaesthesia. They were encouraged to adhere to history taking protocols, and to complete an assessment protocol for nail surgery and consent forms as used by Podiatry Services at Plymouth Community Healthcare. The students would have 24 hour access to the ‘polyclinic’ over a four week period, while on placement, to explore and use the scenario.

Initially the project was highlighted to the students at the end of one of their timetabled lectures with a presentation of S L, the ‘polyclinic’ and the patient scenario. Subsequently those students who expressed an interest were invited to attend a workshop. The technologist and an academic introduced the participants to Second Life, the island, ‘polyclinic’ and scenario. During the workshop the students created an avatar, and it was demonstrated to them how to access the island, navigate their avatar and interact with the patient.

Unfortunately technical difficulties during the workshop prevented the students from fully utilising the scenario themselves.

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Those students that did not feel motivated to engage with the project were requested to give their consent to attend a focus group to explore their reticence.

5. Participants The project was designed for PU third year podiatry students undertaking a 20 credit module in minor surgery.

This was with the intention of augmenting the history taking and decision making skills of the students while on clinical placement. The students on placement have a large amount of daily clinical commitment so the creation of an easily accessible and pertinent tool to enhance skill development is desirable. By creating ‘virtual’ patients and by producing a wide range of complex patient histories the students could engage in a ‘virtual’ seminar to investigate, evaluate and subsequently determine clinical decisions. There would be the opportunity to practice repeatedly without harm to patients, thus enhancing patient safety in the real clinical setting.

A total of eight students volunteered and attended the workshop of which five were interviewed. Four students who did not engage with the project agreed to attend the focus group in order to discuss reasons for non‐participation.

6. Procedure Interviews were chosen as a key data collection method for this phase of the project to capture students’ views, experiences and engagement with second life (Banner, 2006; Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009). The interview schedules were informed by the literature pertaining to students’ challenges relating to engagement with SL (Boulos, et al 2007; Cobb et al, 2009; Wiecha et al, 2010) and based upon the responses generated from the online questionnaires. The interviews were semi‐structured with specific key questions that would help to answer the research question. It was however expected that the interviewer (PW), a podiatry lecturer and one of the researchers, would be flexible, and respond to emerging themes by pursuing different trains of thought.

When necessary the interviewer was prepared to expand upon the question to help the interviewee’s understanding, and encourage elaboration of their answers (Banner, 2006; Gill, 2008; Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009). Some general questions were asked to establish each student’s motivation for volunteering, followed by more specific questions about the challenges to working with the scenario (Gill et al., 2008; Whiting, 2008).

The schedules were planned with open ended questions and were sequenced so that they reflected the scenario experience (Banner, 2006; Gill et al., 2008). These were conducted face‐to‐face, lasting between 10 and 15 minutes and recorded using a digital Dictaphone.

7. Ethics The project gained approval from the Ethics Committee of the University’s Faculty of Health, Education & Society .All participants were given an information sheet explaining the project and asked to complete a consent form and their anonymity was guaranteed.

8. Analysis The interviews were transcribed verbatim by PW and analysed using framework analysis. This approach to analysis of textual data provides a highly structured system for data synthesis, and shares features with thematic analysis. During analysis the researcher creates a framework, which orders the themes from which the data can then be described, synthesised, typologies sought, and explanation for the data made (Carroll et al, 2011). The researcher is required to constantly consult the original data sources, so that there is an auditable trail documenting the rationale for decision‐making, rendering the data analysis process as transparent as possible (Dixon‐Woods, 2011; Ritchie & Lewis, 2003; Smith & Firth, 2011).

9. Findings Analysis revealed that the students fell into three distinct categories. A number of issues represented barriers to 65% (n=15) of the cohort that led them to decide that they would not engage with the SL project. Of the eight participants who agreed to take part (35% of the cohort), seven encountered significant barriers that they were unable to overcome and therefore did not manage to enter the ‘polyclinic’. Only one student, who described themselves as “technologically savvy” managed to engage with the scenario and although they also encountered challenges, the student was able to overcome them. Six main themes emerged from across the data sets: ‘motivation’, ‘navigation’, ‘technology’, ‘technological skill’, ‘training’ and ‘SL environment’.

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10. Focus group The focus group reported that they did not feel motivated to engage with the project due to their aversion to the use of technology, time constraints related to other timetabled commitments, time invested in learning SL programme, and preference for real‐life interactions.

“It is computer‐based and I’m not particularly computer friendly at the best of times”(C 66).

“Real people are unpredictable” (J67)

11. Motivation The reasons for student motivation to engage with the project varied including preference for the learning style; their perception that SL looked engaging and interesting; the medium of technology interested them; benefit to them as a student; desire to be involved in research and perceived ability to increase confidence in a safe environment.

“I was quite intrigued with the idea of a virtual reality package and found the whole concept interesting. I’m quite into technology…” (S85)

12. Navigation This was a major barrier to engagement with the scenario which prevented most students gaining access to the Island and therefore the ‘polyclinic’. The students found that if they were not able to get straight to the Island that they became lost trying to access the Island with all the distractions of the SL world.

“What I found difficult was finding the sort of safe environment of the Island or whatever at home because there are so many other things going on in that web site”(S87)

13. Technology This was another area that was extremely problematic for those students that did not gain access to the ‘polyclinic’. They experienced a number of issues related to the technology such as lap tops breaking; inadequate graphics cards; low quality internet connections; and the University firewall blocking access to Second Life.

“The internet at home was too slow to use” (S84)

14. Technological Skills Several students found their skills with technology were not adequate. The two main issues were:

not being able to load the SL programme on to their lap tops at home without support;

some students were unable to work out how to access the polyclinic as they had not been able to have much ‘hands on’ practice during the workshop

Generally, students who had volunteered for the project felt they lacked the skills to be able to overcome the issues that presented during the initial set up phase, even before they started to try and engage with the scenario.

“I expected it to be easier; I’m not good with technology” (C66)

15. Training The training session was perceived by some to be adequate and good preparation for the project. However, as there was a problem with the technology on the day and although the students were able to create an avatar, they were unable to access the ‘polyclinic’ and therefore walk through the scenario.

“The system crashed, so I did not see it functioning properly” (C66) “Equipment failure on the training day put me off” (S67)

16. SL environment The scenario was only accessed by one student, whose response was that it was “challenging” and “definitely embedded knowledge”. They expressed enthusiasm for more scenarios. However, for those students that did not get on the Island, the avatars were not viewed positively when it came to interaction in Second Life. They

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“I got freaked out by all the avatars…..if I can't get into the portal there will be loads of weird people (S86) “You could just play and not get stuck into doing it” (S84)

17. Discussion Most of the students from the focus group and all of the students from the individual interviews found the idea of the project attractive at the initial introduction: it was “cool” (S86), it was “podiatry games”(S86), “ never seen anything like it before”(S84).

Ultimately, however, most students decided not to engage with the project and of the small number that did take part, only one was able to overcome the barriers. This suggests that the barriers to engaging with this project were dominant in this study.

Those students who had agreed to take part had difficulties navigating to the site, found they did not have adequate technical skills and experienced problems with avatars. They found the training session adequate but found the equipment failure during the session a deterrent. They had thought the scenario challenging when viewed during the training session and the barriers became frustrations. Some had problems with their computer hardware, internet speeds and University firewall. The one student who completed the scenario felt that it helped to embed knowledge relating to nail surgery assessment.

The students who had not been attracted to take part in the project revealed aversion for using technology or lack of reliable internet access. These are real issues for the development of e‐learning projects, because without student engagement and where there is a lack of technological support and hardware these innovations will not be taken up.

In hindsight the training session should have been repeated as the system failure on the day resulted in loss of confidence in the project for some students.

18. Limitations The researchers did not gather information regarding student’s technical ability before the project and therefore all students were invited to volunteer. It took considerably more time to develop the scenario than envisaged. The numbers of students recruited for the project was disappointingly low, but the focus group interview revealed that pressures on time, lack of technological enthusiasm and skill were significant issues for our students.

19. Conclusion The use of virtual worlds in healthcare education has the potential to afford experiential learning opportunities which would enable podiatry students on distant and disparate clinical placements to develop their clinical decision making skills. The students who self‐selected to be involved in the project were not necessarily technologically able. This needs to be considered when offering technological problem‐ based learning. From analysing the results of this study it is clear that the experiences of our students concur with those found in other studies ( Moule et al, 2010; Elbeltagi et al, 2005; Campeau and Higgins 1995). The particular time constraints of podiatry students on clinical placements are also an issue. It can be concluded that embedding the e‐technology within a module and ensuring that time is allocated, along with the necessary technical support, would enhance the potential for successful uptake and use of what was viewed as an attractive and useful development by the majority of the students in the cohort.

20. References Atkinson, T (2008) “Inside Linden Lab: Second life for Educators”. Tech Trends: Linking Research and Practice to improve Learning, 52 (3), 16‐18 Banner, D. J. (2006). “Qualitative interviewing: Preparation for practice”. Canadian Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing, 20(3), 27–30.

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Boulos, M. Hetherington, L., and Wheeler, S. (2007). ‘Second Life: an overview of the potential of 3‐D virtual worlds in medical and health education.’ Health Information & Libraries Journal, 24(4), 233–45. doi:10.1111/j.1471‐ 1842.2007.00733.x Campeau, D.R. and Higgins, C.A. (1995). “Computer self‐efficacy: Development of a measure and initial test”. MIS Quarterly, 19, 189‐211.

Carroll, C. Booth, A. and Cooper, K. (2011).” A worked example of “best fit” framework synthesis: a systematic review of views concerning the taking of some potential chemo preventive agents”. BMC Medical Research Methodology, 11(29). doi:10.1186/1471‐2288‐11‐29 Chittaro, L. and Ranon, R. (2007). “Web3D technologies in learning, education, and training: Motivations, issues, and opportunities” Computers and Education, 49(1), 3–18.

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Phillips, J. and Berge, Z. L. (2009) “Second Life for Dental Education” Journal of Dental Education ,73 (11); pp. 1260‐1264 Ritchie, J. and Lewis, J. (2003) Carrying out qualitative analysis: Qualitative research practice, SAGE Publications Ltd, London Skiba, D. “Nursing Education 2.0: Second Life” Nursing Educational Perspectives 28 (3) pp. 156‐157 Smith, J. and Firth, J. (2011) “Qualitative data analysis: the framework approach” Nurse Researcher 18(2), pp. 52–62 Toro‐Troconis, M. and Partridge, M. (2008) “Game based learning in respiratory medicine via Second Life” [online] http://www.elearningimperial.com/SL/BTS Whiting, L. S. (2008) “Semi‐structured interviews: guidance for novice researchers” Nursing Standard 22 (23), pp. 35–40.

Wiecha, J., Heyden, R., Sternthal, E., and Merialdi, M. (2010) “Learning in a virtual world: Experience with using Second Life for medical education” Journal of Medical Internet Research, 12(1): e1

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Tasks for Teaching Scientific Approach Using the Black Box Method Martin Cápay and Martin Magdin Department of Informatics, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia mcapay@ukf.sk, mmagdin@ukf.sk

Abstract: The Black Box is a substantial system with internal organization, structure and element behaviour, about which the observer has no information, but has the option to impact the whole system via its inputs and observe its reactions via its outputs. The observation of the black box is therefore behavioural. In the paper, we point out the possibility of alternative methods of teaching algorithms using the Black Box Method, which raise the curiosity of students and their desire to uncover the mystery. These boxes should be used as group activities at school or even as a solitary activity at home. Black box applications are also suitable as a part of e‐sources in blended learning methods. In the paper, we will present tasks that can be programmed and in which it is important to know the basic, often very simple, mathematical relations. The activities described in the paper can be used in mathematics lessons and extended on programming lessons.

We strive to describe how to use black boxes in educational practice and, furthermore, how to present principles of reverse engineering. We teach them the basic skills of scientific approach: to analyze the current situation, form hypotheses and consequently verify the correctness of stated assumptions. We mostly presented the tasks on a variety of training and educational workshops. In our experience, applications functioning as black boxes were proved to be adequate “recovery” activities within longer lectures (university), as well as an example of playful learning activities. This concept can be used in teaching, or even in leisure activities, for the activation of students. The contribution of the Black Box Method lies in development of students’ curiosity, systematic approach and critical thinking while gaining new knowledge.

Keywords: activating teaching methods, black box, scientific approach, algorithm, blended learning, modelling and simulation

1. Introduction Several years ago, we were fascinated by some interesting applications that students brought to the class called Creation of the educational software. They brought some “miracle applications” that could create an effect of reading users’ thoughts. Students knew how to create applications, they were able to present them and they also knew the steps for revealing the solution to the mystery, which was usually a number. However, they did not know the answer to our question: How (Why) does it work? Some of the solutions were very transparent. Solutions often enclose complex mathematical formulae. But the students were satisfied with their results without knowing what lies behind the applications. None of them wanted to think about the applications’ substance. They did not want to know why these applications were programmed this way. The development of algorithmic and problem thinking is very important not only for the school environment, but also for a large number of activities in real life. In some situations, we have to clearly describe this process in a numbered sequence using branching or repeating; formulate the abstract terms or create formulae. In other words, we deal with the concept of algorithm, problem analysis and algorithmic thinking. But if we want to describe real‐life problems using a computer program we must have the basic skills of scientific approach: to analyse, to formulate hypotheses and to verify. After this experience, we decided to use more magic applications during the educational process to increase student’s interests for scientific approach. In previous work we try to present some constructivist black boxes tasks and solutions (Cápay and Magdin, 2011; Cápay and Magdin 2013) or tasks that could be used such as computer unplugged activities (Cápay 2013). In this paper, we briefly describe the black box model (BBM), using BBM in education and introduce the realization of the BBM in Computer Science and Mathematics Teaching. We present the tasks that can be programmed and can be used as e‐study applications.

2. Analysis of the complex model functionality using the black box method The black box method is based on analysis of the system behaviour without knowing its internal structure. It is based on analysis of the complex closed model functionality. The desired outcome is the correlation between inputs and outputs..

The Black Box Method (BBM) is considered to be a constructivist teaching method. Constructivist methods are procedures leading the teaching towards achieving the educational goals, in particular based on the authors’

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Martin Cápay and Martin Magdin own work (Guniš et al. 2009). Constructivist teaching methods do not usually require raising financial resources, ensuring special teaching aids, technologies, nor creating or building special classrooms (Sirotová, 2010). We can activate a student’s activity even by a simple change of the concept of lessons, for example, by regular tasks, the solving of which will be rewarded by extra points for the final evaluation (Vilonen, Zizzing and Krause, 2008).

In general, the Black Box is a substantial system (object, process, and phenomenon) with internal organization, structure and element behaviour, about which the observer has no information, but has the option of impacting the whole system via its inputs and registers its reactions via its outputs. The observation of the black box is therefore behavioural. The observer affects the black box via its input and gets information from its output (0). In this way, the observer and the black box create a system with feedback. In our daily lives we are confronted with many systems whose internal mechanisms are not fully open for inspection, and which must be treated by the methods appropriate for the Black Box (Ashby 1956).

Figure 1: Scheme of the method of black box principle Theoretical aspects and the application of the black box and the way of its using in different scientific fields such as pedagogy, software engineering, cybernetics, finance, physics, mathematics, electrical engineering, computer science or even in philosophy and psychology was already described (Amato, 2010; Brunsell, 2010; Lederman and Abd‐El‐Khalick, 1998; Onderová, 2009). Tang (2013) describes significant advantages in solving engineering optimization problems with black box functions.

The problem of the Black Box in electrical engineering was first used in 1956 by Ashby. According to him, the engineer is given a sealed box that has a terminal for inputs, to which he may bring any voltages, shocks, or other disturbances he pleases, and terminals for output, from which he may observe what he can. He is to deduce what he can of its contents (Ashby 1956). Apresian (1960) pointed out that the use of the BBM started in electrical engineering, specifically in the area of modelling. He formulated four steps for the BBM:

definition of facts that need to be clarified,

formulating hypotheses suitable for facts clarification,

realization of hypotheses into the models, that not only clarify the outgoing facts, but also predict the new one,

experimental proof of the model.

MS Excel could also be used as a kind of Black Box. Its calculations can be seen as program outputs of hidden programs. By drawing the curtain away from the hidden processes, one can illustrate concepts and properties that are typical for all programs (Lovászová and Hvorecký, 2005). Gal‐Ezer (2004) uses the new approach and advocates integrating three‐part questions which ask not only to identify the problem that a given algorithm solves and to analyze its complexity, but also to design a new algorithm that performs the same task.

2.1 The black box in education Applying the BBM, we teach the students to systematically examine the things around them and think about the technologies they use. Learning using the black box is a natural way of learning. We learn to open the door using the handle, we learn to lock the door, to turn on the CD player, etc. The learning is often conducted only on the basis of experiment, with no knowledge of the inner structure of the object.

How should we execute the BBM in educational practice? At the beginning of the experiment, there are no assumptions about the black box operation. The student works with an application that is acting mysteriously,

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Martin Cápay and Martin Magdin for example, reading their mind. Of course, the student immediately thinks that the whole program works on the basis of some kind of hidden principle (algorithm) they just do not know what it is yet, so the application is a mystery to the user. Only a mechanism (instructions) is available, showing ways of interacting with the box (inputs). In this way, the students can experiment with the application, explore its reactions (outputs) to different inputs, trying to solve this “mystery”. The students’ aim is to observe the interaction between inputs and outputs and to make a protocol about their observations, which will be the basis for the formulation of the algorithm operating the box (Cápay et. al. 2011b). While executing this type of task, it is necessary to consider the student’s ability to solve the task using the knowledge s/he already has or can easily deduce. The most important moment of using methods for activating students is so called ‘aha effect’. It is the moment when student begins to understand the heart of the matter (Cápay, 2013).

The contribution of the BBM lies in development of students’ curiosity, systematic approach and critical thinking while gaining new knowledge (Guniš et al., 2009). We teach them the basic skills of scientific approach:

to analyze the current situation,

formulate hypotheses,

verify the correctness of stated assumptions.

Experience lets us confirm there is a difference between so called ordinary observer and a research type (Ashby 1956). The ordinary observer asks the question “What is in this Box?”, s/he wants to know the answer, and does not care about the black box anymore. The researcher asks questions such as “How should I proceed when I am facing a Black Box?”, “What methods should be used if the Box is to be investigated efficiently? We believe that the BBM is a suitable method to determine the student’s learning style. We presume that a student preferring an active and intuitive learning style will get better results in experimenting (Felder‐ Silverman Index of Learning Styles, Hawk and Shah, 2007) than her/his classmates. This can be grounds for another research.

3. Realization of the BBM in computer science and mathematics teaching There are a number of tasks that, on the one hand, meet the condition of mathematical essence of the problem solution (Cápay and Magdin, 2011); on the other hand, they are not suitable for the black box method, as they do not include programming the relevant algorithm and they cannot be used in an electronic environment. It is therefore not possible to create a functional application that would act as the black box for the experimentation. We suggest the following types of tasks. The presented principles can be transformed into computer applications. We search for such tasks that motivate and mobilize students to seek the essence of the task first impression of which is “mystique”. Tangible black boxes can be then substituted by electronic model. In all of the mentioned examples, it is then presumed that the student (experimenter) has access to functional magical applications.

We mostly presented the tasks on a variety of trainings and educational workshops (Cápay et al. 2011a, 2011b) where they provoked very intensive reactions and even activated the teachers themselves (Figure 2). They considered the tasks to be interesting; many were surprised by the simplicity of the algorithm behind the magic. In our experience, applications functioning as black boxes were proved to be adequate “recovery” activities within longer lectures (university), as well as an example of playful learning activities.

Figure 2: Presentation of Black Boxes in educational workshops and trainings (in 2013, in 2012, in 2011)

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3.1 Logical circuit realization Models are often used in the educational process, even at the time we do not perceive them. Model is a system developed with the purpose to visualize selected aspects of the real object. It is a simplification of the real object that sustains the sufficient accuracy of modelled aspects. Students at the Department of Computer Science FNC CPU in Nitra in the subject Computer Architecture are conversant with basic properties of electrical and electronic components. They deal with logical systems (combinational and sequence logical circuits) simulated by MultiSim and LogicSim. At the beginning of the semester, the group consists of students with different grammar education. We try to use several methods to get all students to the same knowledge level. The BBM allows students to develop motoric and intellectual skills.

The BBM is used in final testing. Students have to figure out the functionality of the hidden system created in LogicSim (03). They come out from previous experience with the logical circuits’ scheme realized in Multisim or from the real component connection. The aim of the students is to estimate the internal system function.

Manipulation with these black boxes leads students to better comprehension of AND/OR circuit functioning (04).

Figure 3: The black box implemented in LogicSim

Figure 4: Behind the the black box – and/or circuites

3.2 Linear dependence The task is then to find an algorithm (formula) which will generate each particular sequence. The task could read: “Complete the following sequence with a number which will suit a hidden rule, according to which the sequence is generated" (05). We used an XLS document with hidden cells, secured cells and simple macro formulae.

Figure 5: Linear dependence tasks – complete the sequence

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Martin Cápay and Martin Magdin The second type of tasks is a modification of the first one. It focuses on a search for linear dependence based on manipulation with the application. It is necessary to define the formula or verbally render the rule, based on which the input transforms itself into output (0). An XLS document with hidden cells, secured cells and simple macro formula was used again.

Figure 6: Linear dependence tasks – define the formula expected output: 20 ‐ (x ‐ 1) * 5 [left]; x – 4 [middle]; x – (sum of ciphers) [right]

3.3 Text strings The black box designed to exercise the work with text strings is suitable for exercising the ciphering algorithms.

Ciphering is a transformation of information from one form into another with the purpose of hiding the real content of the information from the eyes of unwanted persons. For exercises related to ciphering to be used in the black box education, it is necessary that the problems can be solved using the knowledge gained in a given moment. If we needed complex keys or mechanical tools to solve the problem, the use of this method for educational and algorithmic purposes would be significantly narrowed. We consider the tasks aimed at text ciphering using the following types of ciphers to be suitable exercises, particularly for computer science (07):

Cheaters – the principle lies in inserting of a selected string to a chosen place in the original text. For example, each vowel will be succeeded by the consonant ‘p’ and the vowel itself, ‘i’ will be ciphered as ‘ipi’, ‘o’ as ‘opo’ etc.

Transposition ciphers – the principle lies in preserving the former identity of a character, the only occurring change is the one of its position. For example, each pair of letters will be changed its position.

Substitution ciphers – the principle lies in preserving of the position of a character and in the change of its identity. For example, each letter of the input string will be shifted in alphabet for three (or other) positions to right.

Figure 7: Ciphering algorithms – cheater, transposition, substitution

3.4 Algebraic modifications The algorithm works on a principle of successive instructions for the user from the black box. It begins with the instruction “think of a number…” followed by a sequence of instructions containing mathematical operations such as “add…”, “subtract…” In the end, the application, despite not knowing the number you have thought of, “guesses” the result the user got following the instructions on mathematical operations.

1.

2.

3.

4.

The first instruction Think of any number you want.

Add 5 to it.

Multiply the sum by 2.

Subtract 4.

1.

2.

3.

4.

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The second instruction Think of a number from 1 to 10.

Add 8 to it and multiply the sum by 2.

Subtract 16 and multiply by 2 again.

Divide by 4 and add 8.

Martin Cápay and Martin Magdin 5. Divide it by 2.

6. Subtract the original number from the result.

7. The result is 3.

5. Subtract the original number from the result and multiply by 2.

6. Add 9.

7. The result is 25.

The algorithm is designed so that the operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division are served to the user strategically according to a set key (formula 1, formula 2):

The original value will be eliminated in one of the steps, making it irrelevant to the total result of the expression. Thus, the algorithm never depends on the chosen number; instead it makes the user think of the number chosen by the algorithm. It would be appropriate to parameterize this type of task so that the user will always get a different, random result while experimenting with the black box.

4. Conclusions Education and possible further studies have become a rather demanding investment. Looking for different techniques and ways to make learning process more attractive with minimize financial costs is important. It could be done by combination of traditional teaching and ICT resources (Balogh, Turčáni and Burianová, 2010).

The Black Box methods could be one of the solutions. This concept can be used in teaching traditionally or online, or even in leisure activities, for the activation of students. The activities described in the paper can be extended on the programming lessons. After experimenting and disclosure of the essence of the mysteries, we can ask the students to create an application with the same functionality. Consequently, we can discuss the possibilities of the application’s enhancement or modification with the students, for example by generalizing the idea explaining the mystery or using analogy. The students can make up their own magic trick and present it to their classmates.

We think that using the black box methods is good for developing logical thinking and motivating the students to find the hidden solution. As we mentioned above, we mostly presented the tasks on a variety of educational workshops, but we want to convey that they could be used also a part of e‐courses.

Acknowledgements This publication is supported thanks to the Fund for supporting the Centres of Research and Development with internationally comparable quality of operations, Faculty of Natural Sciences, CPU Nitra, Slovakia and thanks to the financial support of the project 015UKF‐4/2013 “Modern computer science ‐ new methods”.

References Amato, J. (2010) “Using the “Black Box” Approach to Enliven Introductory Physics Labs”, Forum on Education, American Physical Society, 2010, pp 30‐31.

Apresian, J. D. (1960). Leksičeskaja semantika. (Lexical Semantics). Moskva, Nauka.

Ashby, W. R. (1956). An introduction to Cybernetics. William Clowes and Sons, Limited. London and Beccles.

Balogh, Z., Turčáni, M., and Burianová, M. (2010) “Modelling web‐based educational activities within the combined forms of education with the support of applied informatics with an e‐learning support.” Efficiency and Responsibility in Education ‐ ERIE 2010. Praha Brunsell, E. (2010) “How to teach Students to think like Scientists” http://www.edutopia.org/blog/how‐to‐teach‐students‐ to‐think‐like‐scientists?page=1 Cápay M. (2013) “Developing of Algorithms Thinking Using Activating Methods.” Efficiency and Resposibility in Education ‐ ERIE 2013. Praha Cápay, M. and Magdin, M. (2011). “Hlavolamy, kódy a šifry podporujúce algoritmické myslenie (Brain‐teasers, codes and ciphres supported algorithmic thinking)”. Alternativní metody výuky (Alternative teaching methods). Praha.

Cápay M. and Magdin M. (2013). “Alternative Methods of Teaching Algorithms.” Procedia ‐ Social and Behavioral Sciences.

Vol. 83 ( 2013 ), pp. 431 – 436.

Cápay, M., Kapusta J., Magdin, M., Mesárošová, M., and Švec, P. (2011a). “Scientific Fair : science you can see, hear and experience.” Interactive Collaborative Learning 2011 (ICL 2011). pp 487‐491.

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Martin Cápay and Martin Magdin Cápay M., Kapusta J., Magdin M., Mesárošová M., Švec P. and Valovičová Ľ. (2011b). “Popularizing Natural Sciences by Means of Scientific Fair.” International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning (iJET). Vol. 6, no. 4 (2011), pp.

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Gal‐Ezer, Judith. (2004). “Teaching Algorithm Efficiency at CS1 Level: A Different Approach. Computer Science Education”.

Vol.14(3), pp 235‐248.

Guniš, J., Súdolská M., and Šnajder, Ľ. (2009). Aktivizujúce metódy vo výučbe školskej informatiky (Activating Teaching Methods in School Informatics). Bratislava Hawk Thomas F., Shah Amit J. (2007). “Using Learning Style Instruments to Enhance Student Learning”. Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Educatio. Vol. 5, no. 1, pp 1–19.

Lederman, N.G. and Abd‐El‐Khalick, F. (1998). “Avoiding de‐natured science: Activities that promote understandings of the nature of science.”, The nature of science in science education: Rationales and strategies (pp. 83–126). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic.

Lovászová, G. and Hvorecký, M. (2005). “Using spreadsheet calculations to demonstrate concepts of programming.”

International Journal of Continuing Engineering Education and Life‐Long Learning. Volume 15, Issue 3‐6, 2005, pp 162‐184 Onderová, Ľ. (2009). Physics : black box? In:Science in School. ‐ ISSN 1818‐0353. ‐ iss. 12 (2009), p. 40‐43, dostupné aj v slovenčine ‐ online: http://www.scienceinschool.org/2009/issue12/blackbox/ slovak Sirotková M. (2010). “Activating Methods: Tools To Increase Quality And Effectiveness Of Tertiary Education.” The future of Education. Florence. Italy.

Vilonen K., Zizzing E., and Krause O. (2008). “Use of activating teachnig methods in an introductory course of chemical processes.” SEFI annual conference in Aalborg.

Tang Y,, Chen J. and Wei J.. 2013. surrogate‐based particle swarm optimization algorithm for solving optimization problems with expensive black box functions. Engineering Optimization, 45(5), 557‐576.

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Blended Learning as a Means to Enhance Students’ Motivation and to Improve Self‐Governed Learning Ivana Cechova and Matthew Rees University of Defence, Brno, Czech Republic ivanacechova@unob.cz masaryk@gmail.com

Abstract: By the time students are admitted to a university, they have often studied English for at least eight years.

Moreover, today’s students, often described as “Gen‐Z”, have grown up in a world of lifelong use of technology, such as mobile phones, MP3 players, the Internet and the World Wide Web, YouTube, Google etc. Motivating somebody who “has literally seen it all in in terms of methodology is one of the most challenging tasks for an educator” (Sluneckova, 2011). The sole use of technology itself cannot provide the desired result of motivating students and engaging them more actively in their own education, technology is no longer a motivating factor, and it is a must. This paper describes the implementation of e‐learning strategies to move e‐learning beyond learning management systems and engage students in the active use of e‐technologies for their self‐directed, problem‐based and collaborative learning. The main focus is on specific e‐learning activities to meet the needs of intermediate to upper‐intermediate students of English as a Foreign Language at the University of Defence. The research part of this article is based on data (questionnaires, interviews) collected during the bachelor study programme at the Faculty of Economics and Management, University of Defence.

Keywords: blended learning, e‐technologies, Z generation, English as a foreign language, motivation, writing and speaking techniques

1. Introduction In the few last decades, e‐technologies have changed the world we live in and impacted almost every aspect of our lives. Students who study at universities now belong to “Generation Z” (people born in the 1990’s, also known as Gen Z, the connected generation, the millennials, digital natives, the net generation), which means that they have lived their entire life with instant access to the Internet. Technology is an integral part of the Generation Z lifestyle and digital connections with the world and with friends in particular, are essential. For this generation using the Internet and World Wide Web, playing video games, downloading music and films, uploading YouTube videos, broadcasting local events for the entire world, or creating parallel worlds on sites like Second Life is a part of their everyday routine. They do not remember, and cannot imagine, life without the instant answers from the Internet or the permanent and immediate communication of mobile phones, emails, Skype, or Facebook. This generation values speed more than accuracy, having “a need for speed” (Kelly et al., 2009), which means that students are not willing to “wait” and pick up the information from a printed encyclopaedia – they want to have it immediately and in the way they like (in terms of visual information).

Research in March 2010 by Ofcom, the UK's communications regulator, found that 61% of parents think their children know more about the Internet than they do, while three‐quarters of children aged 5‐15 use the internet at home (Kiss, 2010). The situation in the Czech Republic is no different.

Educating the Z Generation is a privilege and a challenge. They expect a great deal of us as teachers, just as we do of them. To find the right balance point, teachers need to understand each other well (Oblinger, 2005).

When Oblinger asked high school students why technology is essential to their education, their responses included the following:

It’s part of our world.

Technology is so embedded in our society; it’d be hard not to know how to use it.

It’s really helpful—it makes things faster.

Abstract concepts are often easier to grasp when technology is used effectively as a teaching tool.

Some students at my school who weren’t great students are better ones now thanks to computers.

Technology allows us to learn as much as we want to about virtually any topic (Oblinger, 2005).

Generation Z spends so much of their time online that it seems obvious to anticipate that they would prefer online teaching and learning to a classical way of education.

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2. Blended learning in tertiary education Historically, the tendency in education was to provide schools with desktop computers and place them in specialized classrooms, which were primarily designed for the teaching of subjects dealing with information and communication technologies (ICT). Today there is no doubt as to whether or not technology should be employed in teaching of other subjects and placed in other classrooms. Speaking about education, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair noted, “Children cannot be effective in tomorrow’s world if they are trained in yesterday’s skills” (Blair, 2001). If modern educators want to bring up and educate the new, young generation and if they want them to succeed in the labour market, they must use technology to attract, motivate and involve students, and they must use interactive technologies to transform and improve the learning process.

Watson says that “through the use of technology in the curriculum, schools will also be helping pupils become knowledgeable about the nature of information, comfortable with the new technology and able to exploit its potential” (Watson, 2001). According to Education Elements (2010), which develops blended learning technologies, successful blended learning occurs when technology and teaching inform each other: material becomes dynamic when it reaches students of varying learning styles. In other words, hybrid classrooms can reach and engage students in a truly customizable way. However, effective technology integration for teaching subject matter requires knowledge not just of technology but especially pedagogy, as well as their relationship to each other. We can state that blended learning/e‐learning can have a broadly positive pedagogical impact.

This fact has been proved by detailed research (e.g. OECD/CERI, 2005), but there is also indirect evidence such as students’ satisfaction surveys, students’ needs analyses, etc. Rosenberg claims that “….. introducing new technology for learning ‐ we are introducing a new way to think about learning” (Rosenberg, 2001). Diaz argues for “emphasizing good teaching, not good technology” (Diaz, 2001). According to Garrison, a large part of the challenge in the adoption of blended learning in traditional institutions is related to change (2011).

Optimally, blended learning combines online delivery of educational content with the best features of classroom interaction and live instruction to personalize learning, allow thoughtful reflection, and differentiate instruction from student to student across a diverse group of learners. There are many definitions of blended learning; however, we should be careful not to be too restrictive by setting stringent boundaries. Kopecky defines blended courses as those that “integrate online with traditional face‐to‐face class activities in a planned, pedagogically valuable manner” (Kopecky, 2006). This means a teacher must implement modern technologies into classes, while wisely keeping timeless pedagogical values. Pankin defines blended learning as structured opportunities to learn, which use more than one learning or training method, inside or outside the classroom. This definition includes different learning or instructional methods (lecture, discussion, guided practice, reading, games, case study, simulation), different delivery methods (live classroom or computer mediated), different scheduling (synchronous or asynchronous) and different levels of guidance (individual, instructor or expert led, or group/social learning) (Pankin, Roberts, Savio, 2012). Previous studies investigating the effectiveness of the blended learning approach have reported that it meets the educational needs of students such as enhancing flexibility and convenience, allowing the attainment of higher achievement and attitude levels, and improving language learning skills as well as developing critical thinking skills (Deghaidy & Nouby, 2008; Wing & Khe, 2011).

The success of blended learning is not only the result of the simple integration of ICTs with the face‐to‐face approach (De George‐Walker & Keeffe, 2010). The use of ICTs in tertiary education requires an evaluation of the contribution of these tools to students’ learning, especially when they are used as a complement to face‐ to‐face methods (Ginns & Ellis, 2009). Therefore, the first goal of our paper is to describe blended methods in a course of Military English and discuss the effect of a blended learning experience on the outcomes obtained.

This research was carried out with the first‐year students at the Faculty of Economics and Management.

3. Different roles of different skills According to the European Commission’s Vision for 2020 “language skills are a ‘must’ for the modern economy. Improving the outcomes of education and training and investing in skills in general ‐ and language skills in particular ‐ are important prerequisites to achieve the European Union goal of increasing growth, creating jobs, promoting employability and increasing competitiveness” (Language competences for employability, mobility and growth, 2012). Language education at the University of Defence follows the standard of NATO STANAG 6001 and is managed according to the Common European Framework of References, which sets individual competences, especially the communicative one.

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Ivana Cechova and Matthew Rees The process of language education assumes two participants and consists of two communicative processes.

The speaker (writer) produces his/her speech and transfers information. The listener (reader) receives the information and reacts to it. In other words, every student of foreign languages needs a whole range of skills and abilities, e. g. writing letters and emails, reading emails and books, listening to the radio, speaking on the phone, all of which suppose four basic language skills: speaking, listening comprehension, writing and reading comprehension. However, some other, more socially‐based skills have been identified, such as summarizing, describing, narrating etc. (Chodera, 2006). All language skills must be developed equally, as they are related to each other by the mode of communication (oral or written) and the direction of communication (receiving or producing the message) and generally more than one skill is used at a time.

The aim of language teachers at the University of Defence is to train and practise all four language skills equally within general language courses as well as in courses of special terminology. However, the limited number of lessons does not allow the teachers to cover some parts and deal with them in detail, e. g. production of written language. The emphasis is put particularly on speaking and listening skills, whereas reading and writing skills are preferred to be practised at home as a self‐study task or electronically through Learning Management Systems such as Moodle, or LMS Barborka (the LMS of the University of Defence).

In 2004 the authors conducted research at the Faculty of Economics and Management, University of Defence to determine what way of teaching and learning students prefer, how many University of Defence students have their own computer, and for what they use their computers. The research method was a questionnaire, and altogether all 104 students in their first year took part in this kind of research.

In 2012, eight years later, the authors used the same questionnaire and asked the entire first‐year student population of the Faculty of Economics and Management (112 students) the same questions. Their aim was to compare if and what differences are there between these two studies (Table 1).

Table 1: Research 2004/2012

Own a computer Cannot imagine life without a computer Cannot imagine studies without a computer Use a computer to relax Use a computer to study Prefer the classical way of teaching and learning Prefer online teaching and learning Prefer a combination of both

2004 100% 95.2% 87.9% 100% 69% 5.5% 68% 26.5%

2012 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 4.9% 60.6% 34.5%

The findings indicate that the most significant difference is in the way of using computers. While in 2004, the computer served as a source of entertainment for students, by 2012 students began to expand their use of the computer to broader range of tasks, such as education. In 2004 only 69% of students used their computers to study, whereas in 2012 it was 100%. The authors can only infer what caused such a dramatic increase, but they think that nowadays students prefer computers. The computer itself became a resource for information and knowledge dissemination, as well as for data processing. However, more interesting is the fact that despite the majority of students preferring online teaching and learning, the number of students who opted for a combination of both classical as well as online lessons has dramatically increased. This fact supports the authors’ call for blended learning implementation to university classes.

4. Writing techniques for effective blended classes Traditional writing can include the description of pictures and photographs, stories, summaries of articles, written interviews, letters, e‐mails, essays, or e‐mail writing; in a military environment these can be extended to include orders, memoranda and briefings. Students quite often consider writing to be the most boring and the least effective skill. Using modern technologies, students might be encouraged to: find a correspondence partner to communicate with by emails (this could be a friend in a language course, a Face‐to‐Face partner or another language learner through an online service), or provide feedback to friends on their writing.

A good tool to develop effective and collaborative writing skills is a wiki, which was developed as a part of Web 2.0 and some users describe it as “the simplest online database that could work” (Cechova et al., Research Report, University of Defence, Brno, 2013). Wikis allow students to develop their projects (research projects)

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Ivana Cechova and Matthew Rees as on‐going documentation of their work, add summaries of their thoughts from the prescribed readings, build a collaborative annotated bibliography, facilitate presentation in place of conventional software, etc. (Duffy, 2012). Wikis have been used more and more often in educational settings and this has occurred at the same time that “educational agendas are shifting to address ideas about how we can create personalised and collaborative knowledge spaces, where learners can access people and knowledge in ways that encourage creative and reflective learning practices that extend beyond the boundaries of the school and the limits of formal education” (Owen et al, 2006).

Publishing a short online article via Wikipedia could be a very interesting and demanding task as well as a challenge for students. Wikipedia allows everybody to contribute and the English used can be simple: “Your article does not have to be perfect, because other editors will fix it and make it better” (Simple English Wikipedia, no date). Before writing an article, a student is given some basic instructions and must study the rules of how to write a simple article on a specific topic. Then a student chooses a topic to write about and must find out what has been written so far about it and what might be interesting for others. In contrast to a regular writing assignment, the Wikipedia article can be edited by strangers, supplemented by pictures and/or hyperlinks, and the article is “alive” (Sluneckova, 2011). This kind of task is highly motivating and, notwithstanding the students’ initial negative reactions, can eventually prove to be among the most effective and satisfying tasks they will undertake.

The implementation of Wikipedia to blended courses is very easy to use, enables gathering Internet sources, creates deeper engagement with the course material, as well as flexibility and scalability, and it offers the ability to interact with an evolving document over time. Wikis also offer the student the ability to interact with an evolving document over time, to see the evolution of a written task, and to continually comment on it.

4.1 Findings Semi‐structured interviews were carried out after a course of Military English to find out the students opinion about wiki implementation into the writing learning and teaching process. In this part of research 15 out of 21 students who participated in this course were selected randomly (9 male students, 6 female students). First of all we wanted to know the students’ opinion about the wiki before and after a course, students’ reactions on publishing their own “articles” and their recommendation to the future use of wikis in lessons. Among the most frequented answers before a course we identified the following:

Source of information

Source for additional sources – references, external links, etc.

After a course the students’ answers were the following:

Source of information

Contact with specialists/professionals and peers, their comments and recommendation

Awareness of written style and common mistakes

Gaining experience in complex collaborative task‐solving

An inspirational starting point for additional writing – incomplete articles, “stubs,” etc.

The students’ in their answers mentioned that they had become more aware of correctness of written style, more critical of their own written work, and they encouraged correspondents to correct spelling, grammar and style in a constructive manner. Findings in this project also indicated that the increased cooperation among students resulted in more active participation in during the lesson. Over the course, an increased engagement by learners at the site and more elaborate submissions was observed. Being involved in a process of negotiation of creating more specific and precise language with their peers and teachers, as well as the editors of Wikipedia, was also shown to have a positive and empowering influence on the learners’ foreign language identities. There was evidence as well of a change in the way the learners viewed technology, not just as a source or one‐way conduit of information but also as an interface for actively engaging in “collaborative authorship and writing” (Duffy, 2012), which shifted the way that these students contributed as well as utilized information.

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5. Speaking techniques for effective blended classes Examples of traditional speaking activities include the description of photographs and pictures, everyday situations, reproduction of read or heard information, expressing and defending opinions, playing language games, role‐plays, information gathering tasks, oral surveys among students, narration, reproduction of topical news etc. In a military environment students, can make briefings, or give reports and orders, for example.

Using communication technologies, students might be encouraged to: find a Face‐to‐Face partner through the Language Centre and speak in the target language regularly with friends on the same course; use text‐based internet chat‐lines to develop students’ “conversational” style and speed of response to native speakers; or seek constructive feedback and corrections from friends/Face‐to‐Face partners, etc.

A picture presentation is a good method which supports not only speaking skills but also individual work. The students are asked to create a picture presentation of one of the military vehicles or weapons that are used in the Army of the Czech Republic. Their task is to find pictures and specific information about it and combine it all in a narrated video. The picture presentations are to be submitted with a tape script, and then the students present their tasks. During the lesson, other students are provided with tape scripts and their task is to listen and correct any mistakes (pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary). Each presentation is followed by a close analysis from the students as well as the teacher, who will add some recommendations. PowerPoint presentations are yet another step. A good example is a lesson in which students spoke about more complex topics e.g. Current Deployments; Peace Support Operations, Humanitarian Assistance; Problems of Today; Security Risks and Threats. Students were given instructions on how to make a good presentation and each presentation was followed by discussion, recommendations and assessment. Students and the teacher analysed each presentation itself, its structure, the use of pictures, charts, body language, atmosphere in the class, and language mistakes. PowerPoint presentations are a good communication medium that enables a balance between oral and written words. To prepare a good presentation it is necessary to read plenty of texts; write meaningful slides that are devoid of paragraphs and contain good spelling; next, present the PowerPoint in an adequate manner; and finally to answer questions and respond to feedback. As a whole, this results in utilization of a combination of all four major language skills. Presentations combined with integrated content‐based tasks provide critical opportunities for meaningful communication, and support individualized learning, competition and personal autonomy.

Another effective tool to teach and learn speaking skills is interactive, synchronous web conferencing that can be implemented by institutions teaching full‐time, distance, and combined online courses. From 2004 to 2010, the University of Defence cooperated with the Canada School of Public Service in the Partnership for Learning Program, which was a multinational project aimed at promoting communication with the support of modern technologies. The software was developed by ICI‐Design, a Canadian company, for this project and due to this software, real‐time connections between the Czech Republic and Canada was possible and allowed the students to practise speaking and listening skills with a native speaker every day. The participants of the program were usually eight to ten of military students, the instructor and special guests. The program was designed to be a learner‐centred program. This means that the content of the program is based on the Military University students’ needs and interests to the largest possible extent, not on the instructor’s pre‐planned agenda. (Charbonneau‐Gowdy, Cechova, 2011). The application also allowed for displaying a written text in case either a teacher or user needed to see a written form of what has been or is going to be said, or when they needed to specify another fact. Features were regularly adjusted, upgraded, developed or discarded in response to users’ feedback and experiences.

Online courses usually rely on asynchronous discussion forums to promote collaboration and communication between the students and teacher. By adding web conferencing, discussions can become more dynamic as the combination of audio and video components promote real‐time discussion. Web conferencing also allows students to work collaboratively on a project even though they are not at the same location. As university students struggle to balance school and home, this kind of flexibility allows them to more easily accomplish collaborative work.

5.1 Findings Grounded Theory methodology was used to uncover themes in learners’ reactions using the various technologies as a way to inform future decision making about language education at the University. We

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Ivana Cechova and Matthew Rees worked from the following assumption: ICT positively influences learning English as a second language.

Internet, multimedia software, web‐based videoconferencing technologies, and LMS Barborka (one of Learning Management Systems used at the University of Defence) were the technologies involved. Taking into account the students’ priorities, students were divided into the following three groups:

Group 1 (27 students) using a classical approach to language learning without ICT;

Group 2 (32 students) using a language learning approach that includes ICT (LMS Barborka, materials from the Internet);

Group 3 (29 students) using a language learning approach that includes ICT (materials from LMS Barborka,, the Internet) and complimented by web‐based videoconferencing technologies.

Each group took part in their respective language training programs during two semesters of sixty lessons. At the beginning of the academic year, all students were tested to find out their entrance level of English using the American Language Course Placement Test (ALCPT). On average, entrance scores for all three groups and for all skills were found to be similar with no significant differences among the three groups. At the end of the two semesters, the same students were retested using the STANAG 6001 test, a standardized NATO language testing tool, in order to compare all language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing).

Table 2: Group comparison (Cechova et al, 2013)

There were no statistically significant differences between Group I and Group II but we can confirm with reliability of 95% that the participants in Group III performed better than Group I and Group II. (Table 2).

Students from Group III had significantly better test results, in comparison with the two other groups including those who just used ICT without the online sessions. We can confirm with reliability of 95% that there are statistically significant differences between Group I and Group II, Group II and Group III and Group III and Group I which confirms the influence of ICT in learning English as a second language (Cechova et al., 2013).

6. Conclusion Pedagogical responses to Generation Z’s familiarity and embrace of communication technologies have been substantial in the past decade, and in accordance with modern educational approaches, language instructors have responded in a variety of ways, commonly by embracing blended learning techniques. The authors welcome these approaches and techniques, particularly in light of language learners’ changing attitudes to computer use. Nevertheless, this text intended to sketch some possible practical pedagogical processes blended learning offers in a university environment, which is at this time under‐evaluated.

Learning is based on motivation, and without teachers that motivation would cease to exist. Incorporating up‐ to‐date trends into the educational process can not only be satisfying and interesting for teachers and students, but can also be extremely motivating, improving students’ performance and enhancing their confidence. A suitable, open‐source technology in the learning and teaching process supports the learners’

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Ivana Cechova and Matthew Rees autonomy, an individualized approach and close collaboration. The above mentioned strategies can be applied successfully into any classes, but the specific needs of a teaching situation likely impact how effective these practices will be.

We are fully aware that our research was conducted only at one university, and for one type of study – English as a Foreign Language. Moreover, the particular character of a military university, such as the self‐selection of its students, or the use of (military) technology in general, limits our ability to make overly broad generalizations about blended learning in tertiary education. Nevertheless, we feel this research represents an important contribution to a fast‐changing field. Further research remains on the relative efficacy of the various proposals outlined in this paper, both in terms of students’ interest as well as in their ability to translate these exercises into “real world” situations. Additionally, observation of a broader student population, for example comparing first‐year students with fifth‐year students, or a comparison between military students and civilian students, may also reveal intriguing insights.

References Cechova, I. et al. (2013) “Jazykove a recove competence vojenskych profesionalu a vliv ICT na jejich rozvoj (Language competences of military professionals and the influence of ICT on their Development,” Unpublished Research Report, University of Defence, Brno.

Charbonneau‐Gowdy, P. and Cechova, I. (2011) “Social Learning Technologies: Are They Created Equal?” Paper read at 9th European Conference on e‐Learning, Porto, Portugal, November.

Chodera, R. (2006) Didaktika cizich jazyku: Uvod do vedniho oboru, Academia, Praha.

De George‐Walker, L., Keeffe M. (2010). Self‐determined blended learning: a case study of blended learning design. Higher Education Research & Development, 29 (1) (2010), pp. 1–13.

Deghaidy, H. E., & Nouby, A. (2008). Effectiveness of a blend‐ed e‐learning cooperative approach in anEgyptian teacher education programme. Computers & Education, 51, 988‐1006. [online],http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2007.10.001. [Accessed 2 September 2013].

Duffy, P. (2012). Engaging the YouTube Google‐Eyed Generation: Strategies for Using Web 2.0 in Teaching and Learning.

In: Leading Issues in e‐Learning Research. Academic Publishing International Limited. United Kingdom. pp. 47 – 70.

Diaz P. D. (2001) "Taking Technology to the Classroom: Pedagogy‐Based Training for Educators", [online], www.ts.mivu.org/default.asp?show=article&id=1034. [Accessed 2 April 2013].

European Commission (2012) Commission Staff Working Document ‐ Language competences for employability, mobility and growth, European Commission, Strasbourg. th Garrison, D. R. (2011). E‐learning in the 21 century. Routledgee, New Yourk and London.

Ginns, P. and Ellis,R. A. (2009). Evaluating the quality of e‐learning at the degree level in the student experience of blended learning. British Journal of Educational Technology, 40 (4) (2009), pp. 652–663 Guth, S. (2007) “Wikis in Education: Is Public Better?”, [online], WikiSym, www.wikisym.org/ws2007/space/GuthPaper/Guth_WikiSym2007_IsPublicBetter.pdf. [Accessed 4 April 2013].

Kopecky, K. (2006) E‐learning nejen pro pedagogy, Hanex, Olomouc.

Richardson, W. (2006) Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, Thousand Oaks, Corwin Press, California.

Oblinger, D.G. and Oblinger J.L. (2005) “Educating the Net Generation”, [online], www.net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/pub7101.pdf. [Accessed 30 April 2013].

OECD (2005) E‐learning in Tertiary Education: Where do we stand?

Owen, M., Grant, L., Sayers, S. and Facer, K. (2006) “Social software and learning”, [online], Futurelab, www.futurelab.org.uk/research/opening_education/social_software_01.htm. [Accessed 2 April 2013].

Pankin, J., Roberts, J, and Savio, M. (2012). Blended Learning at MIT. [online], http://web.mit.edu/training/trainers/resources/blended_learning_at_mit.pdf. . [Accessed 25 August 2013].

Rosenberg, M. J. (2001) “E‐learning, Strategies for Delivering Knowledge in the Digital Age”, McGraw‐Hill, New York.

Simple English Wikipedia front page (2013) [online], www.simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. [Accessed 12 April 2013].

Sluneckova, L. (2011) “Practical suggestions for effective implementation of e‐learning as a means to increase student engagement in their own learning”, Paper read at International Conference on Distance Learning, Simulation and Communication, Brno, Czech Republic, May. Wing, S. C.and Khe, F. H. (2011). Design and evaluation of two blended learning approaches: Lessons learned. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 27(8), 1319‐1337. [online], http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978‐1‐4614‐2370‐6_1.

[Accessed 22 August 2013].

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Strategies for Coordinating On‐Line and Face‐To‐Face Components in a Blended Course for Interpreter Trainers Barbara Class Department of Interpreting, Faculty of Translation and Interpreting, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland Barbara.Class@unige.ch

Abstract: This study investigates the integration of on‐line and face‐to‐face components of a blended Master of Advanced Studies course for conference interpreter trainers, involving 17 participants, eight faculty members, one pedagogical advisor and one IT support person. It is worth 60 ECTS credits; participants spend seven months on‐line on content modules, come on‐site for one face‐to‐face week and then spend the last five months working on their theses, again at a distance. Two modules taught by different faculty members are examined to see how the blended approach enabled participants to achieve the learning outcomes. This study is part of a larger design‐based research project that began in 2004, and stems from design rules disclosed in previous micro‐cycles. The theoretical framework draws on one instructional model related to the design of complex learning as well as on design principles from adult learning, student‐ centered learning environments and blended learning theories. Conjecture maps were used to provide a detailed picture of the relationship between the research question, theoretical conjectures, design elements, processes and outcomes. Data were of two origins – opinion and portal data mining – and were analysed qualitatively. Findings from this exploratory study suggest two new tentative design rules: 1) In a blended setting, consciously building on both forms of communication, written and oral, can be an effective and efficient pedagogical strategy to achieve learning outcomes. 2) In a blended setting, the on‐line component can be used to lay the theoretical foundations while the face‐to‐face component can be used to activate this theoretical knowledge in a practical setting.

Keywords: blended learning, pedagogical strategies, knowledge activation, written and oral communication, design‐based research

1. Introduction This paper presents a small study from a long‐term research project on a continuing education Master’s of Advanced Studies (MAS) course designed to train trainers in conference interpreting. The course has existed since 1996, originally in a face‐to‐face only format. In 2004, to respond to the high mobility of professional interpreters who constitute the target audience of the course, a new blended format was introduced (Class 2009). The introduction of a blended format was an occasion not only to facilitate distance learning but also to revise the pedagogical paradigm and enhance the entire curriculum. Launching a web‐based learning environment capable of supporting socio‐constructivist activities also contributed to the development of Technological Pedagogical And Content Knowledge (TPACK) competencies for both faculty and participants.

The long‐term design‐based research project comprises one large cycle and two micro‐cycles: 2004 (the date the blended format was first offered) to 2012 (the date of the course’s fifth edition) constitutes the first large cycle. Within this large cycle, two micro‐cycles were researched systematically – the 2004 and 2006 editions – and resulted in a set of design rules for similar contexts and a component model of activity‐based training (Class & Schneider 2012). The 2008, 2010 and 2012 editions were not analysed with the same rigour, but each benefitted from some improvements springing from the above‐mentioned design rules. In addition, the 2010 edition underwent substantial changes as a result of the recommendations that accompanied the accreditation procedure (Class & Moser‐Mercer 2011).

With the newly designed 2010 edition and the growing expertise of faculty in teaching in a blended modality, it was thought that the issue of strategies adopted to articulate distance and presence to achieve learning outcomes warranted more in‐depth attention. Stemming from three previously acknowledged design rules, the paper presents one iteration, on one particular issue, within the second micro‐cycle, to answer the research question: In a blended activity‐based learning environment, what pedagogical strategies do faculty develop to make sure participants achieve the intended learning outcomes? The paper begins by introducing the content and the methodology and then goes on to present the larger design‐based research (DBR) approach and the theoretical framework, to conclude with findings and a discussion.

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2. Conference interpreting Conference interpreting is a “complex” or “demanding” cognitive skill (Moser‐Mercer 2008; Seeber 2011) consisting in converting a message from one language to another using oral language. It has two major modalities: Consecutive Interpreting (CI) and Simultaneous Interpreting (SI). The Association Internationale des Interprètes de Conférences (AIIC) defines CI as follows: “Seated at the conference table, the interpreter listens to a speech, takes notes and then renders the meaning of the speaker's message in another language” (AIIC website n.d.). SI is different in the sense that, “in a sound‐proof booth with direct view onto the conference room, the interpreter listens to a speaker through earphones and simultaneously transmits the message in another language through a microphone to listeners in the room” (AIIC website n.d.).

SI and CI involve the mobilization of different “set of skills” (Gile 1997). To explain cognitive processes involved in both forms of interpreting, researchers have elaborated various theoretical models. Each of them explains some aspects of the process and constitutes solid ground for trainers to develop theory backed training strategies. The most used ones investigate the issue from the information processing and multi‐processing perspectives (Gerver 1976, Moser 1978, Gile 1997) but also from the perspective of a rapidly emerging overall mental model (Setton 1998). Building on this theoretical background, some schools successfully use pedagogical strategies associated with adaptive expertise (i.e. deliberate practice) and socio‐constructivism (i.e. collaborative learning, metacognition) to train conference interpreting students (Moser‐Mercer 2008).

3. Methodology The research question that guided this study stems from three design rules disclosed from previous research on the same course. The first two design rules come from the domain of learning design (design rules related specifically to learning and pedagogical issues), while the last one pertains to design in the broader sense (the methods used to design instructional sequences):

Authentic activities develop expert, self‐directed learners.

Authentic activities generate knowledge and skills that interest learners. The debriefing session ensures that objectives are met and reinforces learners' transfer capabilities.

The online and face‐to‐face components of an activity must be designed beforehand either to complement each other or to facilitate and reinforce transfer (Class 2009, pp. 386‐8).

To answer the research question ‐ In a blended activity‐based learning environment, what pedagogical strategies do faculty develop to make sure participants achieve the intended learning outcomes? ‐ different types of data were collected and analysed. Data were of two origins – opinion (semi‐guided interviews with two faculty members and surveys with six participants) and portal data mining (detailed course description, learning outcomes, course book written by participants, assessments) – and were analysed qualitatively. The two modules were selected because of the centrality of the content they address. In addition, Sandoval’s (2004) conjecture maps were used to provide a detailed picture of the relationship between the research question, theoretical conjectures, design elements/embodied conjectures, processes and outcomes. (Figure 1).

4. Design‐based research With the change from a face‐to‐face only format to a blended one, it was deemed important, academically speaking, to monitor the entire process with a research approach. DBR, with its specificities, seemed to be the most appropriate one.

DBR is a methodology designed by and for educators that seeks to increase the impact, transfer, and translation of education research into improved practice. In addition, it stresses the need for theory building and the development of design principles that guide, inform, and improve both practice and research in educational contexts. (Anderson & Shattuck 2012) Characteristics of a DBR approach can be listed as follows: being situated in a real educational context; focusing on the design and testing of a significant intervention; using mixed methods; involving multiple iterations; involving a collaborative partnership between researchers and practitioners; resulting in the evolution of design principles; and having a practical impact on practice (Anderson & Shattuck 2012).

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Design elements

Theoretical conjecture

Processes

Enabling activities

Outcomes

Embodied conjecture Identify tasks performed in the interpreting process, suggest exercises to help beginners train on these tasks.

Individual on‐line activity.

Inductive thinking (design appropriate steps for the acquisition of interpreting constituent skills)

Authentic activities develop expert, self‐directed learners.

Draft or choose texts appropriate for beginners, intermediate and advanced students. Look at peers’ texts.

Collaborative on‐line activity.

Authentic activities generate knowledge and skills that interest learners. Debriefing session ensures that objectives are met and reinforces learners' transfer capabilities.

Interaction

Problem‐based learning (develop systematic approach to analyse learning difficulties)

Production

Identify symptoms, match them to a probable cause, recommend a cure.

Collaborative on‐line activity.

Metacognition

Regulation Agree on the content of a an introduction to interpreting course.

Collaborative face‐to‐face activity.

The online and face‐to‐face components of an activity must be designed beforehand either to complement each other or to facilitate and reinforce transfer.

Knowledge building and skill development

In a blended activity‐based learning environment, what pedagogical strategies do faculty develop to make sure participants achieve the intended learning outcomes?

Research question

Collaborative production (develop a structured approach to teaching interpreting)

Face‐to‐face & distance

Vote for best texts and discuss the results of the vote.

Individual on‐line activity.

Discuss the on‐line collaborative activity with a view to drawing up a "doctor's kit".

Collaborative face‐to‐face activity.

Figure 1: Example of a conjecture map (adapted from Class 2009) Using the metaphor of Russian dolls, the study reported in this paper is the smallest one (Figure 2). It is informed by the three above mentioned design rules, which constitute the starting point for the focused research of interest here and this is one iteration on a particular issue within the second micro‐cycle.

Iteration on the issue of articulating face-to-face and distant components to meet learning outcomes

Cycle I

2004

2006

Micro-cycle 1 Scientific evaluation

2008

Cycle II

2010

2012

2014

Micro-cycle 2 No scientific evaluation

Figure 2: Representation of the larger cycle of the DBR and its micro‐cycles

5. Theoretical background The theoretical framework of the long‐term research project uses the instructional model related to the design of complex learning (Van Merriënboer & Kirschner 2007) together with theories related to student‐centered learning environments (Land, Hannafin & Oliver 2012), adult learning (Knowles, Holton & Swanson 2011) and blended learning (Garrison & Vaughan 2012). It may be useful to remind readers that the theory, as input, in a DBR approach, is composed of three combined elements: 1) models from instructional design that address the different learning levels and explain the overall workflow, 2) design rules or design principles stemming from learning design that explain precisely what is behind each step of the workflow, and 3) any relevant theory than enables the implementation of a design that works. Van Merriënboer & Kirschner’s model represents the instructional design level, while design principles come from the three remaining sources to contribute to the

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Barbara Class overall theoretical framework as detailed below. In addition, the three design rules guiding this very study stem from previous research on the course as stated in the methodology section.

5.1 Complex learning Van Merriënboer & Kirschner’s (2007) instructional model (Ten steps to complex learning) is well suited for the learning of a complex cognitive skill (Figure 3). For the training of trainers, it is important that all elements constituting the skill to be learnt by future students are well understood and decomposed. The process used involves overlearning in association with time and speed. Sequencing techniques to break the task into smaller bits include segmentation – breaking the procedure down into distinct temporal or spatial parts; simplification – breaking the procedure down into parts that represent increasingly complex versions of the procedure; and fractionation – breaking the procedure down into different functional parts (Van Merriënboer & Kirschner 2007, p. 197). The outcome is a very well acquired skill for the long term. The ten steps, ordered according to the pebble‐in‐the‐pond approach, can be listed as follows: design learning tasks, sequence task classes, set performance objectives, design supportive information, analyze cognitive strategies, analyze mental models, design procedural information, analyze cognitive rules, analyze prerequisite knowledge, design part‐task practice (Van Merriënboer & Kirschner 2007, p. 37).

Learning tasks

- aim at integration of (non-recurrent and recurrent) skills, knowledge, and attitudes - provide authentic, whole-task experiences based on reallife tasks - are organized in easy-to-difficult task classes - have diminishing support in each task class (scaffolding) - show high variety of practice

Part-task practice

- provides additional practice for selected recurrent aspects in order to reach a very high level of automaticity - provides a huge amount of repetition - only starts after the recurrent aspect has been introduced in the context of the whole task (i.e. in a fruitful cognitive context)

Supportive information

Procedural information

- supports the learning and performance of non-recurrent aspects of learning tasks - explains how to approach problems in a domain (cognitive strategies) and how this domain is organized (mental models) - is specified per task class and always available to the learners

- is prerequisite to the learning and performance of recurrent aspects of learning tasks (or, practice items) - precisely specifies how to perform routine aspects of the task, e.g., through step-by-step instruction - is presented just in time during the work on the learning tasks and quickly fades away as learners acquire more expertise

Figure 3: Ten steps to complex learning instructional design model (adapted from Van Merriënboer & Kirschner 2007)

5.2 Student‐centered learning environments Student centered learning environments (SCLEs) pertain to authentic activities performed in a learner‐centred environment. SCLEs are characterised by “a) [the] centrality of the learner in defining meaning; b) scaffolded participation in authentic tasks and sociocultural practices; c) importance of prior and everyday experiences in meaning construction; and d) access to multiple perspectives, resources, and representations” (Land, Hannafin & Oliver 2012, p. 8).

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Barbara Class While operationalized differently, SCLEs share common epistemological foundations and assumptions. SCLEs are grounded in a constructivist view of learning, where meaning is personally rather than universally defined. Such perspectives draw heavily from psychological research and theory related to areas such as situated cognition (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989) with attendant assumptions emphasizing the interlacing of content, context and understanding, the individual negotiation of meaning, and the construction of knowledge (Jonassen, 1991).

Pedagogically, SCLEs favor rich, authentic learning contexts over isolated, decontextualized knowledge and skill, student‐centered, goal‐oriented inquiry over externally directed instruction, and supporting personal perspectives over canonical perspectives. Technology tools support the individual’s identification and manipulation of resources and ideas (Iiyoshi, Hannafin, & Wang, 2005). (Land, Hannafin & Oliver 2012 p. 4) The Community, Collaboration, Content Management System (C3MS) that constitutes the web‐based learning environment is clearly affiliated with SCLEs (Schneider, Synteta & Frété 2002). The portal enables participants’ active participation in both on‐line and face‐to‐face formats and provides them with many tools and resources to support rich productions. It also addresses reflection objectives with methodological, metacognitive coaching by teaching staff and peer learning; finally, it ensures access to external expert human resources.

According to Burton et al.’s (2011) typology, the portal is very close to their type 6, which is described as an open, learner‐centered approach supported by a rich and varied learning environment offering a full range of technological and pedagogical resources.

5.3 Adult learning Design principles related to adult learning are of utmost importance. Since the target audience is composed of active professional conference interpreters, it was important to integrate a model that addresses andragogical principles. Knowles, Holton and Swanson (2011, p. 4) base their design on the following core adult learning principles and embed them in individual and situational differences and overall goals and purposes for learning:

The need to know: Adults need to know why they need to learn something before undertaking to learn it.

The learners’ self‐concept: Adults have a self‐concept that includes being responsible for their own decisions, for their own lives.

The role of the learners’ experiences: Adults have experiences, and if trainers do not take them into account it is as if trainers reject not only these experiences but the adults in question as persons.

Readiness to learn: Adults’ readiness to learn is a function of their developmental stage in the learning process. Exposing them to models of superior performance raises their awareness of the distance between their present stage and their training goals, and allows them to envision future possibilities that their training will open up.

Orientation to learning: Adults are life‐centred, or problem‐centred, in their orientation to learning, and their learning must be perceived as relevant to their real‐life situations.

Motivation to learn: Intrinsic motivation (to keep growing and developing) is the most powerful motivator for adults.

5.4 Blended learning Finally, to address the level of the dialectic between work completed on‐line and in face‐to‐face, Garrison & Vaughan’s approach is adopted for its comprehensiveness. Blended learning “is the organic integration of thoughtfully selected and complementary face‐to‐face and online approaches and technologies” (Garrison & Vaughan, 2008, p. 148). What is meant by this is that blended learning designs are informed by evidence based practice and the organic needs of the specific context. Based then on the grounded needs of the intended educational experience, the face‐to‐face and online means of communication are fused in a way that capitalizes on the strengths of each (Garrison & Vaughan 2013, p. 24).

Sections 2 to 5 informed readers about the context, the methodology and the theoretical background used in this study to address the research question. The remaining sections present and discuss findings to this very

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Barbara Class question: In a blended activity‐based learning environment, what pedagogical strategies do faculty develop to make sure participants achieve the intended learning outcomes?

6. Findings Findings for this exploratory study show that for one faculty member, the face‐to‐face was both an extension and a reinforcement of work done on‐line. Discussing material that was submitted on‐line or introducing new activities that can best be taught face‐to‐face were the two strategies implemented. This teacher consciously built on both forms of communication: written and oral.

Participants thought that the on‐line component helped them work on theory, analyses and reflections, and found that discussions with peers on the portal were very enriching. The face‐to‐face component helped them to synthesize information in a practical setting and, again, discussions with peers and tutors played a determining role. The fact that the face‐to‐face component incorporated activities similar to the ones carried out on‐line resulted in more effective and efficient learning.

For the other faculty member, the face‐to‐face component was primarily about activating theoretical knowledge, determining whether participants were ready to use it in the classroom, and verifying whether they could actually do certain things at a relatively fast pace. Role‐plays in which faculty adopted the role of students were set up to offer participants the opportunity to act as teachers. Participants had to rely on all the theoretical knowledge they developed on‐line in order to play this role. No new knowledge was imparted during the face‐to‐face component.

Participants thought that the face‐to‐face allowed them to practice in a ‘live’ setting and to be more confident about their activities in class. The “acting“ activities were appreciated for their real classroom setting. The on‐ line component enabled participants to see the practical benefits of building theoretical knowledge.

Participants reported that this module helped to raise their awareness of the “importance of developing a structured diagnosis in which symptoms are identified first, then causes and finally a series of exercises are recommended in order to overcome difficulties.”

Concerning summative evaluation, it ranged between 4.92 and 5.67 out of 6 for both modules and for the 17 participants. On this grading scale, 5 is equivalent to very good and 6 to excellent. If we rely on these indicators, we can say that learning outcomes were achieved at a very satisfactory level.

Despite the low response rate (6 participants out of 17), the findings suggest the following two tentative design rules, which can nevertheless become the object of future research:

In a blended setting, consciously building on both forms of communication, written and oral, can be an effective and efficient pedagogical strategy to achieve learning outcomes.

In a blended setting, the on‐line component can be used to lay the theoretical foundations while the face‐to‐ face component can be used to activate this theoretical knowledge in a practical setting.

7. Discussion and conclusion Due to the low response rate and to the fact that the study was already exploratory per se, findings are only considered as tracks that the researcher wants to pay attention to when designing the second cycle of this long‐term research project.

To set up the study discussed in this paper, Van Merriënboer & Kirschner’s (2007) instructional model together with theories on student‐centered learning environments (Land, Hannafin & Oliver 2012), adult learning (Knowles, Holton & Swanson 2011) and blended learning (Garrison & Vaughan 2012) were used. In addition, three design rules, stemming from previous research on the course, constituted its starting point. Each of them contributed an important aspect to the design of the study, even if the third one played a heavier role ‐ The online and face‐to‐face components of an activity must be designed beforehand either to complement each other or to facilitate and reinforce transfer. Since the overall pedagogical orientation favours activity‐based learning, and the goal of the course is to develop autonomous trainers able to train students, authentic activities are an essential aspect of the course. That is why the two remaining design rules were also relevant ‐

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Barbara Class Authentic activities develop expert, self‐directed learners; Authentic activities generate knowledge and skills that interest learners.

The two findings of this exploratory study, the goal of which was to investigate the pedagogical strategies faculty develop in a blended context to foster participants’ achievement of intended learning outcomes, are in line with the emerging concept of flip teaching. Flip teaching can be considered as a form of blended learning, since it uses both on‐line and face‐to‐face instructional sessions. Gerstein (2012) defines it as follows: While there is no one model, the core idea is to flip the common instructional approach. With teacher‐created videos and interactive lessons, instruction that used to occur in class is now accessed at home, in advance of class. Class becomes the place to work through problems, advance concepts, and engage in collaborative learning. Most importantly, all aspects of instruction can be rethought to best maximize the scarcest learning resource ‐ time. Flipped classroom teachers almost universally agree that it's not the instructional videos on their own, but how they are integrated into an overall approach, that makes the difference. (Gerstein, 2012) The first tentative design rule – In a blended setting, consciously building on both forms of communication, written and oral, can be an effective and efficient pedagogical strategy to achieve learning outcomes – is related to the use of different media in different settings to promote higher order learning (Brame, no date).

The second tentative design rule – In a blended setting, the on‐line component can be used to lay theoretical foundations while the face‐to‐face component can be used to activate this theoretical knowledge in a practical setting – echoes both Gerstein’s and Brame’s definitions.

Teaching in a blended fashion requires competencies in all TPACK domains: content, pedagogy and technology and most of all in the understanding of the deep interactions between the three. “Underlying truly meaningful and deeply skilled teaching with technology, TPACK is different from knowledge of all three concepts individually” (Koehler & Mishra, 2009, p. 66). Teaching with technology in such a way certainly contributes to the emergence of new knowledge and opens interesting, unforeseen perspectives.

References Association Internationale des Interprètes de Conférence (AIIC) n.d., Modes of Interpretation. Available through: <http://aiic.net/page/1403/how‐we‐work/lang/1> Anderson, T. and Shattuck, J. (2012) “Design‐Based Research: A Decade of Progress in Education Research?”, Educational Researcher, Vol 41, No. 16, pp 16‐25.

Brame, C. (no date) Flipping the Classroom. Available through: Center for Teaching, Vanderbilt University <http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/teaching‐guides/teaching‐activities/flipping‐the‐classroom/> [Accessed 6 August 2013] Burton R., Borruat, S., Charlier, B., Coltice, N., Deschryver, N., Docq, F., Villiot‐leclercq, E. (2011) “Vers une typologie des dispositifs hybrides de formation en enseignement supérieur”, Distances et Savoirs, Vol 9, No. 1, pp 69‐96.

Class, B. (2009) A Blended Socio‐constructivist Course with an Activity‐based, Collaborative Learning Environment Intended for Trainers of Conference interpreters, PhD dissertation, University of Geneva. Available through: <http://archive‐ ouverte.unige.ch/vital/access/manager/Repository/unige:4780> Class, B. and Moser‐Mercer, B. (2011) “Training Conference Interpreter Trainers with Technology – a Virtual Reality”, paper presented at the Second International Conference on Interpreting Quality, Almuñécar, Spain, March 24‐26.

Class, B. and Schneider, D. (2012) "Design, mise en œuvre et évaluation d’une formation hybride", Distances et médiations des savoirs [on‐line]. Available through: <http://dms.revues.org/84> Garrison, D. and Vaughan, N. (2013) “Institutional Change and Leadership Associated with Blended Learning Innovation: Two Case Studies”, Internet and Higher Education, Vol 18, pp 24‐28.

Gerstein, J. (2012) The Flipped Classroom: The Full Picture. Based on an Experiential Model of Learning. Kindle Edition.

Gerver, D (1976) “Empirical studies of simultaneous interpretation: a review and a model”, in R.Brislin (Ed.) Translation: Applications and research, pp 165‐207, Gardner Press, New York.

Gile, D. (1997) “Conference Interpreting as a Cognitive Management Problem”. In Danks, Joseph E., Gregory M. Shreve, Stephen B. Fountain, Michael K. McBeath (eds), Cognitive Processes in Translation and Interpreting, pp 196‐214, Thousand Oaks, London and New Delhi, Sage Publications.

Koehler, M. J., & Mishra, P. (2009) “What is technological pedagogical content knowledge?” Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 9(1), 60‐70.

Knowles, M., Holton, E. and Swanson, R. (2011) The Adult Learner: The Definitive Classic in Adult Education and Human Resource Development (7th ed.), Elsevier, London.

Land, S., Hannafin, M. and Oliver, K. (2012) “Student‐centered Learning Environments. Foundations, Assumptions and Design”, in D. Jonassen and S. Land (Eds.), Theoretical Foundations of Learning Environments (2nd ed.), pp 3‐25, Routledge, New York.

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Barbara Class Moser, B (1978) “Simultaneous interpretation: A hypothetical model and its practical application”, in D. Gerver & H. W. Sinaiko (Eds.), Language interpretation and communication, pp 353‐368, Plenum Press, New York.

Moser‐Mercer, B. (2008) “Skill Acquisition in Interpreting: A Human Performance Perspective”, The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, Vol 2, No. 1, pp 1‐28.

Sandoval, W. (2004) “Developing Learning Theory by Refining Conjectures Embodied in Educational Designs”, Educational Psychologist, Vol 39, No. 4, pp 213‐223.

Schneider, D., Synteta, V. and Frété C. (2002) “Community, Content and Collaboration Management Systems in Education: A New Chance for Socio‐constructivist Scenarios?”, paper presented at the 3rd Congress on Information and Communication Technologies in Education, Rhodes, September 26‐29.

Seeber, K. (2011) “Cognitive load in simultaneous interpreting: Existing theories ‐ new models”, Interpreting, Vol 13, No. 2, pp 176‐204.

Setton, R (1998) “Meaning assembly in simultaneous interpretation”, Interpreting, Vol 3, No. 2, pp 163‐199.

Van Merriënboer, J. and Kirschner, P. (2007) Ten Steps to Complex Learning. A Systematic Approach to Four‐component Instructional Design, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, New York.

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iBuilding for Success? iBooks as Open Educational Resources in Built Environment Education David Comiskey, Kenny McCartan and Peter Nicholl University of Ulster, UK da.comiskey@ulster.ac.uk kg.mccartan@ulster.ac.uk p.nicholl@ulster.ac.uk

Abstract: Recent years have seen a shift in the teaching and learning sphere towards online, open reusable resources that can be accessed and exploited by teachers and learners alike to enhance the e‐learning experience. At the University of Ulster, a Higher Education Academy funded project to create and rollout a series of Apple iPad iBooks was undertaken to support students on an Architectural Technology and Management undergraduate degree programme. The goal of the iBooks project was to create a media‐rich, reusable Open Educational Resource (OER) which the students could use in‐class and off‐campus to study the fundamentals of the topic. This paper reports upon the experience of a range of academics, mostly within built environment disciplines, in the rollout and use of the iBooks to date. Initially, the project was solely aimed at supporting students on an Architectural Technology and Management programme. However, interest from academics working in institutions in the UK, Europe and further afield has led to an expansion of the project, with academics within these institutions now being able to download and engage with the resource. This paper will report on the 'work in progress' findings of a study to determine whether the iBook can become an effective, truly open educational resource which can be utilised in a range of countries. It will present the benefits, pitfalls and guidelines noted by participants in the experience and list possible areas for further expansion of the study.

Keywords: iBook, eBook, iPad, open educational resource

1. Introduction “In its simplest form, the concept of Open Educational Resources (OER[s]) describes any educational resources (including curriculum maps, course materials, textbooks, streaming videos, multimedia applications, podcasts, and any other materials that have been designed for use in teaching and learning) that are openly available for use by educators and students, without an accompanying need to pay royalties or license fees.” (Butcher, 2011 p.5)

There are many possible advantages to using OERs in education, which include sharing information (Hylen 2005) and reducing costs (Billings et al. 2012; Hylen, 2005). For educational establishments, the development of high quality OER can promote courses and indeed institutions to a global audience, thus potentially attracting individuals to enroll on courses they would otherwise have been unaware of (Fleming & Massey, 2007; Hylen, 2005). This is something that becomes increasingly important as competition between universities to recruit students intensifies.

2. OER in the spotlight The role of OERs in education has been brought into focus recently as a result of publications such as the 2012 report from the European Commission. The report entitled, “Rethinking Education” cites the “Industrial Policy Communication Update COM (2012) 582”, suggesting that “European education and training systems continue to fall short in providing the right skills for employability, and are not working adequately with business or employers to bring the learning experience closer to the reality of the working environment. These skills mismatches are a growing concern for European industry’s competitiveness” The report outlines the importance of “Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)” discipline areas and advises that the use of ICT in teaching and learning should be more significant, with OERs being used to a greater degree than at present.

OERs have potential for use within built environment education, which itself falls within the suite of STEM discipline areas. Within the built environment sphere, it could be argued that OERs and emerging technologies have not been utilised to their full potential. The development of discipline specific OERs, such as the Open Resources in Built Environment Education (ORBEE) website, aim to make learning resources more readily available to academics and students alike by hosting content on a free platform. Resources such as ORBEE offer the potential for construction methods, techniques and innovative practice to be shared, assisting

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David Comiskey, Kenny McCartan and Peter Nicholl students in their preparation for professional life and enhancing their overall learning experience. Such resources could be especially beneficial to built environment students, as observations would suggest that a growing number own a portable device (tablet, laptop or smartphone) on which they can access OER material before, during and after classes.

The “2013 Horizon Report ‐ Higher Education Edition” (Johnson et al, 2013) supports the findings of the European Commission study, indicating that open resources will increase in significance in the not to distant future. The report also emphasises the significance of ICT in teaching and learning, stating that “tablet computing” is “likely to enter mainstream use” by 2014. With tablet use expected to increase (International Data Corporation, 2013), the demand for an OER that presents interactive learning content via a tablet device, could be significant. The emergence of new software, such as Apple’s iBooks Author, offers the potential for novel OER content to be created for use on tablet devices. This content, presented in an innovative and interactive format, can offer OER learning in a way that has not been seen before. Content in such a format is not yet obtainable on resources such as ORBEE, where more traditional presentation methods such as word files, PDF documents and PowerPoint presentations are currently favoured and normally have not been integrated into a focused “product” for consumption by students.

3. iPads and iBooks in education Whilst Mobile learning is a concept which is not new to educational technologists, the emergence of the Apple iPad has magnified the possibilities of mobile education for staff and students alike (Hutchison, Beschorner & Schmidt‐Crawford, 2012). The iPad truly facilitates anytime, anywhere learning (Brand & Kinash, 2010). The learning space is no longer a fixed location or time, but one which is based upon portability, expediency, immediacy of access to information and instant engagement with social groups (Terras & Ramsey, 2012; Melhuish & Falloon, 2010). Through the Apple iTunes App Store, users are able to access a huge range of educational Apps to assist teaching and learning in almost any sphere. The iBook is one such application that offers a new dimension for teaching and learning. It is widely recognised how digital texts offer different learning experiences to printed textbooks (Hutchison, Beschorner & Schmidt‐Crawford, 2012; Leu, 2006; Lankshear & Knobel, 2003). The inclusion of multimedia, graphics, images and narration can all benefit the learner, and links to external content can help the user to explore and expand their understanding of a topic beyond the limits of the traditional ‘page’. A second benefit is the fact these digital texts can facilitate the unique pace and abilities of a range of learners, as students can progress at their own speed, listen to text being read, watch recordings of real‐life scenarios or experts in the field, and return to these sections as and when they are needed to further their knowledge of the topic (Hutchison, Beschorner & Schmidt‐Crawford, 2012; Reinking 2001) all within a self‐contained iBook that is stored on the iPad and does not need an internet connection once initially downloaded.

With the iBook, users can take their experience a step further and truly personalise the learning experience as they do not simply access a digital text, complete with media, images and text, but they can also access real‐ time information, complete quizzes and link to online questionnaires to test their knowledge and offer feedback to their tutors, discuss content with peers in real‐time, online or asynchronously, access three‐ dimensional models, read text aloud using the Accessibility features, create their own note‐tracking to aid their study, access a dictionary or glossary for instant clarification, and record their own narration using Siri to help them understand the subject when they return to it (Hutchison, Beschorner & Schmidt‐Crawford, 2012; Larson 2010;).

As is clear, there are numerous potential benefits to be gained from using iBooks and iPad resources to aid teaching and learning. It is also worth noting the potential issues it may also bring. For example, whilst the iPad can enhance mobility and flexibility of learning from the traditional lecture theatre to anytime or anywhere, this greater flexibility can also create a greater risk of distraction, increased interruption of the learning experience, less interaction with the teacher and peers, and reduced concentration on the topic (Terras & Ramsey, 2012). Switching between tasks and Apps on the iPad may lead to a reduced ability to remember information when tasks are resumed (Finstad, Bink, McDaniel & Einstein, 2006). Peluso (2012) also warns educators against the ‘band‐wagon effect’ of simply buying into the iPad or mobile learning experience based upon sensationalisation of the technology by those within the mobile industry and the press. It must also be noted how not all students will benefit of equality of access of such technologies (Jenkins 2009) thus the technical and educational abilities of students will differ within the class between those who own an iPad and

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David Comiskey, Kenny McCartan and Peter Nicholl those who don’t. It will be important for any implementer of such a new technology to ensure others without such technologies will not be unfairly impacted by their lack of such equipment.

4. The study iBooks Author is a free application, which can be downloaded from the Apple Mac App Store and used on any iMac or MacBook running OSX Lion (10.7) or later Operating System. The software enables the user to pull together text, media, images, quizzes and widgets (such as galleries, HTML hyperlinks, quizzes, or 3d models) into a design template for a ‘book’ or binder. The software becomes a publisher ‘wizard’ by rearranging text, content, pages and indices automatically when new content is added, to produce an eye‐catching professional iBook. Once complete it can be shared with users directly or through iTunes U. The high standard of ‘finish’ of the iBooks has seen a huge uptake in user‐created resources, the majority of which are free for download.

Presently the iBooks can only be viewed using an iPad, however a recent announcement from Apple indicates that they may be able to be viewed using the Mac platform in the near future.

Johnson et al (2013), outline, “The advent of services such as Apple iBooks Author is also helping universities formulate strategies for textbooks and reading assignments.” They go on to highlight the work undertaken at Abilene Christian University in Texas, where a document was produced in iBook format “in part to better understand the software and assess its potential in producing next‐generation learning content.” (Abilene Christian University, n.d).

At the University of Ulster, the authors of this paper have taken this initiative one step further by creating their own teaching and learning resources using iBook Author software. This paper follows up on this initiative, which was reported on previously as a “work in progress” study (Comiskey et al, 2013). A series of architectural and construction‐related iBooks were produced which contained a range of interactive features such as three‐dimensional building details, screencasting recordings, quizzes, images and video presentations by building professionals, along with supporting text. Although referred to as ‘iBooks’, in this initial study each ‘iBook’ could have been described as a ‘chapter’ covering a specific subject area. This proved advantageous as a series of smaller chapters could be downloaded and used rather than one large iBook, which would have needed to be re‐downloaded every time it was extended with additional resources. The iBooks were primarily used in class as a teaching tool, but were also used by students undertaking independent study outside of class.

Students who did not have access to an iPad could view PDF versions of the resources that had been exported in the template format that iBooks Author creates. It was possible to store the iBooks, PDFs and associated multimedia resources on a web server for all the students to access. The users in this initial study could be separated into three distinct groups, tablet users who accessed the content via an iPad, laptop/Smartphone users who accessed the PDF version of the resource and those with no computer with them on the move but who accessed the material from a PC at a later date.

This initial study was conducted with year one Architectural Technology & Management students studying a construction related module. It was aimed at gaining an appreciation of whether this teaching and learning medium would have an impact on student engagement and how the iBooks would be received compared to other presentation methods. Although still a work in progress when reported on, the initial findings of the study indicated that teaching and learning material produced in iBook format showed considerable promise.

Subsequent findings have shown that 60% of the cohort (who responded to a paper based questionnaire at the end of the semester) used OERs for learning at the time of the study. For those who didn’t use OERs for learning, 62.5% indicated that the experience of using the iBook would lead them to using it as an OER, whilst 37.5% indicated otherwise.

When disseminating findings from this initial study, an unexpected outcome was the general consensus of the potential for the resource to be used as an engaging OER. Presentations at dissemination events generated interest from academics, within the UK and beyond, who suggested that material produced in this format could offer a potentially exciting OER. Consequently, a sample iBook or ‘chapter’ along with the PDF equivalent were made available to academics from a variety of institutions to engage with and provide feedback.

Resultantly, the aim of this paper is as follows:

To investigate the potential for iBooks to be used as a successful built environment OER.

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5. Study methodology The participants in this project were academics, both within the UK and internationally, who had expressed an interest in partaking in the study. Thus, they are ad‐hoc, small‐scale sample users, and as such it would be wrong to attempt conduct a study on this group. Rather, the approach was more of a small‐scale ‘work‐in‐ progress’ study to ascertain their initial thoughts on using such technology as an OER. Such studies are designed to enable researchers to understand unique situations more clearly, rather than presenting large‐ scale, findings, which can sometimes miss the distinct experience of the participant (Cohen et al, 2011). As well as the main aim there were a number of secondary aims:

Would they find the iBooks easy to use?

How would they compare the iBooks to other student learning methods?

What features would academics see as key to their success as an OER?

Ethical approval was sought and obtained for the study, and an online survey was designed to capture feedback. An online survey (which was anonymous) was selected as the method of data collection as it was seen as the most appropriate method of collecting data from academics situated in a range of countries.

Recruitment was via a call for an expression of interest, which was sent out following conference presentations. Architectural Technology academics within the UK and academics contributing to a separate global construction initiative were also invited to respond to the expression of interest. In total, feedback was obtained from 18 academics situated within the UK and elsewhere (Denmark, USA, China, India, Turkey, Nigeria, Australia and New Zealand). It was seen as important to receive feedback from academics located in a range of countries in trying to answer the research questions.

6. Results Results from the survey of academics showed that 78% did not currently use OERs for teaching. However, a noteworthy point was that 93% of those stated the experience of using the iBook would lead to them using it as an OER for teaching (it should be noted that one additional response was received). Respondents seemed to favour the iBook over other student learning methods such as PowerPoint Presentations, Lecture Notes, Textbooks and Search Engines (Figure 1). For this question the iBook received an average rating of 3.2 compared to PowerPoint Presentations/Lecture Notes (3.1), Textbook (2.1) and Search Engine (1.6).

Figure 1: Summary response for iBook comparison.

89% were ‘Satisfied’ with the iBook experience with 11% ‘Neither Satisfied or Dissatisfied’. The vast majority found the iBook easy to use and thought that the interactive approach offered by the iBook made the topic easier to understand. Comments relating to a question asking ‘do you think the interactive approach offered by the iBook makes the topics covered easier to understand’ included: “Not just easy but more engaging and interesting. I don’t think there’s a lack of information in textbooks to cover our academic subject areas but technology can potentially make it all easier and more interesting for students.”

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David Comiskey, Kenny McCartan and Peter Nicholl “Yes, it allows a quick overview to be taken of [the] subject, then the layering of information allows deeper exploration as needed into aspects of the subject area covered.”

“Yes, it allows the students to dive behind the data to help develop a better understanding.”

“Yes – this iBook was very focused and information appropriately distilled.”

In general, the iBooks were very well received with 94% (Figure 2) indicating that they were either ‘Very Likely’ or ‘Likely’ to recommend the iBook to others. The academics also indicated some of the areas where they saw the iBooks to be more beneficial than PowerPoint, lecture notes or similar materials. They felt the iBooks were more dynamic and engaging due to the range of technologies which could be incorporated in a single resource.

One commented via email: “I think the book is great. Videos, images, the quiz and most of all the links to the referenced documents are brilliant.”

Figure 2: Summary response for iBook recommendation The results above highlight that the iBook format does offer a potentially exciting OER, which could be used by academics and students alike to enhance their learning experience. The incorporation of videos, 3D models and interactive images makes the iBook a particularly useful resource for built environment students studying on a range of courses (Architecture, Quantity Surveying, Construction Engineering) as they are constantly viewing plans, schedules, details, 3D models and images of buildings. All of these features can be enhanced via the iBook experience.

Whilst the majority of respondents found the iBooks easy to use, with comments such as “very intuitive” and “very easy” received, there were a small number of concerns raised by those who accessed the resources. One respondent raised a concern regarding the accessibility of the resource to students without iPads, commenting: “It is easy to use and quite enjoyable. My concern however is the availability of the technology to all students….”

This was an issue which the authors of this paper had also shared, and to ensure equal access for all, a PDF version of the iBook containing the same content (apart from the quiz which was unavailable due to being hosted on a protected server) was made available to all participants involved in the study. Whilst the PDF lacked the more eye‐catching design of the iBook, and some of the functionality was reduced, in did ensure those without an iPad would not be disadvantaged. Indeed, one academic commented: “Very [referring to ease of use] – I used the PDF version on a PC with good Internet access. The text was easy to read, the illustrations relevant and the BIG advantage over the conventional book was the ability to view from a range of videos”.

Finally, one academic made an interesting point to note which the authors intend to uptake in the near future as it may benefit others who are only taking their first steps to using such technology. Although finding it easy to use, the participant commented, “Quite easy [referring to ease of use], but perhaps a quick guide to what can and can’t be done would be useful”. This was an interesting comment and raised the potential for a brief ‘how to use’ guide to be produced to ensure all users obtain the greatest benefit from their iBook experience.

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7. Discussion Compared to other student learning resources/methods, it does seem the academics who participated in the study felt the iBook would be a superior means of disseminating information to their students. The comments from participants suggested the ease of use of the iBook was a major factor, coupled with the increased levels of interactivity and engagement which the iBook can facilitate, seemed to play an important part in this. The main features of the iBook which the participants highlighted for praise were the use of text, complimented with 3D models, interactive images and video clips, and online links to related content which was all brought together neatly in a single, eye‐catching and engaging ‘book’. It would seem that the iBook has the potential to be used in a range of built environment‐related courses as these additional features supplement the written content in a way the traditional textbook could not.

There were minor concerns raised by participants, such as access to content for students who do not own their own iBook. This was also a concern for the authors, and it ties into the fact not all students will be able to access the Internet at all times. To counter this, designers of iBooks must also produce a PDF document of their contents to ensure participants can access the resources from a laptop, mobile, tablet or PC. While this is may reduce the user‐experience for some participants – as the engagement with quizzes, interacting with images, and dynamic features are reduced – it does at least ensure all participants will be able to access the resources with ease.

8. Conclusion This study has shown that the iBook created a format that the academics who were surveyed believe is better than the current alternatives they had at their disposal. The iBooks can bring together a myriad of resources into a single, user‐friendly, eye‐catching ‘book’ which can engage the reader more than static text or images can alone. The iBooks were praised for their user‐friendly design, which could help students to keep on track as they don’t need to worry about getting distracted by typing in references for web‐links or online articles as they can all be incorporated in the design of the ‘book’. One of the comments from participants in this small study indicated that a "how to" guide would prove beneficial to help those who had no experience of using the iBook features before. This could also prove useful for academics in terms of creating their own iBooks, which they could then use as their own learning resource. The ‘how to’ guide could also show academics how easy it is to create and import the video and models as well as producing the PDF output. With the PDF versions it should be noted that if viewing in their institutions the students would need to locate the linked resources on the webserver whereas the iBooks have the advantage of reducing network issues as they can be downloaded at any time. In spite of this, it was clear from the comments of the one academic who did try the PDF output, that they still thought this was an engaging resource. While this may not be just as ‘professional’ in appearance as the iBook template, it does ensure all participants can access the same content regardless of whether they own an iPad or not.

It is clear from this study the iBooks were seen as a useful, engaging OER which the participants would like to use and recommend to others. It has to be noted this was a small‐scale study, with participants who requested to use the iBook, and so it would be wrong to generalise from this work. It would be useful to follow‐up this study with a wider study with a larger population of academics to determine whether their experience will mirror those of the participants in this pilot.

A follow‐up study would be useful to see how the students who participate on courses taught by the academics who decide to use the iBook find using the resource. In addition, it would be interesting to find out how truly the iBook can be seen as an OER for academics and students whose first language is not English.

There was no specific question relating to this in the study, and it was not noted as an issue by those who used the iBook, in spite of the fact many were from countries where English is not the first language. It is possible though, there may be issues with audio translation of the videos, but this could be overcome with accompanying subtitles in the specific language. Non‐English translation is a slight issue in the videos, but well‐ structured intermingling of resources like video and text makes it easier to consume by English and non‐native English speakers.

There is also the question as to whether other academics, will start to create their own iBook resources. It is possible some academics will feel they have invested too much time to ‘give away’ their resources without any notable reward. This is understandable; as a substantial amount of time can be spent creating a professional

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David Comiskey, Kenny McCartan and Peter Nicholl resource that includes a combination of interactive features. Although a specific question relating to future creation of his or her own resources was not asked, one participant commented via email: “General feedback, excellent book. This is the sort of resource I will certainly make extensive use of. I am a great believer in online resources that can be updated and expanded as technology, legislation, etc. develops.”

Before going on to state: “Rather than an open resource I think you are justified in charging a small amount, I would recommend it as a must buy for my students.”

This was an interesting comment, which could suggest that placing a value on something may help students appreciate it more. There is an argument to be made that sometimes students may not value content if it is readily available free of charge and at the touch of a button. Perhaps charging a small amount would enable them to value the resource more, although obviously this would mean that it could no longer be classified as an OER.

Acknowledgements This study was made possible due to a Teaching Development Grant awarded from the Higher Education Academy. Funding was also provided from the University of Ulster’s Centre for Higher Education Practice.

Thanks must also be extended to those who contributed content for use within the iBooks.

References Abilene Christian University. (n.d.). Learning Studio: Year One. [online], http://blogs.acu.edu/learningstudio/lsreport/.

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Billings, M., Hutton, S., Schafer, J., Schweik, C. and Sheridan, M. (2012). Open Educational Resources as Learning Materials: Prospects and Strategies for University Libraries. Research Library Issues: A Quarterly Report from ARL, CNI, and SPARC, no. 280. [online], http://publications.arl.org/rli280/.

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Facilitation of Learning in Electronic Environments: Reconfiguring the Teacher’s Role Faiza Derbel University of Manouba, Faculty of Letters, Arts & Humanities, Manouba, Tunisia fderbel26@yahoo.com

Abstract: The “innovative” nature of e‐learning experiences presumes that teachers are facilitators. The techniques and strategies needed for teaching in a digital age (Anderson 2004, Starkey 2011) generally, and more specifically in electronic environments (Bender 2003, Conrad & Donaldson 2004), necessitate a shift from transactional to more participatory, communication‐rich modes of teaching. Teaching in the digital age (e‐teaching) has specific elements (Anderson 2004, Palloff & Pratt 2003, Palloff & Pratt 2007). The author reviews literature which proposes guidelines and “best practices” in e‐teacher mediation and explores strategies recommended to build online communities of practice (COPs). The challenges teachers face are discussed with reference to accounts of personal experiences, guidelines and models of “best practices” in e‐teacher mediation. The author synthesizes the ideas associated with the “teacher as facilitator” ideal to argue that they in fact resemble ideas advanced in the 1960s and 70s by advocates of the humanistic approach to language teaching (Nunan 1998), and therefore, teachers can, with appropriate support, step into the dynamic, multimodal, and complex technology‐mediated teaching/learning environments and thrive as facilitators of learning. The paper concludes with recommendations for educators to incorporate humanistic teaching and community building theories into their courses as they “reconfigure” their roles to match the demands of the task of online teaching.

Keywords: e‐learning, e‐teaching, educational technology, distance education, communities of practice (COPs), digital pedagogy, computer‐supported learning, role of online teacher, facilitation, mediation, humanism in teaching

1. Introduction Rapid developments in information communication technologies (ICTs), multimedia and social network tools have added new dimensions to the criteria for what Egbert, Hanson‐Smith and Chao (2007) call “optimal learning environments” (p. 2). By bringing technology into the classroom, the teacher creates “new” learning conditions which require adjustment to the goals, objectives and style of course delivery. No matter where this technology‐supported learning environment is being created, the teachers’ learning objectives are conceived with “futuristic” educational imperatives in mind. Worldwide goals and the objectives of 21st century education were defined and circulated by a number of organizations such as the Council of Europe, UNESCO, and the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), among others. As a result of these innovations, the goals of language acquisition and technology and its place in education have been rethought and redefined to match the future aspirations in classrooms throughout the world. Central to the accomplishment of these 21st century learning goals are the adjustments to be made by teachers within this learning environment. When technology is incorporated in language education, for example, language education moves beyond merely teaching vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and pronunciation.

Egbert et al. (2007) list the learning goals from the 21st century education literature then match them with the “desired” classroom environment conditions to argue that language teaching in the technology‐supported classroom requires creating conditions for learners to achieve these goals (see Table 1). Teachers must support learners as they engage in interaction around authentic tasks until they “grow out of the need for external support in the activity” (p. 6). In my view, conditions six, seven and eight are where most of the pedagogical shift in electronic environments occurs. There is need for “[a] certain degree of meta‐cognitive guidance (instructions and examples about how to learn), whether from peers or others” (p. 7), which is part of creating a learner‐centered environment where barriers between teachers, learners and school cultures are reduced to give more control to the learners over their own learning. However, this does not mean that the learners are left to their own devices. “[T]he modeling, mediation, and scaffolding provided by the instructor is indispensable. Consultation with and feedback from the instructor are crucial, as students require varying degrees of control” (p. 8).

Following Egbert et al.’s (2007) argument, teachers need to harness technology to optimize learning. Indeed, recent advances in mobile technology, the advent of wireless connections and social networks further stretch the possibility of applying ICTs in and outside classrooms. Simplified applications on smart phones encourage composing and editing text, images, audio, and video, thus, for individual wants, needs and interests (Jarvis,

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Faiza Derbel 2012). The younger generations in particular are freely tinkering creatively in cyberspace as they join social networks, communicating away from the watchful eyes of parents and teachers, but this technology can be harnessed for pedagogical purposes as well. Hedberg (2011) calls this “disruptive pedagogy” where teachers find themselves confronted with new methods of accessing resources, creating learning activities, and doing assessment. Collaborative tasks on networked computers, for instance, require teachers to design tasks which encourage learners to communicate within the emerging COPs. Thus, the teacher’s role is not to transmit information and/or course content but to facilitate the communication among students and to encourage active participation in discussion (Bender 2003, p. 11).

Table 1: Learning environments to match 21st century goals (Egbert et al., 2007, pp. 4‐5) 21st Century Learning Goals

Optimal Learning Environments

Knowledge Acquisition Productivity Creativity Communication Research Problem‐solving Critical thinking

Learners have opportunities to interact and negotiate meaning Learners interact in the target language with an authentic audience Learners are involved in authentic tasks Learners are exposed to and encouraged to produce varied and creative language Learners have sufficient time and feedback Learners are guided to attend thoughtfully to the learning process Learners work in an atmosphere with an ideal stress/anxiety level Learner autonomy is supported

This paper focuses on information communication technologies (ICTs) and their impact on teachers' perceptions and performance of their pedagogical roles. It is an attempt at revisiting teachers' roles as facilitators as they attempt to incorporate interactive technologies (synchronous and/or asynchronous) into face‐to‐face as well as online courses. Within this context teachers must “reconfigure” their perception of their roles, figuring out new ways to mediate course content and providing support. In short, they must develop maxims which guide their practices in cyber learning environments (Shelley, White, Baumann and Murphy 2006, p. 7).

The paper will first review the literature on online teaching role(s) and e‐facilitation (Palloff & Pratt 2003, Anderson 2004, Palloff & Pratt 2007, Baran, Correia & Thompson 2011) that explains teaching strategies specific to the facilitator’s role and the challenges associated with it. As the values attached to the facilitator’s role in COPs resonate with those found in the literature on humanistic approaches to language teaching (Nunan 1998, Richards & Rogers 2000, Pino‐Silva & Mayora 2010), it is argued that pedagogies should support teachers making philosophical changes in that direction.

2. Specific online teacher roles, techniques and strategies In their book on building learning communities, Palloff and Pratt (2007, p. 5) point out that when schools shift toward online learning, the whole instructional setting and concept of “appropriate” pedagogy changes.

Learners must cope with greater availability of and accessibility to information, and more learning tasks that function on individual and interpersonal levels. Teachers experience similar demands and challenges, thus may have to approach their work differently. E‐learning environments which embed synchronous and asynchronous communication tools require applying “active learning techniques such as working collaboratively on assignments, participating in small‐group discussions and projects, reading and responding to case studies, role playing and using simulations” (p. 5). In the meantime, when working together, teachers and learners create “a web of learning” (p. 5) consisting technology mediating interaction. When teachers incorporate interaction tools and organize activities around threaded discussions or dialogues where they function merely as moderators, learners create and shape relations as part of their participation within the emerging community of learning (COL) (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer 2000). They facilitate by providing support and coaching to help participants build relationships and progress with common learning goals.

Following an analysis of eleven research articles focusing on the roles and competencies of online teachers, Baran et al. (2011) were able to compile three key roles by searching for the commonalities between the roles and functions of online teachers across contexts. These are reproduced in Table 2 below. Each role encompasses numerous complex tasks with the social role occupying a more crucial position in electronic environments.

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Faiza Derbel Table 2: Online teacher roles synthesized from the literature (Baran et al. 2001, pp. 427‐428) Roles

Specific skills and functions

Instructional design role

Planning, organizing, and structuring the course components, designing learning tasks, designing interactive technologies and teaching strategies/models and maintaining and organizing learning and making sure the learning goals are achieved.

Managerial role

Carrying out the pedagogical tasks related with course management, managing communication channels and supervising the virtual learning process.

Social role

Building and improving student‐teacher relationships in a virtual learning environment, expressing energy and humor, and establishing an expressive connection with the students.

The specificities for the role of the e‐teacher are described in a number of teacher training handbooks (Anderson, Rourke, Archer & Garrison 2001, Palloff & Pratt 2003, Anderson 2004, Smyth & Mainka 2006, Palloff & Pratt 2007; Simonson, Smaldino, Albright & Zvacek 2009). Anderson et al. (2001, n.p.) describe three “critical roles” of the online teacher: the role of instructional design, facilitation of discourse, and direct instruction. The first involves designing and organizing the course before launching them into the learning community and monitoring its process. The second involves implementing the activities, and the third consists of blending subject matter with the teacher's expertise and e‐moderation techniques (i.e. varying forms of instruction).

Salmon (in Anderson 2004: 279) propose a five‐step process of e‐moderation in online courses: (i) access and motivation, (ii) online socialization, (iii) information exchange, (iv) knowledge construction, and (v) development. The first two steps require establishing access and solving technical problems, which may seem mundane but can be very crucial in building trust. Anderson illustrates the strategies his own team of e‐ learning teachers uses: We usually facilitate this trust formation by having students post a series of introductory comments about themselves. It is useful to request specific information, and to model an answer to the response request yourself (the teacher). For example, the e‐teacher may request that students articulate their reasons for enrolling in the course or their interest in the subject matter.

I have seen this technique very successfully extended at the beginning of regular online synchronous sessions by asking each student to respond spontaneously to a content related “question of the week” that sets the tone for growth of both social and cognitive presence (p.280) In the third stage, the teacher introduces course content and begins modeling tasks such as how to start discussion threads based on assigned readings, and setting performance criteria such as “please focus on the questions posted. But‐‐do bring in related thoughts and material, other readings, or questions that occur to you from the ongoing discussion” (Levine 2002 cited in Anderson 2004, p. 282). During the fourth stage, the teacher loosens control so “the students focus on creating knowledge artifacts and projects that collaboratively and individually illustrate their understanding of course content and approaches” (p. 289). The fifth step leads to learner autonomy as they assume total responsibility for producing language with little or no teacher intervention.

To summarize, facilitation of online learning is a structured activity and yet its success depends on the exploration of the specifics of the situation and needs of the participants. The specific facilitation strategies performed during each of the five steps outlined above are expected to lead to a gradual loosening of the instructor’s control and participation in shared learning experiences by the more autonomous members of the community, so much so that as the course progresses, the instructor may not need to intervene at all. These strategies are validated in the essays written at Royal Roads University, Canada, compiled by Dewar (2003) on the process of making the transition from face‐to‐face to online teaching. For instance, Harris (2003, p. 6) argues that by easing control over the flow of the interaction, a teacher is able to leave space for learners to manage their own dialogue so that their dialogue evolves in‐interaction. Another contributor (Hillis 2003), mentions “building relationships, showing empathy, providing balanced feedback, acknowledging input, risk‐ taking, and asking questions” (p.12).

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Faiza Derbel While these teachers argue that they were able to manage the new e‐learning environment by transferring skills they had used in face‐to‐face classrooms, Palloff and Pratt (2007) work out “a systematic approach” they call the “human side of online learning” (pp. 45‐64) which rests on concepts like connectedness, shared responsibility, spiritual issues, vulnerability, and ethics and privacy. As can be inferred from the ordering of these themes in Palloff and Pratt’s book, there is, as is the case in Salomon’s (2000) five‐step model, a strategic progression from general to the specific concerns and from control to a gradual loosening of that control. At the same time they discuss the need for adjustment and the gradual adoption of “new ways of teaching” in the process of building an online community of learning. These themes include: “making the transition”, “establishing presence”, “new approaches, new skills” and “building community and participation,” the latter being the ultimate goal of teaching online. As these themes reflect institutional and learner expectations, understanding what they entail definitely impacts teachers’ understanding of their roles within online learning communities. Anderson (2004) believes the e‐teacher helps learners “develop their own thought processes” and construct knowledge and understanding of the world through discourse which “helps [them] uncover misconceptions in their own thinking, or disagreements with the teacher or other students” (p. 280).

The teacher as facilitator of the online interaction mixes “old’ and “new” techniques and strategies and takes on new roles in the hope of “getting the mix right” (Anderson 2004, p. 277). To confirm “teaching presence”, the e‐teacher is required to model posting, react to dissonance, support and reassure anxious learners, monitor individual and group progress, and assess performance. All these roles require skillful flexibly and the “e‐Teacher’s ability to include effective communication, higher cognitive and social interactions, and other student to student or student to teacher collaborations [as] one of the cornerstones of learning experiences” (Soek 2008, p. 727).

Indeed, reporting on their experience as moderators and their analysis of the transcripts of a local Yahoo group of EFL teachers, Pino‐Silva and Mayora (2010) identify distinctive styles of moderation and participation they liken to those of the coach and referee. A coach “set[s] a strategy and tr[ies] to get the players to make moves in the field” (p. 266) while a referee “make[s] sure that the rules of the game are observed. He does not usually start the plays or make moves. He tries to bring back participants into the focus of the discussion…” (p.

267). Judging from the testimonies of teachers making the transition or taking on the role of online moderators, the performance of the numerous and complex tasks as facilitator is a delicate balancing act. The teacher as facilitator can be a referee or a coach or both at the same time. As Gonzalez and Almeida d’Eça (2005) observe: We (moderators) intervene “to taste”, more at the beginning in order to get the action going, then progressively and subtly let go and step back as much as possible, but are always ready to intervene. In short, we try to make this workshop a warm, friendly, responsive, helpful, clarifying, motivating and satisfying place that will generate constant interaction and action (n.p.).

Thus, it is about mixing roles and “getting the mix right” (Anderson 2004). No wonder Dewar and Whittington (2003) choose “Balancing High Tech and High Touch” as a title for their account on moderating an online distance course, wherein they emphasize their role in reconciling program and learner needs, and especially the learners’ needs for affective support. The “high touch” denotes the e‐teacher’s role of genuinely caring for learners as part of the building of the community of learning. The authors see the task of moderating communication in an online community as requiring the skillful display of strategies like:

Building confidence in intimidated or alienated learners

Mixing compliments and recommendation while evaluating students’ work

Sending unexpected “support” emails to the students who seem to be struggling (offering additional support)

Posting notes of encouragement to the group before paper submission deadlines

Dealing with complaints early on in the course

Practicing thorough and timely formative evaluation

Providing individualized feedback privately (while keeping it out of the “discussion group” space)

Building confidence and a group sense of achievement (pp. 37‐42)

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Faiza Derbel These strategies, or "practical moves", described by Dewar and Wittington, reflect their attempt to strike a balance between the teacher's need to show leadership and the need to exert control over the course. They say loosening the instructor’s grip on the course and learners helps promote self‐pacing, autonomy and warmth within the online community. They also write about a “transition” which points to the need to reconfigure an understanding of teachers' roles and strategies. Indeed, facilitating instruction/learning is easier said than done. The first challenge comes from the nature of the group processes and patterns of participation evolving over time. As the title of my paper suggests, it is due to these demands and the complexity of the situation and the issues arising from such complexity that I am suggesting “reconfiguring” the role of the teacher as facilitator. For instance, Simonson et al. (2009, p. 186) advise instructors/facilitators to

assess the quality of the initial postings and to carry out a critical (not negative but scholarly) analysis of at least one initial posting by one other person’s posting

see if there are additional scholarly analyses of other postings

provide guidance for managing the flow of postings

see if people have read the instructor’s clarifications and explanations in the thread

Evidently, these tasks are far from linear. They need to be coordinated, synchronized and gauged on the basis of the facilitator’s judgment of the “depth and breadth” of the postings and his or her assessment of the participants’ level of engagement. In other words, the facilitator’s presence is not affirmed by conveying course content, but by assisting the members of this learning community in how to learn and how to cooperate with one another and perhaps others in cyberspace (Palloff & Platt 2003, p. 126).

While it appears that by performing this role e‐teachers are acting like a guide on the side and a leader of group process (Collison, Haavind & Tinker 2000), they are also “hand holding” for the technologically challenged, organizing posts and discussion threads, infusing personality with tone, and leading introductory community‐building activities.

I turn now to the challenges e‐teachers face as facilitators and sum up the issues of concern in facilitation in online learning environments.

3. Challenges of e‐facilitation Several authors and educators mention various areas of concern. Palloff & Platt (2003) mention “feelings of isolation and potential problems accessing resources” (p. 60). In a later book they highlight four areas of concern for the e‐teacher: (i) making the transition, (ii) establishing presence, (iii) applying new approaches and skills, (iv) building community and participation, and (v) social presence in the online environment. Clark and Mayer (2008, pp. 265‐267) discuss learner control being decisive in the process of community building efforts, and warn against uncertainty surrounding the outcome expectation when shifting the locus of control to the learners. They raise questions about whether the discourse produced during collaborative work necessarily results in learning for the individuals and the group, to what extent the heterogeneous composition of COPs can be a valid choice, and whether individual performance criteria and group cooperation criteria can be balanced.

A study related to the role of facilitator of COPs in organizations Tarmizi et al. (2007, p. 26) yields a list of ten tasks perceived by professional facilitators as important and/or difficult, with the top three considered at the same time challenging and important (see italics):

Encouraging new members to participate in the community’s activities

Promoting ownership and encouraging group responsibility

Creating and maintaining an open, positive, and participative environment

Building cooperative relationships among members

Mediating conflicts within the community

Creating comfort with and promoting understanding of the tools and tool outputs

Keeping community focus on its purpose

Implementing a strategy for attracting new members

Advocating community independency to management

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Encouraging multiple perspectives

Notably, participation in these three tasks is recognized by professional facilitators as a concern in COPs, regardless of the length of experience, suggesting that fostering human relations, managing the e‐learner’s affective needs, and cultivating harmony within the group are priority concerns in e‐facilitation. These results coincide with the ideas in the literature on the social role of the online teacher in building communities in the field of distance education emphasized by Palloff & Platt (2007).

4. What is not so novel in the teacher’s role?

The facilitator's role can be understood in terms of COL's catering to learners’ affective and social needs, a caring humanistic role that has been acknowledged in general education and in language teaching models in the 1960s and 70s (Stevick 1990, 1982; Curran 1972). Nunan (1998, p. 235) summarizes the implications of the humanistic tradition in terms of the cognitive function, the management function, the practical goals function, personal/interpersonal function and the warmth and enthusiasm function, which are at the heart of the “reconfigured” role of the online teacher I have described.

E‐teachers functioning in the electronic environment and taking on the role of facilitator are required to mix managerial, technological and relational/inter‐relational skills to keep the interaction within the learning community flowing. Along the way, e‐teachers intervene to “smooth the way” (Dewar 2003, p. 43), “lower barriers” and help participants “navigate through the obstacles” (Tarmizi et al. 2007, p. 19). Therefore, when planning preparation or induction courses, teacher educators may take into account the need for expanding their roles in virtual learning environments. As part of the theoretical input, they may incorporate readings about the philosophical underpinnings of the humanistic approaches to learning, teaching, and counseling in learning and community building. As Baran et al. (2001) put it, “online teachers often feel uncertain, uneasy, and unprepared for the challenges of teaching online, and also lacking in the tools and conditions that they use to establish their expertise…” (p. 436). Therefore, I believe the easiest way for teachers to make the transition is to experience learning in online communities themselves as part of their on‐going professional development programs.

st I have attempted in this paper to analyze the role of teacher as facilitator in the context of the 21 century online learning community by examining the different views about the need for teachers to re‐examine their roles. Most writings emphasize pedagogical transitions or shifts, but on the whole it became clear that facilitation means remembering the principles of “good teaching” and “best practices” in face‐to‐face instruction, and especially those which match the requirements of online teaching/learning (see Wright 1987).

As we revisit “old” ideas coming from the humanistic tradition teacher educators will need to continue to inspire teachers wanting to make sense of the new task of teaching in the electronic environment by allowing them to reflect on their social role as mediators within online communities.

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Effect of e‐Learning on Achievement and Interest in Basic General Mathematics Among College of Education Students in Nigeria Foluke Eze Department of Science Education, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria folukeeze@yahoo.co.uk

Abstract: The advancement in technology especially in computer has multiplicative effect in the way humans relate and interact in everyday activity including the educational sector. Teachers are expected to integrate these technologies in the teaching and learning procedures and to effectively perform in the classrooms; the teachers need to acquire same knowledge while in training. In Nigeria, Nigeria Certificate in Education (NCE) is the minimum teaching certificate. It is awarded to students on completion of a three year academic programme in any of the Colleges of Education or through the distance learning programme of the National Teachers Institute. This work is a quasi –experimental study aimed at evaluating the effect of e‐learning approach on achievement and interest of year 1 college students in Basic General Mathematics (GSE113 and GSE112) they are compulsory courses for all students of the college irrespective of his/her department. Two Instruments namely College Achievement Test In Mathematics (CATM) and College Interest Inventory In Mathematics (CIIM) will be used to generated data at the end of 2013/2014 academic session using a study sample of 180 students in the school of Primary Education Studies (PES)of Federal College of Education(Technical) Omoku Rivers State.

Keywords: e‐learning, achievement, interest, retention, basic general mathematics

1. Background of the study Mathematics is a key to the scientific and technological development of any nation. Kalejaiye (1989) acknowledged that the level of technological development that a nation can reach depends on the quality of its mathematics education. Nigeria as an underdeveloped nation encourages the teaching and learning of science and technology through innovations like the introduction of Introductory Technology in Junior Secondary schools, establishment of technical tertiary institutions. Despite the efforts made by the government towards achieving this development, it is sad to observe that students achievement has remain very low in science because of low achievement recorded in mathematics not withstanding its importance.

Ukpebor (2009) states that Mathematics is an indispensable tool needed for the transformation of technological development to reality so to achieve technological development through mathematics in the nation Okebukola (2002) pointed that there should be proper teaching and learning of sciences especially mathematics in our schools. Ahiakwo (2005) postulated that the solution to proper science especially mathematics teaching and learning in Nigeria must start from the primary school level, since the primary school mathematics is the basic foundation level for other mathematical concepts to be built upon. The primary school is the foundation of Nigeria educational system (FRN, 2004). It determines the success or failure of the entire educational system. It is only by ensuring a solid mathematical foundation at the primary school level that the nations’ quest for scientific and technological development could be actualized through teachers.

Sule (1991) stated that the quality of school mathematics programmes and an in‐depth understanding of mathematics by the teaching professionals are interwoven and interlocked because there cannot be good mathematics educational programmes unless there exist excellent set of teachers to implement it successfully and unless the trainees are quite comfortable with the mathematics curriculum and instructional procedures, it is unlikely that much meaningful result will occur in the teaching and learning of primary school mathematics. Invariably, the positive or negative outcome of primary school and junior secondary school mathematics instruction have a lot of implications on learners performances, attitudes and interests for mathematics. So the teacher quality needs to be improved at the Colleges of Education which awards the National Certificate on Education (NCE) and considered the minimum entry qualification into teaching profession in Nigeria.

The teachers’ quality in colleges in education could be improved when innovations in teaching are incorporated and taught during the school years such innovation approaches include games, discussion, project method, mathematics laboratory, Computer Assisted Instruction and e‐learning. Some studies had shown that these innovation in teaching affect student achievement, retention and interest in mathematics

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Foluke Eze (Okoye: 2009, Eze,2006: Usman, 2002) also enable learners obtain maximum self‐development and fulfillment (FRN, 2004: 8)

The learning environment is also a strong indicator of students’ level of academic achievement. Uche (2004) identified two various forms of environment which play significant role in academic achievement of the learner such environment comprises all the equipment, materials, furniture, learning space and sensory elements as lighting, colour, sound as found in the electronic learning. Ichikawa (2006) defined e‐learning as an educational tool that enables the learner to study by experience and to answer questions repeatedly in the subject therefore it serves as individualize and effective method of teaching to provide the rich and creative environment. Diana(2009) stated that e‐learning can increase the quality of education and based on more research findings, e‐learning have been found to increase achievement in other countries and in other subject areas but not many work have been carried out in Nigeria hence the need to explore its effect on the teaching and learning of College of Education Basic General Mathematics.

Interest is believed to be an important variable in learning. Harbor – Peters (2001) stated that interest is a subjective feeling of concentration or curiosity over something; it is the preference for a particular type of activity also the tendency to seek out and participate in certain activities, it implies, that a student with interest in mathematics will study mathematics because he enjoys it. Therefore, without interest in mathematics by college of Education students no solid foundation can be built at the primary school level. The researcher wants to find out whether the e‐learning approach can enhance achievement and improve interest in mathematics amongst College of Education students.

2. Scope of the study The geographical scope covers the Federal college of Education (Technical) Omoku Rivers State in Nigeria while the year 1 students for the two sessions 2012/2013 and 2013/2014 in the School of Primary Education will be used because they are not mathematically oriented and upon graduation will form the manpower for both primary school where they will teach mathematics also the course basic general mathematics (GSE 113 and GSE 122) will form the content scope for the study. The content covers binary numbers, sets, Basic operations on fractions, decimal, indices, surds, algebraic processes (expansion and factorization), simple word problems, ratio, percentage, simple and compound interest, variations, Graph and change of subject formular.

3. Purpose of the study The Prime purpose of this study is to determine the effect of e‐learning on achievement, interest and retention of students in College of Education Basic General Mathematics. Specifically, the study will be carried out to achieve these objectives:

Determine the mean difference in achievement scores of students taught with e‐learning and the traditional approaches in Basic General Mathematics.

Determine the mean difference in interest scores of students taught with e‐learning in Basic General Mathematics.

4. Research questions To guide the study the following research questions were posed:

What is the mean difference in student’s achievement scores in Basic General Mathematics when taught with e‐learning and traditional approaches?

What is the mean difference in student’s interest scores in Basic General Mathematics when taught with e‐learning approaches?

5. Research hypotheses To guide the study the research questions were transformed into corresponding null hypotheses and tested at α = 0.05. These are:

There is no significant difference between the mean achievement scores of students taught with e‐ learning and traditional approaches.

There is no significant difference between the mean interest scores of students taught with e‐learning.

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6. Design of the study The design of this study is a quasi‐experiment. Specifically, the non‐equivalent control group design was adopted. It makes use of randomly selected groups instead of randomly composed samples used in true experiments.

The design is presented as

Grouping

pre‐test

research condition post‐test

X

O 2 Experimental: O1

‐

O 2 Control:

O1 O1 = represents pre‐test scores for the groups X = represents treatment or experimental variable.

O2 = represents post‐test scores for the groups ‐ = represents absence of treatment/no treatment.

Source: Nworgu B.G(2006)

7. Population of the study The population of the study comprised of all year 1 Primary Education Studies (PES) students for the academic session 2012/2013 in Colleges of Education, Nigeria.

8. Sample and sampling technique Purposive sampling technique was used to select Federal College of Education (Technical) Omoku from all the Colleges of Education in Nigeria as it is the only college of education in Rivers state. Purposive sampling technique was used to select the school of Primary education from the seven schools in the College because the students are not mathematically oriented while the study sample of 260 year 1 students of Primary Education studies was randomly assigned into experimental and control groups.

9. Instrument for data collection Two instruments were developed for data collection. These are

College Achievement Test on mathematics (CATM)

College Interest Inventory on Mathematics (CIIM)

The College Achievement Test on Mathematics (CATM) was constructed by the researcher on the contents of Basic General Mathematics GSE 113 and GSE 122 which includes binary numbers, sets, Basic operations on fractions, decimal, indices, surds, algebraic processes (expansion and factorization), simple word problems, ratio, percentage, simple and compound interest, variations, Graph, variation and change of subject formular.

The CATM was of two different sets for pretest and posttest, each set consisted of 50 multiple choice items based on the National Commission on Colleges of Education (NCCE) minimum standard requirement (2009) for Federal Colleges of education with four options (A‐D). The test will be used to determine the students’ achievement in mathematics when taught with two learning (traditional and e‐learning) approaches. The researcher would score the instrument immediately after the administration. Each correct option was scored two (2) marks. The total maximum mark for the 50 questions is 100 and total minimum mark was zero (0).

The (CIIS) was prepared by the researcher to assess College student’s interest in mathematics. It consists of 20 items meant to assess the interest of students in mathematics before and after the experiment. Each item was rated on a modified likert 4‐point scale with response type as strongly agree (SA) Agree (A), disagree (D) and strongly disagree (SD) weighted as 4,3,2,1 respectively for the maximum score to be obtained is 100 and the minimum score is 25.

10. Validation of instrument The instruments were face validated by Professors in the field of mathematics education, educational psychology and in measurement and evaluation. The valuators corrections and comments were incorporated in the final drafting of the test items. The content of CATM, and CIIS are based on NCCE 2009 minimum standard requirement.

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11. Reliability of instrument The reliability of CATM was calculated using kuder‐Richardson 21 on the data collected from fifty students in School of Vocational Education with internal consistency coefficient of CATM of 0.88

Cronbach Alpha was used to determine the reliability coefficient of the interest inventory, copies of the (CIIS) filled by 50 students in the trial testing was used and scored by the researcher with the coefficient of 0.92.

The internal consistency coefficients were considered high and thus proved the instruments are reliable for data collection.

12. Experimental procedure Two sets of six modules each (A and B) were prepared by the researcher on the course contents of GSE 113 and GSE 122 (Basic General Mathematics 1 and 11) that will last through the academic semesters 2013/2014.

The modules were prepared based on the National Commission for Colleges of Education (NCCE 2009 edition) of Minimum Standard Requirement.

The researcher as the course lecturer will teach the control group using the traditional teaching approach with the set B module while the set A module will be uploaded into the specially designed website hosted by the researcher and will be use in teaching the experimental group. The modules contain the same concepts and objectives but the differences will be in the delivery method/approaches (traditional and e‐leaning teaching approaches).

The pre‐tests of CATM and C11S will be administered at the end of online registration week before the commencement of the experiment.

13. Administration of instruments The following research procedure would be considered used during the administration of the instruments. A Website was designed and hosted by the researcher

Relevant permission will be obtained from the College management under the study for the online course registration which will last for two weeks from the beginning of the second semester 2013/2014 academic session each online registered student will have login details.

In order to account for possible pre‐existing differences in overall ability between the experimental and control groups, pre‐test will be administered to all groups (experimental and control) one week before the commencement of the experiment.

At the end of seventh week of each semester the researcher will administer the post test to the control group taught with the traditional approach and the experimental group taught using the e‐elarning approachfor the semester,

In all the experiment will last for 10 weeks in each semester and data collected from these tests will be used to answer the research questions and test the hypotheses formulated for the study.

14. Method of data analysis The data to be generated in the study will be analyzed using mean score and standard deviation to answer the research questions. The null hypotheses will be tested at 0.05 level of significance using analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). The pre test score were used as covariate to the post test scores.

References Ahiakwo M.J (2005) Primary school teachers preparation for primary science in Wokocha A.M: Trends and issues in the Nigerian Primary school system Uyo, Ivy Press ltd Diana G. Oblinger and James L. Oblinger eds (2009) Educating the net Generation builder, colo: EDuCASE<2005 www.educase.edu/educating www. media.wiley.com/../0764524984.pdf Eze, F.B.(2006): Effects of mathematical scrabble game on students achievement and interest in secondary school computational skill. Unpublished M.Ed Thesis, University of Nigeria.

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Foluke Eze Federal Republic of Nigeria (2004). National Policy on education (4th edition) Lagos. NERDC Press Harbor‐Peters,V.F (2001): Unmasking some aversive aspect of school mathematics and strategies for averting them. An inaugural lecture presented in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka Enugu.Snaap Press Ltd. Ichikawa,H (2006) “effect of elearning as educational aid to study fundamental Mathematics ” Digital library >ELEARN>VOLUME2006, issue1.

Nworgu,B.G(2006). Educational research .Issues and methodology. Ibadan. Oluseyi press ltd Okebukola P.A.O(2002). Beyond the stereotyped new trajectories in science teaching. Ibadan. Science Teachers rd Association (STAN) Text of special lecture presented at 43 Annual Conference of STAN and the commonwealth Association of science technology and mathematics Education (CASTME) 19‐23 Aug 2002 Okoye,F.N (2009) An empirical assessment of primary school teachers awareness and usage of some innovative instructional strategies in mathematics education: Implications for the attainment of universal primary education. A paper presented at the 46th Annual National Conference of Mathematical Association of Nigeria46(1)pg45‐55 Otunu‐Ogbisi,R.O & UkpeborJ.N(2009): Mathematics education: A tool for technological development in Nigeria. ABACUS. Journal of The mathematics Association of Nigeria 34(1)pg 46‐53 Sule A.R.O (1991): An evaluation of the mathematics teacher education programme in Colleges of Education in Nigeria Unpublished Ph.D Thesis University of Illorin Uche (2004) The Nigeria Learning Environment: A hindrance to the introduction of science and technology in schools International Journal of Arts, Technology and Education 2(1), 45‐55 Ukpebor N.J(2002): The relevance of mathematics to the teaching and learning of science and technology in the education era. A lead paper presented at the second Oyo state National Conference of MAN. Usman K.O (2002): The need to refrain in servicer mathematics teachers for the attainment of the objectives of Universal Basic Education(UBE).ABACUS. The Journal of Mathematical Association of Nigeria, 27(1), 37‐44

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Self‐Organization of e‐Learning Systems as the Future Paradigm for Corporate Learning Gert Faustmann Department of Cooperative Studies, Berlin School of Economics and Law, Alt‐ Friedrichsfelde 60, Germany gert.faustmann@hwr‐berlin.de

Abstract: The current development of information processing can be viewed from different perspectives: the interface to the end user is characterized by devices that are mobile, and that become technically and ergonomically more efficient.

From the perspective of communication, complex content can be distributed with fewer obstacles to bigger target groups.

Thus, more content is also available for free (examples are news, footage and product reviews). These contents are potential candidates for learning processes supported by documents. On the other hand, the development of working environments is coupled with growing demands on the knowledge and engagement of each employee. Most people also see an opportunity to improve their own job satisfaction when qualifying. Both developments will contribute to the new situation, that learning processes are no longer isolated, but are integrated into the daily work. Learning support systems will have to meet these requirements of "on the job training". One can compare this process with two areas: in information search processes, relations between information are used to improve the search results. In electronic commerce, recommendation systems and user behaviour are used to create and advertise additional offerings. In both areas, user‐ specific information is generated by automated processes of the information provider. Without these processes, the respective large amounts of information could not be overcome. Future e‐learning systems will individually take into account the connection of work processes, associated documents and content, as well as the background of the affected user. These systems will be self‐organizing, as they analyse large amounts of information, e.g. the working and learning behaviour of users, and convert them into individual recommendations of documents for learning and process support.

The paper outlines approaches to self‐organization of e‐learning in the context of user models, competencies, and work processes.

Keywords: future of e‐learning, work‐based learning processes, information overload, data mining

1. Introduction There is an on‐going advancement in performance of information technologies. But also the way technology is used, especially defined by software systems modelling communication and work processes, changes and adapts the roles the participants play in these processes. Both trends will increase in future, as the capacity for storage, transmission and processing of information continues to be steadily growing. This paper takes a look into the future of information processing in business. With the goal of more efficient work processes conducted by competent staff, dynamic approaches to dealing with the diversity of information are proposed.

These approaches use methods from areas with large amounts of information. Example processes will be the general search for information, as well as product recommendation in sales processes.

2. Major trend of development 2.1 Technology in information processing In recent years there has been significant increase in efficiency of technical systems regarding all areas of information processing:

processors are faster with higher clock rates and offer the possibility of processing tasks in parallel,

transmission speeds increase both in wired as well as wireless communication,

display options are improved through faster reacting and high‐resolution displays.

In addition, there is a generally increased connectivity of people through denser cable networks and a better supply of wireless networks and high‐performance mobile devices.

From the perspective of the available software, there is a significantly increased active participation of the people to the content available in the network. Through social platforms and Web 2.0, the number of authors and, consequently, the amount of information available increased by orders of magnitude.

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Gert Faustmann These developments are also reflected in the companies and their business processes. There is a marked increase of the amount of documents used in the processes and the additional information needed. Again, social and communication‐supporting platforms are increasingly used (wikis, forums, etc.) to optimize information provision for employees.

2.2 Availability of information Due to the overwhelming number of documents and information on the Web, it is possible to find quality information that can be used as a basis for learning. These include multimedia introductions to academic subjects (e.g., videos, simulations, talks etc.), didactically sound text and graphs, and more (e.g. (Apple, 2013)).

The difficulty in the design of online‐based teaching is currently less in the basic implementation of online courses than in finding suitable training documents.

When examining work and learning processes in companies, a similar situation can be found: There are very many sources of knowledge (e.g. colleagues, seminar materials with process descriptions, general reference documents, introductions to methodologies, etc.) but performing efficient work processes very often fails while not finding the appropriate information (Ajmal, Helo and Kekäle 2010). In addition, there is the business‐specific issue that the knowledge of the content and procedures immediately changes with the execution of the processes. Examples among others are changing contacts in and outside the company, new kinds of documentation and modified procedures (Nurcan 2008). While processes still run successfully under the new conditions, they get more time‐consuming when adjustments are required. The new experiences of the employees usually are documented, but are difficult to incorporate into later processing.

3. Tendencies in e‐learning research An analysis of the present research activities in the field of e‐learning shows that the current technology developments find their way into the proposed concepts. Complex and data‐intensive learning objects take advantage of the technical possibilities of multimedia presentation and rapid distribution of information.

Examples are serious games (Wendel et al 2013). The transfer of the social platform approaches to learning is encouraged by the proven concept of constructivist learning, where students learn independently and through their own active contribution (McLoughlin and Lee 2007). Here one can find different approaches to support collaboration and information exchange.

Efforts to standardize the learning content as learning objects, and so to promote the discovery of content and the design of new learning processes, are taking place, but have not yet produced the successes to date, which would lead to a widespread use of appropriate learning content (Churchill 2006). This raises the question of what are the causes of stagnation in the field of standardization of learning objects in e‐learning. Against the background of rapid increase and complexity of new information in all areas, probably a reason is in the necessary effort to redesign and integrate existing and constantly emerging information components that could be a basis for the creation of learning units.

4. Learning in working environments 4.1 Consequences from the current development Standardization processes on existing materials require additional effort. With the complexity and amount of today’s and tomorrow's information and documents it will be nearly impossible to refurbish the raw information to a standard appropriate learning format. On the other side, when specific learning objects for use in learning environments and processes are created intentionally (e.g., videos, assignments and others), a corresponding standardization (e.g. in the form of Learning Objects Metadata standards, (Hodgins 2002)) can be used.

Beyond such explicit learning objects, learning support systems must use existing information from previous work processes. Only with this information can be guaranteed that the complexity and dynamics of the processes and their (partial) results can be controlled by the employees. Therefore, systems are needed that are able to design learning processes from existing documents and process experience without additional (manual) effort.

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4.2 Existing approaches Some approaches from e‐learning research focus on relating learning objects to users, depending on the previous use of documents and processes.

In the KnowMore project (Abecker et al 2000) execution of processes can be supported by knowledge intensive tasks (kit) helping the worker to find applicable documents and information. The AD‐HOC platform (Farmer et al, 2004) introduces competencies that relate documents and workers. A worker may have a gap in his or her set of competencies which then can result in the utilization of one or more associated learning objects. In the project „Learning in Process“ (Schmidt 2005) dynamic user context information is used to suggest personalized learning programs (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Approaches to assign learning objects to users (adopted from (Schmidt 2005)) This research also relates the different paradigms e‐learning and knowledge management. But learning on the job (which is claimed to be 80% of the learning process) is not achieved by learning objects. When using learning objects they have to be developed and adapted. The complex internal structure of linked objects (learning objects, competencies, documents etc.) has to be maintained by specialists. Is there a self‐organizing structure for learning processes that relates to the dynamics of the knowledge sources in a corporate environment?

5. Approaching self‐organization of learning systems 5.1 Examples of algorithms dealing with information overload Large and complex amounts of information can be found in many other areas. Three examples to support processes are picked out, which pull out information from a large amount of data: 5.1.1 Google's PageRank algorithm The PageRank algorithm (Brin and Page 1998)(Arasu et al 2001) calculates results for keywords in the set of known web pages (which have already been visited by a crawl robot). In addition, the results are ordered according to an keyword independent assessment value (the "PageRank"). It is calculated from the number of pages that link themselves to the page to be evaluated, as well as the respective PageRank adhering these pages.

5.1.2 Amazons item‐to‐item recommendation algorithm This algorithm uses information about the customer and generates a list of recommended items. Results are not only items that were bought by different customers, but also items that tend to be purchased together by others (Linden, Smith and York 2003). In this way, a personalization of the shop system can be realized for every user of the system.

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Gert Faustmann 5.1.3 Embedded analytics architecture Embedded Analytics (EA) integrates analytical information in an operational work environment (Nijkamp and Faustmann 2009). For example, in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) services can be designed according to the current order volumes of a requesting client. Customers with a high value for the company would receive priority treatment in this case or additional services. To avoid time‐consuming changes to analysis tools, the analysis results are seamlessly integrated in the existing working environment and the required information is displayed (Figure 2).

Figure 2: SAP CRM with analytical add‐on The implementation of this integration is illustrated in the software architecture in Figure 3. It defines the components of a service‐oriented EA solution. The agent uses a work environment that has access to business intelligence information using analytical services. Entities displayed in the user interface (e.g. products, customers), are enriched with analytical information by a lookup and according to predefined logic. Finally, a data warehouse provides the requested information and an embedded representation occurs.

Figure 3: Reference architecture for embedded analytics solutions The approaches described here use contexts in large amounts of information to support the work with the data. They use data mining techniques and provide results that guide the users in their query, or in their further activities. The support takes place by suitable algorithms that can operate on sets of information with certain formal conditions (web pages, client log files, sales databases). The actual contents are not relevant and are part of the respective search and the calculation process.

5.2 Dynamic learning processes „on the job“ Future e‐learning systems will support workers in their daily working tasks. As a side effect, the employees will become more familiar with the processes and the tasks. By calculating this support from moving data originating from previous process executions, the support and hence the learning content will always be compatible with the current business needs. According to (Schmidt, 2005), dynamic user contexts are defined that include personal (knowledge, goals, preferred interactivity), organizational (unit, roles, process, task) and technical (operating system, bandwidth etc.) perspectives. User contexts will be complemented by “dynamic task contexts” that simply adapt to the quickly changing intra‐ and inter‐organizational business needs.

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Gert Faustmann Task contexts may have the following dimensions:

documents (or document templates) used in the context of a given task,

documents similar to the most frequently used documents for the task,

activities most frequently carried out in the context of the task,

activities that followed the task in the majority of cases,

persons and/ or roles often contacted in this process step,

other employees often carrying out the task.

A challenging question at this stage is how to construct the support within the very heterogenous working environment of an employee. Think of a help functionality in a software system that depends on the working context. Based on a windows context, a user is offered a selection of explaining texts for the control elements of this window. Or even better, by hovering over a specific control element in the window, a help text appears.

When showing dynamic task contexts to the user a comparable unintrusive way of communicating may be used in software systems, e.g. by placing a (semi‐transparent) heat map over the controls that should be used in a specific process. The same approach could be implemented when offering documents, template documents or even contact information in one or more separate resource windows (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Learning support based on dynamic process information Figure 4 also shows the incorporation of specific learning materials that may be constructed for learning purposes according to standards like learning objects metadata. The effort to build these materials is justifiable when covering general topics leading to a widespread use of the supporting materials. The offering of specific learning objects may also be subject to data mining algorithms analysing dimensions similar to other documents (e.g. frequency of earlier utilization in the context of the task).

6. Conclusion To cope with the flood of information and the control of strong momentum in business process, methods for learning "on the job" are required. Learning objects can complement this process, but rather replace it because of their static structure. The use of transactional data and documents in support of the process and the learning process can be reached only with automated, self‐organizing methods. The information processing in many industries shows that a simple one‐dimensional search, e.g. by indexing, is a no longer sufficient basis for sound results due to the huge volume of information.

The use of process logs always entails the risk of using this information for the monitoring of a company's employees. Here suitable precautions will have to be taken to ensure that the mining policies do not violate law and data are protected.

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References Abecker, A., Bernardi, A., Hinkelmann, K., Kühn, O. and Sintek, M. (2000), “Context‐Aware, Proactive Delivery of Task‐ Specific Information: The KnowMore Project”, Information Systems Frontiers, Vol. 2 No. 3‐4, pp. 253–276.

Ajmal, M., Helo, P. and Kekäle, T. (2010), “Critical factors for knowledge management in project business”, Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol. 14 No. 1, pp. 156–168.

Apple Inc. (2013), “iTunes U”, http://www.apple.com/de/education/itunes‐u/ Arasu, A., Cho, J., Garcia‐Molina, H., Paepcke, A. and Raghavan, S. (2001), “Searching the Web”, ACM Trans. Internet Technol., Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 2–43.Brin, S. and Page, L. (1998), “The anatomy of a large‐scale hypertextual Web search engine”, Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, Vol. 30 No. 1–7, pp. 107–117.

Churchill, D. (2006), “Towards a useful classification of learning objects”, Educational Technology Research and Development, Vol. 55 No. 5, pp. 479–497.

Farmer, J., Lindstaedt, S.N., Droschl, G. and Luttenberger, P. (2004), “AD‐HOC–Work‐integrated Technology‐supported Teaching and Learning”, Proceedings of Organisational Knowledge, Learning and Capabilities, Innsbruck, Austria.

Hodgins, W. (2002), “Draft Standard for Learning Object Metadata”. Retrieved from http://www.webs1.uidaho.edu/fritz/edui/LOM_1484_12_1_v1_Final_Draft.pdf Linden, G., Smith, B. and York, J. (2003), “Amazon. com recommendations: Item‐to‐item collaborative filtering”, Internet Computing, IEEE, Vol. 7 No. 1, pp. 76–80.

McLoughlin, C. and Lee, M.J. (2007), “Social software and participatory learning: Pedagogical choices with technology affordances in the Web 2.0 era”, ICT: Providing choices for learners and learning. Proceedings ascilite Singapore 2007, pp. 664–675.

Nijkamp, E. and Faustmann, G. (2009), “Embedded Analytics: Datenanalysen im operativen Tagesgeschäft”, SemesterJournal, Vol. 1/09, p. 31.

Nurcan, S. (2008), “A Survey on the Flexibility Requirements Related to Business Processes and Modeling Artifacts”, Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Proceedings of the 41st Annual, Presented at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Proceedings of the 41st Annual, pp. 378–378.

Schmidt, A. (2005), “Bridging the Gap Between Knowledge Management and E‐Learning with Context‐Aware Corporate Learning”, in Althoff, K.‐D., Dengel, A., Bergmann, R., Nick, M. and Roth‐Berghofer, T. (Eds.), Professional Knowledge Management, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg, Vol. 3782, pp. 203–213.

Wendel, V., Gutjahr, M., Göbel, S. and Steinmetz, R. (2013), “Designing collaborative multiplayer serious games”, Education and Information Technologies, Vol. 18 No. 2, pp. 287–308.

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An Online Tool to Manage and Assess Collaborative Group Work Alvaro Figueira and Helena Leal CRACS & University of Porto, Porto, Portugal arf@dcc.fc.up.pt helenalleal@gmail.com

Abstract: For a long time collaborative work has been seen as an important pedagogical methodology. Lately there has been an increased interest in creating tools that allow and foster collaborative work in online and web‐based environments. However, despite these efforts most of the available tools today only allow students to participate in a collaborative work. Issues like helping the teacher to create the whole collaborative activity and, helping the students to collaborate with each other are usually left out from the automatic tools. Interestingly, one of the main difficulties that hamper collaboration between students during a course work is that they do not know how to do delegate tasks, how to set deadlines and how to control the colleagues’ contribution’s in a democratic way. This later issue is particularly important because most collaborative systems do not offer a mechanism to differentiate the group participants in order to assess and grade them individually. In this article we propose and describe a system capable of creating group tasks while providing information that would help to individually assess each group member. The system can be configured in order to leverage the collaboration between students and guiding them in this sort of working methodology. The proposed system features two operating modes: the sequential and the simultaneous activity. It also includes the possibility to establish time limits for each assigned task; an automatic forum for mandatory comments upon referred drawbacks on a colleague’s work; a versioning system associated with the simultaneous activity, and the retrieval of all logged interactions, provided in the form of a report which we believe ultimately would help the teacher to differentiate group participants in order to assess their work and grade them individually.

Keywords: group work, collaborative work, Moodle module, individual assessment, group assessment

1. Introduction In many European countries the student / teacher ratio has been continuously increasing in past couple of years, mainly due to a more rational use of resources, as some would say; or measures to cut off public expenses, as another might say. Apart from the reasons, there is a clear need for the use of other pedagogical resources and pedagogical means in order to promote a more decentralized education. This article presents a tool to promote, and help to assess, collaborative learning activities. Our view is that those activities would be increased because they surely are a possible, simple solution, to circumvent the ratio problem.

The interaction between students, while undertaking a joint project, provides them not only an opportunity to have a more active role in their learning, but also a way to develop their social skills. In fact, the "collaborative work" is a teaching strategy that makes the students become responsible for their learning and for the learning of their group fellows. This inherent responsibility, when used with care, is also a clear add‐on to the development of the student’s “soft‐skills”.

Although the concept of "collaborative learning" is quite attractive in the first instance, it appears that it presents certain difficulties for the teacher, especially at the time of evaluating the students. We recall that it is not always easy to have the perception of the contribution of each student to the whole group work.

Accordingly, the adoption of this kind of pedagogical activity justifies the need for reliable instruments and techniques to provide a greater accuracy (and legitimacy) when assigning the student’s final grading.

The most common difficulties (Swan et al, 2006) associated with group work are:

A largely unequal contribution of the group participants

An inability of the students to manage the different ideas and opinions while progressing

A decentralization of the objective of the work due to the requirement for increased autonomy and control over the choice of information and its processing

An individual assessment of each group participant

And, despite the obstacles referred are focused primarily on the student role in the development of group work, teachers themselves feel some difficulties, namely to evaluate, assess and grade each individual group participant. Together all these difficulties may actually hamper the accomplishment of activities involving

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Alvaro Figueira and Helena Leal collaborative approaches. The most well‐known learning management systems (Blackboard, Moodle and Desire2Learn) at this time of writing do not provide in their features portfolio a tool to distribute work among group participants and to individually assess them.

In this context we propose a new tool to help the teacher in the process of creating, maintaining and assessing collaborative online work, with emphasis on the assessment of the individual participation.

In the following sections we describe the problems and perspectives related with group work (section 2); we present the conceptual design of our tools, which is based on events, alerts and conditions (section 3). In section 4 we describe the configuration aspects of the tool illustrating with screenshots. Section 5 is devoted to the assessment in the two operating modes and we conclude the article (section 6) with a brief description of our tool, presenting its weaknesses and directions for future work.

2. Group work Completing a work individually or in a group with other students typically influences the learning outcome, the learning of others and, of course, the final grade of the student. In the next sections we discuss the merits of group work performed collaboratively, the problems associated with this learning strategy and the recent approaches to deal with it.

2.1 A simple dichotomy: Group work vs. individual work As described in Hoffman & Rogelberg (2001), one of the advantages of group work is that it provides students with an opportunity to improve their “social component”, which is essential given that we are in the "social networks generation". Other more objective aspect of the group work is the fact that every student has the opportunity to acquire new learning, according to their knowledge / experiences and the knowledge / experiences of the colleagues, which otherwise would not be possible.

In 2007, Strijos and Fischer (Strijos and Fischer, 2007) presented a study about the challenges related to collaborative learning, its effects in the learning process and the benefits taken from it.

However, there are also disadvantages in conducting group work strategies. The main disadvantages can occur due to the large discrepancy with respect to the workload, or the engagement of each of the participants. In particular, it is related to the difficulty in assessing group work. The second drawback, taken from Kagan (1995), is according to the author, the common knowledge that determines the choice of this type of activities.

More than often, not only the teacher but also the students prefer individual work situations to avoid large discrepancy in the assessments. To minimize these disadvantages some tools are used to analyze the development of the work, and record the interactions that are made (Chyng, Steinfeld, & Pfaff, 2000). This concern is also expressed in our proposed tool.

2.2 Assessment of group work Assessment is many times one of the most influential aspects when creating a new pedagogical activity. The way the work is evaluated and assessed largely depends on the purpose of it (Boud, Cohen, & Sampson, 1999).

Taking into account the characteristics inherent in group work, it is essential to take into account not just the final work but also the contribution of each element in the preparation of this work. As there is probably a consensus on respect to the need for differentiation of grades in a group work, the same is not true when we are stipulating how this differentiation should be made. In general, it is considered that there are three aspects that should be taken into account in any collaborative activity: the distinction between individual and group accomplishments, the transformation that will occur throughout the duration of the collaboration and, the social, motivational and cognitive aspects (Strijos, 2011).

There are many objective suggestions, for instance through auto and hetero evaluation (Gilies, 2007); through creation of individual portfolios (Lee and Aalst, 2006) and even through the use of basic level generic log‐files, trace data, and “digests" to determine the interactivity degree in the course of the collaborative activity (Schummer, Strijos, & Berkel, 2005), or it may even be included an extra individual task can be made that distinction.

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Knowing which the best strategy to adopt is still an open question, since every task has its own characteristics, which makes it difficult to find a way that can be considered advantageous to all the different cases.

Despite the relevance of each of the aspects mentioned, it is important that the assessment should be as objective as possible. The problem is that some of aforementioned parameters are inherently subjective.

Therefore, our view was to create a tool which could assist the creation, management and evaluation of group work, with emphasis on the distinction of individual contributions of group participants, but also considering the changes that occurred during the accomplishment of the work itself.

2.3 Online group work The Moodle system is perhaps the most well‐known and most‐used worldwide, open source, learning management system. In Moodle there are different resources and activities that can be used during a course.

In general, a resource does not require the intervention of the student to manipulate it. On the other hand, an “activity" does require the intervention of one or more students, and require the production, or participation in a given task. The Moodle standard package provides the following activities: Database, Chat, Forum, Glossary, Survey, Lesson, SCORM Package, Survey, Quiz, Assignment, Wiki and Workshop. There are activities which can be performed simultaneously by several students, whereas activities such as Test, or Survey, typically require individualized participation, although there may be some interaction with colleagues. It is curious to note that while it is possible to monitor the students' work in most Moodle activities, in none of them (except the Wiki) the teacher is able to monitor the participation of each student individually. There are other LMS which feature collaboration tools, but essentially the problems are the same (Burnett and Roberts, 2005). Hence, we may state clearly that there is missing one activity where students may work collaboratively and be assessed individually, that is open source, freeware and associated with well‐known LMS.

3. Conceptual description of the tool Our concern is then to design a computer application that assists teachers in creating, managing and evaluating group activities. Conceptually the tool should provide the infrastructure needed for any normal activity that can be performed in a group through a web‐based system. Thus, disregarding the specific design and programmatic principles, we assemble the following guidelines for such a system:

Be able to distinguish between a task and different sub‐tasks, i.e. between a final product in which there is no specification of intermediate steps, and also the opposite situation. In this sense we created two different modes of operation: the "sequential activity" and the "simultaneous activity".

Be able to establish deadlines for submissions of the final product, and also for the assessment phases

Be able to establish intermediate milestones associated with tasks

Allow group participants to discuss, comment and evaluate their processes along the work

Allow the retrieval of data automatically collected to understand the contributions of each group participant regarding the final product submitted.

Based on these guidelines we developed a tool that can be used in Moodle as a new module. The tool allows the creation of batch jobs, automatically, managing the group's actions and helps to conduct the evaluation of each work group. Specifically, the system’s interface allows the teacher to follow the interventions of each individual student, as well as the group as a whole. Accordingly, from this information the teacher can also make comments and feedback on the work.

Regarding the evaluation, the tools allows the teacher to give an individual grade to each group member, based on the computed amount of work and on the automatic report created, as well as on the contributions made to help other group participants. Also, since this is a group activity, the teacher also has the opportunity to submit a grade to assess the performance of the group itself.

We expect that with the use of this tool the teacher would observe the performance of each individual student along the proposed resolution of the problem and, along with other information provided by the system, would have more insight in assigning a score to each group participant.

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3.1 Sequential activity The first type of the activity we propose is called the “sequential”, or “linked”, activity, whose main characteristic is that it allows a job to be divided into several tasks distributed by the various elements of the group, each participant responsible for a particular task.

This activity is conceptually described in the diagrams shown below. As illustrated in Figure 1, there is a deadline represented by a dashed line (1), for the work itself. That is, the whole set of tasks should be completed within a period established by the teacher during the activity creation. When a task is completed, the system will provide automatically the next one in the list (provided it is not the last one). After the completion of the last task assigned, some final (and optional) improvements are allowed, and it terminates the activity.

Figure 1: Generic diagram of the sequential activity In Figure 2 we describe what happens within each "task". One of the deadlines, represented in Figure 1, labeled as (2), and also on the left hand side of Figure 2, as an arrow, is the duration within which the student must complete task j assigned to him. The teacher sets the deadline, and if the student does not finish it in time, the task will be assigned to student j+1. The second deadline concerns the evaluation period. The group members must evaluate the submitted task within a certain time resulting in the group approval (or not) of this task. The approval may take place within one of four criteria set by the teacher: unanimity, majority, minimum and teacher assessment. Unanimity is a mode in which the work is approved if all group members approve it. If the criterion is set to approval by a majority, then a task is approved if the majority of the group approves it (in case of a tie, the teacher should intervene to break it). The minimum value is a mode in which each of the group participants assign a grade to the submitted task, and this will be approved if the average grade is greater than or equal to the value set by the teacher. Finally, if established by the approval of the teacher, a task will be approved regarding only the teacher’s opinion.

Figure 2: Generic diagram of the sequential activity with focus on the task

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3.2 Simultaneous activity The second type of activity assumes that all group members can freely interact with each other and simultaneously changing the product of their group work. While the interaction of group members with the resulting product is controlled by the system, the interaction between group participants is not. However, all changes that are made in terms of the final product are registered in system. That is, our tool creates in Moodle a "store" for each group, which then houses their set of data / files. Along with time this set is incremented, changed, or simply manipulated until the moment it is considered in a satisfactory state by all group participants. From the general agreement of the group it may then be submitted as the group "final product". This process is illustrated in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Generic diagram of simultaneous activity

4. Description of the tool, its configuration and use According to Moodle standards, the creation of an activity begins by setting its title and description. Then, the teacher selects one of the two possibilities: "sequential" or “simultaneous” activity type, and establishes the initial and final deadlines for the completion of the activity, as illustrated in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Creation of a collaborative group activity – selecting sequential mode

4.1 Sequential activity type This format has as main characteristic the fact that the tasks are distributed among all group members, ie, each student will work in a different part of the whole group work. All student get access to the general description of the work, but the student responsible for the first task will be the only to have access to the description of that task. As suggested in Figure 5 and Figure 6, during activity configuration, the teacher sets the number of tasks that are appropriate, taking into account the number of group elements and the characteristics of the whole job to be undertaken by the group.

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Figure 5: Distribution of tasks among group participants The teacher must also assign a deadline for the completion of tasks, which may be the same for all of them (first option shown in Figure 6), or set specific deadlines for each task (second option illustrated in Figure 6). If the teacher chooses the second option, the system will present a list of tasks which will then have to be filled with the respective duration (in hours). This last option may be used in situation where the expected duration of a task in not proportional to the effort needed to complete it. For example, finding a good set of references usually takes much more time than compiling them in a web page, to give just an example.

Figure 6: Setting task duration When any task is submitted all other group participants will have access to the work of the first participant, and must approve or disapprove it. Note that the teacher can set a deadline for that assessment to avoid spending too much time with the evaluation of submissions. The grading takes place according to four possibilities (Figure 7):

Figure 7: The grading criteria A negative opinion on a colleague’s work should be associated with a comment of how to improve it. This comment is then made visible to all group participants. If the submission is approved and submitted within the due time, the next task will be assigned to the next student. This process is repeated until there are no more tasks to assign. If the work of a student is not approved, even after its redesign, the teacher should intervene and help the group to move forward with this work.

If student j does not submit the job within the due time, it will be assigned to student j+1. The group participant that has not fulfilled his task will be assigned to the last task (eventually having a penalty established by the teacher) and there will be a "rotation" of tasks.

Associated with the submissions engine there is an automatic type of forum that students and teacher use to register comments to the work done by each group (separately).

If one or more tasks are unfulfilled, they will be available to all members of the group who have completed their tasks, to allow the group to conclude the proposed work. In the end, there is also a period of time to make specific improvements in each of the tasks submitted.

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4.2 Simultaneous activity type The second format is what we call “simultaneous work”, meaning a joint activity. In this mode group members are allowed to build together the final work. Basically, the principle behind this mode is that the interaction between students is a “black box”, and the only visible actions of the group are changes made to a set of files that in the end will be the submitted product of this group. In Figure 4 we presented the configuration screen of this activity. This mode is chosen basically by selecting a different activity type.

Once assigned a task to a group, the participants can submit new files and/or change files already submitted.

The system saves all submissions made to the respective versions of each file, the author of each submission, the date of the submission, and the comments given by the student who made the changes. This is reflected on the table presented in Figure 8 (visible both to the teacher and to each participant of this group).

For each file submitted, it is possible to access all of its versions through the respective link in the text (the dates), which has indicated the date and time of that submission and, who made that submission. It is possible to access the latest version of each file by clicking on the leftmost link (date). The upload button (with an arrow pointing upwards) is used to perform an upload of a new version of the respective file. There is also the possibility to view all comments made by students on each file by selecting the button with the letter “i”.

Figure 8: Table illustrating file versioning during a collaborative activity Basically, the simultaneous collaborative activity unfolds like this: a task is presented to each group of students, eventually requiring them to confront their ideas, to reach a consensus with the aim of ultimately submitting a set of file which express and describe coherently the group ideas. To reach this end, the group participants are expected to save in the group online repository files that are continuously being manipulated by them until they reach a ready state to be submitted. Hence, there is a virtual place where students submit temporary files to which the rest of the group has access. During the progress of the work, the changes to these files are logged by our module, which is therefore used as a versioning system.

In Figure 9 we show a possible interface display for student "Elizabeth Moore". As the figure suggests, she may submit a new file to the group repository, which should be accompanied by a commentary (in field “description”).

On the right hand side of Figure 9 the interface presents the “Allow submission box”. As the group works collaboratively and simultaneously, it is important to know at which stage the current work is able to be submitted. Clearly, this is a decision to be taken by all group participants. Accordingly, the system provides a democratic mechanism in which every participant must grant permission for the submission of their group work. Only after permission has been granted by all group members, the “Submit work” button is displayed.

The moment all students have grant authorization for final submission, all names listed are followed by "OK", and the "Submit work" button will be available. In Figure 10 we can see that students Michael Harris and Peter Miller have not yet authorized the submission of the work.

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Figure 9: submission of a new file and the granting permission for final job submission

5. Assessment using the online tool Given that there are two distinct modes for the activity ‐‐ sequential and simultaneously ‐‐ we define some basic rules for the evaluation of each.

5.1 Assessment of the sequential activity In this mode, as we saw earlier, the idea is that students perform a task individually, which will be evaluated by all members of the group. After the work is validated by all students, the system launches a new task to be performed by another group participant, following a previously established ordering of the pairs (student‐ task), set by the teacher. The final grade is assigned using the same weight to each task, so that all students have the same conditions (recall that the need to set a duration for a task is related with the difficulty or amount of work for that task. For that reason it is important to have this parameter as fair as possible). On the other hand, the final score for each student should take into account the following parameters:

Quality and appropriateness of the work submitted

Capacity to meet the deadlines

Capacity of evaluation of the tasks carried out by colleagues and respective comments

Final score of the work

These parameters intervene in the final assessment using the Moodle’s well known 20% variable offset for grading. I.e., the teacher may adjust the final score up to 20% from the computed grade.

Depending on the type of work request, the teacher can even decide if the evaluation is done individually (which is what is intended with this type of activity) or is given the same grade to all group participants.

5.2 Assessment of the simultaneously activity In this type of activity students perform tasks that they consider appropriate, rather than having a set of assigned tasks. As the teacher has the opportunity to see the development of the work, the evaluation should be more in line with the performance of each individual member of the group, since they can see what has been the contribution of each student to the resulting product.

Thus, the final grade of each student must take into account the submissions of each of the students as well as the justifications given for these submissions. This activity requires the teacher to assess all students' submission and comments throughout the completion of the work. Of course, the final work must also be taken into account, but in this case it would be to differentiate between groups.

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6. In conclusion In this paper we propose a web‐based system that allows the execution and administration of collaborative activities.

Sometimes the group assignments are merely a set of individual tasks, which later on are joined and, moreover, there is often only the contribution of part of the group to perform the work. Our system can help overcome these difficulties, with its tools that allow the teacher to distribute tasks, analyze drafts and verify the participation of each student, since, even working in a collaborative way, the work that makes each element will always take into account its characteristics as a student and a member of a group. The fact that it has two types of activities is a distinct advantage for the teacher, since it can choose the type of activity according to the task that is to be performed within the course taught.

The fact that the teacher is able to follow the progress of the work is also a benefit, as it can give your opinion and unlock if necessary deadlock situations.

Future work will involve the assessment of the system in a real learning and pedagogical situation, in order to prove the functionality of the tool as well as the expected benefits that would derive from it.

Acknowledgements This work is financed by the ERDF – European Regional Development Fund through the COMPETE Programme (operational programme for competitiveness) and by National Funds through the FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) within project “FCOMP‐01‐0124‐ FEDER‐037281”.

References Boud, D., Cohen, R., & Sampson, a. J. (1999). Peer Learning and Assessment. In Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 413‐426.

Burnett, B. and Roberts, A., (2005). “Online Collaborative Assessment: Unpacking Process and Product,” Assessing Online Learning, P. Comeaux, ed., pp. 55‐71, Jossey‐Bass.

Chyng, Y.J., Steinfeld, C. and Pfaff, B. (2000). “Supporting Awareness among Virtual Teams in a Web‐Based Collaborative System: The TeamSCOPE System,” ACM SIGGROUP Bulletin, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 28‐34.

Gilies, R. M. (2007). Cooperative Learning: Integrating Theory and Practice. Sage.

Hoffman, J., and Rogelberg, S. (2001).”All Together Now? College Students' Preferred Project Group Grading Procedures”.

Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Pratice, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 33‐40.

Kagan, S., (1995). “Group Grades Miss the Mark,” Educational Leadership, vol. 52, no. 8, pp. 68‐71.

Lee, E, Chan, C. and Aalst, J. (2006) “Students Assessing Their Own Collaborative Knowledge Building,” International Journal of Computer‐Supported Collaborative Learning, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 57‐87.

Schummer, T., Strijos, J. and Berkel, T. (2005). ”Measuring Group Interaction during CSCL”. Proc. Conf. Computer Supported Collaborative Learning: Learning (CSCL ' 05), pp. 567‐576.

Strijos, J. and Fischer, F. (2007). ”Methodological Challenges for Collaborative Learning Research”. Learning and Instruction.

Vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 389‐394.

Strijos, J.W. (2011). ”Assessment of (Computer‐Supported) Collaborative Learning”. IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, Vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 59‐70.

Swan, K., Shen, J. and Hiltz, S.R. (2006). “Assessment and Collaboration in Online Learning” J. Asynchronous Learning Networks, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 45‐61.

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Design 4 Pedagogy (D4P): Designing a Pedagogical Tool for Open and Distance Learning Activities Olga Fragou and Achilles Kameas Educational Content Methodology and Technology Laboratory (e‐CoMeT Lab), Hellenic Open University, Patras, Greece fragou@ecomet.eap.gr kameas@eap.gr2

Abstract: Object Based Learning (OBL) has been compatible with HE Standards whereas International Standards in Open and Distance Education are used for developing Open Educational Resources. Learning Design for the Higher Education environment is a complex task, especially in the light of the increasing diversity of student body. Any definition of learning design includes a means of describing learning activities so that they can be shared and reused. Designing and developing pedagogical tools to support Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) in their educational practice is a challenging task for the instructional design field. This paper aims to present design guidelines and theoretical underpinning of the Design 4 Pedagogy Tool (D4P), a pedagogical tool used by Hellenic Open University (HOU) to design e‐learning activities.

Keywords: rapid prototyping, learning activities, pedagogical planner, e learning planning

1. Introduction Important issues in the field of Open and Distance Learning (ODL, QAA, 2003) are a) emphasis on rapid development in methodologies, b) emphasis on disruptive innovative initiatives with the potential for significant impact in Higher Education, c) focus on accountability, quality, performance with a demand for standards and accreditation. Facilitating knowledge exchange and sharing of good practice is an important means to achieve excellence in ODL. Despite the rapid uptake of internet and mobile technologies, there is a need for increased awareness of the digital divide: students’ awareness of ODL processes as well as practitioners’ awareness of new tools and methodologies, supporting the learning process in distance education context. E‐Learning (Beetham, 2004) can be defined as an open and distributed learning environment that utilizes pedagogical tools, enabled by Internet and Web‐based technologies, so as to facilitate learning and knowledge building through meaningful action and interaction. In addition to this definition, the following attributes apply: (1) globalization and learning as a social process are inherent and enabled through telecommunications technology; (2) the concept of a learning group is fundamental in achieving and sustaining learning; (3) the concept of distance is relatively unimportant or blurred, and is not limited to the physical separation of the learner and the instructor; (4) teaching and learning events are distributed over time and place occurring synchronously and/or asynchronously; (5) learners are engaged in multiple forms of interaction: learner‐learner, learner‐group, learner‐content, and learner‐instructor; and (6) internet and Web‐based technologies are utilized to support the teaching and learning process and to facilitate learning and knowledge building through meaningful action and interaction.

Standards in ODL and guidelines of good practice imply that in order to achieve HE institutions’ feasibility opportunities for same‐ time and same‐place interchange between the tutor and the student or among students, credit courses should be built and taught at a distance. Open Distance Learning institutions around the world have realised that effective pedagogies are critical in retaining students. Tutors in ODL need support on getting to grips with technologies that underpin distance learning courses and the way technologies are used for specific purposes. Tutors’ needs in a specific ODL situation are affected by the organisational and social contexts, the type of program and the tutors’ and organisations’ level of ODL experience (QAA,2003).

Research into the attitudes and skills of educators indicates that they have difficulties in embracing the rapid changes they are faced with (Bain, 2004). There is a need for new professional knowledge for teachers: education systems need to draw on the collective intellectual capital of educators. Practitioners in distance learning context lack familiarity with contemporary trends and methodologies in pedagogy so supporting tutors in their task of delivering e learning courses is of critical importance so as to build distance education courses (Conole, Oliver et al, 2007).

Systematic investigation of e learning technological tools and resources to support students’ experience is at the core of the on ‐going research in Higher Education institutions. There is an increased interest with the

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Olga Fragou and Achilles Kameas pedagogy of e learning and in particular the development of pedagogical models that can be used as tools for teaching practice, covering also instructional aspects such as understanding effective design principles. The basic problem has been in this case to design a tool which identifies and captures basic elements of the design process of an activity in ODL such as educational context, description of educational content, and support tools used to implement a learning activity in a linear format so practitioners would be able to use it in structuring activities of ODL. However, a generic structure in the context of a learning design framework has been adapted to enhance tutors’ engagement with activities’ design process and achieve easier manipulation of learning components so as to support activities’ adaptability by teachers. In this context, there has been an effort to abstract an activity schema that can be reused in a range of subject disciplines.

Learning Design as a new field of e learning technology is based on “best practice process” ( Koper, 2006).

Learning Designs can be stored, reused and customised (Beetham, 2004). Basic assumptions of the Learning Design field are a) use of single or multi learner environments and flexible groupings, b) primary focus on sequencing learning activities, c) interactivity provided by discussion rooms, chat groups etc, d) inclusion of content delivery as one type of learning activity, e) ability to describe long term learning (Conole, Oliver, et al, 2007) . The use of pedagogical tools from practitioners in learning institutions is quite important in expanding their teaching repertoire: however designing pedagogical tools that actually support practitioners effectively in their teaching practice is a very demanding design task.

Web based environments are being heralded as a catalyst for innovation in teaching and learning (Koper, 2006, Beetham, 2004). This highlights the need to produce web based tools that are pedagogically adept and functionally relevant to the context and purpose of use: applying pedagogical concepts and following standards at design time simplifies putting materials on line. In practice this entails exploiting the connectivity of pedagogical concerns whilst taking into consideration pedagogical capabilities of ICT tools used. These design challenges highlight the need for well harnessed methods and techniques for incorporating pedagogy into system design. Producing effective educational tools requires defining the nature of activities and relationships that exist in the proposed context of deployment. In this context structural aspects, design characteristics, development methodology of a pedagogical tool, the Design for Pedagogy Tool (D4P), are presented in this paper. The following sections provide the educational context used, the design rationale of the D4P tool, the development methodology, aspects of implementation and evaluation of the D4P. The paper’s structure is as follows: section 2 presents the state of the art as well as the methodology selected on Rapid Prototyping and Boundary Objects. Section 3 presents the design of D4P tool, the educational context, the learning activities designed in ODL and the types of pedagogy in ODL. Section 4 presents thoroughly the design rationale and characteristics D4P, issues in activity design and Object Oriented Methodology. Section 5 presents the conclusion of the paper.

2. Background 2.1 Designing activity templates: state of the art Learning is influenced by a set of learning factors such as curriculum, teaching methods, environment and assessment (Conole and Fill, 2005). In order to support the creation of e learning activities there has been extended development of pedagogical tools which explore and present the learning activities within a particular context, and they are designed to meet a set of specified learning outcomes and assessment criteria, through a series of tasks using a set of tools and resources. The ICT tools designed and implemented for learning activities have been based on Learning Design principles, and the basic challenge is to understand the factors and their relationships in the learning environment (Koper, 2006). Though e learning activities have been basically based on instructivist approaches, which focus on single learners accessing educational content, recent development in technology allows us to go beyond resource reuse and implement social constructivist learning methods such as collaborative learning through learning communities. Within Higher Education the JISC exchange for learning programme X4L(http://www.x4l.org) has supported a number of projects developing new resources and activities that have been developed for reuse across the post‐16 sector. The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA) (http://www.becta.org.uk) and Learning and Teaching Scotland (http://www.lts.org.uk) have developed resources for the schools and the learning and skills sectors. Activity planning tools (Conole, Dyke et al 2004) support the design and the implementation of activities based on pedagogical theories. Learning activities available like reusable activity templates, can be

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adapted and contextualized by populating them with content objects to allow tutors to create learning activities based on a variety of educational models.

2.2 Rapid prototyping and boundary objects Communities of Practice ( CoPs) are “groups of people informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise” (Wenger, 2004). According to CoPs pedagogy in learning should not be considered in terms of procedures and techniques for supporting the construction of knowledge but in terms of their effects on the formation of identities. Understanding the coordination among individuals and artifacts (how individuals align and interact within a distributed process) in a system or a community is a very important process in situated cognition (Wenger, 2004). Rather than acquiring concepts as abstract, self contained entities, the idea is to acquire useful knowledge through understanding of how knowledge is used by a group of practitioners or members of a community. While traditional models such as ADDIE (Koper, 2006) constrain the design process into completed steps in the hopes of successful implementation, Rapid Prototyping (Fischer, 2011) “follows the pragmatic design principle of minimum commitment that at each stage in synthesizing a design no commitment is made beyond what is absolutely necessary to solve the problem at hand. In Rapid Prototyping, design and development tasks are accomplished simultaneously in a non‐linear fashion, with analysis and evaluation occurring throughout as the prototypes are built and used (Fischer, 2011). Iterative design cycles, customer feedback, and continuous review and revision all contribute to the success of Rapid Prototyping as a model for efficient, effective Instructional Design. Figure 1 presents the Rapid Prototyping process:

Figure 1: Rapid prototyping graphic. (2012). [Graph illustration]. Retrieved May 20, 2012 from http://uwf.edu/ddawson/d3net/research/rapid_prototype.htm Individuals have different ideas regarding for example learning effectiveness and accordingly they construct their own representations: Boundary Objects (BOs) (Fischer, 2011) have been proposed as an important means of translating such multiple, overlapping but divergent representations in ways that they accommodate both diversity and synergy because they inhabit several intersecting social worlds and satisfy the information requirements of each of them.

3. Designing an e learning tool for pedagogical planning 3.1 The educational context Hellenic Open University (HOU) (http://www.eap.gr ) is the major Hellenic educational institution in Open and Distance Learning. Educational Content Methodology and Technology Lab (http://www.eeyem.eap.gr ) is the supportive organization in providing HOU with educational content and methodologies introducing and applying the use of ICT tools such as Learning Management Systems and Teleconferencing tools. The teacher’s role in ODL involves facilitation and moderation (QAA, 2003): the basic pedagogical concerns are the formulation of basic objectives of groups, suggestion of tasks and problems, suggestion of readings and research, questioning students in a creative and stimulating manner, encouraging students to participate, stimulation of reflection and arguing in, and discussion moderation.

3.2 Learning activities in ODL A learning activity can be described as “an interaction between a learner or learners and an environment (optionally including content resources, tools and instruments, computer systems and services, “real world” events and objects that is carried out in response to a task with an intended learning outcome” (Beetham,

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Olga Fragou and Achilles Kameas 2004). Learning activities occur within a particular context (environment, pedagogical approaches, institutional procedures and constraints) and are designed to meet specified learning outcomes and assessment criteria through a series of tasks using a set of tools and resources. Learning Objects (QAA, 2003) can be used in digital repositories where they can be easily accessed, recombined and reused; they can also be adapted to fit different educational models, subject disciplines and levels of study (Littlejohn, 2005). Reuse is one major issue in activity design in terms of educational content’s adaptability for pedagogical planning. Single learners, access content by sourcing, creating, adapting, integrating, and storing resources in a variety of formats. Types of learning activities quite popular have been reading texts, carrying out synchronous discussion, doing quizzes, or completing short problem solving exercises and concept mapping: role plays and simulations have not been widely used yet.

3.3 Pedagogy and types of environments in ODL Different goals of education require different types of learning environments such as knowledge centered, learner centered and community centered environments (Conole, Dyke et al, 2004). In a scope like that a combination of the above types could be characterized as important to achieve learning effectiveness. The situated cognition and constructivist view (Wenger, 2004) of learning is the specification of pedagogical models and strategies that allocate control of the sequence of instruction and task: the learner creates, elaborates, or otherwise constructs representations of individual meaning. E‐Learning (Beetham, 2004) stipulates that there are three key components working collectively to foster meaningful learning and interaction: (1) pedagogical models or constructs, (2) instructional and learning strategies, and (3) pedagogical tools or online learning technologies (i.e., Internet and Web‐based technologies). Instructional strategies (plans and techniques to engage learner) are derived from pedagogical models which in turn are derived from learning theory. Instructional strategies that embody the characteristics of pedagogical models grounded in the situated cognition and constructivist views include: a) promoting or supporting authentic learning activities, b) facilitating problem solving, exploration and hypothesis generation, c) promoting collaboration and social negotiation, d) supporting or facilitating role play activities, e) promoting articulation and reflection, f) supporting multiple perspectives, g) supporting modeling and explaining, h) providing scaffolding.

4. Implementation: Pedagogical design and object oriented methodology 4.1 Description of D4P The basic aim has been to design an activity planning tool (Conole, 2007), supporting initially the design and in future scaffolding the development of learning activities, grounded in educational theory. Reuse of activity structure in different cognitive domains has been based on designing activity templates, that they could be adapted and contextualised by populating them with content objects to allow tutors to create activities based on various educational models. The activity structure was based on learning objects, needs of learners and e‐ learning tools available on Assessment, Feedback, Educational Content and Cooperation in a structure of Learning Management System (eg LAMS, http://www.lams.org , Moodle, https://.moodle.org). Τhere has been an effort to a) provide practical assistance to lecturers for designing blended learning activities, b) provide a generic structure, though expandable and literature based, c) provide support for designing in “weekly” study level expandable however in “course” level, d) enable iterative design by lecturers, e) enable lecturers to collaborate on design for learning, f) to create user specification requirements for a learning design tool. The pedagogical tool D4P provides a) a framework for systematic gathering of contextual information about the conditions and specific priorities of the learning process, b) a descriptive and analytic language for mapping out components and relationships that exist within the anticipated learning activities. The design rationale of the pedagogical tool has been based on :a) simplicity and plasticity in design format, b) identifying (5) levels of design, from simple to complex, c) use of Learning Objects and Learning Outcomes in combination with LMS tools used. The basic axes of the D4P tool are: a) description of educational context, b) brief description of activity, c) description of activity in the context of Learning Outcomes and Learning Objects, d) description of activity in the context of LMS tools used to structure the activity. In the broad approach of constructivism, methods like discussion and collaboration among learners, focusing on case studies or project work, open ended assignments linked to changing learning objectives or assignments constructed to reflect “real world” conditions are important for enhancing learner performance. These axes are presented in Table 1:

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Table 1: Basic axes of D4P Basic axes of D4P

Axis I Axis II LEVEL 1 Educational Context Short Activity Description LEVEL 2 Educational Content Activity Completion Criteria LEVEL 3 Analytic Activity Description I Analytic Activity Description II LEVEL 4 Learning Outcomes Learning Objects LEVEL 5 LMS Tools used Learning Outcomes and Learning Objects

The design rationale of building D4P has covered the following issues:

Start with what is recognisable to Tutors

Aim at optimal use of technology

Collect educational resources

Build on existing practice and existing examplars

Focus on teaching and learning

Take lecturers to the point of analysing ideas

Scaffold lecturers in terminology of Learning Design

Record decisions and notes

By designing the D4P we aimed at: a) providing an outline of the design framework of learning activities, b) work through learning activities that we collected on (4) modules of HOU, c) link the designed framework to subject specific exemplars of learning activity designs, d) test identification of case examples against framework, d) work with questions on learning objectives, requirements and constraints of the generic structure, e) finalize learning activity design out of an activity selection. The design rationale of the activity has been based on a learning design framework, describing the context where learning takes place and the relationship between the concepts involved. Basic aim has been to formalise learning activities and provide for teachers a framework to reflect in a deeper and creative way about how they design and structure activities for different groups of learners. The benefits of design templates are (Conole, Oliver et al, 2007):

resharing of effective learning activities,

communicating examples of effective practice in teachers,

used as a framework for planning for accessibility since resources can be placed by other materials,

are an effective means of communicating design requirements to developments,

useful resources for students as they can help them reflect on learning tasks.

4.2 Issues in learning activities’ design Actual use of templates supports the emergence of taxonomies in pedagogical planning of learning activities (Conole and Fill, 2005). The emergence and use of international standards has led to the development of e learning frameworks and many organizations have been involved in the development of standards with the most important the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee (http://ieeeltsc.org). Issues in the design of learning activities are connected with the extent to which activities and resources are reusable in multiple subject domains (Conole,Dyke et al, 2004). In addition tutors’ understanding of activity templates and their connection to educational resources needs in each case of application to be supported by scaffolding process: activities’ template selection is interrelated with recognition of their learners’ needs, curriculum requirements and tools available to them. Another demanding issue in activity design is the achievement of constructive alignment between theory and practice (Conole and Fill, 2005). There is no evidence of generic templates being developed and shared without specific subject content: it is difficult to abstract an activity that can be reused across a range of subject disciplines (Beetham, 2004). Constraints regarding the development of learning activities are a) the tension between invidualized learning approach and the increasing development and use of collaborative learning activities with groups of students, b) the tutors’ lack of skills to develop learning activities based on a range of educational models, c) teachers’ difficulty to browse through activities from other subject disciplines, d) teachers’ lack of e ‐literacy skills to allow for effective reuse of learning resources and activities (Littlejohn and McGill, 2004).

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Olga Fragou and Achilles Kameas Ε learning moves towards the use of generative resources (resources developed through learning tasks (Mayes and de Freitas, 2004). There is a need for tools that allow the teacher to customize generic components into a tailored learning experience. There are a few tools available to allow teachers to support learning activity sequencing and sharing (Bain, 2004). The use case approach abstracts the generic features of learning activities, based on a standardized vocabulary as a way to develop activity templates. Use case is “a way of capturing the expected behavior or the system when a person uses a system to achieve a specific goal” (Coper, 2006). There has been an effort to extract a reference model in the sense of producing an abstract description whose entities are described in the basis of the main characteristics and the relationship between the entities is loosely defined. Drawing on Mayes and de Freitas (2004) and Beetham (2004) four levels of abstraction have been used to design learning activities: a) perspective, which describes the fundamental assumptions that constitute learning (cognitive, learning through understanding, situative in the context of social practice), b) theoretical position, describes the position adopted with respect to theories of learning, c) theoretical approach, a practice model such as the constructivist approach, d) mediating forms of representation more abstract (models, use cases and patterns) and not those which are more contextually located ( guidelines, narratives, case studies). A commonly understood and standardized vocabulary has been important to achieve learning activities reusability and the role of templates in that direction is critical.

4.3 Object oriented methodology in developing D4P The D4P tool provides a description and generic structure of components of learning. The important components in Learning Design are based around the Unit of Learning (Bain, 2004). These components include learning objectives, roles, activities, activity structures, environment (quiz, chat tools), resources, method. IMS Learning Design includes a series of use cases which focus on the work flow element of learning design which include a description of the activity, the pedagogy, the context, the learning objectives, the roles, the content, the services, the collaborative activities, the learning activity workflow, scenarios and other specific requirements (Beetham, 2004). Modeling Learning Design requires further representations including the sequencing of activities into “units of learning” or “learning designs”. Papers on e‐learning strategy highlight the need for effective design tools to help practitioners design and deliver their own learning activities (Koper,2006). The use of template is expected to result in an underpinning taxonomy attempting to consider aspects and factors involved in developing a learning activity from the pedagogical contexts to Learning Outcomes and types of LMS tools used.

The D4P activity template has been sequenced in a linear fashion and consisted of the following elements: the context within the activity occurs such as subject, level of difficulty, learning outcomes, environment on which the activity takes place, the learning and teaching approaches including learning theories and models, the tasks and their types, teaching techniques, associated tools and resources, the interaction and roles, the assessments involved in the learning activity. Learning activities are achieved through completion of a series of tasks. An aspect of learning activities is that they often result in artifacts. These artifacts have been termed generated (Beetham, 2004) or “second order learning objects” (Allert, Richter et al, 2004) and they are reusable. There has been an initially, generic form of the activity design template so as to avoid restricting learning processes such including production and transformation of artifacts and concepts. The relationship between theories, models and the development of learning activities is a very complex one. Figure 2 presents the basic schema of the 3‐tier client server architecture of the application D4P:

An a priori selection of a learning model has been avoided: main instructional goal however has been to capture generic aspects of learning process so as to consequently make a selection of the learning model in the second stage of design. The D4P tool aims at describing a) the educational context of the activity such as the School of HOU and subject domain, type of activity and important information of the activity such as the Week of Study, Duration and Level of Difficulty of the Activity, b) the briefly presented activity description, c) the criteria for completing the activity according to the HOU Tutors, d) the Learning Outcomes and Learning Objects of the activity presented, e) the connection between the LMS tools used and both Learning Outcomes and Learning Objectives of the activity designed. The design rationale of the D4P tool is supported by the following principles: a) simplicity in structure and format, b) incorporating structural aspects of the learning process as vital aspects of the D4P pedagogical tool, c) the design of a design prototype, easily expansible to more complex forms as the research is in progress, d) providing climax in design from the simpler to more complex level, e) the design of a design prototype with discernible structural components easy to understand

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and manage by the HOU Tutors, f) the compatibility with the structure of LMS platforms, g) structuring the pedagogical tool according to EQF Standards (2008) combining Learning Outcomes and Learning Objects.

Figure 2: The 3‐tier client‐server architecture of the application D4P Object Oriented (OO) Modeling is a fairly new methodology used to develop software systems and applications (Koper, 2006). Modeling is an activity of capturing a systems’ components and behavior in an abstract form, using a given set of symbols that when put together become a specific type of the diagram. A methodology comprises, besides a specific modeling technique a process, a set of other methods and techniques as well as specific tools to implement these. Since modeling needs to capture both structural and behavioral aspects of the system there are various types of OO diagrams to represent these aspects. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a language that uses the concept of Actor or participant in any activity domain. Actors interact with system components and this result in a Use Case. A Use Case is rather a view of a system or part of a system as being used by one on its users. In Figure 3 the Iconix process is presented:

Figure 3: The Iconix process graphic :[Graph illustration] Retrieved January 23 2013 from http://www.iconixsw.com/articles/roadmap.pdf Τhe functional software requirements/specifications outline (2) important roles : the Administrator and the Author Role. The administrator is responsible for retrieving the activities inserted by any authors, inserting new descriptions or modified descriptions of activities, verify the final version of activities, provide log in details and access for deleting users, modify system’s specifications. The Authors have access exclusively to their designed activities, introducing new descriptions of learning activities, modifying their own activity designs, deleting and modifying their own activity schemata. The following schema presents a diagram of use case for the Administrator Role:

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Figure 4: A diagram of use case for the administrator role The basic use cases in the Role Author are: a) presentation of the list of each author’s activities, b) description of learning activity, c) creation of a new learning activity, d) modification of an existant learning activity, e) activity description output in an extracting file, f) personal data presentation, g) modification of personal data.The object oriented methodology ICONIX has been used by the use of NetBeans IDE 7.2, aided by My SQL, jQuery for the graphs interface, and supported by PHP.The D4P is supported by a) the design, implementation, management of database, b) the design and implementation of Graphic User Interface, c) the incorporation in a LMS platform. The design of database is used for storing the designed activities by the use of (2) levels: Act where the designed activity description is stored , User, where the user’s data are stored .In figure 5 the Act table is described in the My SQL Workbench.

Figure 5: Description of ACT table in the environment My SQL Workbench In figures 6 and 7 the introductory screen of D4P is presented and the first level of design respectively. Figure 6 presents the User Log In screen and Figure 7 presents the screen of the D4P Design Level 1:

5. Evaluation A paper prototype has been used as a mediation tool for design between the E‐Co‐MeT Lab instructional design team and the HOU Tutors. The generic D4P structure has been verified during the FGs sessions designed and conducted in (4) Modules of HOU. The research activity conducted focused on a) organization of FGs sessions so as to discover current practice and needs in HOU, b) the trial of existing materials and tools with lecturers, c) test template usability , d) use lecturers’ design requirements to populate activity types, e) investigate lecturers’ approaches to iteration of design, f) investigate use of tools ,g) revise and retest design of support template, h) report on user requirements for learning design tools.

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Figure 6: D4P User Log In screen

Figure 7: D4P, Design Level 1 interface The testing framework consisted of the following phases (Futcher, L.,and von Solms, R., (2008): a) Phase 1: Before development begins, b) Phase 2: During definition and design, c) During development. The Phase 1 covered tests to ensure standards and policy, developing also the metrics and measurement criteria. The Phase 2 During definition and design covered exploration of requirement gaps, looking at security mechanisms such as User Management, Authentication, Authorisation, Data confidentiality, Integrity, Accountability, and identifying security flaws in the design phase, the creation and review of UML models and threat models. The Phase 3 During development covered Code walkthroughs and Code Review. Further testing of the design tool is currently under process for the Phase 4 During development and Phase 5 Maintenance and operations. The D4P tool structure is also being enriched and updated in an effort to expand its structure in a format that captures detailed aspects of learning, pedagogical theories and use of standards such as EQF (2008).

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6. Conclusion The design and use of pedagogical tools in Higher Education is an important aspect of designing learning effectiveness in Open and Distance Learning courses. Support of Tutors in the design of learning activities is a demanding design task, requiring for careful analysis of the learning process and aspects of the learning context and media used. Higher educators seek for guidance on how to use effectively technological tools and integrate them effectively into their educational practice. There is a need to decompose complex tasks in learning hierarchies, to provide analysis of concepts and procedures of subject matter curricula in terms of information structures and gave rise to new approaches to pedagogy. The basic characteristics, design methodology and rationale of the D4P tool have been presented so as to produce a clear structure of the generic interface in the prototype’s firsth version. Expansion and further testing of the D4P is scheduled and conducted so as to assure further output on the use of the tool in HOU design activity process. Future work involves further working with templates in default teaching and learning methods, and learning activity types, in various student numbers and group sizes as well as generating a plan for Course including issues of time management (on line –of line process) and learning activity structure. Future goal is to develop an on line toolkit that actually supports and guides practitioners in designing their own pedagogically informed learning activities.

Acknowledgements The research described in this paper has been co‐financed by the European Union (European Social Fund ‐ ESF) and Greek National Funds through the Operational Program "Education and Lifelong Learning" of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) (Funding Program: "HOU").

References Allert, H., Richter, C. & Nejdl, W. (2004). Lifelong Learning and Second‐Order Learning Objects. British Journal of Educational Technology, 35(6), 701‐715.

Bain K., (2004) , What the Best College Teachers Do ,Cambridge: Harvard University Press Beetham, H., (2004) Review: Developing e‐Learning Models for the JISC Practitioner Communities, [Online], www. jisc.ac,uk Conole, G., Dyke, M, Oliver, M, Seale, J, (2004) “Mapping pedagogy and tools for effective learning design”, Computers and education, Vol 43, p. 17‐33.

Conole G., Fill, K., (2005,) A learning design toolkit to create pedagogically effective learning activities, Aug 2005, JIME, Special Issue: Advances in Learning Design [Online] http://jime.open.ac.uk/jime/article/viewArticle/2005‐8/275 Conole,G.,Oliver,M.,Falconer,I.,Littlejohn,A.and Harvey,J.(2007),‘ Designing for learning’,in G.Conole and M Oliver (Ed) , Contemporary perspectives in e learning research : themes, methods and impact on practice , part of the Open and Distance Learning Series, F. Lockwood (Ed), Routledge Falmer Fischer, G. (2011): "Social Creativity: Exploiting the Power of Cultures of Participation", Proceedings of SKG2011: 7th International Conference on Semantics, Knowledge and Grids, Beijing, China, October, pp 1‐8. http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/2011/SKG‐China.pdf EQF (2008). European Qualification Framework for Life Long Learning, http://ec.europa.eu/education/pub/pdf/general/eqf/broch_en.pdf Futcher, L.,and von Solms, R., (2008), "Guidelines for secure software development," Proceedings of the 2008 annual research conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists on IT research in developing countries: riding the wave of technology , pp. 56‐65. Available at http://doi.acm.org.navigator‐esu.passhe.edu/10.1145/1456659.1456667 Koper, R. (2006). Current Research in Learning Design. Educational Technology & Society, 9 (1), 13‐22.Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, Guidelines on the Quality Assurance of Distance Learning (2003), http://www.qaa.ac.uk/public/dlg/dlg_textonly.htm Littlejohn, A. (2005). Community dimensions of learning object repositories. In H. Gross (Ed),Balance, fidelity, mobility: Maintaining the momentum? Proceedings ASCILITE 2005 (p3). http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/brisbane05/blogs/proceedings/KA3_Littlejohn.pdf Littlejohn, & McGill (2004). Detailed report on effective resources for e‐learning. Effectiveness of resources, tools and support services used by practitioners in designing and delivering E‐Learning activities – JISC E‐pedagogy Programme Project. Available at http://cetis.ac.uk:8080/pedagogy Mayes, T., de Freitas, S,(2004) Review of e‐learning theories, frameworks and models. JISC e‐learning models desk study.

[Online] www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/Stage%202%20Learning%20Models%20(Version%201).pdf Wenger, E. (2004). Knowledge management as a donut: Shaping your knowledge strategy through communities of practice. Ivey Business Journal Online. Retrieved on June 6, 2009, from http://www.iveybusinessjournal.com/view_article.asp?intArticle_ID=465

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The Affordances of 4G Mobile Networks Within the UK Higher Education Sector Elaine Garcia1, Martial Bugliolo, and Ibrahim Elbeltagi2 Plymouth College of Art, Plymouth, UK 2 University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK

1

egarcia@pca.ac.uk mbugliolo@pca.ac.uk i.elbeltagi@plymouth.ac.uk

Abstract: Although 4G mobile networks have been available within twelve countries such as the USA, Japan and Germany since 2008 (Tung, 2008) the United Kingdom (UK) has been somewhat slower to adopt these technologies. It is not surprising therefore that the launch of 4G services within the UK in August 2012 has been subject to much publicity particularly as it is stated that the UK will have the world’s fastest 4G network with coverage across 98 per cent of the country by the end of 2014 (Garside, 2013) This paper seeks to determine the affordances to the Higher Education (HE) sector of the rollout of 4G services across the UK. Affordances are considered within the existing literature to include factors such as an ability to study in an any time, any place manner, improved access to education, particularly for those in remote and rural areas and a transformation of teaching and learning. The degree to which these benefits will impact upon the manner in which mobile technologies are used within the UK HE sector will be discussed through the use of a case study of teaching staff who have taken part in a trial of 4G devices provided by EE as part of a Janet funded project. From this study the affordances of the use of 4G mobile technologies are seen to relate to key areas such as the general effectiveness of 4G services, any time, any place access, the transformation of teaching and learning and personal and organisational effectiveness. Overall this paper concludes that teaching staff can envisage significant affordances to the HE sector as a result of the adoption of 4G technologies within the UK although full benefits will not be realised until the network is fully evolved and accessible to all.

Keywords: 4G, mobile learning, higher education, teaching and learning, case study

1. Introduction In recent years there has been an interesting technological shift occurring across much of the developed world in relation to the use of mobile devices. The use and ownership of not only smartphones but also internet‐ connected mobile devices such as tablets and laptops has grown significantly. The growth in the use of such devices has resulted in the prediction that the number of internet‐enabled devices will be greater than the population of the world by the end of 2013. (Cisco, 2013)

Within this context it is unsurprising that mobile vendors such as Apple and Nokia and network providers such as EE are now looking at the opportunities 4G will provide, particularly where competitive advantage can be gained for those who are first to market. This is leading to consideration of not only existing products such as smartphones but also new products such as tablets and laptops that are seen to now be generating significant Internet traffic. (Cisco, 2013)

What is to date less clear is the extent to which the introduction of 4G services and networks will affect the manner in which we work, socialise and study. This paper seeks to determine the extent to which 4G services may provide affordances to one of these key areas, the HE education sector, in relation to both teaching and learning and organisational effectiveness.

This paper shall report the findings from a case study of teaching staff who have participated within a Janet funded 4G trial during the Spring / Summer 2013 and who have been interviewed to seek their views of the affordances of 4G to the HE education sector. Before the results of the case study are discussed in more detail however a review of the existing literature shall be considered firstly in relation to 4G within the UK and secondly in relation to the use of 4G within the education sector.

2. 4G within the UK It can be argued that the UK has fallen behind other countries in the development of 4G capabilities. Countries including Sweden, Denmark, Canada, Australia, Germany, USA and Japan (Knight, 2013) have all rolled out 4G at some point since 2008 (Tung, 2013). For the UK, whose inhabitants are amongst the biggest users of

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Elaine Garcia, Martial Bugliolo, and Ibrahim Elbeltagi smartphones anywhere in the world (Davis, 2013), the introduction of 4G at the end of 2012 had seemed to have been a long wait. (Gradwell, 2012)

It is anticipated that now 4G has been launched that the rollout of services will be relatively rapid. EE plans to double the speed of its network within 10 cities by the summer of 2013. (Garside, 2013). Overall average speeds on EE’s network are predicted to then be as fast as Sweden, the current fastest service in the world (Knight, 2013). If this is achieved the 4G network will be twice as fast as the average UK domestic broadband speed. (Garside, 2012)

It is this increase in speed that is considered to be one of the key advantages of 4G as this will be akin to an individual taking their home broadband connection with them wherever they are. (Tabbitt, 2013) This is even more likely to be achieved due to the manner in which spectrums were auctioned. As part of the condition of buying the 800MHz band 4G has to reach 98 per cent of the UK by 2017. (Woods, 2013)

With 4G currently only provided by EE and not yet generally available outside major metropolitan areas (EE, 2013) the likelihood that the frustrations that individuals currently have relating to failed 3G signals in rural areas or whilst on the train are likely to remain for the time being. (Gradwell, 2012) Some reports have also indicated that in practical tests there was no task that a 4G could perform better than 3G. (Garside, 2012) This may explain why some commentators believe that 4G take up has not gone as well as hoped. (Woods, 2013) For those that have been able to connect, 4G is considered to have made a huge difference to mobile usage.

(Warman, 2013)

When compared to 3G the benefits of 4G are considered to be higher bandwidth, lower latency and greatly improved spectrum efficiency. (Place & Keeping, 2012) In this way 4G has the potential to radically alter the way in which we use mobile devices (Gradwell, 2012) allowing access to a greater number of applications in more locations and across more devices (Geer, 2012). It is important to note that whilst 3G is able to provide access to the Internet the connection speed and reliability of the connection may be poor (Place & Keeping, 2012). Conversely however some users have reported that 4G is more reliable and better able to handle some tasks than some home broadband connections. (Tabbitt, 2013) Whilst these advantages are clearly beneficial when compared to 3G it is important to note that 4G is also reported to provide benefits in relation to Wi‐Fi and broadband connections.

When compared to broadband, 4G is considered to be advantageous in the manner that it provides the ability for applications that need broadband speeds to be truly mobile, the improved convenience of ownership of the connection and the security that 4G offers. (Place & Keeping, 2012) The convenience of being able to use broadband speed Internet connections on the move has also not been achievable before (Warman, 2013).

When considering the implications of 4G we therefore need to consider not just improvements in relation to 3G but also if it may represent a replacement for Wi‐Fi. In this way the introduction of 4G should not be thought so much as something that is changing mobiles but is changing the Internet. (Warman, 2013)

It is important to note that 4G does not only refer to smartphones but also to other devices such as tablets, laptops and MiFi devices which allow connection to 4G via Wi‐Fi (Phelan, 2013) The use of MiFi devices also demonstrates the way in which it is no longer “the norm” that individuals only have one mobile device but instead may have multiple devices. (Geer, 2012)

Whilst there can be seen to be benefits to the introduction of 4G services to the UK it is necessary to consider whether the introduction of such services will have an impact on the education sector. This will now therefore be considered in more detail.

3. The use of 4G within the education sector The benefits of 4G discussed above would appear to make the new services offered attractive to HE institutions particularly when compared to 3G services. (Geer, 2012) The introduction of 4G is also considered to have come at a time when education is facing calls to change from a model which is considered to be unfit for 21st century learners (Cochrane, 2013). One of the ways in which learning is transformed with profound and far‐reaching consequences (Corbeil & Valdes‐Corbeil, 2007) is through mobile learning and it is within this

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Elaine Garcia, Martial Bugliolo, and Ibrahim Elbeltagi context that 4G will have the biggest impact. There are three key motivations for the use of mobile learning; improved access to education, the ability for mobile learning to change teaching and learning and finally for mobile devices to enable the development of wider institutional and business objectives. (Kululska‐Hulme, 2007)

It is the manner in which 4G seeks to provide almost universal coverage of the UK and allow us to do more no matter the location (Geer, 2012) that will be one of the major advantages for education. Teachers and learners will no longer be tied to their computers and broadband connections (Corbeil & Valdes‐Corbeil, 2007; Traxler, 2007). The removal of location dependence will be important in two ways: Firstly the provision of 4G will allow users to access learning resources and communication channels wherever they are. This may include locations when they wish to work independently including whilst travelling (Traxler, 2007) at home (Yang & Yang, 2011) or in any other location. (Corbeil & Valdes‐Corbeil, 2007). This particularly could be useful where time may otherwise be considered “wasted” such as commuting or absence due to sickness (Yan et al, 2012).

Secondly location is important as it will allow learning requiring or assisted by immediate access to Internet technologies to occur in context‐specific locations (Traxler, 2007) such as fieldwork, (Yang & Yang, 2011) situated learning (Traxler, 2007) and work placement (Geer, 2012).

Whilst there are a numerous benefits as a result of the ability to use internet technologies within differing locations and situations in reality the importance of this development is in the manner that there will no longer be the need to separate learning, particularly in vocational and occupational settings, between theory and practice as they can happen in the same place. (Attwell, 2007)

Whilst the ability to access learning in a range of new locations may provide new opportunities to existing learners it is also important to consider that the increased range of coverage that 4G purports to provide may also provide new opportunities for Institutions to offer distance learning to learners who may not have not had a sufficient level of broadband (Serrano‐Santoyo & Organista‐Sandoval, 2010). This may enable Institutions to reach a greater range of remote and rural areas than before. (Geer, 2012; Traxler, 2007)

In addition to location time will no longer be a factor in using such a device. (Corbeil & Valdes‐Corbeil, 2007) The affect of any time access is expected to not only allow students to access course materials and content, (Yang & Yang, 2011) institutional data and other applications (Sprint, 2010) at any time of day but will allow students and staff to communicate with each other more fully outside of the traditional learning environment (Yang & Yang, 2011) It is the manner in which 4G will provide greater access to reliable, efficient and new communication and interactions systems which is considered to be one of the benefits of 4G (Serrano‐Santoyo & Organista‐Sandoval, 2010) and may lead to new forms of collaboration. (Yang & Yang, 2011)

It is important however that, due to the manner in which 4G technologies are expected to change society itself (Traxler, 2007) it may be difficult to know how education may develop in the future or which tools and services may be available to us. Largely it is expected that the success and usage of 4G services will depend upon the individuals who are using the mobile devices and the degree to which staff and students consider the systems offered are useful and enhance learning. (Corbeil & Valdes‐Corbeil, 2007) It is therefore important that institutions encourage staff to consider the ways in which such technologies can be used in education. (Corbeil & Valdes‐Corbeil, 2007)

4. Summary of the literature review From the literature it is clear that there are a number of key ways in which 4G is expected to be beneficial to the educational sector. Firstly issues of the effectiveness of 4G must be considered such as the speed of connection and the coverage of the network. Both of those factors will affect the benefits that could be gained from the introduction of such services that include the mobility of broadband equivalent connections and the ability to gain access in a range of locations.

If these areas have been successfully achieved it may then be possible for teachers and students to start to imagine some of the possibilities this technology may be able to afford education such as any time / any place, access to education, transforming teaching and learning and other benefits.

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Elaine Garcia, Martial Bugliolo, and Ibrahim Elbeltagi Each of these potential affordances shall therefore be considered in relation to a trial project currently underway within the UK HE sector.

5. Methodology This research will utilise an exploratory case study approach. A case study approach is a qualitative research approach that allows the researcher to explore a phenomenon or topic within its context (Saunders, Lewis & Thornhill, 2012). It is considered to be a useful method when an in‐depth and holistic approach is required.

(Tellis, 1997) An exploratory case study is a method that is used effectively when there is no clear single outcome to the research being undertaken. (Yin, 2003)

A case study allows the researcher to collect a range of detailed information using a variety of methods over a period of time. (Creswell, 2009) The manner in which a case study approach allows the collection of data using multiple methods, which may be qualitative or quantitative, also allows a triangulation of data that ensures a higher level of validity to the research. (Saunders, Lewis & Thornhill, 2012).

Whilst the validity is therefore considered to be high, generalisation is often an area that receives criticism within this approach. This is however refuted by proponents of this approach who consider that generalizability can be achieved when this approach is designed and used appropriately. (Tellis, 1997)

Further criticisms of a case study approach include that access to a suitable organisation can be difficult to gain, the process of research can be time consuming, the parameters of the research can be hard to define and that influences such as previous experience will play a part in the results but will not necessarily be understood by the researcher. (Collis & Hussey, 2003)

5.1 The case study This case study utilised the opportunity provided by a six month 4G trial project funded by JANET. This project invited interested UK educational institutions to take part in a trial, which aimed to explore the potential use of 4G services within the UK educational sector. (JANET, 2013)

Participating institutions were given a number of MiFi devices that allow the connection of up to 10 devices to the 4G network via Wi‐Fi. The aim of the trial from JANET’s perspective was to gain feedback relating to the connectivity and performance of the 4G services on offer and additionally to gain an understanding of the potential benefits and limitations of the services within the educational sector. (JANET, 2013)

5.2 Data collection Data collection for this case study was undertaken through semi‐structured interviews with pilot participants who were invited to take part from a range of institutions. These were conducted via face‐to‐face interviews and via computer mediated asynchronous methods. Interviews were conducted with five participants within the pilot and the results of these interviews are reported below.

In addition to the interviews, data was collected via a quantitative survey of the speed of connections gained at differing locations across the UK. Participants captured these as they utilised 3G, Wi‐Fi and Mifi during the trial.

6. Findings In order to consider the findings of the pilot in relation to the literature four key areas will be covered. The first area of consideration will be the general effectiveness of the 4G services experienced within the pilot.

6.1 General effectiveness of 4G services Table 1 below demonstrates the speeds that have been achieved when using a range of connections across the UK.

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Elaine Garcia, Martial Bugliolo, and Ibrahim Elbeltagi Table 1: Connections speed gained across various UK locations tested with speedtest.net Type Date / Time Time Download (Mbps) Upload (Mbps) Ping (ms) Location 3G 19/06/13 20:40 0.89 0.00 179 London (4) Wifi 19/06/13 20:38 12.91 0.64 17 London (4) 4G 19/06/13 20:37 14.40 5.00 51 London (4) 3G 17/06/13 09:03 3.05 1.65 109 Plymouth (3) Broadband 17/06/13 09:03 63.06 29.13 16 Plymouth (2) Wi‐Fi 17/06/13 09:03 50.99 28.80 17 Plymouth (1)

It is clear from the results seen in this table that currently the speeds offered by broadband and Wi‐Fi far exceeds those offered by either 3G or 4G. From this table it is demonstrated that the current 4G speeds in fact exceed the 10 mbps expected in terms of download speeds. These speeds are therefore significantly greater than those achieved by 3G services on offer. These figures appear to be representative of speeds gained by participants across the trial. It is also important to consider user feedback that is received as a result of using the devices.

From the results it would appear that access to 4G was mixed and in some cases staff appeared to be expecting 4G to be present in areas in which had not yet been provided: “…I did in London, but not in Portsmouth, Bournemouth, Cornwall or parts of Plymouth.” (S1) “4G didn’t last for long on the train and after an initial period the rest of the journey was pretty much a black spot.” (S5) Where staff was in 4G areas they indicated that access to the 4G network was relatively good: “Yes I can access 4G. There are a few areas it won’t work on route from Plymouth to Penzance but it’s never been an issue as I just do something else until it returns, and it does.” (S2) “Bristol is the only place so far that I have visited that has a native 4G cell network. 4G worked very well there.” (S3) Where staff have been able to access 4G there appear to be mixed opinions concerning its quality. For some staff it appears that 4G was fast and worked well: “The speed of 4G from Bristol to Birmingham is amazing even on a moving train.” (S4) “When tested with three devices whilst on 4G in Bristol city centre it provided very fast simultaneous access.” (S3) Other staff however felt that 4G did not provide something that could not be gained from Wi‐Fi connections: “Most often the location that I ended up in would have Wi‐Fi and I would find that to be as equally good as using 4G.” (S5) It would appear that there does seem to be general agreement that having access to 4G on the train is useful: “Overall, it means I can stay in touch and on the pulse all the time I’m on the train.” (S2) “A good internet signal can make the train journey far more productive.” (S5) Although it is noted by one participant that: “If I was on a train with Wi‐Fi though this probably would remove the need for 4G access.” (S5) It would appear generally that staff felt that 4G devices were useful and did represent an improvement when compared to existing network connections but these were not considered to be an improvement in comparison to Wi‐Fi: “Once 4G becomes nationwide I can see it being useful as a general speed boost for any Internet activity one might need to partake of whilst away from Wi‐Fi.” (S3) Where Wi‐Fi wasn’t available staff appeared to embrace the opportunity to use 4G when it was readily available. One staff member commented: “I love my device and it has literally change my life. I don’t think I can, or should, go without it,” (S2)

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6.2 6.2 Any where, any time access It would appear that staff did not give a great deal of consideration to the manner in which such devices may improve access to education. As staff were asked to mainly reflect on their personal usage this is not surprising. One member of staff did comment however that they felt that such devices would be useful for extending access to education: “I am sure especially in terms of distance learning soon to be expanded within the institution.”

(S1) Whilst therefore there was little consideration of the widening of access 4G may give, one respondent did comment that their access to online services had been improved substantially and this had resulted in students and colleagues being able to contact them more easily (S2). This respondent also comments that: “I used to feel that it was “dead” time travelling before because we really need the Internet to do our job.” (S2) This indicates the way in which the Internet is now becoming integral to academic work.

6.3 Changing teaching and learning In terms of teaching and learning it would appear that staff could see the benefits of using 4G as allowing new pedagogies and teaching approaches: “It will allow you to do anything you do indoors, outdoors. This will really change teaching and learning experience.” (S4) “It’s also an excellent device to have in the classroom, or should I say in our outdoor classroom.”

(S2) “These specific devices could be useful for field trips where you want students to connect to the Internet through a controlled connection.” (S3) Participants also considered the major benefits of delivering in a range of off‐site locations: “This will enable sessions to occur in a range of environments and allow students to have hand on experiences and learn from this.” (S5) It is interesting to note that staff had discussed the use of such devices and had begun to trial them with students who were also stated as considering the devices to be useful: “The students think it is a brilliant device for continuity and remote teaching.” (S2)

6.4 Personal and organisational efficiency In relation to personal and organisational efficiency it appeared that staff did not feel there was a huge benefit to the use of 4G: “Probably not a life changing experience.” (S3) “These devices haven’t really improved my efficiency. It’s been useful but it hasn’t really change things.” (S5) Amongst other staff however it would appear that the use of such devices had a real impact and made a significant difference to their work: “Extremely useful and something I should like to use permanently.” (S1) “I love my device and it has literally changed my life. My time is now used efficiently and effectively. My productivity has been increased.” (S2)

7. Discussion From the findings it would appear that 4G is proving beneficial to individuals as predicted in the literature.

(Warman, 2013) There does however appear to be a lack of understanding and some frustrations amongst respondents that 4G is not yet universal. (Gradwell, 2012) It also appears that staff did not see any major advantages in using 4G over Wi‐Fi or that there were any benefits in doing so if Wi‐Fi was available. (Place & Keeping, 2012)

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Elaine Garcia, Martial Bugliolo, and Ibrahim Elbeltagi In relation to improved access to education it does appear that some respondents did note that the provision of 4G may aid in distance learning opportunities and this may suggest staff saw the opportunities 4G may give to reach a greater range of learners. (Geer, 2012; Traxler, 2007)

Staff who lived further away from the institution did consider 4G to be beneficial in allowing independent working whilst travelling (Traxler, 2007) and did state that this allowed other staff and students to respond with them more easily. (Serrano‐Santoyo & Organista‐Sandoval, 2010; Yang & Yang, 2011) It would therefore appear that 4G did allow staff and students to be more flexible in their learning.

One of the major benefits staff appeared to identify was the ability of teaching and learning to occur at a range of new locations and particularly in non‐traditional locations (Serrano‐Santoyo & Organista‐Sandoval, 2010) such as outside. This indicates that the provision of 4G within teaching and learning may allow the establishment of new forms of pedagogy and new teaching practices.

In relation to personal efficiency and effectiveness it would appear that as yet 4G technologies have not changed society. A number of staff appear not to consider 4G to have significantly change their working practices however this may be due to the current lack of availability of the 4G network across much of the country. These views may change as 4G is rolled out more fully. For those staff that appear to have access the use of 4G does appear to be advantageous and something which staff would wish to continue to use in the future. It also appears that the use of 4G may lead to the development of new forms of teaching and learning practice but until 4G is more universally distributed across the UK this is likely to only occur on a small scale.

8. Conclusions and recommendations This research has considered the affordances of 4G within the UK education sector. From the literature reviewed and the study undertaken it is clear that 4G within the UK is still evolving and coverage is currently limited. With this in mind however it would appear that the promises of such technologies are considered to be fairly high and there are expectations of changes to society as well as to education. In reality it would appear that 4G is something which staff found beneficial, particularly staff who face a daily commute. Benefits relating to teaching and learning are being considered by staff but as yet these have not been fully considered.

As 4G is rolled out across the UK and network speeds are increased it is likely that the benefits identified above will become more pronounced and therefore a greater degree of interest will be shown in developing new forms of teaching and learning and approaches to education.

Future research may consider whether the expectation and use of 4G changes as it becomes a more mature and commonplace service and whether this has a fundamental impact on the manner in which teaching and learning is conducted in addition to the manner in which staff work and students learn.

References Attwell, G. (2007) “Personal Learning Environments – the future of eLearning?”, eLearning Papers, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp1‐8.

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Elaine Garcia, Martial Bugliolo, and Ibrahim Elbeltagi Garside, J. (2013) “EE to double speed of 4G mobile network in 10 UK cities”, [Online], http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/apr/09/ee‐speed‐4g‐mobile‐network?INTCMP=SRCH, Accessed 10/04/13.

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Warman, M. (2013) “4G: do believe the hype – there’s a superfast difference”, [Online], http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sponsored/technology/4g‐mobile/10001673/4g‐superfast‐difference.html, Accessed 28/05/13.

Woods, B. (2013) “4G spectrum auction raises £2.34bn for UK, but who are the winners and losers?”, [Online], http://www.zdnet.com/uk/4g‐spectrum‐auction‐raises‐2‐34bn‐for‐uk‐but‐who‐are‐the‐winners‐and‐losers‐ 7000011548/ , Accessed 10/04/13.

Yan, W., Li, C., Ma, S., & Truong, H. (2012) “m‐LTE: A Mobile‐Based Learning and Teaching Interactive Environment, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment, and Learning for Engineering, Hong Kong. th Yang, Z. & Yang, Z. (2011) “Research on M‐learning supported by 3G/4G”, Proceedings of the 6 International Conference on Computer Science & Education, Singapore, pp102‐106.

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An Integral Approach to Online Education: An Example Jozef Hvorecky Vysoká škola manažmentu, Bratislava, Slovakia jhvorecký@vsm.sk

Abstract: The arrival of new internet technologies has raised researchers’ interest in advanced methods of knowledge delivery such as Massive Open Online Lectures and virtual classrooms. It also may distract it from the ones typical of traditional teaching. In our belief, their combination may lead to synergy effects. The present paper exemplifies this idea within a Database Management course for Information Systems Management students. The course has been systematically developed over a number of years in an integrated way: its tools for its non‐computer‐based and computer‐ based support have been developed simultaneously. The current package contains a textbook and a problem solver (traditional tools) and a series of downloadable files with databases and video lectures (the electronic support). Their full combination addresses our online courses, but relevant parts are effectively exploited in our on‐ground courses, too. The course objective is to educate database‐literate “interpreters" – individuals effectively acting as “glue” and enhancing customer‐developer collaboration during business application development. The idea of the course design has been based on the following observations of software engineers: The managers (as the future users of the designed application) have sufficient tacit knowledge about the functions to be executed by the planned application but are unaware of the accuracy of their description requested by programmers to make perfect procedures and user‐friendly environments. The programmers have explicit knowledge necessary for programming the applications but lack a picture of their business logic.

The combination of these negative factors after leads to projects failures. The aim of the course is to prepare graduates capable of understanding their partner’s position better. Thus, it has to be strong in both programming and in verbal descriptions of business application structures. Compared to courses for specialists, there is a penalty: compared to programming courses, our course is less formal; compared to managerial courses, it is more formal. Our approach was inspired by the Knowledge Management SECI model. It stresses the importance of simultaneous development of tacit and explicit knowledge and of their balance with each other. For programmers, it means reducing the role of formal languages in database design and development and paying more attention to relationships between natural‐language specifications and programming language constructs. For managers, it requires expressing their ideas and concepts in more formalized ways and replacing verbal description by formulae whenever possible. Our course progresses at a rather slow speed. To reduce the quantity of formal notation typical of programming courses, we use QBE and other developmental tools in Microsoft Access; SQL is reduced to an unavoidable minimum. In order to add a substantial portion of tacit knowledge, the content includes examples of bad design, of posing wrong or irrelevant questions and of confused computer‐human interaction. Advantages of the combined approach over purely SQL‐based training have been successfully demonstrated in (Hvorecky, Drlik and Munk, 2010). At present, the other sections of the course are being tested. Part of the material is delivered by electronic media. Thirty YouTube lectures accompany the book and can be accessed directly from it by reading their QR codes. A USB key attached contains PowerPoint slides accompanying all the video lectures, as well as pre‐ processed databases corresponding to our problem‐solver’s assignments. The databases are time‐sensitive, i.e. they adjust their internal time data in accordance with the day of their opening. From the students’ perspective, this makes the database contents more trustworthy and realistic.

Keywords: introductory database course, online education, enhancing course delivery, lecture streaming, managerial informatics

1. Introduction Among educators, there is a consensus around the necessity of computer awareness for university graduates.

Because databases are at the heart of computerized information systems, database courses must become a part of the literacy of managers. A typical example is the introductory Database Management course for Information Systems Management students. In our understanding, its objective is to educate database‐literate “interpreters" – the individuals on the watershed between Management and Computer Science – future professionals effectively collaborating during business application development. We support the following statement: “Single semester database courses tend to focus on the relational model thus restricting topics forcing the inclusion of the others. Once the relational model is selected, the relational algebra, the E‐R model, SQL and normalization are included in the curriculum and a particular database management system is used for the implementation.” (Robbert et al, 2000). It states the ceiling of any introductory database literacy’s course as novices can hardly be expected to learn more.

Despite such limited goals, achieving them is not easy. The experience shows (see e.g. Ewusi‐Mensah, 2003) that the absence of mutual understanding between customers (managers) and programmers (developers) is a

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Jozef Hvorecky frequent cause of software development failures. The two partners differ in their dominant knowledge about the future software products:

The managers (as the future users of the designed application) have sufficient tacit knowledge about the functions executed by the planned application but are unaware of the expected accuracy of their specifications. Only precise and well‐specified design allows the programmers to make suitable procedures and user‐friendly environments. The managers are rarely trained to delineate them.

The programmers have explicit knowledge necessary for the procedure programming but lack a picture of their business logic. As a result, often they simply guess their customers’ expectations.

The principal reasons for problems in non‐computer‐science student groups are following:

The standard teaching aids (database textbooks and manuals) are focused on forming correct notation rather than on understanding its semantics.

The above activities require precise thinking accompanied by the application of a formal notation. None of them is popular among students of humanities.

In computer‐science student groups other problems appear:

Problems solved in traditional (computer‐programmer‐oriented) introductory database courses rarely touch on business logic and its expression by means of programming language.

Correct applications of formal notation require experience and extensive know‐how. In on‐ground classes, these can be transferred from educators to learners by face‐to‐face communication. The same gap makes teaching of the identical course in online classes more difficult.

In our opinion, the problems are caused by an inappropriate teaching methodology. Typical database textbooks address programmers’ needs i.e. they start with very abstract topics and concentrate on SQL concepts. For example, Connoly & Begg, (2009) explains their material by starting from conceptual, through logical to physical database design. It takes two thirds of their book before databases in their real‐life meaning are discussed. The book’s size (more than 1375 pages) will deter almost any non‐computer‐science students from the course. Even more practically‐oriented books as (Van der Lars, 2006) and (Silberschatz, Korth & Sudarshan, 2010) with their 1 056 and 1376 pages respectively, function similarly. One can hardly expect students who do not plan to become database professionals to consume such volumes of explicit knowledge.

On the other hand, textbooks addressing Management students (e.g. Turban et al, 2008) mostly speak about business applications at a very general level. They discuss their potential commercial value and do not explain their inside mechanisms. They usually do not mention that the business logic must be implemented within them to a high level of detail and precision. The students therefore learn very little about what to say to programmers when describing their planned software product.

Thus, a natural question arises: Is it possible to design a methodology that will comprise the database concepts, and loosen the ties of formal notation but without losing the core knowledge necessary for effective development of database applications? Our intention was to attempt the construction of an educational methodology that balances students’ tacit and explicit knowledge, with the following assumptions made during the course:

The core of explicit knowledge needed for the students’ professional needs will be delivered.

The course will be organised on a less formal basis because humanities students prefer working in this way.

This paper shows our response to these challenges. In short, our database course has been built using the following principles:

Only a selection of database concepts is presented. It is rich enough to allow comprehension of the computational power of the totality of concepts and of the relationships between them.

The concepts are organized from the simplest to the most difficult.

Whenever possible, formal notation is replaced by a semi‐automated developer support.

The problems offered to students come from areas familiar to them.

Relationships between natural language and database constructs are underlined; the links between informal and formal concepts are explained.

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The limited scope of the knowledge presented is explicitly acknowledged. Students become aware that what they get is only a basis for the acquisition of the more substantial skills necessary for relational‐ database‐oriented thinking and reasoning. They are advised to cooperate with database professionals for the solution of tasks beyond the scope of the course.

Chapters 2 and 3 of this paper introduce Knowledge Management as the backbone of our theory. Chapter 4 gives the reasons for our choice of Microsoft Access for implementation. Examples of problems and learning strategies are in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 outlines tacit and explicit knowledge addressed by the course. The paper ends with Conclusions.

2. Knowledge management implications to our methodology In accordance with the theory of KM, our knowledge has two main forms. A portion called explicit knowledge can be demonstrated using facts, formulae, instructions, drawings, and similar means. SQL commands and rules of normalization are examples. The rest of our knowledge is informal, stored only in our brains and can be termed “tacit” – often, it is gained unnoticed through our day‐to‐day practice. The ability to form an SQL command corresponding to a user’s question or the ability to recognize violations to normalization rules belong to this category. Both types are interrelated and develop simultaneously as Nonaka and Takeuchi’s SECI model indicates – see Table 1 (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995).

Table 1: The SECI model

TACIT KNOWLEDGE EXPLICIT KNOWLEDGE

TACIT KNOWLEDGE Socialization Internalization

EXPLICIT KNOWLEDGE Externalization Combination

The most common means of development of tacit knowledge is by face‐to‐face communication. The process in Table 1 is specified as Socialization. Generally, it is performed by interpersonal communication and/or intrapersonal insights. Socialization is the most traditional form of learning and it occurs in every community.

Nowadays, it is still much more favoured in the humanities than in natural sciences and technology. The latter fields prioritize formal notations such as mathematical or chemical formulae, technical drawings, etc. The reasons for this prioritization lie in the vagueness and ambiguity of verbal expressions.

Transfer of tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge is called Externalization. Its outcomes (numbers, texts, graphs, formulae, computer programs, and similar forms) create a basis for the wider distribution of knowledge as the “dialogue” between the author of the particular piece of knowledge and its consumer. The SQL language and Entity‐Relationship Diagrams (ERD) are examples of the commonly accepted notations of database concepts. Thus writing queries is an externalization of the programmer’s ideas. Usually, the database management system (DBMS) is the consumer of this formal notation. Nevertheless, people have to understand them as well, otherwise they are unable to formulate them properly and modify them when necessary. As every database teacher knows, novice programmers’ interpretations of their SQL commands often differ from the DBMS’ ones. Such mistaken notations results in partially or completely incorrect executions. Thus, it is preferable to have a tool allowing the expression of the same intention using a less formal system (closer to common sense). Query‐by‐example (QBE) languages are examples of such simplification for query creation.

The pieces of knowledge expressed in their formal notation can be processed by their receivers. Such Combination may lead to new knowledge. In databases, knowledge encoded in formal notations is executed by the DBMS. The combination superposes the user’s commands on data stored in the memory. Nevertheless, machine‐performed Combination represents only a part of all these activities because people constantly have to use their tacit knowledge to specify what new knowledge is to be extracted and how. The correct result can only be received when the database contains required data and a query corresponding to the user’s question.

In the last stage, people try to interpret the outcomes of their activity and want to comprehend them. Through Internalization, the new piece of knowledge becomes an integral part of our individual knowledge. The learners start to understand the effects of their activities and make them ready for their future applications in analogous situations.

In accordance with the SECI model, the knowledge‐acquisition processes function in the following ways:

Inside each of the four quadrants: During Socialization we learn by exchanging our non‐explicit knowledge with our partners. We absorb their style of thinking; study their mentality and the effects of emotions on

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Jozef Hvorecky them etc. During Externalization we visualize our ideas and try to present them in a legible manner. We study which of presentation methods are widely comprehensible and which not. We improve their quality to make them generally accepted. During Combination we process these formal notations, we learn to control our moves to get fair results and search for more efficient combination methods. During Internalization we study the place of the new piece of knowledge in our existing knowledge system and estimate the benefits it could bring to us.

The clockwise order represented by the initial letters S‐E‐C‐I indicates that our learning runs in cycles. The ideas are generated in our minds (S). Then we try to express them in a more concise way (E). This preliminary outcome is then “scrutinized” in order to test its validity, acceptability and quality (C). Finally, we “digest” the new data, merge it with those already present in our knowledge system and become capable of discussing it with others (I).

Perpetually: Every new piece of knowledge is then presented to the community and discussed. Its “socialization” begins and may lead to new ideas. As a result, knowledge processing acquires the form S‐E‐ C‐I‐S‐E‐C‐I‐S‐… Thus, the SECI model shows a life‐cycle of knowledge with its multiple reincarnations. Due to its endless iteration, our knowledge turns out to be deeper, wider and more abundant over time.

3. SECI model and database courses for non‐computer professionals The SECI model helps us to understand the importance of tacit knowledge and its place in education. The course has to include all four SECI components and to run in all three modes: inside quadrants, clockwise and perpetually. It also says that the main aim of learning is knowledge internalization. Excellent programmers are not those capable of writing syntactically correct SQL commands but those able to apply any notation accepted by DBMS and (with over time) more and more effectively. To master the knowledge of programmers means to understand what commands do and how to improve their performance.

The SECI model also suggests a stepwise accumulation of knowledge – the newer pieces have to be digested and superposed on well‐internalized older ones. It indicates that introductory courses should concentrate on the understanding of the expressive power of formal notations and on their internalization. The course should not focus on the volume of consumed explicit knowledge but on the selection of a (sufficiently large) core which can be properly internalized and later serve as a basis for its future expansion. It should also address students from two distant fields – one with intensive Socialization learning approaches and the other preferring Externalization approaches. For the first group it delivers an unusual amount of explicit knowledge; for the other it may seem “extensively talkative”. For that reason, our main aim has been to find a balance between tacit and explicit knowledge and to contrast it.

An authentic method of internalization is “learning by doing”. Presumed explicit knowledge can be delivered in different formats presuming that it will lead to appropriate tacit knowledge. Owners of relevant tacit knowledge can easily transfer their working habits and skills to new notations – just by saying to themselves: “I want to do this and this. How do I express my idea using the new notation?” We therefore do not see obtaining explicit knowledge as a goal but as a tool. Those who have spent a few decades in the field of ICT will likely agree.

In our course, we concentrate on the following blocks of concepts:

The composition of well‐protected structured data;

Searching for requested information;

Building an entity‐relationship universe;

Design and creation of a user‐friendly environment.

The SECI model also suggests a circular progression. In the “small” circles, the stages are studied sequentially and “separately”. Then, every stage moves seamlessly to the next one to form a large circle.

In the first block, the students first learn that databases are just another – better structured – description of our surrounding world. Data tables are then presented as an appropriate storage for records. The concepts of attributes and their data types are also introduced. Finally, the metadata and their role in prohibiting incorrect data input are discussed. As similar restrictions are difficult to implement in spreadsheets, the students become aware of the superiority of using databases as tools for long‐term data storage. The students become

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familiar with more and more complex input restrictions – starting with specifying relevant data types and ending with restrictions binding several attributes. All tasks are posed in natural language in order to develop connections between student’s tacit and explicit knowledge. For example, in a gallery database we start with specifying the data types for authors of paintings, their titles, price, years of origin and presence/absence of insurance. In the second round, one‐attribute restrictions are trained as “The painting title is an obligatory attribute value and must not exceed 35 characters”. Finally, multiple‐attribute restrictions are introduced as “All paintings priced over 1500 € must be insured”. To make the learning loops perpetual, the students are informed that professional programmers are capable of forming even more complex restrictions – and advised to consult their future input restrictions with them.

The concept of the primary and secondary key is also introduced in this round but its role is purposely reduced to being a reference between the table with “fully‐fledged” records and a supporting table containing e.g. days of the week. The explanation of their true role in entity‐relationship diagrams is postponed until multiple‐table databases are discussed.

In the second block, the data in one‐table databases are searched for requested information. The tables cover common real‐life problems such as personal records, book libraries, stock‐keeping, pizza delivery, car rental and others. The tables are not always normalized. (To avoid confusions, only questions not leading to conflicts caused by anomalies are posed.) Queries address typical managerial inquiries such as the aggregation of data and their grouping. The number of keywords has been reduced to an optimal minimum allowing selection of records with specific properties. Again, all tasks are formulated in a natural language: “Which cars are currently rented?”

The students are also trained to solve their tasks using a stepwise approach. First, they are asked to prepare a query corresponding to the question: “How many cars have not been returned in time?” Then, the students are asked: “Identify them”. The second response requires a nested query, i.e. the problem is substantially more difficult. As they know their number, they can verify the correctness of their outcome more easily. Another feature helping our students to verify their results is small table size. The tables mostly do not contain more than 20 records. Again, we warn our students that their list of keywords is far from complete and the table size does not correspond to that of real‐life databases i.e. there is a lot of room for expanding their knowledge.

In the third big block, the reasons for splitting non‐normalized tables into several simpler ones are shown. This necessity is demonstrated in a very practical way. Examples of databases with anomalies are shown and questions which cannot be properly answered are asked. All queries proposed by students generate incorrect outputs. Then we search for a transformation that could produce correct ones. We “rediscover” the role of primary and secondary keys and their potential to build relationships between tables (entities). We also study their role in the entity‐to‐entity cardinality. We pay special attention to forming entity‐relationship diagrams and in “reading” (i.e. in interpreting) them. By using practical examples we show how ERDs can be used for understanding producer‐consumer chains, family relationships etc.

The third block ends with queries over several tables (JOIN and UNION) and with action queries. Then we point the students’ attention to the fact that all query operations can be successfully applied to the joint data. We stress the fact the JOIN and UNION operators form “virtual one‐table bodies” so all their knowledge on query design can be directly applied. Another loop is added because the students start understanding that there is no substantial difference between using query design strategies in one‐table and multi‐table databases.

The last block shows creation of fair and user‐friendly communication. Here, we often refer back. For example, the forms built upon join queries automatically distribute input values into their respective tables without the need for checking the identity of the values of primary and secondary keys. Students start to comprehend higher dimensions of normalization. The feeling “it is a puzzle enjoyed by theoreticians only” is dispelled.

We also discuss ways of making the database interior – tables, queries, ERD structures – invisible. We return students to their period of innocence in which databases were just black boxes with buttons. We point to the simplicity of their operation and invite them to replicate it in their final projects. As a result, our students design and develop simple but fully‐functioning database applications with 4‐7 tables. To motivate online students, we encourage them to build databases for their day‐to‐day professional needs.

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Jozef Hvorecky Another apt method of enhancing tacit knowledge (widely exploited in virtual classrooms) is our discussion forum. The forum apparently serves for Socialization only. However, the opposite is true. It also facilitates Externalization (as its participants must formulate their ideas legibly), Combination (as every person must compare different views to the subject discussed) as well as Internalization (by valuing these different versions, by evaluating them and then by modifying their own opinions accordingly). For example, data distribution in normalized databases is often anti‐intuitive. The discussions allow students to see the ERDs of their classmates, to understand why they can (or cannot) be considered normalized, to discuss the reasons and to see the process of their step by step normalization.

4. Choice of DBMS Microsoft Access has been chosen as the carrier of the practically oriented part of our course. There are several reasons behind the decision:

It is a part of Microsoft Office Professional. The majority of students have implemented it long before the course and do not need to make any additional arrangements. Many external students can access it at their workplace, too.

Using DDL in Access is unnecessary as its Table Design View allows forming tables in an equipollent replacement of it. It offers much more legibility and allows faster development.

Access also contains tools supporting query design and development, for building entity‐relationship diagrams, and for building user‐friendly environment. They allow the production of high‐quality databases without paying unnecessary attention to formal notation. The students can concentrate more on understanding the roles of these components and on the interrelationships between them.

All these features enhance the development of students’ tacit knowledge because they allow them to concentrate on understanding and optimisation of the development of particular elements and the simplification of debugging.

Ontop of that, the computational power of Access is sufficient for many small and medium enterprises – an environment typical of that in which the majority of Management graduates work. Students therefore see the applicability of their knowledge from the very outset.

5. Course outcomes, implementation and support As the course addresses non‐computer‐science students, it concentrates on the topics in which applicability is evident and neglects those whose value is primarily academic. For example, the theory of relational algebra is skipped: only its practical consequences are demonstrated and explained. The entire course is accompanied by four types of support: a textbook (Hvorecky, 2013a), a handbook referenced here as Problem Solver (Hvorecky, 2013b), thirty lectures on YouTube, and a USB key with databases and PowerPoint slides. Their various roles are specified below. For the above reasons, the book and problem solver use a less formal language than common database textbooks do. Naturally, the informality of the language does not equate with inaccuracy in its constructs or incorrectness of explanation. The register only means that in explanations we relate on the basis of common sense rather than academic purity. For example, when we speak about data organization having a structured form we say: Records are stored in tables: every record occupies a row – the values of their identical attributes are stored in columns. We see our figurative description as more student‐ friendly than the specification of records as tuples which “are functions from a finite set U of attributes (of the relation) to a domain of values (assumed distinct from U)” (Wikipedia, 2013).

In Access, tables can be defined using Table Design View. The students can switch between designed tables’ Data View and Design View. To relate attributes and their values to real‐life objects (e.g. airline tickets) is much easier. This approach completely diminishes the application of the DDL part of SQL. Their metadata are represented as a list of features: “the price of any airline ticket cannot be negative”, “the date of the flight must refer to the future” or “the name of the departure airport and the name of the arrival airport cannot be the same” which must be entered into their definition form. Instead of writing complex syntax, the process is reduced to filling in the cells related to particular properties; many of them with pull‐down menus. Compared to the approach based on writing equivalent DDL commands, the risk of making unintended errors is reduced.

The students are less stressed and can concentrate more on their problem solving. Our textbook never mentions the existence of DDL as an equally powerful tool is at the student’s disposal.

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To facilitate tacit knowledge and to point to key principles of table design, a particular part of the textbook contains the QR codes of seven lectures available on YouTube. The PowerPoint slides for all lectures are stored on a USB memory stick available with the Problem Solver. As Figure 1 shows, every lecture can also be accessed via a link and/or QR code placed on the title slide.

Figure 1: The title slide of the presentation on primary keys The query design also starts without SQL. The built‐in tools – Access’ Query Wizard and Query Design View are used for first queries. SQL comes into use only when query design previous becomes too complex and/or cannot be completed efficiently. Even then, the students are allowed to combine them using their preferred methods. In (Hvorecky, Drlik & Munk, 2010) an educational experiment comparing the class with a traditional SQL‐based course and the one using our new methodology is described. The students of the tested group solved their problems faster and felt more comfortable – whilst the correctness of their solutions was not affected.

Table 2 The table used for the actualization of the Contracts table ActualDataSource Car_ID When BA 321 PT 0 KE 362 KE ‐20 PP 650 DA ‐1 TN 409 BG ‐10 TT 081 AC ‐4 ZA 994 DR ‐2

To speed up query creation, every assignment is accompanied by an empty database on the USB. The adjective “empty” means that the database contains all tables and necessary data in them but no queries. The data are “time‐sensitive”, i.e. they automatically adjust their time values in relation to “today”. The actualization exploits the built‐in Date() function. Its value is the current date. In every database that must be adjusted, there are one or several tables (usually called ActualDataSource or similar ‐ see Figure 2). In the table, the Car_ID attribute has its standard meaning. The value of the When attribute are all non‐positive. They will be added to the current date moving all dates of rental i.e. they will be presented to the students within the interval “20 days back from today”. The modification is executed by the following update query which is automatically executed after the opening of the database:

UPDATE Contracts INNER JOIN ActualDataSource ON Contracts.CarID = ActualDataSource.CarID SET When = When + Date();

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Jozef Hvorecky The Problem Solver contains 35 pages of problems related to query development and testing. An additional 13 pages of query‐related tasks come after introducing multiple‐table databases. Queries are discussed in twelve YouTube lectures.

The creation of the global databases structure is exemplified by many positive and negative examples – i.e. successful designs and failures. The ERD‐reading skills are stressed because the normalization is not a straightforward process. It must reflect the intended business logic which always affects the distribution of attributes among entities. Figure 2 shows the difference between car‐rental agreements in a company with fixed fees and another one with fees which are subjects of negotiation. In the first case, the attribute RentalFee belongs to the Cars table; in the other one, it is in the Agreements.

Figure 2a: Rental fee is fixed

Figure 2b: Rental fee is negotiable In this way, future managers’ are trained to point their attention to the details which may have critical (and sometimes fatal) consequences for the success of their information system. The course is intended to educate qualified users, not professional programmers. Nevertheless, they should understand why the programmers will ask them many silly questions during the development process. This is why our textbook concentrates on similar nuances and exemplifies their influence on future database applications. Assignments in this part of the Problem Solver ask for the design of real‐life databases with several tables and their assembly into ERD diagrams. To maintain connection with real life, the applications start in a nursery and end at a cemetery.

Often, the necessity of understanding difference between intuitive representations of databases in spreadsheet tools (like Excel) and in a DBMS is underlined. To emphasize them, we exemplify negative experience with low data reliability:

Entered without controlling input restrictions by metadata;

Distributed in tables which are not referenced by primary and secondary keys.

The problem is often discussed in virtual classrooms. In particular, students working with databases implemented in Excel have difficulties understanding the difference.

Finally, the textbook section on user‐friendly interfaces discusses not only their importance of their smooth exploitation but also demonstrates differences between well‐ and badly‐designed ones. The Problem Solver contains problems that are accompanied by “empty” databases on the USB key. They now also include queries submitting data which are to be accessed/presented through forms and reports.

6. Summary Table 3 contains a brief summary of concepts that are developed using the methodology described. The list is not complete; only the principal concepts are presented.

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Table 3 Main concepts and our educational methodology used Concept

Implementation Tools

Explicit knowledge

Tacit knowledge

Tables, Records, Attributes Queries

Access Table Design, Expression Builder

Data organization

Importance of data structuring, Protection of input

Access Query Wizard, Access Query Design, SQL

Query formation and testing

Normalization, ERD

Access Table Design, ERD design

Rules leading to a normalized database structure

User‐friendly environment

Access Form Design, Access Report Wizard, Access control wizards, Macro Generator

Design and development of user‐friendly communication

Step by step problem solving, Testing and debugging strategies, Understanding of relationships between natural language and query text Relationship between database structure and business logic, Readiness to accept anti‐intuitive database structures Elements of user’s psychology, Creative design, Simplification of database exploitation

7. Conclusion (Adams et al, 2004) stress the importance of database education. In our paper, we have concentrated on a specific group – on those who do not plan to become professional programmers but will likely become qualified users and occasionally clients cooperating in design and development of their own specific applications. They must learn to communicate with ICT professionals and know the dangers arising from unstated or misinterpreted details. They therefore have to undergo practical training in database development but without the necessity of going into full details.

The title of our paper discusses an integral approach. In fact, our course uses three routes to integration:

The first one integrates tacit and explicit knowledge. It joins formal “SQL‐like” facts with their meanings.

The second one combines traditional teaching aids with electronic ones.

The third one stresses the importance of acquiring a “large” picture – the ability to see database applications as human products which are as good as the people who create them.

In online courses, we stress both aspects by selecting appropriate discussion topics and by exploiting students’ previous experience with databases. Some of the negative examples in the textbook have their origin in our online discussion forum. For example, when discussing input protection, students mentioned “a 186‐year‐old client of an insurance company” or “telephone numbers allowing maximum size of 10 digits degrading all longer (in particular international) ones”.

We consider Socialization as the key to developing long‐lasting knowledge. It is not only the oldest teaching and learning method; it builds in people what Einstein considered as “true education”: Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything one learned in school. Using Knowledge Management terminology, tacit knowledge remains even if explicit knowledge vanishes.

That’s why we stress the necessity of expanding room for tacit knowledge in our courses – even if it means reducing the size of the explicit. By discussing with the teacher and classmates, students start understanding the context in which their explicit knowledge functions. They become familiar with the language the database professionals use and with the fact that all details of business processes must be incorporated into the application developed. They have to learn to talk with them about their expectations and requirements using the vocabulary that is shared by both parties.

The author sees these observations as a principal contribution of Knowledge Management to methodologies of education. Online education will bear little fruit unless all participants are socialized.

References Adams, E.S., Granger, M., Goelman, D. Ricardo, C. (2004): Managing the introductory database course: What goes in and what comes out? SIGCSE Bulletin, 36(1), pp. 497‐498

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Ewusi‐Mensah, K. (2003). Software development failures: anatomy of abandoned projects. The MIT press, 290 pp.

Hvorecký, J. (2013a): Databázové technológie. Equilibria, Košice, 316 pp.

Hvorecký, J. (2013b): Databázové technológie – podporný učebný text. Equilibria, Košice, 106 pp.

Hvorecký, J., Drlík, M., and Munk, M. (2010): Enhancing Database Querying Skills by Choosing a More Appropriate Interface. Education Engineering (EDUCON), Madrid, pp. 1897 ‐ 1905 Nonaka, I., Takeuchi, H. (1995): The Knowledge‐Creating Company – How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation. Oxford University Press, London, 284 pp.

Robbert, M. A. et al (2000): The Database course: What Must Be Taught. SIGCSE Bulletin Proceedings of 31st SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, March, pp. 403‐404. http://ocw.kfupm.edu.sa/ocw_courses/phase3/ICS324‐Offering‐072/Study%20Materials/What‐Must‐ be%20Taught.pdf Silberschatz, A., Korth, H., Sudarshan, S. (2010): Database System Concepts, McGraw‐Hill Science/Engineering/ Math, New York, 1376 pp.

Turban, E., Leidner, D., McLean, E., & Wetherbe, J. (2008). Information technology for Management, (with CD). Wiley.com Van der Lans (2006): Introduction to SQL: Mastering the Relational Database Language, 4th Edition, Addison Wesley Professional, New York, 1056 pp.

Wikipedia (2013): Relational Algebra. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_algebra (Accessed on 23 May 2013)

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Scaffolding in e‐Learning Environment Antonín Jančařík Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Education, Prague, Czech Republic antonin.jancarik@pedf.cuni.cz

Abstract: The paper focuses on the potential and possibilities of use of scaffolding in e‐learning courses. One of the key concepts the author works with and builds upon is the concept of zone of proximal development, which was introduced by Vygotsky. One of the key questions every teacher must ask is how to state the border between the current pupil’s knowledge and the horizon where it can be developed. Needless to say that determination of these limits may be of crucial importance for the educational process. The question becomes even more important in work with gifted pupils, in whose case the limit of what they can achieve under convenient guidance is very individual, as well as the teacher’s role very specific. The author presents various forms of scaffolding based on his longitudinal experience from work with mathematically gifted pupils in an e‐learning course Combinatorial Game Theory. This course is organized within the frame of the Talent project which is designated for gifted Czech upper secondary school students from all over the country. This course has been designed with respect to the principles of the method of problem‐based learning. Students are assigned problems that they solve either collaboratively or individually. Some of the problems are intentionally designed in such a way to bring students to situations in which they must overcome epistemological obstacles. In these situations scaffolding proves to be a very efficient method. However, its implementation in the environment of internet is specific and differs from its use in ordinary classrooms. As there is no face to face contact with the student, it is much harder to determine his/her real state of knowledge. Also the time lag in off‐line communication makes the process harder. The paper discusses different aspects of use of scaffolding in the internet environment in detail. This all is illustrated on specific examples of its use. The paper presents four forms of scaffolding realised by specific instructions. The aim of the paper is to illustrate by and demonstrate on concrete examples the benefits of the use of scaffolding in an e‐learning course for gifted students.

Keywords: scaffolding, game theory, e‐learning, mathematical education

1. Introduction The concept of zone of proximal development, introduced by L. Vygotsky (1978), is defined as “the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers.” However, this guidance does not have to be personified, it may also be provided e.g. by an e‐learning system. That is why Vygotsky introduced also the concept of “more knowledgeable other”.

1.1 Scaffolding The concept of scaffolding is close to the concept of zone of proximal development but is not used by Vygotsky. The concept refers to the help and support provided to a pupil or student while solving problems in order to allow him/her to achieve the desired goals (German, 2011, Saffkova, 2011). The methods of providing scaffolding are manifold. Saye and Brush distinguish between soft and hard methods (Saye and Brush, 2002).

Soft, or also contingent scaffolding is based on a teacher’s discussion with their pupils, their reactions to the pupils’ needs and on offer of support and guidance with respect to the momentary needs (Simons and Klein, 2007). In contrast, in hard scaffolding the teacher analyses the problems that can be come across in advance, already when planning the lesson (Nováková and Novotná, 2011) and prepares supporting problems or hints to offer to the pupils or students when needed. Scaffolding can also be provided automatically (e.g. Wood, 2011) by the e‐learning system. However, this paper focuses predominantly on situations when guidance and support is provided by the course teacher, or more specifically the lecturer.

Wood and Middleton (1975) define three categories of support that can be provided to pupils:

General encouragement

Specific instructions

Direct demonstration

The following text demonstrates and specifies the use of all these three categories of support within e‐learning courses. When introducing the category “Specific instructions”, four different forms of its use are distinguished:

Pushing the limits

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Confronting a counterexample

Providing the right answer but not the solving procedure

Experimenting using Trial and Error method

The advantages of each of the methods is classified with respect to the anticipated benefits of scaffolding into the following five categories (Wood et al., 1976):

Gaining and maintaining the learner’s interest in the task.

Making the task simple.

Emphasizing certain aspects that will help with the solution.

Controlling the level of frustration.

Demonstrating the task.

1.2 Course description The paper presents methods of scaffolding used by the author in e‐learning courses for mathematically gifted students. These courses for gifted students are opened repeatedly and the here reported research on scaffolding is still in progress. The paper therefore presents its interim findings and work in process. The courses are organized for small groups of students (5‐10 persons) from selected upper secondary schools from all over the Czech Republic. The syllabus of the course is Combinatorial Game Theory (Berlekamp, Conway and Guy, 2001, Nowakowski, 1998). The course is designed as assisted problem‐solving. There is almost no instruction, students are assigned a series of graded problems which they solve in open discussion forums.

Students may also enter private discussion with the teacher but this option is seldom selected. The lecturer’s guidance has the form of his intervention into the discussion. This intervention has different forms, the lecturer uses both soft and hard scaffolding.

The course is divided into two parts. In the first part students are introduced to different variants of the NIM game. The goal of this activity is to guide students to discovery of the winning strategy (Bouton, 1901). In the second part students get to know the game hackenbush. Their task is to find the value of given positions. The key moment of the course is discovery of positions with surreal values , a . Pupils must overcome epistemological obstacles (Bachelard, 1940) connected to their existing understanding of real numbers, number line and the concept of infinity (Cihlár, Eisenmann, Krátká and Vopenka, 2008).

2. General encouragement in e‐learning courses It is often the case of e‐learning courses that pupils and students who find the presented problems too difficult stop being active. That is why the lecturer must observe activity of different participants of the course carefully and encourage the pupils and students as needed. It is much easier for a teacher to see that a pupil is not paying attention in the classroom – he/she starts disturbing, stares out of the window, reads something else.

These evident signals are not present in e‐learning courses and the lecturer’s position is much more difficult.

He/she may notice a participant’s lack of activity but may fail to interpret the reasons for this drop‐out. He must then carefully think what and how to do to encourage and motivate the student to get involved again.

Sometimes it is very hard to discover the true reason of a student's drop‐out.

2.1 First example A student ceased to be active for several weeks during the course and did not even answer the lecturer’s messages. Only later was he able to find out that she had had a serious injury and had spent some time in hospital where she could not participate in the course. Having recovered she got involved in the course again and completed it successfully.

2.2 Second example The lecturer was facing the situation when several students fell silent for a longer period of time. He addressed them by personal e‐mails asking for reasons of their inactivity and offered help with difficult problems, including organizing a videoconference. The following are some of the replies he received:

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My plan is to join in again at the end of the week. As soon as I finish other things that kept me occupied. I hope I will catch up on coursework. :) Student 2: Hello, sorry for my activity but I have too many courses and am getting short of time.

As it is I only have time to look at it at the weekend. But now I’ve been offered two scholarships :P so I won’t get to the coursework before the weekend. Honza After the lecturer’s encouraging intervention the students joint in actively again.

Soft scaffolding in the form of general encouragement helps to gain and maintain the learner’s interest in the task. In some cases it may also help to control the level of frustration. It is advisable to make this encouragement very personal and to combine it with offer to help. This eliminates the potential risk of the student’s dropping out of the course for its difficulty.

2.3 Comparison to the situation when no scaffolding was offered In the first course, the teacher repeatedly used mail merge to alert to deadlines. Despite these alerts, some students did not join in and often sent excuses for having dropped out of the course. An analysis of individual cases showed that these students’ drop‐out was most often the consequence of a sudden increase in difficulty of the tasks and problems. Having discovered this, the lecturer now informs students in advance that they are about to proceed to a more difficult level and offers them additional help if they fall silent at this point.

3. Specific instructions – pushing the limits Pushing the limits is one of the forms of soft scaffolding. It may be in the form of lecturer’s reactions to the limiting conditions in a pupil’s or student’s reasoning and thinking. The lecturer tries to encourage the pupil or student to broaden and generalize his/her considerations. The aim of this type of guidance is predominantly to turn the student’s attention to those aspects of the assigned problem that he/she failed to notice or to deduction of consequences the pupil or student has been not aware of.

3.1 Example Lecturer: What is the relation between won and lost fields?

Student: Is their structure always regular?

Lecturer: A good question, but what do you mean by a “regular structure”? Try to find an answer, it is connected to the previous question.

Student: With the exception of the fields before finish, won and lost positions always repeat in the same numbers. In case one cannot use a move by one field they are always two blue and four red fields.

Lecturer: I thought you were asking whether a situation must necessarily have a regular structure regardless of the rules of the game. Is this not a more interesting question :‐)?

This example shows that the student uses the concept of “regular structure” spontaneously. This enables introduction of the general topic of periodicity of a solution to a problem. The lecturer takes the student’s concept which is yet not developed and hands it back to the student for further development. As the initial initiative was on the student’s part, the problem seems more real to the student and he/she is much more motivated to be solving it.

3.2 Comparison to direct task assignment Tasks in which students are asked to find a regular structure of won and lost positions can also be come across in the course but only if they follow a series of lead‐in tasks. In this case, reaction to the student’s spontaneous idea made it possible to skip these exercises and start solving a more demanding task before the student would have done if proceeding along the standard course trajectory. The idea of a regular structure had just moved into the particular student’s zone of proximal development, thus allowing the lecturer to make use of it.

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4. Specific instructions – confronting a counter example Another example of soft scaffolding is providing a counterexample to the presented hypothesis. Confrontation of the student’s strategy with a situation in which it does not work makes him/her reconsider the whole situation. Moreover, a conveniently selected counterexample may guide the student to the correct solution.

4.1 Example One of the games solved by the pupils in the discussed course is the game TIC‐TAC‐TOE (see fig. 1). In some cases students assess the game as won by the first player even though it is a draw. The counterexample is offered by playing the game with teacher.

Figure 1: TIC‐TAC‐TOE game (from Jancarik, 2007) Providing a well‐chosen counterexample to the presented hypothesis helps to emphasise some aspects of the problem and may help with the solution. A counterexample may help the student realize where he/she is making a mistake and to correct his/her solution.

4.2 Analysis of use of counterexamples Providing a counterexample is in some cases far more efficient than looking for and uncovering of mistakes in students’ logical reasoning. The reasons are:

A student’s justification may be long and complicated. In some cases explanation of different separate ideas and deductions may require a lot of time. This of course implies that in an e‐learning course environment the effort to pinpoint the source of a mistake in reasoning is extremely difficult and time demanding. On the other hand, without any doubt in some cases this time and effort are worthwhile, especially in case of complex problems.

If a teacher or a lecturer points out a pupil’s or student’s mistake, it might demotivate the pupil or the student. In contrast providing a convenient counterexample enables the pupil or the student to succeed by discovering the source of his/her mistake in reasoning on his/her own.

5. Specific instructions – providing the right answer but not the solving procedure This form of help is based on the teacher’s provision of correct answer and student’s search for justification or explanation of this answer. This form of scaffolding may be situation based or planned in advance by the lecturer. It means this is a form of hard scaffolding.

5.1 Example The example comes from a discussion forum about the Cat and Mouse Game (Tapson, 1977, see fig. 2). The goal of the game is to have the cat capture the mouse. The game has a very simple winning strategy but every time most students defend the possibility that the mouse can always escape.

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Figure 2: Cat and mouse game (from Jancarik, 2007) Student: Each hole neighbours at least with other two holes which means the mouse can never “be cornered”. The mouse can be escaping for ever. (This is the last of a number of comments expressing the same idea.)

Teacher: You all agree here that the mouse can be running away as long as it wants, you present supporting arguments, but are you sure about this? Are you sure there are not any mistakes in your considerations?

Teacher (after 4 days with no reaction): Well, nobody replied to my comment. So I am giving the right answer now: The cat, if it uses the right strategy, will catch the mouse quite fast, regardless of the mouse’s strategy. Will you find how the cat can do it?

Another student: Yes, this is a real Cat and Mouse game. The cat must not attack, it must lurk. If it wants to win, it must get the advantage of one move by cutting across the triangle. (If we leave any field A in a move, we get back to it by an even number of moves but if we take a shortcut via triangle, an odd number of moves will do.) So the position changes, the cat and the mouse can e.g. again get to the same position, but now the mouse will be in a trap as it is its move this time.

Similarly the cat may get this advantage in a corner.

This example illustrates the use of this method in a situation when students “got stuck” while solving the problem and got lost what solution to be actually looking for. Once they were told the right answer they were able to justify the solution and find the correct solution of the whole problem.

6. Specific instructions – experimenting using trial and error method This form of support is also hard scaffolding. It is used for difficult problems where pupils and students can be expected to propose erroneous solutions. Scaffolding in this case is not provided by the lecturer. It is an automatic element which is integrated in the e‐learning course (see Wood, 2001). This enables the pupils and students to confront repeatedly their strategies with counterexamples, to test them and modify them.

6.1 Example The students’ task in the course was to find the winning strategy to a three‐pile NIM game. An automatic script was programmed in the game which runs according to the winning strategy. If a player makes a mistake in his/her solution, the computer wins. The game has the form of a car race. The player can select a car he/she wants to ace in and the number of fields (in accordance with the rules) by which he/she wants to approach the finish. The script enables setting different rules in respect to the needs of a given game. The winner is the player who first crosses the finish line (see Fig. 3)

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Figure 3: 3 heap NIM game with cars The difference of this form of scaffolding and of providing one counterexample is that in case of one counterexample pupils and students cannot usually find the winning strategy. This form, in contrast, combines the advantages of confronting a counterexample and giving the right answer but not the procedure. The pupil or student sees the mistake he/she has made and the move he/she must make in the situation but does not know the reasons why it is so and must discover them.

6.2 Discussion of the problem In the first course, every single situation was discussed with the lecturer. This was unnecessarily too long.

Automation using script made the process faster and more efficient. Students can now verify (or confront) their hypotheses before presenting them in public.

7. Direct demonstration Direct demonstration is the form of hard scaffolding which is used in this e‐learning course least often, which is the consequence of its focus. The goal of the course is not to introduce students to winning strategies but to teach them to look for them on their own. That is why they are expected to be looking for all solutions individually and none of the solutions is disclosed or directly demonstrated to them. Direct demonstration is used to make students familiar with a method they are subsequently expected to generalize and apply.

7.1 Example Students are expected to learn to use NIM numbers in order to employ them in search for strategies in other games. The lecturer demonstrates their application in the game The Silver Dollar Game With No Silver Dollar (Bogus Nim, see fig. 4). Subsequently students are asked to find the winning strategy for The Silver Dollar Game.

Figure 4: Bogus NIM game (http://www.cut‐the‐knot.org/, © 1996‐2013 Alexander Bogomolny) Direct demonstration is very convenient when teaching algorithms. Its use in constructivist approaches is more problematic as it offers students very little space for their own observation, reasoning and deductions.

7.2 Discussion of direct demonstration Application of knowledge in new contexts is known to be very difficult in the long run. At the same time it is crucial. Students usually link their knowledge to knowledge from concrete situations they have experience with. Preceding full‐time courses showed that students had problems to apply NIM strategy in new situations unless they had had prior experience with this approach. That is why one sample of such use was presented to students in the e‐learning course. The lecturer’s experience shows that students then find it much easier to modify the winning strategy to other, more or less similar games.

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8. Conclusion Scaffolding is an important tool a teacher can use in their work. Scaffolding enables to push the limit of what pupils are able to achieve in their solving procedures. This implies that scaffolding is well justified not only in the classroom but also in virtual environment. E‐learning environments allow the use of most methods that a teacher would employ when working in the traditional classroom. However, it must be born in mind that work in a virtual environment rules out personal contact and face to face interaction between the pupil and the teacher. This may make it hard to predict the pupil’s reaction. Scaffolding, especially in the form of general encouragement, becomes increasingly more important. It can help the pupil overcome obstacles that would otherwise put them off from further work and would result in frustration and failure. However, students must not only be encouraged, they must also be offered stimuli and additional information needed for solution of the assigned problems and for drawing general conclusions.

The paper presented and illustrated four forms of this support. The author presented concrete examples to demonstrate what forms scaffolding can take. As the same time he described his motivation for having used the described methods, or what their benefits were. The presented list is far from exhaustive. The aim of this paper is to document the chosen methods. Taking into account the course specialization and small number of respondents, the author decided to present his findings in the form of description of concrete examples.

However, it does not mean the paper cannot be a source of inspiration for other authors of e‐learning courses.

The presented methods can be applied in a variety of other contexts.

References Bachelard, G. (1940) La philosophie du non. Essai d’une philosophie du nouvel esprit scientifique. PUF, Paris.

Berlekamp, E. R., Conway, J. H. and Guy, R. K. (2001) Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays, AK Peters, Ltd. Bouton, C. L. (1901) “Nim, a game with a complete mathematical theory”, Annals of Mathematics, Vol 3, pp 35–39.

Brush, T. A. and Saye, J. W. (2002) “A summary of research exploring hard and soft scaffolding for teachers and students using a multimedia supported learning environment”, The Journal of Interactive Online Learning, Vol 1, No. 2,pp 1‐ 12.

Cihlár, J., Eisenmann, P., Krátká, M. and Vopenka P. (2008) “Cognitive conflict as a tool of overcoming obstacles in understanding infinity”, Teaching mathematics: innovation, new trends, research, Vol 47.

German, D.A. (2011) “Extreme Scaffolding in the Teaching and Learning of Programming Languages”, Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on E‐Learning, pp 978‐981.

Jancarik, A (2007) Algorithms and Solving Strategies. PedF UK, Prague.

Nováková, H. and Novotná, J. (2011) “A priori analysis in theory and teachers’ practice”, International Symposium Elementary Maths Teaching SEMT ’11 Proceedings, pp. 252‐260.

Nowakowski, R. J. (Ed.) (1998) Games of no chance, Cambridge University Press.

Saffkova, Z.(2011) “Using Blended Learning to Develop Critical Reading Skills”, Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on E‐Learning, pp 705‐715.

Simons, Krista D. and Klein, James D. (2007) “The impact of scaffolding and student achievement levels in a problem‐based learning environment”, Instructional Science, Vol 35, pp 41‐72.

Tapson, F. (1977) Take two – 32 board games for 2 players. A & C Black limited, Berkshire.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978) Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes, MA: Harvard University Press, Cambridge.

Wood, D. (2001) “Scaffolding, contingent tutoring, and computer‐supported learning”, International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, Vol 12, No. 3, pp 280‐293.

Wood, D. J., Bruner, J. S. and Ross, G. (1976) “The role of tutoring in problem solving”, Journal of Child Psychiatry and Psychology, Vol 17, No. 2, pp 89‐100.

Wood, D. and Middleton, D. (1975) “A study of assisted problem‐solving”, British Journal of Psychology, Vol 66, No. 2, pp 181−191.

Wood, D., Bruner, J. and Ross, G. (1976) “The role of tutoring in problem solving”, Journal of Child Psychology and Child Psychiatry, Vol 17, pp 89−100.

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Planning for Success in Introducing and Embedding Technology to Enhance Learning Amanda Jefferies and Marija Cubric University of Hertfordshire, College Lane, Hatfield, UK a.l.jefferies@herts.ac.uk m.cubric@herts.ac.uk

Abstract: The authors reflect on the outcomes of recent change management projects for introducing technology into Higher Education in the UK and discuss key aspects which have led to success in the increasing use and subsequent embedding of learning technologies in the classroom. They focus on three areas where it is suggested that institutions need to ‘get it right’ in terms of justifying the expensive introduction of technology into the learning environment: the building and maintaining of the technical infrastructure; the provision of appropriate initial and continuing user support, which includes relating the use of technology to pedagogy; and the management of the impact of change on those who are faced with adapting to different ways of learning and teaching. These are mapped to a set of critical success factors by the authors. The paper investigate these firstly, via a case‐study within a technology‐focussed university, where its commitment to the enhancement of the student experience through using technology to support assessment and feedback mechanisms has increased. The authors explore how academics were encouraged to become further engaged within the process. Consequently, the use of technology in the classroom was no longer seen as being the preserve of a group of ‘enthusiasts’ or ‘early adopters’ but was perceived to be relevant to a wider user group. A further case‐study shows how the critical success factors were applied to develop a flexible learning module within a more traditional teaching environment. This paper explores the importance of balancing underlying pedagogical approaches to the introduction of new technologies. It is proposed that while technology can be an excellent tool it should not drive the pedagogy. The aim finally is to ensure that throughout and following a period of change both academics and students can benefit from the appropriate use of technology to enhance learning.

Keywords: learning technology, change management, critical success factors; case studies

1. Background to evaluating learning technology in HE in the UK The UK has seen significant investment in the use of learning technologies in the HE classroom in the past decade. Alongside this investment, much research has been undertaken to determine the best ways to introduce technology for supporting changing pedagogy whilst noting the general increase in class‐sizes seen in many UK Higher Education Institutions (HEI). As money has been made available to extend the use of technology from the support of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) in 2005 for the Centres for Excellence in Learning and teaching, (CETLs) it is important to consider whether there has been a reasonable return on investment. As noted by Kirkwood and Price: Using technology can be costly, not only in terms of the financial investment made by institutions for infrastructure, equipment and technical support staff, but also in relation to the personal investment made by staff and students in using the technology for teaching and learning.’(2013:2) In addition to other funding made available to HE institutions, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) part funded by Universities UK, has been supporting a number of projects since 2006 firstly through their Learners’ Experiences of E‐Learning Programmes (JISC, 2007) and more recently through their funding of programmes for supporting large‐scale changes in Assessment and Feedback practice, supported by technologies. Since summer 2011 JISC has overall provided funding towards 20 projects at UK universities with the aim of developing wider use of technology across institutions and support the changing learning landscape in HE, (JISC Design Studio, 2011). Final delivery of these outcomes is planned for summer 2014. In summer 2011 JISC also provided funding for 12 university research teams to explore the development of digital literacies across different student demographic groups. Much of this work builds on their earlier programme of developing digital literacies among students and encouraging universities to research their practice, (JISC, 2011)

Ensuring that the introduction of technology is going to be a success both financially and in the human cost of accepting new systems, will rely on the end‐users, both the academics and the students seeing its benefit and relevance to their practice and studies. Alongside much generous funding for research, it is critical that the introduction of technology into HEIs is undertaken in a manner which will as far as possible ensure its success.

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Amanda Jefferies and Marija Cubric Within the period of rapid technological change in the past decade and a half, through changing processes, changing culture and changing practices experienced, there is, practically speaking, no return to an age before technology was used to support learning. For those who are supporting HE staff and students through a period of technological change and embedding, it is vital to also consider the impact of changing technology on their living and learning. Not all of the students are the so‐called ‘net geners’ (Oblinger, 2006) and many of them appear more comfortable with being ‘digital residents’ (White and Le Cornu, 2011).

Geoghegan (1994) has used the term ‘compelling value’ when considering the introduction of technology into a commercial organisation, and recommended measuring whether it performs an existing task in a better way, or if it performs a new task in a way that adds a major benefit. In investigating the wider issues of technology introduction he suggests that the inherent value is seen beyond the basic use of technology and the associated hardware and software provision and in the value‐added to the learning and teaching experience for both students and academics. In determining what might lead to a successful introduction of technology in HE, defining how the value‐added is measured presents difficulties as it is not necessarily linearly quantifiable and can appear transient, dependent on convenience and comfort factors that academics and students associate with using technology. Some of the difficulties in evaluating the effects of the impact of e‐learning are further discussed by Conole & Oliver (2006).

Within the authors’ own university there was a major institutional investment during 2010 to 2012 into the purchase and introduction of Electronic Voting Systems (EVS), also known as Personal Response Systems (PRS) as a technology to support assessment and feedback with an associated evaluation of the issues surrounding the technology introduction and its perceived benefit for students and the institution. While a number of academics have praised the use of EVS for adding a significant pedagogical value in the areas of deep learning, feedback and engagement, there is still a proportion of staff less willing to engage with the new technology (Jefferies, Cubric & Russell, 2013). This suggests that the ‘compelling value’ factor may be more difficult to assess as it depends not only on personal needs, but also on intangibles including the quality of previous experience with new technologies.

The authors first consider some general guidelines for ensuring success for a change management project when introducing technology into a university and then address in more detail the broad issues of:

the building and maintaining of the technical infrastructure;

the provision of appropriate initial and continuing user support,

the management of the impact of change on those who are faced with adapting to different ways of supporting learning for their students.

In order to succeed in embedding technology for supporting learning the authors believe it is crucial to emphasise at the outset the importance of considering the underlying pedagogy of how, what and why material is being taught. The pedagogical decisions should be made first, prior to the decisions on which technology is most appropriate. This ensures that the ‘technology cart’ is not placed before the ‘pedagogical horse’.

2. A background to change management There has been extensive research into models of change management and technology adoption, which the authors will refer to just in passing here. Alongside the multiple theories for technology introduction and adoption, (e.g. Davis,1987 inter alia) recent work by Venkatesh, et al. (2003) has led to the proposal of a Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT). This theory has been formulated in an attempt to unify the various technology acceptance models and theories and also to provide key decision makers with a useful tool for assessing the likelihood of success for new technology introduction and help them in devising the strategies and interventions for wider technology adoption. The theory has been empirically validated and found to outperform an original eight models researched. UTAUT identifies four significant factors, which act as direct determinants of behavioural intentions and thus the actual personal usage of technology. These are:

performance expectancy,

effort expectancy,

social influence and

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facilitating conditions

As will be seen below these four factors have been woven into the development of a series of critical success factors in the authors’ own institution. It is of vital importance that those responsible for introducing new technology in HEIs consider the impact on current academics and their existing and future students. It is from the background of reflecting on the introduction of technology across their own university which has led the authors to draw up a short list of those factors which are critical to the success for introducing technology across an HEI. The critical success factors introduced below were drawn up by the authors following their involvement in evaluating the introduction of electronic voting systems (EVS) across their own university (Jefferies & Cubric, 2012). While the use of EVS has been fairly widespread and popular throughout the school system in the US for some years, their use in HEIs and in the school systems in the UK and Europe tends to be somewhat ‘ad hoc’. The authors evaluated the outcomes of this project, which saw nearly 5,000 EVS handsets provided to mainly undergraduate students as well as the introduction of supporting hardware and software across teaching classrooms on multiple campuses. Additionally an extensive programme of staff and student support was initiated. The driver for this project was a generous investment from their own university into technologies to support assessment and feedback mechanisms, with the facility for immediate feedback through the EVS handsets for either formative or summative tests.

Their evaluation processes also reflected on lessons learnt from a previous major university investment in learning technology when the institution‐wide use of an LMS, was introduced in 2001 (Thornton, et al.,2004).

Additionally EVS had been used on a small‐scale across some of the university’s schools and faculties since 2004. The research question was therefore – how can the key benefits and processes that the HEI underwent previously be fully articulated, to ensure that the current technology introduction will proceed smoothly and be effective in supporting and enhancing the students’ learning? Within the broader areas of change outlined above the authors developed and refined a set of critical success factors which further explore the issues to consider when planning for successful change:

A top‐down initiative must be supported throughout at local level i.e. by senior management and grass roots.

Reliable software and hardware should be readily available (and facilitated in all teaching rooms for campus‐based programmes)

Sufficient initial and on‐going staff development must be provided

Support should be provided for developing a changing pedagogy

Building variety into the use of technology for learning supports student engagement

Responsibility for learning should rest with the student

The mapping of the broad change areas onto the authors’ critical success factors is shown in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1: Mapping of strategic change areas to critical success factors

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3. Critical success factors in relation to the first case study – a blended learning campus‐ based university 3.1 A top‐down initiative supported throughout at local level – from senior management to grass roots A change management initiative must be supported by the Senior Management if radical technology adoption is going to be successful. By radical technology adoption the authors mean the large‐scale institutional wide adoption of a specific technology which impacts across the whole HEI. Requiring the top‐down support from the management for a technology project which affects teaching and learning as a core part of the university’s business will ensure that the change aligns with the university vision and can be planned for. Within business it is always seen to be critical that the IT strategy should align with the business strategy since so much of the budget is now typically spent on IS/IT. The same is true of an HEI since the success of an integrated technology will impact across the institution and needs to be supported throughout and include top‐level technical decision‐makers. Most HEIs now include their educational technology strategy in their university strategic plan, recognising the crucial importance that the provision of reliable and relevant technology plays in the daily lives of staff and students.

The commitment of a Senior Manager for the success of the overall project will ensure that all stakeholders with a relevant interest in introducing new technologies for supporting learning and teaching, i.e. technical infrastructure and support and educational technologists would be included in the decision making alongside the academics. The importance of those at a local level ‘buying in’ to support the project cannot be over‐ estimated either, since it is their workload which will be impacted and their day‐to‐day meeting with students in the classroom which will see the real impact of the technology adoption into their pedagogy. The local ‘gatekeepers’ and influencers among technicians and academics should be identified early on and drawn in to discussions. This will help to ensure a smooth transition and avoid the gathering of academics and support staff into ‘silos’ of support or rejection.

3.2 Reliable software and hardware should be readily available (and facilitated in all teaching rooms for campus‐based programmes) The authors recommend that there should be a sound and reliable technology infrastructure. This will allow academics to think about what and how they are teaching instead of worrying about whether the technology will be working.

The local hardware should ideally be supported centrally so that back‐ups happen automatically outside teaching time. Thus, academics can arrive and set up ‘just in time’ for teaching without having to take along extra ‘kit’ or perform lengthy start‐ups in the classroom. The infrastructure should be designed and tested with the teaching academics in mind and preferably taking into account their regular feedback on what is required.

This will ensure that a priority is given to the teaching and learning taking place in the classroom, instead of letting the technology distract and draw attention away from the pedagogy.

Within the example of using EVS that the authors researched, their university has developed a standard pattern of notices, which are posted in every teaching classroom. These remind academic staff and technologists how to set up and use EVS from the in‐room computer, and remind students about the local channel for the EVS and if necessary how to change channels. It is this close attention to detail from those supporting the embedding of the technology which has helped to instil confidence in academic staff that the system is reliable and robust, whether they use the EVS system weekly or more occasionally.

3.3 Sufficient initial and on‐going staff development must be provided Drawing on their reflections from the earlier introduction of an LMS and the extensive research into evaluating its embedding with staff and students (see above, and also Yeh and Tao, 2013) the authors worked with the wider team across the university for technology introduction and embedding to ensure that sufficient staff support was available on an initial and on‐going basis. This support embraced two aspects, firstly the changing pedagogy that using EVS introduced. The greater use of formative and summative testing was considered and how this could form part of the ordinary curriculum. From a research perspective the authors drew on the

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Amanda Jefferies and Marija Cubric work of Mazur (1997) inter alia, who had previously demonstrated the importance of constructive student engagement in class, and thus a moving away from the centrality of the didactic lecture as the foremost means of instruction for university students. The staff introduction sessions discussed and shared ways in which the EVS handsets could be used creatively to support student understanding. A key lesson learnt from the earlier introduction of the LMS had been to provide staff support in terms of regular instruction sessions which continued for a year or more after the first introduction of the technology. During the second year of their introduction there was a sharing of tips from ‘experienced’ users and a series of workshops which catered for beginners as well as intermediate users and a regular ‘drop‐in session’ for support. A further support for the embedding of the technology was the recruitment of ‘local champions’. An important lesson learnt from the earlier LMS introduction had been that those Schools who appointed staff to help and advise each other had been more successful in the take‐up and embedding of technology across their modules. Once again feedback evaluated by the authors from all staff indicated the importance that the role of a ‘local’ change leader had played in supporting them. Some Schools introduced their own staff self‐support group; this was not seen as merely a quick fix for issues but as an on‐going pedagogic requirement to discuss innovative ways to use EVS. The on‐going training and local support was needed to move the use of technologies on from those categorized by Moore (1991) as ‘innovators’ and ‘early adopters’ to a greater acceptance and willingness for their use by the ‘early’ and ‘late majorities’ and encourage widespread use in faculties and schools. This is not a fast process and may take several years to see the full benefit of academics using this technology confidently and regularly in appropriate ways. Staff development may be organised at an institutional level but it should be reinforced by extra support at the local level for administrators as well as for academics.

3.4 Support should be provided for developing a changing pedagogy which is learner‐centred Where technology is introduced to support student learning and assessment it may differ from a more traditional teacher‐centric pedagogy, indicating a move away from what is described as ‘the sage on the stage’ approach to a ‘guide on the side’. Following examples from Mazur et al and the developing examples of in‐ house practice (e.g. Lorimer and Hilliard, 2007), the centralised Learning and Teaching Institute (LTI) provided a series of workshops on developing a more student‐centred approach to learning to fit alongside the embedding of technology across the university. Much of this was already in place prior to the introduction of EVS, to support wider online engagement through the LMS and ensure it was not just used as an online repository for teaching materials. Developing and applying different approaches to pedagogy aimed to encourage discussion between students about the knowledge gained, with a more constructivist approach to building their understanding. This benefitted students in their use of technology on‐campus and academics were encouraged to consider how they could further blend the online and face‐to‐face learning. Local champions supported those who wanted to experiment with more technology‐based student‐centred approaches and extensive Continuing Staff Development (CPD) was provided. This area has also seen extensive research through other JISC funded programmes such as ESCAPE (2011) and REAP (Nicol et al. 2010).

3.5 Building variety into the use of technology for learning supports student engagement Within the example of using EVS technology the research showed (Jefferies & Cubric, 2012), that in line with other research projects most students were enthusiastic about the use of the technology for testing their understanding and knowledge. They noted and appreciated the changing classroom pedagogies that this often led to, in terms of more opportunity for discussion and for recapping material. They were enthusiastic about the speed with which they received relevant feedback, noting that this showed them in a formative situation what they had understood or what they needed to spend further time on learning. They recognised that using the handsets in every teaching session could lead to the same onset of boredom and lack of interest through ‘death by EVS’ that can happen when PowerPoint is overused. The use of the same style of teaching and assessing can ultimately lead to a lack of engagement with the material in the same way that didactic lectures may lead to students lacking concentration. It has been suggested that placing all materials online can lead to falling attendance figures and this may well be true if the student (often incorrectly) cannot see the benefit of attending in person when everything is available for downloading online. The alternative is to vary the patterns and require the student to engage in different ways online so that the face to face sessions are used to support learning instead of delivering the same material already available to them. The recent examples of ‘flipped classrooms’ show that students can benefit from a greater variety in their learning through the judicious design of online materials (e.g. Martin, 2012).

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3.6 Responsibility for learning should rest with the student The authors suggest that one should not consider the introduction of new technologies in HE without considering the impact on students and have spent significant time researching the impact of new technologies on students (Jefferies, Cubric, Russell, 2013) and gathering their views alongside the necessary change management approaches from industry.

The latest research into student ownership of their own computer identifies high world‐wide levels of personal ownership of laptops at around 83% (Educause, 2012 p.13) and alongside a 5545% increase in the ownership of smartphones in the U.S. since 2004 ( ibid p.15). It is clear that while few universities mandate the ownership of computers and continue to provide desktop computer access to students, it is now seen as an essential technology to own to stay connected with their studies and an indication of serious commitment to accessing their learning.

Within the EVS example used above it was decided that those students in schools where EVS technologies were being used should be given personal ownership to an EVS handset, this was linked through an online database to the student’s unique ID number. This allowed academics to use the EVS to schedule formative and summative tests and record the students’ achievements immediately. After moderating the marks student received confirmation swiftly. Any issues over handset ownership could be resolved promptly as staff had access to the central EVS ownership database. Other examples of universities with a single point of loan such as the library from which students borrowed handsets have proved less flexible in their use. This format relied on sufficient handsets being always available and did not include a database where student IDs were linked with a unique handset.

4. An exploration of the critical success factors with traditional campus‐based institution In another much shorter study undertaken by the first author, a traditional, campus‐based research‐focussed institution embarked on the introduction of technology for a flexible online learning programme for mature students embarking on post‐graduate study. This HEI had an in‐house LMS with a small team of dedicated technologists working to support and develop its use. While most academics were technically competent, few of them were using the LMS to a great extent and many had not previously experienced directly editing and uploading materials, nor using the discussion fora available. With an emphasis on face to face contact in small classes there had been less incentive to embed technology to enhance student learning and engagement.

With regard to the critical success factors suggested above, each is now described with its relevance to this second case study:

4.1 A top‐down initiative must be supported throughout at local level i.e. by senior management and grass roots The project had been proposed by a small team of ‘early adopters’ of technology for receiving external funding and this had included a letter of support from a Pro‐Vice‐Chancellor. At Faculty level there were definite pockets of enthusiasm and the small team identified early on those ‘gatekeepers’ who controlled opinion, working with them individually to share project plans and identify the potential of online learning. In retrospect the team members reflected that a tangible commitment from the senior management to a small reduction in working hours, while they were developing the materials would have resulted in the project moving ahead faster and at a regular pace.

4.2 Reliable software and hardware should be readily available (and facilitated in all teaching rooms for campus‐based programmes) The thrust of this case study was to set learning in an online context and the academics all relied on the LMS being easily available on and off‐campus to accommodate new ways of working as they developed an appropriate pedagogy for online learning. This required more engagement remotely with students and a reliable and easy way for students to access their materials.

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4.3 Sufficient initial and on‐going staff development must be provided The staff development in the second case study related to introducing academic and administrative staff to working effectively online. Some of this support was offered in small tutorial‐like settings or a one to one basis.

As the development team prepared to launch the flexible learning programme they identified the on‐going support issues that should be built in to the delivery of the programme through the academic year and started to recruit student change agents. These mature students would be available online to support the new students embarking on the programme. At the same time they identified local champions who could support the academics in each faculty.

4.4 Support should be provided for developing a changing pedagogy The requirements for changing the pedagogical design by moving from a campus‐based and face‐to‐face delivery to a flexible online learning programme were discussed at length as the generic programme was designed and built. The team spent time reflecting on what the pedagogical drivers were in order to avoid merely transferring existing material from a face‐to‐face environment to an online one. In their design, extensive use was made of opportunities for students to engage with each other and academics in ‘chatrooms’ and find support online.

4.5 Building variety into the use of technology for learning supports student engagement An intrinsic part of the design for using technology meant that academics sought out a variety of media, including video clips and podcasts and drew up a programme which allowed some face‐to‐ face engagement alongside synchronous and asynchronous sessions online.

4.6 Responsibility for learning should rest with the student There was no doubt in this smaller case study that students would be engaging with technology for learning, and the team involved in the project design were confident that this critical success factor was already a certainty. The student demographics which expected a cohort of mature students to enrol also considered how to support students who were less confident with learning technologies and this was addressed by the induction programme designed to ensure they could start off from a level playing‐field.

5. Reflections on building success into the introduction of technology to enhance learning In this section the authors reflect on the broad areas of introducing technology to enhance learning. The first imperative to ‘get it right’ was for the building and maintaining of the technical infrastructure. As has been shown this requires senior management support to ensure the technology and educational strategies are aligned within the university’s strategic plan; funding technology investment is expensive and requires clear commitment throughout from the management. The provision of local and centralised technical support for academic staff was shown to be very necessary in this survey and this is further reinforced by the findings from the UCISA TEL (Technology Enhanced Learning) Survey for 2012, which noted that: ‘Availability of TEL support staff’ remains the leading factor in encouraging the development of TEL, followed by ‘central university and school/departmental senior management support’.

(Walker, Voce, Ahmed, 2012:2) Reflecting on examples of technology introduction in recent research and the authors’ own experience, the support for staff at all levels has been essential to ensure the embedding of technologies within the HEI and alongside this support for learners. This does not require that all academics must be using identical technologies, but that they all have access to full support for those which they need to use and know how and where they can find the necessary support in person or online.

The management of the impact of change which technology brings affects users at each level and within the university sector it will also affect the changing pedagogy as academics discover the opportunities for engagement with additional materials that technology can offer their students. Recent pedagogic developments have noted a shift away from students as passive learners in a didactic process and towards the expectation of greater engagement and ownership of their learning by students as exemplified in the case studies explored above.

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Amanda Jefferies and Marija Cubric Planning for success in introducing the wider use of technologies and their embedding within the pedagogy of HE entails careful attention to the design and close engagement with academics and students and full evaluation of technology use with students (e.g. Twetten et al,2007). Without the commitment of the stakeholders throughout the institution and their understanding of the benefits that technology can bring then the authors suggest that ‘innovators’ may introduce technology but will fail to embed it successfully.

References Conole, G. and Oliver, M. (2006) Contemporary perspectives in e‐learning research: themes, methods and impact on practice, Routledge.

Dahlstrom, E. (2012) The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology. Louisville: EDUCAUSE Centre for Applied Research.

Davis, F. D. (1989). Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and user acceptance of information technology. MIS Quarterly, 13(3), 319–339.

ESCAPE Project report (2011)at:http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/page/12458419/ESCAPE%20Project Geoghegan, W. H. (1994) “What Ever Happened To Instructional Technology?” Paper presented at the 22nd Annual Conference of the International Business Schools Computing Association.

Jefferies, A., Cubric, M. and Russell, M. B. (2013). ‘Enhancing Learning and Teaching Using Electronic Voting Systems’ In: Blessinger, P. & Wankel, C. (eds.) Increasing Student Engagement and Retention Using Classroom Technologies.

Bingley: Emerald.

Jefferies, A., Cubric, M (2012) ‘Evaluating Electronic Voting Systems’ The EEVS Project Final Report [online] http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/page/48734953/EEVS%20Project JISC Design Studio (2011) [Available online] http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/assessmentandfeedback.aspx JISC (2011) [Available online] http://www.jisc.ac.uk/developingdigitalliteracies JISC (2007) [Available online] http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearningpedagogy/learnerexperience.aspx Kirkwood, A. and Price, L. (2013) ‘Technology‐enhanced learning and teaching in higher education: what is ‘enhanced’ and how do we know? A critical literature review’, Learning, Media and Technology, DOI:10.1080/17439884.2013.770404 Lorimer, J. and Hilliard, A. (2009) ‘Use of Electronic Voting System (EVS) to Facilitate Teaching and Assessment of Decision Making Skills in Undergraduate Radiography Education’ in Remenyi (Ed) Proceedings of 8th European Conference for E‐Learning, Bari, Italy Martin, F. G. (2012) ‘Will massive open online courses change how we teach?’ Communications of the ACM, 55, 26‐28.

Mazur, E. (1997) Peer Instruction, A User’s manual, Upper Saddle River, NJ Prentice‐Hall Moore, G. A. (1991). Crossing the Chasm, New York: Harper Business.

Oblinger, D. and Oblinger, J. (eds.) 2006. Educating the Net Generation: Educause Nicol, D. and Draper, S. (2009) A blueprint for transformational organisational change in higher education: REAP as a case study. In: Mayes, J. T. (ed.) Transforming Higher Education through Technology‐Enhanced Learning.

Thornton, M., Jefferies, A., Alltree, J., Jones, I. Leinonen, E. (2004) ‘Changing Pedagogy: Does the introduction of networked learning have an impact on teaching?’ in Proceedings of 4th International Conference on Networked Learning Lancaster, 2004 Twetten, J., Smith, M.K., Julius, J. and Murphy‐Boyer, L. (2007) ‘Successful Clicker Standardization’ in Educause Quarterly 4, 2007 Venkatesh, V., Morris, M. G., Davis, G. B., & Davis, F. B. (2003). User acceptance of information technology: toward a unified view, MIS Quarterly, 27(3), 425–478.

Walker, R., Voce, J. and Ahmed, J. (2012) Survey of Technology Enhanced Learning for higher education in the UK [online] http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/~/media/groups/ssg/surveys/TEL_survey_2012_final_ex_apps White, D and Cornu, A. L. (2011) Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16.

Yeh, C. R., and Tao, Y.‐H. (2013).’How Benefits and Challenges of Personal Response Systems Impact Students’ Continuance Intention: A Taiwanese Context’ Educational Technology & Society 16 (2), 257–270.

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Adopting Blended Learning – Practical Challenges and Possible Solutions for Small Private Institutions Olga Kandinskaia Cyprus International Institute of Management (CIIM), Nicosia, Cyprus olga@ciim.ac.cy

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to highlight practical challenges in the process of the adoption of blended learning, and to suggest specific solutions, which may be applicable to all types of academic institutions, but are primarily intended for small private organizations. One of the barriers discussed in the paper is the skeptical attitude of faculty. While many institutions are embracing online methods of instruction, there are still many academics who are not convinced.

Researchers have identified the resistance of faculty as a major obstacle to the widespread adoption of various forms of e‐ learning. The reasons behind this notorious resistance to innovation are well understood by now, but there have been few attempts to provide specific suggestions for how to transform this attitude. The strongest argument is usually the evidence of the improved learning outcomes. However, as many researchers admit, it may be difficult to collect such evidence. We propose a different approach. Our suggestion is to focus on measuring the level of student satisfaction and the improvements in students’ learning experience. High level of student satisfaction is particularly important for private institutions, and therefore it may be a powerful practical argument in favor of blended learning. The paper shares the experience of adopting blended learning at a private postgraduate institution in Southern Europe. In 2011 the Chairman of this business school set the goal to introduce e‐learning to enrich the traditional ways of teaching and learning. The author of this paper, one of the resident professors, has been given the task of leading the blended learning initiative at the school. The research presented in this paper is of empirical nature, and is using both quantitative and qualitative methods.

The findings of the paper are based on the author’s observations from interviews with faculty, staff, students and alumni, and also on the results of the students’ surveys conducted by the author over the period of January 2012 – April 2013. The main findings of this paper can be summarized as follows. For the successful adoption of blended learning the positive attitude of faculty, staff and students is of crucial importance. An effective way to change the attitude of academics is to start the process with only one blended course (or just a few), which will be created and run as a pilot test by an enthusiastic professor, with the aim to ensure highly positive feedback from students, and using it as a best convincing argument for innovative teaching. The paper proposes a specific evaluation form to be used in the collection of students’ feedback. The author presents the results of such evaluations, and argues that the students’ positive responses truly made a difference and transformed the institutional attitude. At the same time, they contributed towards quality assurance and quality enhancement processes at the school.

Keywords: adopting blended learning, improving student learning experience, faculty resistance, measuring student satisfaction, evaluation form for blended course

1. Introduction 1.1 Blended learning as an integral part of education In the last two decades e‐learning has been steadily growing in popularity. According to the 2012 Survey by the Sloan Consortium, "the rate of growth in online enrollments remains extremely robust”, and the number of students in the U.S. taking at least one online course has now surpassed 6.7 million, which represents an increase of 570,000 students over the previous year (Allen, Seaman, 2013, p.4). As Bacow et al (2012) commented, in the U.S. “online learning is taking place at just about every college and university” (p. 7).

Moreover, the arrival of MOOCs (massive open online courses) in the second half of 2011 in the U.S. drew tremendous media attention to the e‐learning phenomenon, with European universities joining up in this initiative in April 2013.

It is overwhelmingly clear by now that every higher education institution has been affected by these developments, and that ignoring online learning is not an option anymore. The pressure to incorporate e‐ learning into traditional university courses has never been stronger. With the increasing competition to attract the modern generation of students, university deans see blended learning as an important competitive advantage. The concept of blended learning as “the thoughtful fusion of face‐to‐face and online learning experiences” (Garrison, Vaughan, 2008, p. 5) fits well with today’s aspirations of academic deans. As Allen and Seaman (2013) show, 69.1% of chief academic leaders see e‐learning as critical to their long‐term strategy – the highest it has been for the last ten‐year period (p.4).

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1.2 Adoption of blended learning: relevant literature Practical implementation of blended learning is challenging. There have been numerous comments on that in the literature. To mention some, in relevance to this paper, Garrison and Kanuka (2004) wrote that the complexity of blended learning becomes evident when we take into account the wide variety of settings, diversity of the student population and consequent learning designs. A short paper by Stacey & Gerbic (2008) gave an overview of success factors for blended learning which had emerged from the literature by that time.

They grouped those into four categories: institutional success factors, teachers’ perspective, students’ expectations, pedagogic considerations. The fundamental paper Blended Learning in Higher Education (Garrison and Vaughan, 2008) provided both theoretical framework and essential practical guidance for implementing technology‐enhanced learning. The author of this paper also found EDUCAUSE documents such as Blended Learning Workshop Guide extremely helpful when it came to practical implementation.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that blended learning has matured and became more widely accepted, there are still considerable obstacles to its adoption, which do not seem to be going away. A comprehensive overview of current and anticipated challenges, which the author of this paper found extremely relevant, was provided by EDUCAUSE Blended Learning: A Report on the ELI Focus Session (2010). Also Bacow et al in their study Barriers to Adoption of Online Learning Systems in U.S. Higher Education (2012) provided a comprehensive list of obstacles, which the leaders of 25 major academic institutions have encountered in attempting to supplement traditional methods of instruction with new, technology‐enabled instruction. Their findings were of particular interest since they allowed insightful comparisons between the current situation in the U.S. and the specific case of a European business school, which is the focus of this paper.

1.3 Paper objectives The main aim of this paper is to contribute with data and critical analysis to the international research on the process of adoption of blended learning at higher education institutions (HEI), and offer insight on what practical challenges may be encountered, and how an institution may deal with those challenges. More specifically, the objectives of this case study are the following:

To share the experience of adopting blended learning in a specific setting, such as a small private HEI located in the EU, and aimed at a specific student population (master‐level students);

To comment on motivation for adopting blended learning, the features of the adoption process itself, the attitude of the faculty, and the students’ perspective;

To provide conclusions and practical recommendations for successful adoption of blended learning.

2. A blended learning initiative in practice 2.1 The details of the specific setting The paper is based on the experience of adopting blended learning at a small postgraduate institution in an EU member country. It is a private non‐for‐profit business management school. We will be referring to it below as the School. It was founded in 1990 by a group of local business leaders and a team of academics representing some of the world’s best business schools. The School offers MBA and a number of MSc degrees, and also runs an extensive range of non‐degree executive education programmes. The degree programmes follow the modular (versus the semester type) principle, which allows inviting visiting faculty from abroad. The classes take place in the evenings and weekends to accommodate Master‐level students who therefore can complete their degrees without leaving their job.

The School is small in size, with approximately 300 students spread between two campuses (in two different towns). The School has 7 resident faculty and more than 50 visiting professors from abroad. The School prides itself on offering exclusive, high‐quality postgraduate education ‐ serving as “a centre of excellence.” The School has a very well established reputation in the local market, but in the recent years it has met intense competition from local state‐owned and private universities.

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2.2 Motivation for adopting blended learning In most cases, blended learning is adopted because the traditional “information transmission approach of large lectures” does not satisfy anymore the modern generation of students who “expect a relevant and engaging learning experience” (Garrison, Vaughan, 2008, p. ix). In the case presented in this paper the motivation was somewhat different. As a private institution for postgraduate students, the School has relatively small classes, and its highly interactive learning environment with a variety of teaching methods has always been the School’s distinguishing competitive advantage.

Blended learning was initially mentioned in 2010 when the School’s MBA programme was undergoing international accreditation with AMBA. Following the committee’s recommendations, the School introduced its own VLE (virtual learning environment) via the open source Moodle platform, which began to be used to distribute course materials to students.

In 2011 the Chairman of the School set the goal to introduce elements of e‐learning to enrich traditional ways of teaching and learning, and thus to move forward from web‐facilitated courses to blended. The reasoning behind this move had to do, firstly, with further improving the quality of the School’s programmes, and secondly, with increasing flexibility of studies. Regarding the quality, it was highlighted that blended method supports and facilitates interactive and reflective learning, and helps to develop an essential skill of independent life‐long learning, which is particularly important in the constantly changing business world.

Regarding the flexibility of courses, the School was eager to use online technologies to allow students more options in combining work with studies, which was expected to help attract more students, especially from abroad.

Since there was no candidate within the School who could become the leader for this new blended learning initiative, the Chairman invited applications from academics who had experience with online and blended environments. In this way in November 2011 the author of this paper became a resident professor and was given the task of leading the blended learning initiative at the School.

2.3 Important initial concerns and constraints There were two major concerns when it came to the actual initiation of blended learning.

In what specific ways can we convince/encourage resident and visiting professors to use the School’s Moodle? How much guidance should be given, and to what extent should the School insist on its new rules?

The perceived problem had to do with the fact that the School normally gave a high degree of freedom to a visiting professor in choosing teaching methods. That was essentially part of the School’s strategy, and it served the goal to expose local students to teaching methods from different parts of the world. Most visiting professors have been teaching for many years at the School and the School’s Chairman was worried as to how they would accept changes.

How do we know that our students will welcome this change?

As a private small institution located in a small community where the “word of mouth” spreads quickly and means a lot, the School has to be very sensitive to students’ needs. The School’s students are on average 30 years old, some in their early twenties, but some are in their fifties. Most of them are employed, and many have families with children. Their needs are quite different from typical undergraduate students of large universities. Furthermore, the perception was that more mature students (over 35 years old) may not be proficient enough in technology and may react negatively.

The major constraints for the new blended learning initiative were the following:

Limited budget

The School is a charitable institution that receives no funding from the state or from private donors, which implies a reliance on its own resources and revenues. The School has been experiencing lower enrollments due to a number of factors, and its financial situation has been negatively affected. The expectation of the School’s management was that blended learning will allow certain savings, though it was never a goal. When starting

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Limited human resources

Due to the small size of the School, the team for the new blended learning initiative was also very small. It comprised of an academic, an IT person and a librarian, each of whom also had other duties at the School.

2.4 Pilot test It was decided that the best course of action in those circumstances would be to develop and run a pilot blended course, evaluate student reactions to the new method, assess implications for the instructor, discuss internally the results and then decide how to proceed further.

In developing the new instructional design the main emphasis was on transforming Moodle from a “storage room” into an encouraging learning environment, which would provide a new kind of learning experience. It meant effectively the following:

Creating a friendly‐looking virtual space

Emphasizing the lecturer’s personality (in line with the School’s strategy in the F2F environment)

Providing a well‐organized structure for course materials

Offering opportunities for interactive learning, quick feedback and self‐assessment (quizzes, assignments, surveys)

Engaging students through social learning (online forum discussions)

A Corporate Finance MBA course taught by the author was chosen for the role of the pilot blended course. It was a 6 ECTS credits course scheduled as an intense module for 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18 January, 2012. The traditional course was revised to replace some in‐class activities with online assignments, quizzes, video links and online forum discussions, which were aimed to create a new learning experience for students. Preference was given to very simple online tools via Moodle to make the technical side easily understood by all students.

The course assessment was changed to incorporate online assignments and discussions (20% of the total grade), and also the F2F sessions were reduced from 28 to 24 contact hours (i.e. two hours were reduced from each of the weekend sessions which normally would go from 9 am till 5.15 pm and presented a challenge for students). Due to the modular principle of the course, there were no opportunities to give students any online activities in‐between the F2F sessions, and therefore the goal was to offer activities either before the start of the F2F meetings or afterwards for revision.

2.5 Evaluating student satisfaction Proper evaluation of this new blended learning experience was a major priority from the very beginning. Proof of student positive experience in the pilot course would serve as important validation of the chosen strategy and as a powerful argument to convince the School’s faculty.

A special Blended Learning Method Evaluation Form was developed to assess students’ reactions. It included 11 multiple choice questions and also asked for suggestions for improvement and additional comments. The results were to be processed via a specially written program, which assigned score from 1 to 5 to the answers, calculated percentages of different answers, total score, and average score. Full text of questions with multiple choice answers and corresponding scores is presented in Table 1. The higher the score ‐ the better is the result.

2.6 Pilot blended course evaluation results The evaluation results from the pilot course are presented in Figure 1 (as processed by the Moodle Evaluation Form Calculator program). The main highlights from student feedback can be summarized as follows:

68% of the students said that the use of Moodle (=online element) for this course was either necessary, or both necessary and interesting, with the total score of 3.9,

50% of the students rated the new blended format as better and much better than the traditional format, with 22% saying that it was the same in terms of quality (total score 3.5),

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72% found the extended opportunity offered by Moodle to interact with the lecturer as either somewhat useful, or useful and interesting; same number of students found the extended opportunity offered by Moodle to interact with fellow students as useful and interesting, with total score of 3.8 for both questions,

72% answered that Moodle ensured better access to materials and helped them learn better (total score 3.6),

13 out of 18 students appreciated the idea of reduced lecture hours on weekends (total score 3.9), but one student out of 18 strongly insisted on more lectures, while 4 said it didn’t make a difference.

Furthermore, students underlined the importance of a modern technology‐enhanced teaching, the convenience of submitting assignments online, the well‐organized structure of the course materials in Moodle (94% said it was clearly presented), the great appreciation for online forum discussions and the lecturer’s presence (the total score for instructor’s participation was particularly high: 4.8). Student complaints, on the other hand, had mostly to do with the increased workload in the blended course (32% of students felt they spent too much time online) and difficult activities (28% rated online activities as difficult or very hard).

Table 1: Questions of the blended learning method evaluation form

Questions 1. What do you think about the use of Moodle for this course?

2. How would you rate this new Moodle+F2F format compared to traditional F2F teaching?

3. How would you rate the level of difficulty of Moodle activities for this particular course?

4. What do you think of the amount of work that you had to do through Moodle (=time spent)?

5. What do you think about the extended opportunity offered by Moodle to interact with the lecturer?

6. What do you think about the extended opportunity offered by Moodle to interact with fellow students?

7. Do you think that by using Moodle you had a better access to the course materials (course outline, lectures, articles, revisions) and a better opportunity to learn?

8. Was the Moodle part of the course clearly presented?

9. The use of Moodle enabled us to offer you more flexibility in your studies (e.g. certain hours were reduced from the schedule). What do you think about it?

10. The Instructor showed active participation in Moodle and was helpful.

11. If you participated in any e‐ course/blended course before, how would you rate this Moodle course as compared to your other online experience?

Answers to choose 3 4 I don’t mind Necessary

1 I don’t like it Much worse

2 Unnecessary Worse

Same

Better

5 Necessary and interesting Much better

Very hard

Difficult

Not very difficult

Rather easy

The right level

Very little

Too much

Rather a lot

Not quite enough

Reasonable amount

Not useful

Doesn’t matter

Somewhat useful

Very useful

Very useful and interesting

Not useful

Doesn’t matter

Somewhat useful

Very useful

Very useful and interesting

Not really

Same as without Moodle

Yes

Much better

Much better and also different

No

I was a bit confused Not a good idea

On the whole, yes No difference

Yes Good idea, I liked it

Yes, all very clear I greatly appreciated it

Never

Seldom

Sometimes

Often

Very often

Much worse

Worse

Same

Better

Much better

Very bad idea

2.7 Interpretation of the pilot results: a major caution The results of the pilot blended course were internally discussed at a faculty and staff meeting on March 6, 2012. Overall the presented student feedback was interpreted as highly positive, considering that 84% of those students had never taken any online course before, and they didn’t specifically choose the blended format

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Olga Kandinskaia over the traditional one. Quantitative data from the evaluation forms confirmed a higher level of student satisfaction, while the individual impressions of the lecturer/author and the informal conversations with the students confirmed increased students’ engagement, enhanced interaction, better opportunities for the essential “purposeful reflection” (Garrison, Vaughan, 2008, p. 14), and an overall feeling of improved learning outcomes in the pilot blended course.

Based on the overall positive reaction to the pilot blended course, the decision was made to go ahead with broader implementation of blended learning. A particular caution however was seen necessary when it came to cutting down the F2F time. As it became clear from the pilot experience, a certain number of students chose the School specifically because they wanted to have the advantage of F2F interaction in a small class, and they were bound to react negatively to a reduction in contact hours. This in fact goes in line with the situation in other selective private institutions (Debating the ‘Flipped Classroom’ at Stanford, 2012).

The School did not want to deal with disappointed students, even if there would be few of those. Therefore, it was decided that at this early stage only a minor reduction of class hours (no more than 15%) is acceptable and it is up to the instructor to decide whether such a reduction suits a specific course.

Figure 1: Evaluation results record for the pilot course

2.8 Further steps Resident faculty were encouraged to start including online activities in their courses with the purpose to gain experience in this area and test out in their own courses the techniques suggested by the pilot course.

Meanwhile, a comprehensive Blended Learning Guide for Faculty was created by the author. It was presented to the resident faculty on May 10, 2012, and served as a good opportunity for a discussion and reaching mutual understanding. Over the summer 2012, the Guide was distributed to all visiting professors to communicate the new approach. A short Student Moodle Guide and a Student Moodle Training Course were created, and also an Orientation Moodle Workshop for students was introduced.

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Starting from the academic year 2012‐2013, the School strongly encouraged all instructors to use Moodle as an interactive learning environment. Due to the specific situation with the School’s faculty, it was not possible to organize any common workshops as normally suggested (Garrison, Vaughan, 2008, p.50), and therefore, the School’s support for instructors was through on‐going individual consultations with the leader of the blended learning initiative, and the help of the School’s librarian who did all the routine work of creating a Moodle course page, uploading materials, and creating activities with the content provided by the instructor.

2.9 Accumulated blended learning evaluation results In the period between September 2012 and May 2013 the feedback from 14 blended courses was collected, but it is important to note that the extent to which online activities were incorporated in each course varied greatly. The accumulated scores from the blended courses (with total number of students surveyed 256) are presented in Table 2.

Table 2: Accumulated scores from blended learning method evaluation forms

Questions

1. What do you think about the use of Moodle for this course?

2. How would you rate this new Moodle+F2F format compared to traditional F2F teaching?

3. How would you rate the level of difficulty of Moodle activities for this particular course?

4. What do you think of the amount of work that you had to do through Moodle?

5. What do you think about the extended opportunity offered by Moodle to interact with the lecturer?

6. What do you think about the extended opportunity offered by Moodle to interact with fellow students?

7. Do you think that by using Moodle you had a better access to the course materials and a better opportunity to learn?

8. Was the Moodle part of the course clearly presented?

9. The use of Moodle enabled us to offer you more flexibility in your studies. What do you think about it?

Scores received In the pilot course (January 2012)

Average for the 3 blended courses with the same subject and the same instructor as in the pilot course (October 2012, December 2012, March 2013)

Accumulated averages from 11 blended courses run over the period September 2012 – May 2013 (other subjects and other instructors from the pilot)

Total accumulated averages from 14 blended courses (run over the period September 2012 – May 2013) and the pilot course

3.9

4.3

3.7

3.8

3.5

3.9

3.3

3.5

3.5

3.3

3.7

3.6

3.1

2.9

3.9

3.6

3.8

3.9

3.4

3.6

3.8

4

3.2

3.4

3.6

4.1

3.6

3.7

4.3

4.2

3.2

3.7

3.9

3.9

3.7

3.8

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Questions

10. The Instructor showed active participation in Moodle and was helpful.

11. If you participated in any e‐course/blended course before, how would you rate this Moodle course as compared to your other online experience?

Total score Response rate

Scores received In the pilot course (January 2012)

Average for the 3 blended courses with the same subject and the same instructor as in the pilot course (October 2012, December 2012, March 2013)

Accumulated averages from 11 blended courses run over the period September 2012 – May 2013 (other subjects and other instructors from the pilot)

Total accumulated averages from 14 blended courses (run over the period September 2012 – May 2013) and the pilot course

4.8

4.5

3.4

3.7

3.5

4

3.5

3.6

3.8 95%

3.9 85%

3.5 82%

3.6 83%

It is worthwhile to note that the 3 blended courses (Corporate Finance) taught by the author scored higher in questions 1, 2 (attitude towards blended learning and new format), 5, 6 (forum interaction), 7, 8 (better access to course materials), 10 (instructor’s participation), and earned the highest total score (3.9). The lowest total score was earned in the blended courses taught by other instructors, though 3.5 is still a satisfactory score. The only two questions, in which other courses/instructors scored higher, had to do with the amount of work (less) and the level of difficulty of online activities (easier). However, as it emerged from the conversations with students, the challenging nature of the blended Corporate Finance class and its additional revision and forum activities in Moodle were highly appreciated by many students since it allowed them “to learn so much more and in a different way”.

3. Conclusions and recommendations for successful adoption of blended learning Reflecting on the results of the blended learning initiative presented in this case study and matching those results with approaches in literature, we can summarize challenges and possible solutions in the following way.

3.1 Overcoming resistance to change Blended learning in practice means significant change for any institution. In real life people are resistant to change. Starting with one pilot blended course (run by an academic with expertise and passion for blended learning) is a prudent course of action. It allows to work through technical issues, to understand student reactions to the new method, to comprehend implications for faculty and staff. Most importantly, it should aim to create positive attitude towards the new type of learning within the institution.

3.2 Evaluating student satisfaction Convincing students and staff is relatively easy ‐ though still requires a lot of effort. The biggest challenge is winning faculty, and at the same time it is a crucial factor for success. Yet Allen and Seaman (2013) confirm little progress in this area so far (p.6). An excellent initial argument to convince faculty of private institutions is an increased level of student satisfaction, which can be easily measured. The paper proposed a specific evaluation form to be used in the collection of student feedback, and a special software program to process the results. The author fully realizes that while focusing on student satisfaction is a good start, it is very important to work in the direction of evaluating learning outcomes to be able to further validate the blended format within the School.

3.3 Educational and technical support for faculty Extensive faculty support is most essential, i.e. assistance with technical issues, workshops and/or on‐going individual consultations, regular meetings to discuss best practices, and, most importantly, allowing time for faculty to revise traditional courses. As observed by the author, professors with less current load became more successful adopters of blended learning as compared to those who had a big teaching load. In the example of

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the School, many visiting professors – despite the Chairman’s initial concerns ‐ turned out to be much more cooperative than resident professors who had to deliver a lot of teaching. This observation goes in line with the ELI Focus Session (2010) whose participants cited “faculty development” and “finding the time to research, develop and implement blended courses” as top challenges (p.4).

3.4 Alignment with institutional goals As Garrison and Vaughan (2008) note, “blended learning must be shown to be consistent with the values of the institution” (p.165). This principle has proved to be essential. It also implies that adjustments are needed. For each institution however, irrespective of its specific goals, blended learning can become a powerful catalyst for positive quality changes.

Acknowledgements I want to thank the CIIM Chairman John Ioannides for his visionary support, the members of the CIIM Blended Learning Initiative team Evgenia Constantinou (librarian) and Alex Vrahimis (IT Manager) for their practical help, and Eugene Kandinsky for writing the Moodle Evaluation Form Calculator program.

References Allen, I.E. and Seaman, J. (2013) Changing Course: Ten Years of Tracking Online Education in the United States, Babson Survey Research Group and Quahog Research Group, LLC, [online], http://sloanconsortium.org/publications/survey/changing_course_2012 Bacow, L.S., Bowen, W.G., Guthrie, K.M., Lack, K.A., Long, M.P. (2012) Barriers to Adoption of Online Learning Systems in U.S. Higher Education, ITHAKA S+R, [online], http://www.sr.ithaka.org/research‐publications/barriers‐adoption‐ online‐learning‐systems‐us‐higher‐education Boettcher, J.V. (2011) Ten Best Practices for Teaching Online. Quick Guide for New Online faculty [online], http://www.designingforlearning.info/services/writing/ecoach/tenbest.html Diaz, V. and Brown, M. (2010) Blended Learning: A Report on the ELI Focus Session, EDUCAUSE, [online], http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI3023.pdf Diaz, V. and Brown, M. (2013) Emerging Technologies, Innovation, and Academic Transformation: A Report on the ELI Focus Session, EDUCAUSE, [online], http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/PDF/ELI3028.pdf Diaz, V. and Strickland, J. (2009) ELI Discovery Tool: Blended Learning Workshop Guide, EDUCAUSE, [online], www.educause.edu/blendedlearning retrieved 02/11/2011 Garrison, D.R. and Kanuka, H. (2004) “Blended learning: Uncovering its transformative potential in higher education”, Internet and Higher Education, 7, pp 95‐105.

Garrison, D.R. and Vaughan, N.D. (2008) Blended Learning in Higher Education: Framework, Principles and Guidelines, Jossey‐Bass, San Francisco.

Organisational Benefits of E‐learning, White Paper by Epic, [online], http://www.workforce‐development‐ advice.com/support‐files/19_wp_organisational_benefits.pdf Parry, M. (2012) “Debating the ‘Flipped Classroom’ at Stanford”, The Chronicle of Higher Education ‐ Wired Campus, January 5, blog, [online], http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/debating‐the‐flipped‐classroom‐at‐ stanford/34811 Stacey, E. & Gerbic, P. (2008) “Success factors for blended learning”, Hello! Where are you in the landscape of educational technology? Proceedings ascilite Melbourne 2008, [online], http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/melbourne08/procs/stacey.pdf

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Evaluation of e‐Learning Courses for Lifelong Learning Jana Kapounova, Milan Majdak and Pavel Novosad University of Ostrava, Czech Republic Jana.Kapounova@osu.cz majdak.milan@seznam.cz novosad@novosad.cc

Abstract: The article reports on the evaluation results of selected eLearning courses. Evaluated courses were designed for students as well as adults studying at secondary vocational schools. Courses were created by a professional company in cooperation with the secondary school teachers. This article defines and refines criteria for evaluation of eLearning courses. Our criteria are grouped into following sections: information about the course itself – basic and extended, technical aspects, didactic aspects, content aspects, user friendliness, control panels and multimedia, communication and course management. Data for evaluation of each section is gathered through electronic questionnaires. An evaluation tool is then used to evaluate the gathered data. This tool was developed at our department and is available online. Data from evaluation of selected courses was subjected to analysis and the results were provided to the schools, professional company developers and to the author of the evaluation tool as a feedback.

Keywords: eLearning course, lifelong learning, secondary vocational school, evaluation tool, evaluation criteria

1. Introduction It has not only been in the Czech Republic that the economy has struggled with the lack of apprentices in technical professions over the last few years. At the same time there is a greater demand for retrained workers in fields where technology has been changing rapidly. This gives rise to questions such as how to motivate trainees as well as how to effectively create learning materials for courses where the trainees need training especially in skill.

Can eLearning be used in such courses?

In the Czech Republic there are three types of institutions concerned with eLearning:

Public schools: primary schools, secondary schools (grammar schools and various vocational schools) and post secondary schools.

Private educational institutions.

Private consulting and intermediary companies.

Considering distance education, eLearning is most frequently used for in‐house business education, because to some extent it can save resources and time. The primary advantage of eLearning is its flexibility. eLearning courses are a common practice in post secondary education. Our study focuses on the quality of eLearning courses for secondary vocational schools. What is the level of their quality? Are they beneficial for the students?

Secondary vocational schools are currently transforming into centers of lifelong learning and so provide education not only for their regular students, but also for adults. These schools are often technically oriented and this manifests itself in a low number of regular students. The schools have experience with distance education mostly as a part of further education. They offer retraining and certificate courses providing skills and knowledge required by the labor market.

For the needs of educational programs focused on further education, secondary vocational schools create either their own eLearning courses or cooperate with companies which specialize in eLearning. It is very common that school use such courses also for teaching their regular students who are studying the same field.

We tried to apply our evaluation criteria to some of such courses.

2. Some approaches to evaluation of eLearning Our department has been engaged in eLearning evaluation for an extended period of time (e.g. Kapounova 2012, Kapounova, Kostolanyova and Pavlicek 2006, Kostolanyova, Kapounova et al. 2009). The publication

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Jana Kapounova, Milan Majdak and Pavel Novosad called Approaches to Evaluation of eLearning (Kapounova et al. 2012) was published as an output of project Evaluation of eLearning – system approach (Kapounova 2011).

The theoretical background for our Model of eLearning Project Evaluation (Kapounová et al., 2011) is based on a number of foreign and domestic papers, e.g.:

Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Evaluation (Winfrey, 1999);

A Framework for the Evaluation of eLearning (Huges and Attwell 2002);

The Model of assessing quality in eLearning elaborated by The Swedish National Agency of Higher Education (Åström 2009);

Managing eLearning Strategies (Khan 2005 and 2006).

Our long‐standing interest in eLearning evaluation led to a number of theses in which our students analysed, designed, developed and, in practice, verified the model of our evaluation tool.

These theses describe various concepts and definitions of related terminology, such as eLearning, evaluation and evaluation of eLearning (e.g. Novosad 2011, Fäber 2009, Otto 2009, Majdak 2013). There are other sources where we drew ideas and experiences, e.g. Nikanorov 2006, Carvalho 2003, Horton 2001 and 2006).

Let us mention only some:

eLearning is an educational process which uses information and communication technology in order to achieve educational goal effectively; it includes creation of educational objects, delivery of educational content, implementation, communication among the participants of educational process and learning management (Kapounova 2012).

Evaluation is a process of systematic collection and analysis of information for the purpose of decision making, using given criteria (Nezvalova 2002).

From various criteria used to evaluate quality of eLearning courses are listed the following (Brdicka 2006). We ask whether the course

content corresponds with the educational syllabus;

can be used in various situations and for more groups of students;

fosters the interest of the participants;

uses innovative approaches;

teaches effectively, teaches students to find their own way;

contains formative evaluation (educational process and feedback);

contains summative evaluation (classification, but it is not required);

takes into account the aspects of uniformity, consistency and comprehension;

respects the ease of use;

takes into account efficiency of incurred expenses.

2.1 Evaluation portal To evaluate selected courses we utilized an evaluation tool, which was described and verified by Novosad (2011) in his thesis. He based his designing work on theoretical papers (see above) and practical case studies for verifying eLearning. These tools were presented in various projects to a number of various evaluators of eLearning courses in the form of either paper or online questionnaires. Therefore, the presented criteria in our evaluation tool (sec. 2.1.2) were verified and modified based on their feedback and were presented in some papers, e.g. The Evaluation of eLearning Study Supports (Kapounova and Sarmanova, 2010).

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Jana Kapounova, Milan Majdak and Pavel Novosad In order to verify functionality of his evaluation portal, Novosad used courses from the University of Ostrava.

We made use of the same tool for the evaluation of eLearning courses which are available to the students of secondary vocational schools and also for further education of adults.

The application of the evaluation web is available online. Visitors with limited access, who do not posses log in information, can preview a tabular list of already evaluated courses.

2.1.1 Framework of the evaluation portal The opening page offers quick links as consistent with the type of users: the anonymous user (viewing), the registered user (editing of course evaluation, viewing analyses from data filled in by evaluators).

The search field enables the searching for documents with a certain characteristic or containing a certain word.

Updates draw attention to significant changes in the framework or content of the web.

The blog allows the sharing of information quickly and contains dated entries which are listed chronologically.

Registered users can add their comments, links to interesting web pages and/or similar blogs.

Survey enables users to carry out various questionnaire surveys.

Course evaluation is the main page of the web. It contains all the results of already evaluated courses, allows users to enter information about new courses and fill in data regarding course evaluation.

Evaluation criteria are determined through the use of wiki web and serve as a kind of a quick help feature.

License agreement.

Reports centre is a data library as well as a library of already created reports including sample reports and graphs.

2.1.2 Criteria in evaluation form Criteria for the evaluation of eLearning courses are organized into electronic questionnaires. Both closed ended questions (with the option to assign points) and open ended questions (without assigning points) are used. Items are clustered into groups ranging from A to I: A. Basic information (18 items) Basic identification data about the evaluated course such as the course title, taught subject, author, etc.

This data does not affect the evaluation of the course.

B. Extended information (4 items) Extensions to the data in group A. C. Technical aspects (20 items) This group contains everything related to the functionality of the evaluated course, such as availability to various groups of users (for example, handicapped users), and hardware and software requirements.

D. Didactic aspects (15 items) From the teacher’s point of view this is the most important set of criteria. They are especially important when the course is being created by a professional company. This group includes aspects like motivation, tests and grading methods appraisal, preview of course educational resources and so on.

E.

Content aspects (12 items) These criteria are related to the course content and educational resources content. The suitability of teaching strategies is considered. It is very important to have to flexibility when updating information or altering the course for different groups of students. This should not be a problem in an eLearning environment.

F.

User friendliness (20 items) User friendliness is now considered a standard on various internet portals and users can be very demanding. However, careful consideration must be given here so that the flashy tricks will not

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Jana Kapounova, Milan Majdak and Pavel Novosad overshadow the true substance of the course. Evaluated in this group is the option of choosing one’s own pace, suitability of the multimedia components, options of progress indication, suitable help, a terminological dictionary and many similar aspects.

G. Control panels and multimedia (9 items) Multimedia are not only represented by text, graphics, audio and video, but also largely by the opportunity to interact. In other words, it is a way, how to involve the student into the lesson through simulations, games and other elements.

H. Communication (4 items) Standard for eLearning courses are email, chat and discussion forums. The development of technology allows other options like Skype, ICQ, social networks and others.

I.

Course management (3 items) It means to consider the Learning Management System, which is used for implementation of the course.

3. Technical solution The electronic evaluation form was created using Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 application, which is compatible with other Microsoft applications and servers. That significantly helps with gathering and organizing data as well as data management. Attributes are arranged into nine individual tables – SharePoint lists.

Designed forms were published on the web portal. Portal also offers other functions, for example retrieval within stored data, discussion forums or conducting surveys. It is possible to easily change the attributes or assign numeric weight. So‐called revision control that stores all the versions of data while editing is very helpful. All data can also be exported into a table and so allow for better insight. Textual and graphic reports are helpful for better data interpretation. Embedded is also the so‐called KPI (Key Performance Indicator). The KPI illustrates the achievement of evaluation points.

3.1 Application systemic and functional requirements System requirements:

web application is publicly available online;

the application is created using SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences), database management system SQL (Structured Query Language) and InfoPath;

the system is optimized for the Internet Explorer browser;

the system allows a display of required reports;

portability;

dependability;

security;

central data storage;

ethical (license).

Functional requirements:

access to the system is based on authentication;

the system allows access for any set number of users;

users are assigned various roles;

the user is entitled only to that kind of information that is matching his assigned role;

according to the assigned role the registered user is allowed:

to view reports;

to use blog, survey and help available through wiki site;

to enter, edit, delete and search for courses and related information;

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Jana Kapounova, Milan Majdak and Pavel Novosad

to enter, edit, delete and search for evaluation criteria and related information;

the entered course is identified through generated unique file name, which consists of system date and time (ISO format);

when entering a new course, a new page opens providing information about whether the saving process was successful or not and the name of the new file;

when editing attributes a new page in form of data sheet opens (similar to MS Excel table);

the system allows filtering of courses according to given aspects;

when listing the courses, all courses stored in the database identified by the unique file name is displayed;

the system uses the SPSS technology for document recovery;

the system uses the SPSS technology for revision control of documents and possible recovery of older versions;

the system contains simple key performance indicator (KPI) of evaluated courses.

3.2 Design and development of the evaluation portal Following applications were used to create the evaluation tool. Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 application was used to create electronic evaluation form. This form draws data from a readily available database and allows the user to choose from default table values. This solution allows easy creation of new tables, editing of existing tables or creation of customized InfoPath forms. Presented model was implemented in Microsoft SharePoint Server, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft InfoPath environment and a web portal with required user interface was created. The portal is operated on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 in Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition. Considering the operating platform, IIS (Internet Information Server) which is a part of operating server Microsoft Windows 2003 R2, was chosen as web and application server. IIS was extended (Web Service Extensions) of ASP.NET 2.0, which is part of NET Framework and is regarded as the fundamental development platform for web applications. The portal itself was built in Microsoft SharePoint 2007 environment.

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise was chosen as a database layer. It was later upgraded to SQL Server 2008 Enterprise, which provides better data reporting options.

InfoPath 2003, Visio Professional 2007, SharePoint Designer 2007 and SQL Server Management Studio Express were selected as development tools recommended by Microsoft corporation.

Among other utilized software were the following: Office SharePoint Server Language Pack 2007, Microsoft Office Project 2007, Forefront Security for SharePoint with Service Pack 1, Forefront Client Security and service supplement Reporting Service SQL Server 2005 for SharePoint technologies.

4. Description of evaluated eLearning courses The aim of the project was to assess the suitability and evaluate eLearning courses intended for apprentices and adults in retraining. Courses chosen for evaluation are used at secondary vocational schools. They serve as an educational eLearning support for regular students as well as adults. The 23 selected courses focus on assorted areas of professional skills and knowledge. Courses originated as a part of regional operational projects in the Moravian‐Silesian Region and South Moravian Region. Courses are intended for

regular daily students (listed under numbers 1–10). These courses are also used in adult education to help achieve participant's professional qualification;

instructors in further education (listed as 11–15). Courses serve as an eLearning support for lecturers who work with adults;

competency development of primary and secondary school teachers (listed as 16–23). Courses were created for further education of teachers.

4.1 Lightweight cladding of buildings This block contains four courses (numbers 1–4) and is intended for students of technical fields.

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Jana Kapounova, Milan Majdak and Pavel Novosad Courses are accompanied by an animated guide that clearly presents inserted texts and images. Available in the course is a time indicator monitoring the time spent in the course and as well as an indicator of success rate in the tests. Every course offers a final test and when completed successfully a certificate confirming participation in the course is issued. Unfortunately, there is no information available as to what conditions must be met or what amount of points must be achieved in order to obtain the certificate. To foster students’ activity in the course, continuous assessment or checking questions are present.

Considering all evaluation criteria, the courses are well done. They are user friendly, easy to work with, well organized, easy to navigate in and overall seem to leave a good impression. Graphic layout is very professional, technical diagrams and images are placed in appropriate places. Communication is poorly integrated in the course; the sending of messages is only available via email.

There are no demonstrative videos of work and technological procedures or suitable animations for work skills practice or mastering new technologies.

4.2 An eye to the future Block consists of six courses (numbers 5–10) and is intended for training future opticians.

Courses are well organized and are user friendly. Navigation in the courses is easy and leaves a favorable impression. Graphic layout can be considered successful. Technical diagrams and images are placed in appropriate places. The course offers a help feature to enhance the users work experience with eLearning, which is very positive. Other pros include links to educational resources, additional journal articles and literature. Only two courses offer a final test and grant a certificate as an output. However, it is not stated what conditions must be met in order to achieve it. Continuous assessment and checking questions are present only in two courses. Other cons include missing educational objectives and a curriculum summary.

Likewise, communication in this block of courses is very poor and there are no animations to vitalize the learning experience.

Furthermore, there is a lack of demonstrative videos of work and technological procedures, which serve for work skills practice and mastering new technologies.

4.3 Trends The block consists of two courses (numbers 11 and 12) and is intended for competency development of pedagogical staff who works as lecturers in further education.

Courses are well arranged and user friendly. Navigation in the courses is easy. Graphic layout is of a high quality and the learning experience is vitalized by a creative animated guide. The eLearning user manual is available as a link and can be downloaded. Both courses offer final tests and when completed successfully, a certificate is granted. Nevertheless, there are no specifications about the required conditions for successful completion. The students’ activity is fostered by continuous assessment and checking questions. Both courses state their educational objectives and are concluded with a curriculum summary containing highlighted passages of important information. A provided list of references for further reading, as well as used references is beneficial. Communication options are weak.

4.4 Development This block contains three courses (numbers 13–15) and is intended for competency development of pedagogical staff who is involved in further education.

Courses are well arranged, user friendly and easy to navigate in. Graphic layout is pleasant. An animated guide is available only in certain parts of some courses. An instruction manual for how to work in eLearning environment is available for download. There is one routine test and one final test in each course. A certificate is awarded for successful completion of the latter. Furthermore, the criterion to pass the test successfully (70 %) is provided. Continuous assessment and checking questions, as a means to encourage students’ activity, are part of only one course. All courses state their educational objectives at the beginning and curriculum summary at the end. Likewise, a list of recommended references for further reading is available.

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Jana Kapounova, Milan Majdak and Pavel Novosad Considered cons are lack of communication options and only a few multimedia features.

4.5 Key to education This block consists of eight courses (numbers 16–23). These are follow‐up to courses called Professional, Creative and Personal Growth of a Primary and Secondary School Teacher.

Courses are well arranged, control and navigation are easy and the overall impression is pleasant. The layout of graphics is well‐done, all courses use graphics to highlight important passages of text. An imaginative animated guide livens up the course. The manual and textbook are available for download on the opening page. Only two courses contain continuous checking questions with the possibility of response assessment.

The successful completion of the final test results in a certificate being issued. Criteria defining successful completion are not stated. A list of references is provided as a part of the textbook, as are various links to web pages thematically related to some of the courses.

Educational objectives are not specified, a curriculum summary is stated only in one course. No communication options are a drawback.

5. Evaluation according to various aspects The following evaluation of eLearning courses applies only to those parts of the courses that are available in the school’s learning management system. The additional educational resources, such as textbooks or other learning aids, which are used for face‐to‐face education, are not considered.

Technical aspects

Figure 1: Demonstration of the evaluation form of technical aspects Results of evaluation are rather even for all courses. It is difficult for an ordinary user to evaluate technical aspects. A course administrator or manager is fit for such a task. For this reason we obtained information from administrators to evaluate these aspects.

Didactic aspects

The results of this category are more diverse, especially when it comes to the lack of tests or other means to encourage student’s activity in some courses. The implementation team claims that courses without such means are only used as an additional resource for independent study or as a lecturer’s presentation aid.

Content aspects

The differences in evaluation are caused by the lack of educational objectives statements.

User friendliness

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Jana Kapounova, Milan Majdak and Pavel Novosad The main drawback is the lack of a progress indicator. It is undoubtedly a beneficial feature for the user, but its absence does not affect the course functionality. Missing interactive help is another drawback, most courses offer only written instruction manual.

Multimedia features

Overall, multimedia features are used very sparingly. Somewhat better are courses equipped with animated guides, which seems to be a good idea. Animations, when used, complement the related topic very well.

Graphic layout of the courses from the block “Eye to the future” is very professional and the courses have an unobtrusive appearance. Courses from blocks “Lightweight cladding of buildings” and “Eye to the future” completely lack videos with demonstrations of work procedures. The role of videos is considered very important for training new skill, especially in eLearning courses. The assessment of student’s involvement is considered complexly, including student’s options to be part of games and simulations. Suitability and the amount of checking questions and/or placement of continuous assessment play an important role in course evaluation. They are both represented in various proportions.

The managers of companies that developed evaluated eLearning courses stated following: “It was impossible to create videos with more sophisticated demonstrations due to the cutback of originally planned financial resources.”

Communication in courses

Almost half of the evaluated courses (11) do not have their own communication channel between the lecturer and the student. The various forms of communication do not have to be active in a given moment, but should be available on the course opening page. A total of 12 courses meet the fundamental means of communication through email messaging, it is embedded as a link on the web page.

The reaction of the implementation team: “Courses are intended for independent study, perhaps as a preparation aid for classroom education. Communication options were not considered and they were not even part of the eLearning project specifications.”

Following graphs represent the courses and their evaluation based on the individual aspects.

Table 1: Summary evaluation of all courses No of course Technic al aspects Didactic aspects Content aspects User friendly Multime dia features Commu ni‐ cation

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

75 75 75 75 66 66 66 66 66 66 75 75 75 75 75 75 75 75 75 75 75 75 75 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 1 5 5 3 25 99 3 25 25 25 5 5 0 85 85 25 93 25 25 93 25 25 25 60 60 60 60 55 55 55 55 55 55 60 60 60 60 60 55 55 55 55 55 55 55 55 10 10 10 10 11 12 12 11 11 11 11 11 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 8 8 8 8 8 8 3 8 6 6 1 1 1 95 95 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

53 53 53 53 12 23 23 12 12 12 49 49 39 19 19 41 46 41 39 46 39 39 39

10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

5.1 Knowledge utilization based on the evaluation The analysis results were given both to the schools and authors of evaluated courses. Suggestions can be used for adjustments or improvements. Some suggestions were accepted.

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Figure 2: Evaluation of all aspects in the first block of subjects

Figure 3: Evaluation of didactic aspects of all subjects Courses were created with certain objectives and suit all participants. The overall quality standard of courses is surprisingly pleasant. The expectations of bad quality were caused by previous experience with courses which were created by secondary school teachers in LMS MOODLE. It was obvious that courses evaluated in this paper were created by professionals, even though teachers were also involved in the process. That may also explain why some pedagogical aspects were missing, for example, stating educational objectives and a curriculum summary. Furthermore, it was confirmed that eLearning courses intended for students of secondary vocational schools are different than those for university students or adults, in both the course content, which is often related to skill acquisition, as well as in a different approach towards the student, who usually is not as motivated as an adult.

The incompleteness of some courses is related to their original designation. They were used as an accompanying presentation to the teacher’s lecture. The same can be said of missing communication means in the courses. They were not even required in the project specifications. However, experience suggests that

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Jana Kapounova, Milan Majdak and Pavel Novosad students use their own communication channels which allow them to stay in touch even outside the classroom.

Drawbacks in multimedia, especially missing demonstration videos, are well known to the authors. As stated, their absence corresponds with the project financing.

These findings can be applied to creation and development of new courses, or use for modifications and adjustments in current courses.

5.2 Observations from work with the evaluation tool Working with the tool was very comfortable and intuitive. The graphic layout is arranged so that provides for quick user orientation. Navigating through the web is easy, there is a witty guidepost (I am... and I want...) with the help feature placed right on the opening page. From the available functionalities the most interesting are the following: simplicity of data evaluation and data export in MS Excel and Adobe format. The form is well‐ structured based on evaluation criteria and its graphics are well laid out.

Abundant variations of form layouts are considered the strong points of this tool. To evaluate eLearning courses it is not only required to select data and fill it in, but also to process it into a desired form. That is achieved through the option to create one’s own design of output report.

Finally, it can be concluded that the evaluation portal functions as an effective tool which helps the user see how and what he evaluated and what sections need more attention.

5.3 Suggestions for evaluation tool adjustments Various evaluators verified 23 courses while using our evaluation tool. The results of their evaluation were analysed and adjustments of the tool were proposed which were consequently carried out.

Generally the tool is easy to work with. Some advice concerning a few drawbacks and possible adjustments were given to the author, e.g. about:

header, fields in the form, basic information…;

the table with evaluation results – it is better to create several evaluation reports;

technical aspects – it is better to be answered by administrator or course manager;

didactic aspects – designed fields and possibly their evaluation options (for example selection from a menu) are too general. It is more common that a course has several didactic functions, which can be evaluated with various scoring scales.

6. Conclusion Functional verification of a tool designed for assessment of eLearning courses evaluation criteria, was performed for 23 courses made for secondary vocational schools and lifelong learning. Courses were intended for (1) regular students, with the possibility to use them for adults, (2) adult education lecturers and (3) further education of teachers. All evaluated courses were part of projects and were created by companies in cooperation with the secondary pedagogical staff. The gathered data was processed and evaluated and feedback was passed on to the interested parties.

Observations from the evaluated courses are favorable, courses mostly exceeded expectations. No more worries about austere and functionless courses. In general courses can be labelled as interesting, graphically well done and without significant drawbacks. In the aspects of multimedia features and communication between lecturers and students, there is still room for improvement. The potentially greatest drawback is the lack of demonstration videos for motor skills practice.

The described evaluation tool allows courses to be evaluated from various aspects. However, an evaluator does not know or need all the aspects. Many times, only deeper analysis of one or selected part of an aspect is enough. This finding led us to adjustment of the reports in the portal application. A user can easily create reports to his liking by himself, displaying values of the items only within one selected aspect.

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Jana Kapounova, Milan Majdak and Pavel Novosad The results of the verification findings of the evaluated tool for the secondary vocational schools and lifelong learning were passed on as feedback to the school, implementing company and author of the evaluation tool.

Some suggestions were accepted and appropriate adjustments were made.

Summary: The evaluation tool, which was originally created for the evaluation of college courses, has shown to be a suitable tool even for the evaluation of courses intended for apprentices and persons in training at secondary vocational schools. The tool was tested by evaluators from various fields: teaching instructors, school management, school authorities, and IT staff from companies specialised in creating eLearning courses.

The evaluation tool was adjusted based on their feedback; moreover, the deficiencies in the development of the courses were revealed.

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Interuniversity Collaborative Learning With Wiki Toolsets Elisabeth Katzlinger2 and Michael Herzog1 1 Department of Economics, Magdeburg‐Stendal University of Applied Sciences, Germany 2 Department of Data Processing in Social Sciences, Economics and Business, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria michael.herzog@hs‐magdeburg.de elisabeth.katzlinger@jku.at

Abstract: This paper reports about a study of a collaborative learning scenario in university education within the subject of e‐business. In business education advanced collaboration skills and media literacy are important for surviving in a globalized business where virtual communication between enterprises is part of the day‐to‐day business. To facilitate communication and collaboration between partners who work in different places at different schedules and even in different time zones, tools of web 2.0 are adequate in supporting this process. Especially working together with Wiki and similar collaborative Web‐Tools satisfies asynchronous communication processes because all group members can trace changes, view the history of their colleagues work, and communicate about it. To transform these global working situations into higher education, a learning scenario was created where hundreds of students from two universities in Germany and Austria worked together in small interregional learning groups. Participating students had to collaborate virtually to prepare and report a shared case study online. The e‐business case study had to be documented in a Wiki, and presented in the classroom of each university. When working together, learners used different tools for close virtual collaboration around a Wiki toolset such as forum, chat, video conferencing and other social media. Based on the didactical concept of moderate constructivism that should be best implemented by editing realistic problems and project tasks as well as cooperative learning, the case study method was chosen for collaboration. Students applied given case studies (e.g. from Harvard Business Review) or they worked out a business case from their own experience, which covered a range of upcoming e‐business topics. An attending evaluation study with around 270 participants from two universities could show several substantive effects like

Tremendous influence of interregional group work for media competencies

Hidden social aspects and conflict potential

Scenario design and different media usage

Teaching effort vs. learning outcome of such a scenario

Learning impact for different student groups and learning styles: Who benefits most from such a learning scenario?

Collaborative learning with a Web 2.0 tool like a Wiki in combination with the case study method can be quite effective in higher education settings. Methodical design of a learning scenario and choosing the media toolset is worth to plan carefully. Especially the presentation and debriefing requires a personal reflection of the case study itself and virtual collaboration about it in several groups. However this resulted in a high professional and social learning outcome on the part of the individual students. The online survey collected data from student groups who worked together in interuniversity or regional teams on case studies within the subject area e‐business. The findings of this study show several interesting aspects of media usage and how students benefited from this learning scenario.

Keywords: learning, Wiki, virtual collaboration, cross teaching, business education

1. Introduction Throughout recent years, the media didactics discussion has been dominated mainly by constructivist approaches. In these approaches, the conceptualization of knowledge plays a central role. Knowledge is thereby not regarded as the immediate result of knowledge transfer within a learning process, but constructed by learners themselves. Constructivism puts the learner into the center of theory construction and supersedes the idea of a possible external controllability of learning. Special focus is thereby placed on the collaboration of learners within learning communities (Papchristos et al 2010).

To learn with the aid of Web 2.0 services – such as Wikis or Weblogs – can be associated with constructivist learning, as it supports an active construction of knowledge as well as a self‐regulated learning process.

Through interaction, joint learning and learning from each other become possible. Especially Wikis open up new possibilities concerning learning and a collaborative construction of knowledge (Cress et al 2008). In this connection various recent studies could confirm certain benefits for learners. (Zdravkova et al 2012; Wang et al 2013; Heng 2012; Huang et al 2013; Laru et al. 2012).

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Elisabeth Katzlinger and Michael Herzog The basic idea of collaborative learning is that knowledge is not regarded as static content but rather as a constructive process. Through dialogue different contents are extended and refined jointly and subsequently interlinked with each other. Collaborative learning facilitates a joint knowledge construction on the one hand, but on the other hand puts high requirements on the learners.

Collaboration is characterized by a common goal. All participants involved have to share an interest in this common goal – in the case at hand the development of a Wiki – even if conflicts may occur on the way. In order to achieve this common goal, all participants contribute their knowledge, skills and hours of work. The equal status of all actors is the basis for collaboration in this connection. The rights, duties and tasks dynamically arise from the working process. (Schmalz 2007) A further basic idea of constructivist learning approaches is situational learning. Gräsel et al (1997) particularly emphasize active learning, which is situational as well as context‐bound and facilitates a self‐regulated learning process.

The article at hand focuses on Wikis as supporting tools for the learning process. In 1996 Ward Cunningham coined the term “Wiki” for HTML documents that are developed and edited via a web browser. In order to do so, no programming skills are necessary. All that is needed is a web browser and internet access. The basic idea behind a Wiki is the collaborative work on hypertexts that everyone can read and also modify. Thus in other words, a Wiki is a tool for collaborative publishing.

In order to be able to reconstruct what has been modified a Wiki has a revision control system and access to earlier versions is possible, too. At certain views a discussion may be opened, which means that the quality of individual publications results from a “Wisdom of Crowds” (O´Reilly 2005). Within the context of learning this means that a learning group may work jointly on the solution of a certain task and so may gain new insights.

Globalized economy is characterized by virtual communication. The communication partners are often located at different places and communicate at different points of time, due to the different time zones they live in.

Hence the requirements that are put on economic science students concerning communication and media competencies get higher and higher, which is why learning scenarios that facilitate these competencies find their way into e‐business education.

Wikis are also used as tools for knowledge management in business and can be used, for example, for project documentations. In this context the advantages of Wikis are that knowledge may be documented easily on one hand and that it can be easily accessed by means of a search function on the other hand. Thus it is an important goal of e‐business education to make students familiar with the application of the tool Wiki (Erpenbeck et al 2013). Especially in the academic environment, Wikis are often used as collaborative learning tools (Hug 2010).

In the last years Wikis got more and more hypermedia integration functions like graphics, images, and video support (Blankinship 2007, Seidl 2012). Social Media tools – like an advanced discussion section within a Wiki – allow direct linking of several communication opportunities to the content. Semantic Wikis open with new kinds of analytics and supervising tools, enhancing the observation of group working processes, e.g. organizing genomic knowledge, coding software, or tracking environmental data (Gil 2013). Supporting simplified mobile access to Wikis becomes a further challenge in the current development. The integration and reconfiguration of all these technologies in a web environment will open Wikis to multidimensional collaboration tools. Using these rich media environments in an effective way needs especially strong competences in media literacy. To train students in higher education todays media and social competences for virtual collaboration was one aspect in creating the following learning setting.

2. Learning setting Elaboration of business case studies was applied as a learning method within the course‐scenarios at two different institutions of higher education. The interregional collaboration of these two institutions arose from an ERASMUS teacher exchange between the Johannes Kepler University Linz and Magdeburg‐Stendal University of Applied Sciences.

Not least because of the narrow resources the development of the learning setting aimed at various different goals at the same time. The strengths of both participating institutions should be used within this learning

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Elisabeth Katzlinger and Michael Herzog setting. While the German university has an emphasis on IT, the Austrian university focuses more on business sciences. The collaboration between these two institutions should not be furthered only on the part of the teaching staff but also on the part of the students. The European ERASMUS Teaching Program financed the exchange.

In addition to that, the learning scenario should meet academic demands. In order to achieve this, the case study method was chosen, whereby the case should be worked on jointly by means of a Wiki. For the collaboration within the individual learning groups, different communication media were offered to the students. Furthermore students were allowed to use other additional media if they wanted. However, these additional communication media are not considered in the paper at hand.

The case study approach has been chosen as a learning setting (The case method is also known as case study method, Harvard method or case study approach, see. Lasch et al. 2008, p. 5; Matzler et al. 2006, p. 241). The introduced case studies describe operational situations from the topic area e‐business, each containing a decision problem. For example, case studies were taken out of the Harvard Business Review, such as “The Dark Side of Customer Analytics” (Davenport et al 2007) or “Open Source: Suicide or Salvation“ (Scott et al 2008).

Throughout three terms (winter term 2009, summer term 2012 and summer term 2013) overall more than 270 students were organized into regional and interregional learning groups of four to six students. For this survey we analysed the first two terms with 196 students. The interregional groups were usually composed of two Austrian and four German students at the maximum. The students formed the respective groups via a Moodle choice module. Subsequently each learning group received the task to work either on one of the seven predefined case studies or on a self‐chosen case study relevant to e‐business. The result of the four to six weeks of collaboration had to be documented in a Wiki and presented in a short talk at both locations.

3. Preconditions for the implementation of the solution Approximately half of the learning groups were supported by students of the specialization field e‐learning at the JKU Linz, who acted as moderators. These students attend a course “e‐tutoring”, in which they learn about how to manage and accompany virtual learning groups. The lecturer of the JKU Linz in turn instructed these students. It was the task of these moderators to support the learning groups concerning organizational matters. Especially at the beginning of the collaboration the moderators were in demand, as they arranged the first virtual appointments or helped the learning groups to choose their topics. Due to the fact that learners were located at different places the effort of coordination was much higher, as e.g. informal on‐campus coordination meetings were not possible.

The first step on the way to solve the given task was to choose either one of the predefined case studies or to find an adequate topic for a self‐chosen business case, which already turned out to be a difficult task for some groups. The lecturers provided a structure for the work on the case and students were encouraged to make their own investigations on the case and to consider the respective situation (e.g. legally) in Austria and Germany, too. The result of the case study is documented in a Wiki. Both institutions work with the learning management system Moodle but in different versions and with different user policies. A separated Moodle course only for collaboration activities was created and within this course, the activity Wiki was used for documentation of the case study. This resulted in a bit more work for all participants but showed that information systems integration problems are still not unusual in global organisations.

4. Findings and transferable results Concerning demographic data, the two groups differ from each other regarding average age and percentage of women, as becomes apparent from table 1. These two aspects can be interpreted by the different positions the two courses have within the curriculum.

Table 1: Average age and gender ratio

Male Number

Age

Female Number

Age

Total Number

Age

Linz

28

25,71

16

23,75

44

25,00

Magdeburg/Stendal

80

24,24

72

23,25

152

23,77

Total

108

24,62

88

23,34

196

24,05

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Elisabeth Katzlinger and Michael Herzog What is additionally striking when comparing the two groups is that the percentage of working students is significantly higher in Linz (only 13,6% are non‐working students) than in Magdeburg‐Stendal (51,3% are non‐ working students), see figure 1. The study programmes in both institutions are not especially for part time students but for full time students.

Figure 1: Hours of employment In this survey students ranked the different learning and teaching methods (case study, game based learning, peer review) on a scale from poor to very good. They ranked the case study method in virtual learning group high, especially to enhance media competences (figure 2). To practice virtual communication was one of the learning targets in the learning scenario that students ranked high. Virtual collaboration within the learning group was an important factor for their personal learning outcome. To work at the case study and the Wiki was a time‐consuming work for students so cost‐benefit ratio and enjoyment was rated lower.

Case‐study‐as‐teaching‐method‐ Case‐study‐for‐learning‐media‐literacy‐ Case‐study‐for‐intercultural‐enrichment‐ Case‐study‐for‐learning‐virtual‐communicaDon‐ Personal‐learning‐outcome‐ Enjoyment‐ CostAbenefit‐raDo‐ Case‐study‐in‐general‐‐ (1)‐poor‐A‐(4)‐very‐good! !

1‐

2‐

3‐

4‐

Figure 2: Ranking of case study as teaching method About one third of learning groups in the study were regional, they had no participants from the other institution. The comparison of the interregional groups (with only virtual communication) and regional learning groups show that the work in interregional groups is more intensive, they needed more time for particular processing steps. An interesting point of view is that the duration of steps of the forming of the group, which are more social phases, differs hardly (figure 3). The collaboration with the Wiki and beside the Wiki, the phases where students worked out the content, last longer in the interregional groups, the results seen in the presentations and the Wikis were often better than in the regional groups. Interregional partners force the motivation to dive deeper into collaboration tools, to spend more time and to perform strongly.

Students used different media for communication and collaboration. Teachers offered media for students in the learning management system like a videoconference room, forum and chat. Social Media is a common communication channel between students today, in this cohorts it is used by 82,6%. Surprisingly Social Media are not the preferred channel for collaboration in a professional context; they are used for leisure and

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Elisabeth Katzlinger and Michael Herzog friendship activities. In case study projects students rated face‐to‐face communication highest in both cohorts.

They see audio communication, chat, forum, Wiki and email as very useful or useful (figure 4).

Figure 3: Phases of teamwork (average duration in days)

Figure 4: Rating of used media In the individual comments students reported about their personal mix of different media they used for communication within the learning group.

„I’d rate video conferencing with a concurrent use of google docs best, as it allowed us to talk simultaneously without any time lag, so we could work out the core points really together.”

“For us audio communication via skype was very important as well. We used it to discuss the outline and who should work on which issues. The wiki allowed us to follow the progress of this work; therefore it is useful, too.”

“Email, Wiki and forum ease communication but can be really time‐consuming, because you always have to wait for answers. Chat is a very good alternative, although the typing is quite time‐consuming as well. Direct contact still is the fastest and most effective way of communication to solve problems or manage difficulties.”

As shown above, interregional collaboration demands raised use of media and students are motivated to train their media competencies. Figure 5 shows the average time (in hours) students used different media. In interregional groups the use of media is more intensive and time consuming, not only for video or audio communication but also for working on the presentation, the text or the wiki.

Students discussed the task and questions of case study in their learning groups and documented the conclusions in a Wiki. 90% of students rated the Wiki as very useful or useful for this purpose. Figure 6 shows that students who rated the Wiki as very useful worked more hours on the Wiki. The period of time that

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Elisabeth Katzlinger and Michael Herzog students worked on the Wiki differed between one and twelve hours, in the group of students who rated the Wiki as not so useful only one student invested ten hours in the Wiki, the others more or less.

[1] not useful - [4] very useful

Figure 5: Use of media for case study (average time in hours)

4

3

2

3,5

3,7

3,9

4,1

4,3

Wikitime in hours

4,5

4,7

4,9

Figure 6: Average time working on the Wiki (N=141) Especially in interregional learning groups students commented on the Wiki as a very useful tool for collaboration.

“The Wiki is really good, because all group members have access to the whole communication which is not the case with emails or other media, where it can happen that some just do not get certain information.”

“The Wiki offered us the opportunity to keep track of our work. But as the Wiki often seemed to work against us, it was rather time‐consuming to take care of the Wiki problems. To keep direct contact is still the best. And of course video conferencing is also very useful if you have to work with students from other countries. But as we had no other students in our group, it was not necessary for us to use it.”

5. Conclusion and outlook The use of Wikis in training situations was described for a variety of scenarios in literature. This study looked behind the approach of using Wikis in interuniversity learning projects with the case study method. Developing professional as well as personal skills like media literacy can be addressed well by such a mostly learner controlled constructivist teaching scenario.

For students it is challenging to work together in interregional learning groups. They are used to work together in groups on campus of their university. There face‐to‐face communication is the most preferred way to communicate. Most students are not familiar to use a Wiki as a collaboration tool. Most learning groups worked together with other media and used the Wiki only in the last phase of the group work. The students

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Elisabeth Katzlinger and Michael Herzog had to learn the syntax of Moodle Wiki and surprisingly it was challenging for them. From the perspective of teachers, the use of Wikis in university education enriches the teaching methods especially to improve the self‐regulated learning process. With view history it is possible to influence the progress within learning groups and to see which persons are main authors.

Enhanced Wiki functionality for learning purposes will be welcome in future environments. This could be an enhanced Media support, synchronous and asynchronous video communication, video annotation, and semantic properties. In university environments plagiarism prevention is a wide discussed topic and there are already several tools available in learning management systems (e.g. Moodle) like the commercial Turnitin, the free Crot Checker for uploaded documents, or MOSS for text and computer programming code. In combination with Wikis this functions could give learners also a better sensitivity on academic oriented working in collaboration processes. On the other hand recombination of digital media content for learning purposes is worth rethinking the role of authorship and copyright (cf. Gray et al 2008). But this will be discussed in another article.

References Blankinship, E. and Mikhak, B. (2007) „Video‐Wikis and Media Fluency“, Proceedings of 6th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children, pp 175–176 Breuer, F. and Schreier, M. (2010) Lehren und Lernen qualitativer Forschungsmethoden. In: Mey, G. and Mruck, K. (Hrsg.), Handbuch Qualitative Forschung in der Psychologie, VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften | Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden.

Cress, U., and Kimmerle, J. (2008) A systemic and cognitive view on collaborative knowledge building with wikis.

International Journal of Computer‐Supported Collaborative Learning, 3(2), 105–122.

Davenport, T. H. and Harris, J. G. (2007) The Dark Side of Customer Analytics. In: Harvard Business Review. Aug. 2007.

Ehlers, U. and Steinert, A. (2010) “Networked Learning in a Networked World”, [online], http://netzwerklernen.wikispaces.com/file/view/Ehlers_Steinert_NETWORKED+LEARNING+IN+A+NETWORKED+WOR LD.doc.

Erpenbeck, J., and Sauter, W. (2013) Anforderungen an das betriebliche Lernen – heute und in der Zukunft. In J. Erpenbeck & W. Sauter (Eds.), So werden wir lernen! (pp. 45–106). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Gräsel, C.; Bruhn, J.; Mandl, H. and Fischer, F. (1997) Lernen mit Computernetzen aus konstruktivistischer Perspektive.

Unterrichtswissenschaft, 25(1), pp 4‐18.

Heng, L. T., & Marimuthu, R. (2012). Let's Wiki in Class. Procedia ‐ Social and Behavioral Sciences, 67, pp 269–274 Gil, Y., Knight, A., Zhang, K., Zhang, L. and Sethi, R. (2013) “An initial analysis of semantic wikis”, Proceedings of the companion publication of the 2013 international conference on Intelligent user interfaces companion, pp 109‐110.

ACM. Gray, K., Thompson, C., Clerehan, R., Sheard, J., and Hamilton, M. (2008) “Web 2.0 authorship: Issues of referencing and citation for academic integrity”. The Internet and Higher Education, 11(2), pp 112‐118.

Huang, W.‐H. D., Hood, D. W., and Yoo, S. J. (2013) Gender divide and acceptance of collaborative Web 2.0 applications for learning in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 16, pp 57–65.

Hugl, U. (2010) Work in Progress: Wiki‐Einsatz als Blended Learning‐Instrument in der universitären Lehre. In M. H. Breitner, F. Lehner, J. Staff, & U. Winand (Eds.), E‐Learning 2010. Aspekte der Betriebswirtschaftslehre und Informatik.

Heidelberg: Physica‐Verlag Heidelberg, pp 215 – 228.

Laru, J., Näykki, P., and Järvelä, S. (2012) Supporting small‐group learning using multiple Web 2.0 tools: A case study in the higher education context. The Internet and Higher Education, 15(1), pp 29–38.

Lasch, R., Schulte, G. (2008) Die Fallstudie als didaktische Methode. Quantitative Logistik‐Fallstudien. Gabler Verlag.

Matzler, K., Bidmon, S. & Schwarz‐Musch, A. (2006) Didaktische Aspekte der Arbeit mit Case Studies. In: Engelhardt‐ Nowitzki, C. Ausbildung in der Logistik. DUV, pp 241 – 274.

O´Reilley, T. (2005). What Is Web 2.0. [online] http://www.oreillynet.com/go/web2.

Seidel, N. (2012) „Collaborative hypervideo editing using MediaWiki“, Proceedings of the Eighth Annual International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, p 22, ACM. Papachristos, D.; Alafodimos, N.; Arvanitis, K.; Vassilakis, K.; Kalogiannakis, M.; Kikilias, P. and Zafeiri, E. (2010) An Educational Model for Asynchronous E‐Learning. A case study in Higher Technology Education. iJAC – Volume 3, Issue 1, February 2010, pp 32 – 36 Schmalz, J. S. (2007) Zwischen Kooperation und Kollaboration, zwischen Hierarchie und Heterarchie.

Organisationsprinzipien und ‐strukturen von Wikis. kommunikation@gesellschaft, Jg. 8, Beitrag 5, http://www.soz.uni‐frankfurt.de/K.G/B5_2007_Schmalz.pdf Scott, W. & Kambil, A. (2008) Open Source: Salvation or Suicide? In: Harvard Business Review, April 2008.

Wang, J., Zou, B., Wang, D., and Xing, M. (2013) Students' perception of a wiki platform and the impact of wiki engagement on intercultural communication. System. Elsevier.

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Something for Everyone: MOOC Design for Informing Dementia Education and Research Carolyn King1, Jo‐Anne Kelder2, Rob Phillips3, Fran McInerney4, Kathleen Doherty2, Justin Walls2, Andrew Robinson1 and James Vickers1 1 Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia 2 Faculty of Health Science, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia 3 Murdoch University, Perth, Australia 4 Australian Catholic University/Mercy Health, Melbourne, Australia Carolyn.King@utas.edu.au Jo.Kelder@utas.edu.au r.phillips@iinet.net.au Fran.jmcinerney@acu.edu.au Kathleen.Doherty@utas.edu.au J.Walls@utas.edu.au Andrew.Robinson@utas.edu.au James.Vickers@utas.edu.au

Abstract: The introduction of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) as a system for education delivery presents opportunities and challenges. In our context, the driver to develop a MOOC was the promise of addressing the international deficit of quality evidence‐based dementia education, as well as the lack of research into international perspectives on dementia. Dementia is a condition of the brain caused by many diseases; the trajectory of most age‐ related dementias is progressive mental and, ultimately, physical degeneration, leading to death. The work of the Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre (Wicking Centre) is committed to the integration of research and education and framed by the concept of ‘quality of life across the trajectory of dementia.’ With dementia emerging as the public health st issue of the 21 century, lack of dementia education at multiple levels, professional and non‐professional, is increasingly recognised as an emergency. The disruptive character of MOOCs, with associated risks and uncertainties, warranted a research‐oriented project management approach, investing resources in gathering and analysing data to underpin each phase of decision‐making. This paper describes the Wicking Centre’s method of iterative investigation and analysis of three dynamically interacting components to realise a final MOOC design: 1) the Wicking Centre’s expertise in dementia knowledge and dementia education; 2) the Centre’s desire to take a cohort‐centric approach to design and delivery, and 3) models and designs for MOOCs currently promoted, discussed and reported in the higher education discipline. We used a design‐based research approach incorporating the concept of life‐cycle of an e‐learning design (Phillips et al. 2012). The realised structure for the Understanding Dementia MOOC meets multiple objectives through integrating education and research using a hybrid xMOOC and cMOOC approach. The paper reports on the decision‐making process for the initial design and the outcomes of the limited release pilot that informed the first full offering of the MOOC. The course design provided expert content to participants and also opportunities for reflecting on the content in discussion, producing a context for collaborative learning that is evidence‐based. Participant interactions constitute a rich dataset of international experiences and perspectives that is at the level of individuals, communities and cultures.

Keywords: dementia, MOOC, education, research, open, course

1. Introduction Dementia is an issue of global importance: this paper addresses the design (and pilot) of a MOOC about dementia. Dementia refers to a change in cognitive and behavioural function from previous levels, and ageing‐ related dementia may be caused by many diseases. The trajectory of most dementias is progressive mental and, ultimately, physical degeneration, leading to death over a variable period, usually 3‐8 years from diagnosis. The prevalence of dementia worldwide has sharply increased as populations age, with numbers expected to double by 2030 and triple by 2050 (World Health Organization 2013). In the Australian context, and consistent with these figures, it is estimated that the number of people with dementia will increase from 298,000 to 891,000 from 2011 to 2050 (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2012). To accommodate the care needs of this group, it is estimated that the current aged care workforce in Australia must quadruple (Productivity Commission 2011). There is, therefore, a need to provide quality dementia education for health professionals, care workers and family members who care for people with dementia. A lack of dementia

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Carolyn King et al. knowledge often diminishes the quality of care, and thus quality of life, for the person diagnosed, particularly at the end of life stage (Di Giulio et al. 2008, Mitchell et al. 2004, Sampson et al. 2005). Caring for people with dementia involves a range of management and decision‐making requirements including those associated with diagnosis, health and social support, medical management, carer support, behavioural strategies, psychological and psychiatric care, and palliative and terminal care.

The authors work at, or are otherwise affiliated with, the Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre (the Wicking Centre), Faculty of Health Science, University of Tasmania. The Wicking Centre is an integrated centre with expertise in neuroscience, translational dementia research and dementia education. Through their research, the Wicking Centre has developed expertise in designing and providing a range of dementia care courses, including an Associate Degree in Dementia Care, for health professionals in Australia. However, recognising that dementia is a problem of global significance, the Wicking Centre sought to increase the global awareness and understanding of dementia through education. Towards this end, the emerging Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) approach was used to develop a new educational offering, Understanding Dementia, to reduce the dementia education deficit internationally.

2. Open education and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) 2.1 MOOCs A University might provide open education in addition to traditional channels in order to:

provide opportunities to those who find it difficult to access education;

enhance reputation and attract students;

apply its expertise to address global problems;

generate income;

improve the efficiency of learning and teaching practice;

improve student learning outcomes (Norton et al. 2013).

The concept of MOOCs, as a form of open education, has evolved over recent years. In the original expression of the idea, an open course was offered in a distributed fashion across the Internet, outside the confines of an individual institution, to make it ‘massively open’. It was taught collaboratively, with participants and course materials dispersed across the web using a ‘connectivist’ pedagogy, in an attempt to democratise education and empower people from disadvantaged backgrounds (Downes 2012). As the use of this term has evolved, it has become known as a cMOOC (Siemens 2012).

More recently, MOOC has been used to refer to a course offered freely to the world by one institution, sometimes through commercial brokerages such as MITx (subsequently EDx), Coursera and Udacity. The first instances were by high‐profile US institutions supported by venture capital. Large enrolments occurred in some cases, and the concept captured the attention of the mainstream press and university decision‐makers worldwide. The commercial style of MOOC has been labelled an xMOOC (Siemens 2012), a reference to the ‘x’ in the name of some of the early commercial providers.

While MOOCs are a relatively new phenomenon, they build on decades of research into technology‐enhanced learning, discussed, for example, in Collis (1996), Harasim et al. (1995), Herrington et al. (2010), Laurillard (1993, 2002) and Salmon (2000, 2003). A key finding of this body of work is the need for teachers to support students to construct their own knowledge. While online approaches have enriched the experiences of (previously correspondence‐based) distance education students, in recent years, they have been extensively used to ‘blend’ on‐campus activities with online activities (Littlejohn and Pegler 2007), retaining face‐to‐face facilitation of learning.

The approach taken in many xMOOCs explicitly replicates a traditional, transmissionist model of classroom practice (Borden 2012, Knox et al. 2012). As an example, Norvig’s (2012) approach to a 100,000‐student artificial intelligence MOOC is representative of a minimalist teacher presence for reasons of cost and scale.

The design of cMOOCs, by contrast, aims to create a MOOC community that leverages the shared knowledge of members, but this relies on the presence of some “more knowledgeable other in the group” (Borden 2012).

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This approach requires students to engage collectively in developing shared knowledge but only works if students are motivated and technically competent to use and develop the MOOC environment.

Norton et al.’s (2013) analysis distinguishes between three types of outcomes sought by students: learning new things; improving employment prospects; and a general broadening of the mind. He subdivides these into 11 components, and analyses which of these can be achieved effectively through a MOOC, vis‐a‐vis a blended educational environment. This analysis establishes that there are four outcomes that a MOOC may be effective in achieving: vocational knowledge, knowledge for its own sake, formal credentials and evidence of achievement.

2.2 The design of the Understanding Dementia MOOC We approached the design of the MOOC as a ‘wicked problem’ (Rittel 1984 [1972]). This concept applies to situations in which a problem cannot be well‐defined and decision‐making is best approached as a process of inquiry rather than goal‐directed problem‐solving. Thus, the design evolved over time and was open to a range of MOOC styles, educational design methodologies and pedagogies. The iterative reconceptualising of the MOOC took into account competing tensions between MOOC style, the expertise of the content developers, the proposed target audience and the limitations of the available MOOC platform. Incremental partial solutions with emergent properties were then reflected on and fed into the next iteration of decision‐making (Checkland and Scholes 1999). The iterative process of investigating possibilities for the design of the Understanding Dementia MOOC took place over several months. We started with the audience and desired outcomes, and this led us to consider the kinds of expertise we could deliver, and that we needed translation of expertise into course content and to facilitate the student role of reflective practitioner (Shön 1973).

We decided to use a design‐based research approach (van den Akker et al. 2006) for the specific learning environment of the Understanding Dementia MOOC. The idea of the e‐learning design lifecycle described in Phillips et al. (2012) guided our project plan that included a baseline analysis, pilot phase and delivery phases that are evaluated to inform refinement of the design and measurement of effectiveness. The baseline analysis (the analysis that precedes the first phase in a design lifecycle) included online learning design principles and recommendations from publications such as those referenced in the preceding discussion about MOOCs, target audiences and Wicking Centre knowledge and expertise. The pilot was completed in June 2013 and the outcomes of the evaluation data fed into the subsequent design.

2.2.1 Baseline analysis The baseline analysis was important to establish the nature and extent of the education problem that that the Wicking Centre was seeking to address, and the expectations of potential and identified stakeholders, including the target audience. This analysis informed decisions on the learning design of the MOOC and will also provide the benchmark against which the learning outcomes and other effects of the MOOC will be identified and measured. For example, outcomes relating to the project goals including enhancing the reputation of the University, generating income, improving (online) learning and teaching practice, and the dissemination of Wicking Centre’s expertise.

The Understanding Dementia MOOC was designed to capitalise on the Wicking Centre’s unique expertise in integrating neuroscience and social science/health services dementia research. Central to the approach was the recognition of a global need for quality, evidence‐based dementia education and, critically, for an accompanying paradigm shift in the conceptualisation of dementia. Wicking’s research to date has demonstrated that there is a disconnection between the public perception of dementia (including that of health professionals and care workers) and the reality of the condition (Robinson et al. 2010). The Wicking Centre’s recent educational efforts have sought to address this disconnect by conceptualising dementia as a progressive loss of mental and, crucially, physical functions that reflects relentless, irreversible, brain cell death. Understanding that dementia is not simply a behavioural or mental health issue but, rather, is a progressive and terminal condition, highlights the importance of a palliative approach to care. Thus, the underlying narrative of the Understanding Dementia course is, “quality of life across the trajectory of dementia”, whereby an appreciation of the life limiting trajectory of the disease is key to making appropriate decisions to optimise quality of life.

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2.2.2 Intended outcomes and audience The goal of the Understanding Dementia MOOC was to provide a foundation‐level course that would increase evidence‐based knowledge about dementia, internationally. The target audience was deliberately broader than the Wicking Centre’s existing Associate Degree in Dementia Care. It was accessible to:

Those in Australia interested in dementia who might not be prepared to enrol in a fee‐paying course;

Those carers and others across the world who wished to access quality, evidence based information to assist in understanding dementia.

However, identifying the target cohort was initially problematic. It was clear that dementia knowledge could be of general interest to anyone and it was tempting to take a generalist approach: provide a ‘wikipedia’ on dementia, in the interests of being broadly appealing or non‐exclusive. Initial investigations showed that many organisations were delivering high‐quality general dementia information online (Pittman 2012). However, no integrated course was available that provided the crucial links between neuroscience and dementia care, with the additional capacity to inform on the key aspects of a palliative approach. The Wicking Centre is uniquely placed to provide such a course. We chose to tailor the learning to those for whom this knowledge would have the biggest impact in terms of translation to practice, to drive evidence based dementia care, and to facilitate a broad recognition of the life limiting nature of the condition. Identification of the target audience (health professionals, aged care workers, personal carers, people with dementia and their families) was key to informing the design and structure of the course. Furthermore, expanding the target audience internationally raised the potential for cross‐cultural sharing of dementia care practices. A well‐designed MOOC presented an opportunity to share those different perspectives among course participants, thereby increasing and enriching global understanding about dementia.

2.2.3 MOOC design choices Of the four effective uses of MOOCs identified by Norton et al. (2013), the Understanding Dementia MOOC was initially designed to achieve vocational knowledge and knowledge for its own sake. However, the course has recently been incorporated into a pathway for formal credentials and evidence of achievement, via articulation with an elective unit in the Associate Degree in Dementia Care.

The University of Tasmania supported the development of the Understanding Dementia MOOC in line with its strategic intention to enhance its reputation in Open Education. The Wicking Centre’s rationale for developing the MOOC was to apply its expertise to address a global deficit in dementia knowledge and to enhance its reputation and attract students to the ADDC, and therefore generate income.

The baseline analysis, including of Wicking’s research expertise and the target audience, resulted in the decision that the transmissionist, xMOOC style was broadly appropriate, with features of cMOOC incorporated to facilitate and leverage student engagement. The intention was to share the Wicking Centre’s knowledge, and encourage participants to apply that knowledge to their own contexts. At the same time, the Understanding Dementia MOOC was designed to provide an opportunity to contribute to international approaches to dementia care, through providing a forum for participants to share their expertise in different contexts, recognising that expertise is only useful in its successful application in a local context. In this sense, aspects of a cMOOC approach were considered appropriate for the Understanding Dementia MOOC design, in particular a context for collaborative learning that is evidence based.

An equally important driver for developing the MOOC was to leverage the data which could be generated through its delivery. This includes supporting discipline research into international perspectives on dementia care in general, and evaluating the impact of the Wicking Centre’s expert content in particular. In addition, the data collected will also support research into the scholarship of learning and teaching in the MOOC context.

The inclusion of research as an output of the MOOC was agreed with the understanding that this would imply and require a higher contribution of staff time to manage interactions and viewpoints than is usual in xMOOCs. A purposeful tradeoff has thus been made between unfunded teaching costs and the potential research outputs.

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3. Design of the e‐learning environment The design of the MOOC balanced considerations of the target audience characteristics and expertise and MOOC platforms to decide on the MOOC style (xMOOC with cMOOC characteristics). Once the MOOC style was settled, other elements of the design were considered: the curriculum (what was to be taught), the learning design (how it was to be taught), the technical platform to be used, and the expertise available (both technical and domain‐specific). Each combination of design elements was evaluated for its ability to meet the goals the project: to raise awareness of dementia as a life‐limiting disease of the brain, requiring a care response including palliation, and to support the Wicking Centre’s ongoing research efforts.

Having identified the broad range of material possible to deliver, we progressively refined the basic content design for the MOOC into three primary themes: ‘the brain’, ‘the diseases’ and ‘the person’. Within each theme, content expertise was digested and translated into a presentation form that would enable participants to reflect on and apply in their local context. A guiding principle for each module was to inform students of the theory, encourage them to reflect on the theory in their local context, and to feed back their reflections to all MOOC participants.

The themes were developed into separate modules, where each module contained several parts. Each part was designed as a single, scrollable HTML page, with several components:

Video clips of up to thirty minutes in combined duration;

One or more reflective questions, to be entered into a ‘journal’;

A quiz about video content;

One or more questions to guide forum discussion;

Other supporting materials.

The learning design was developed by a core team of six part‐time staff, consisting of a project coordinator/manager, two technical staff, two media personnel and a copyright/open educational resource officer. This team was supported by content experts who contributed material and provided advice on their particular areas of expertise. The project coordinator/manager was also involved in all content development, ensuring a consistent approach to material delivery, and alignment of unit objectives with learning activities.

3.1.1 Video elements In many xMOOCs, a single academic expert presents the content. The diversity of content here meant that a single academic or even a small group of experts would be insufficient to present the range of information required. Accordingly, we sought the input of 11 experts, locally and nationally, to speak on their individual areas of expertise. These included scientists, clinicians, health care professionals, educators, people with dementia and carers.

Online courses and MOOCs have adopted a range of content delivery styles, ranging from the use of graphics tablets, to PowerPoint or Prezi presentations, to paper‐based and white‐board explanations. Our baseline analysis of the target audience informed the decision to deliver the majority of content as interview‐style video clips. Of the diversity of styles currently available on the Internet, two particular approaches inspired the format of our video clips: the Khan Academy’s image annotation and diagrams, with interview‐style voiceovers (eg. Khan Academy 2011), and mathematician, Dr Keith Devlin’s (Devlin 2012) paper‐based illustration of examples, captured using an overhead camera. The key to Devlin’s approach is the presence of hands, which convey important aspects of non‐verbal communication. However, the delivery of content via an interview, in the Khan example, encourages an engaging conversational discourse that enables clarification of difficult concepts as one person takes on the role of the participant. Employing the strengths of these two approaches, we chose to use the interview format for most clips, with the addition of an iPad, graphics tablet or widescreen computer monitor for demonstrating images, drawing diagrams, or presenting text to enhance the explanation of certain content. Two cameras were used in all videos to add editing flexibility and viewing interest.

3.1.2 User interface elements In line with the e‐learning project management literature, organizations like Open Universities Australia and the University of Phoenix have adopted a standardised curriculum and instruction method to ensure

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Carolyn King et al. consistent quality and to lower costs (Norton et al. 2013). However, it became evident early in the process of Understanding Dementia MOOC development that a uniform approach was too rigid to accommodate our diverse content. Rather, content delivery was determined by the particular professional discipline of the presenter, their delivery style, the types of supporting resources and the nature of the material. For example, one content expert used role playing to communicate content, another used hand‐drawn graphs on an iPad, and yet another used images presented on a wide‐screen computer monitor. Our learning design balanced standardisation with flexibility, accommodating diversity of presentation approaches to ensure that the primary focus was on communication effectiveness, whilst maintaining a coherent curriculum.

4. MOOC platform and course design The open instance platform available to the project was largely untried for large scale course delivery. The instance was primarily designed for use as an open educational repository, with limited functionality as a learning environment. This posed significant challenges for the Understanding Dementia MOOC design.

However, positively, it forced the team to start with pedagogy, and adapt existing tools, rather than defaulting to a design approach that uses online technologies because they are available, without clear pedagogical justification.

In terms of the interface with students, courses hosted on the closed instance of the platform are structured as a sequential list of content links that are progressively navigated by students. Our cohort‐centric approach meant that we could not presume a particular level of prior education or any level of technical proficiency. A decision was, thus, made to stylise the interface using html programming such that content was embedded in the familiar surroundings of a scrollable web page design. Colour‐coded backgrounds and activity icons were implemented as visual standards to organise the content, while the distinct course units were arranged into separate pages. Each module within a unit can be downloaded as a stand‐alone HTML document, which students can interact with offline.

5. Understanding dementia pilot In line with the e‐learning design‐based process in (Phillips et al. 2012), a pilot was used as the first phase in the design life cycle. The absence of any other courses on the open instance platform allowed us to implement a restricted release with opportunities to test and identify improvements to the platform, as well as refinements to the design.

A 3‐week version of the full 11‐week course was trialled April‐June 2013 as a soft launch with 184 participants, 128 of whom were active in the course. The pilot was particularly useful in identifying a suite of recurring issues relating predominantly to the registration process, site navigation and technical problems. Many of the issues were resolved during the course of the pilot, while others are being negotiated with the commercial provider as part of platform development. Participants suggested a variety of improvements, including the incorporation of bullet‐point summaries of video clips, and task completion checklists, both of which will be implemented in the full release. Twenty‐seven participants completed the final feedback survey, which gathered a broad range of data relating to course design, structure, content, accessibility and navigability. Our approach to content delivery was rated highly by the majority of participants: “The range of presenters and presentation styles, eg case histories as well as professionals, gave breadth to the course.” (Pilot participant feedback) “The in‐house videos are exceptionally good … both in content and quality.” (Pilot participant feedback).

92% of respondents rated the course as either good or excellent (top two options), while 88% stated that they would be interested in completing the full course based upon their pilot experience.

“This is a fantastic learning opportunity for professionals and families and suffers of Dementia. It is well put together and easy to understand.” (Pilot participant feedback) The pilot data did not provide reliable information about our likely audience for the full‐release, as participants were primarily recruited from Wicking Centre, School of Medicine and School of Nursing and Midwifery academics and their networks. Interestingly, word of mouth and social media recruited participants from all over Australia, from a diversity of backgrounds and motivations for learning about dementia. These additional participants potentially reflect the anticipated general level of interest and attraction of the Understanding

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Dementia MOOC. The pilot also demonstrated that a range of qualitative and quantitative data can be collected, validating the tradeoff between cost of delivery and benefit to Wicking Centre research.

6. Concluding reflections This paper has presented a project undertaken by the Wicking Dementia Education and Research Centre to develop the Understanding Dementia MOOC. Following a limited release pilot, the MOOC will be ready for first full release in the second half of 2013. The disruptive nature of MOOCs means that the decision to develop a course that is free and on a massive scale is a risky enterprise. The business case must balance the cost of development and delivery against, sometimes intangible and difficult to quantify, benefits. The Wicking Centre project team conceptualised their task as a ‘wicked problem’ (Rittel 1984 [1972]): a situation in which a problem cannot be well‐defined and decision‐making is best approached as a process of inquiry rather than goal‐directed problem‐solving. This understanding that the design problem was necessarily ill‐structured because of the many uncertainties currently associated with MOOCs, gave warrant for a research‐oriented and iterative approach to design decisions. We adopted the design‐based research approach in (Phillips et al.

2012). It assumes that learning design has a life cycle from conceptualisation to maturity and is best conducted as an iterative process in which each phase of development is underpinned by data collection to evaluate and refine the design until it is considered mature. The approach also provided a framework for investing resources (human and technical) over an extended period targeted at different components of the MOOC design.

In our context, the driver to develop a MOOC was the promise of addressing the international deficit of quality evidence‐based dementia education as well as the lack of research into international perspectives on dementia. The Wicking Centre research is framed by the concept of ‘quality of life across the trajectory of dementia’ and education is a strong focus. The MOOC is expected to provide both research and education outcomes that warrant the investment in its development. The pilot confirmed that the integration of education and research into the MOOC design is likely to deliver the intended benefit that participants will provide the Wicking Centre with a rich data set suitable for discipline (dementia) research, as well as education research. It also indicates that our MOOC design will deliver its goal to engage students in understanding dementia through being exposed to expert content and to each other in discussion to produce a context for collaborative learning that is evidence based. In response to evidence from the pilot, the design for the first full release has been refined and further developed into an 11 week course in which participants will be connected together as a network and directed, scaffolded and supported to situate and apply their learning in their local context.

References Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. (2012) Dementia in Australia, Cat. No. AGE 70, Canberra.

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Siemens, G. (2012) “MOOCs are really a Platform”, Elearnspace [online], http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/07/25/MOOCs‐are‐really‐a‐platform/ Van den Akker, J., Gravemeijer, K., McKenney, S. and Nieveen, N. (2006) Educational Design Research, Routledge, Abingdon, UK. World Health Organisation. (2013) “10 Facts on Dementia”, [online], http://www.who.int/features/factfiles/dementia/en/

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Collaborative Learning Environment for Discussing Topic Explanation Skill Based on Presentation Slide Tomoko Kojiri1, Hayato Nasu1, Keita Maeda2, Yuki Hayashi3 and Toyohide Watanabe2 1 Faculty of Engineering Science, Kansai University, Osaka, Japan 2 Graduate School of Information Science, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan 3 Faculty of Science and Technology, Seikei University, Tokyo, Japan kojiri@kansai‐u.ac.jp Abstract: We often present our ideas using presentation tools such as Microsoft Office PowerPoint. To create an effective slide, authors need to select topics and order them by considering the understanding levels of audiences. We call this ability topic explanation skill. The topic explanation skill is an implicit knowledge and is experientially acquired through the reactions of audiences. However, it is difficult to acquire it as explicit knowledge and utilize it in the activity of creating slides. The objective of our research is to propose a learning method for obtaining topic explanation skill and develop support tools for the learning method. To acquire topic explanation skill, considering the reasons for inappropriateness of a slide is effective. Therefore, we have proposed a learning method that consists of three steps: 1) the author presents his/her ideas using the slide in front of an audience, 2) each audience member (learners of topic explanation skill) modifies the slide as his/her amended version (amendment), 3) learners discuss the reasons for modifying the original slides. In addition, to facilitate learning, we have developed two supporting tools. To support the generation of amendments easily in step 2, a slide reconstruction tool is provided. This tool decomposes the original slide into meaningful parts and provides the grouping and ordering functions for the parts to reconstruct them as a slide. On the other hand, a discussion navigation tool is developed for supporting effective discussion among learners in step 3. The tool analyzes structures of all amendments and points out the parts of the original slide one‐by‐one as discussion targets. Based on the experiment, the slide reconstruction support tool was able to decompose the slide into an appropriate size of parts and provide enough reconstruction functions to represent amendments. In addition, the discussion navigation tool could indicate appropriate targets that were worth discussing.

Keywords: collaborative learning, discussion navigation, presentation slide creation, topic explanation skill

1. Background Nowadays, we often present our ideas using presentation tools such as Microsoft Office PowerPoint. However, audiences sometimes cannot follow the narrative or understand what the author has intended because prepared topics are insufficient and the order of arrangement is inappropriate. To create effective presentation slides, authors need to select appropriate topics and order them by considering the understanding levels of audiences or constraints of the presentation, such as presentation time and place. We call the ability to prepare appropriate topics according to the audience and situation “topic explanation skill”.

The topic explanation skill is implicit knowledge. During a presentation, authors are able to notice the inappropriateness of prepared slides by the reaction of the audience. Nevertheless, they cannot understand which parts are inappropriate and how to fix them.

The objective of our research is to propose a learning method for obtaining the topic explanation skill and develop support tools for the learning method. Many studies have tried to support the creation of better presentation slides that can communicate the author’s ideas to audiences. Hanaue et al. (2012) developed a system that automatically created slides based on the topic relations represented by authors. The slides created by the system followed the relations between topics indicated by the author, but the level of audiences or constraints of the presentation were not considered. In addition, since the system created slides, authors could not acquire the topic explanation skill. Hasegawa et al. (2012) extracted the patterns of slides for the community from created slides. Extracted slide patterns reflected topic explanation skills for the community, but this system did not consider the levels of audiences or presentation constraints explicitly.

Rowe et al. (2006) tried to develop a presentation support system that could annotate presentation scenes in a video automatically. Okamoto et al. (2012) also developed a presentation rehearsal support system that organized comments acquired by audiences according to each slide. Kamewada et al. (2007) proposed a system that showed differences between presenting slides and monitoring slides for audiences during a presentation. Kurihara et al. (2010) proposed an index that can be used to evaluate a discussion qualitatively on two points: “did the presentation go off as expected?” and “did audience understand the narrative as expected narrative?” They also provided an evaluation function to calculate the effectiveness of the discussion

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Tomoko Kojiri et al, using the indexes. These systems tried to help slide authors discover the inappropriate part of a slide and modify it easily. However, these studies did not have a mechanism for making authors and audiences think about the reason for the inappropriateness of the slides, such that the topic explanation skill was not acquired.

To recognize the topic explanation skill, it is effective to consider the reason for the inappropriateness of the existing slides. The problem is that it is difficult for authors to consider the reasons by themselves. If there is someone to whom they have to explain the reason, they are motivated to consider the reasons deeply.

We have proposed a learning method that consists of three steps: 1) an author presents his/her ideas using the slide in front of the audience, 2) each audience member (learner) modifies the slide as their amended version (amendment), and 3) learners discuss the reasons for modifying the topics in their amendments.

Learners have to justify the validity of their modifications to others, so they are expected to consider the topic explanation skill. To facilitate this learning, we have developed two supporting tools. To support the generation of amendments easily in step 2, a slide reconstruction tool is provided. This tool decomposes the original slide into meaningful components and provides grouping and ordering functions for the components to reconstruct them as slides. On the other hand, a discussion navigation tool is developed for supporting effective discussion among learners in step 3. The tool analyzes structures of all amendments and infers the audiences’ intentions for modifying the original slide. Then, it points out the slide/s one‐by‐one as discussion targets. Seta et al. (2010) proposed a meta‐learning support system in learners’ created slides to explain the knowledge and discussed their differences so as to notice the inefficiency of their learning method. In the system, learners had to select the reasons for preparing each slide from domain‐dependent ontology that represented educational purposes. Since reasons were limited by the ontology, discussion topics were limited to what was defined in the ontology. In our system, learners can determine the modification reasons freely, and the system leads to the slide/s in which various reasons may be derived and topic explanation skill may be considered.

2. Topic explanation skill learning environment A presentation file corresponds to sequences of slides. Following are the characteristics of slides:

one slide consists of one topic,

the title represents an overview of the topic,

slide components are the smallest semantic units that explain an individual topic, and

narrative is the sequence of topics.

Since narrative is regarded as the sequence of the topics and the topic consists of components, expression of each component is not the target of our research. Topic explanation skill is the ability to select topics and constitute narrative according to the audiences’ levels. Therefore, under such characteristics, to consider topic explanation skill is regarded as considering i) slide components that belong to each title and ii) the sequence of titles.

Topic explanation skill can be considered if the reasons for modifying the slides are discussed. To foster such discussion, we propose collaborative learning based on the slide amendments. Figure 1 illustrates activity for acquiring topic explanation skill. First, the author presents his/her presentation slide (original slide) in front of the audience. The presentation slide was prepared for a specific audience’s level. Second, audience members create slide amendments while considering the audience level. Last, collaborative learning is performed by the author and audience by discussing the reasons for modifying the original slide and better constituents of slides.

Collaborative learning is the learning style where plural learners acquire knowledge through exchanging opinions with each other (Dillenbourg (1999)). The effect of the collaborative learning becomes large if the discussion is controlled by a teacher or a mentor to derive various meaningful opinions.

slide reconstruction tool,

discussion navigation tool.

In generating a slide amendment, it is preferable that audience members can generate amendments based on the original slide. Existing presentation tools such as PowerPoint show components in slide form, so that it is difficult for learners to generate their own presentation narratives without being affected by the original slide.

The slide reconstruction tool analyzes the structure of the original slide and provides components so as to allow presenters to rearrange them freely. The discussion navigation tool compares original slides and

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Tomoko Kojiri et al, amendments, and indicates the meaningful differences as discussion points. Based on these supporting tools, learners are able to create amendments easily and attain meaningful discussion. Figure 2 illustrates relations between learning activity and support tools.

Figure 1: Learning activity for acquiring topic explanation skill To support smooth execution of the activity, the following two support tools are introduced:

Figure 2: Learning activity and its support tools

3. Slide reconstruction tool A slide amendment is created based on components of original slides. Learners can add new components or delete existing components. In addition, they arrange components according to their narratives. Therefore, the original slide needs to be decomposed into components that are semantically minimal enough to explain the topic. If the size is too fine, learners have difficulties in recognizing the meaningful components. On the other hand, if the size is too large, they may not be able to represent their amendments only with the provided components and thus will have to divide existing components into smaller pieces. We have conducted a preliminary experiment to determine the appropriate size of components and the representation form of drawing amendments (Maeda et al. (2011)). As a result, title, figure, table, and text are the appropriate sizes as basic components. In addition, grouping and sequencing should be provided in order to connect components as presentation slides.

Yamasaki et al. (2010) proposed a Kit‐Build concept map system that allows learners to represent the relations among different knowledge by making meaningful links between nodes that represent knowledge. In the Kit‐ Build concept map system, a teacher prepared nodes and types of links previously. Learners could build a map only with supplied nodes and links. Our research is different from this on two points. One is that the system generates components from the given presentation slide automatically. The other is that learners can add components arbitrarily.

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Tomoko Kojiri et al, The slide reconstruction tool provides an environment for learners to easily represent amendments to an original presentation slide made in Microsoft PowerPoint. This tool divides a slide into titles, figures, tables, and text. Figures are composed of several auto‐shapes that are sometimes gathered as one group object. If auto‐shapes are grouped, they are regarded as one figure object. Each component is given an ID number that indicates the slide number in the original slide and the type of component. Two types of links are prepared for representing the amendment: sequencing and grouping. The sequencing link represents the sequencing order of components in the amendment, which can be added between title components. The grouping link makes connections between components and the title, which is regarded as the name of the group. By grouping components as one meaningful unit and connecting them in sequential order, a slide amendment can be generated easily.

Figure 3 shows screenshots of the slide reconstruction tool. When the original slide is inputted, its components are shown in the interface (Figure 3a). These components can be moved freely. In addition, new components are created by inputting text into the creating components area. Currently, only a text object can be created.

When two title components are selected and the sequencing button is clicked, a sequential link is made from the first title to the second one, and a link appears in the interface. If the title component and other component are selected and the grouping button is clicked, the other part is grouped with the title part. In this case, no link is shown in the interface. When the title component is moved, other grouped components move in the same way. Figure 3b is an example of a slide amendment. When the amendment is completed and “output” is selected from the menu, the structure of the amendment is outputted in XML format.

4. Discussion navigation tool The discussion navigation tool analyzes slide amendments of learners and selects target slide/s to discuss (discussion target). To consider topic explanation skill, the validity of components for each topic (topic contents) and the order of arranging titles (narrative) need to be discussed according to the modified components and slides in the amendments. To make the discussion target clear, topic contents and narrative should be discussed separately. In addition, the topic explanation skill may be considered deeply when the discussion targets are modified by many amendments, since learners who created amendments try to explain the reasons to other learners. Therefore, appropriate topic contents or narratives to discuss are slide/s that are modified by a large number of amendments.

Figure 4 shows the steps for extracting discussion targets. Differences of each amendment from original slides are analyzed. The differences show the inappropriateness of the original slides. First, an inappropriate narrative is determined by the ranges of topics that are modified by many amendments. Learners sometimes modify the order of more than two slides at the same time. Thus, consecutive topics that are modified by a common intention should be detected as an inappropriate narrative. Then, narratives that include intentions of many amendments are selected for the discussion targets. Here, the number of intentions of amendments which is used to select the discussion target is called as threshold of narratives. On the other hand, inappropriate topic contents are topics whose components are modified by many amendments. Thus, the number of modified topic components for each topic is counted, and those whose numbers are large are detected as discussion targets. Here, the number of modified topic components which is used to select the discussion target is defined as threshold of contents. Detected discussion targets are shown to learners one‐by‐ one from inappropriate narratives to the topic contents.

The inappropriate narrative corresponds to the consecutive modified title components. If audiences thought the order of topics inappropriate, they may modify title components from the original slides. If title components are removed, the topic is not important. If new title components are added, necessary topics are missing. If the order of title components is changed, the orders of topics are not effective. The inappropriate topics that are modified under the same intention can be grasped by consecutive modified title components. If modified title components are continued, they are regarded to be changed under the same intention. Figure 5 shows the example of detecting the modified narrative of the same intention. In Figure 5, the original slide and its amendment are shown. The numbers in the rectangles assume the title components. In this example, the learner who created the amendment changes the order between slides other than slides 3 and 4. In this case, the learner may think the order between topics of 3 and 4 is appropriate, but those between 1 to 3 and 4 to 7 are not appropriate. Thus, 1 to 3 and 4 to 7 are extracted as modified narratives of the same intentions.

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a)

When presentation slide file is inputted.

b) After slide amendment has been created.

Figure 3: Interface of slide reconstruction tool

Figure 4: Steps for extracting discussion targets

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Figure 5: Example of modified narratives of the same intention The discussion targets for the inappropriate narrative should contain the intentions of many learners. For example, let’s assume three amendments in Figure 6. Amendment 1 modified 2 to 4, amendment 2 did 3 to 5, and amendment 3 did 3 to 4. In this example, if the narrative that consists of slides 2 to 5 is selected, intentions for all learners are included. Therefore, slides from 2 to 5 are extracted as an inappropriate narrative.

Figure 6: Example of amendments For the purpose of grasping inclusive relations between inappropriate narratives, a tree structure is introduced, which is called the intention tree. In the intention tree, nodes correspond to the narratives and links show the inclusive relation. If two narratives are in inclusive relation, the included narrative becomes a child node of the including narrative. Also, each node has a weight that represents the number of including narratives. The intention tree is constructed by adding narratives in amendments one‐by‐one. Following are the policies for constructing the intention tree.

If “start of the narrative X” ≧ ”start of the narrative Y” and "end of the narrative X” ≦”end of the narrative Y”, then X becomes the child node of Y.

If “end of the narrative X” ≧ ”start of the narrative Y”, then create new node Z whose start is the start of X and end is the end of Y, and X and Y become child nodes of Z.

Figure 7 shows an example of constructing the intention tree when amendments 1 to 3 are added in this order.

Both narratives in amendment 1 become child nodes of the root node because there is no other child node.

According to policy 2, the narrative that consists of slides 4‐10 in amendment 2 becomes a parent node of the node 4‐6. When the narratives in amendment 3 are added, a new node of slide 4‐7 is created, since nodes 4‐6 and 5 ‐7 satisfy X and Y in policy 2.

On the other hand, inappropriate topic contents can be grasped by the number of modified components.

Modified components include added components and removed components. Changing components is regarded as removing old components and adding new components. Figure 8 shows the example of amendments that show the number of modified components. In this example, the total numbers of modified components for each slide are two in slide 1, five in slide 3, and two in slide 4.

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Figure 7: Example of constructing intention tree

Figure 8: Example of amendments with number of modified components Figure 9 shows the interface of the discussion navigation tool. It detects the discussion targets and shows them one‐by‐one as the button is pushed. To start the navigation, the original presentation file and directory that contain all amendment data are inputted. The original presentation file should be created in Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 or a later version. Amendment data are in XML format, which is generated by the slide reconstruction tool. When files are inputted, slides in the original file are shown on the upper half of the interface. Also, detected discussion targets are shown in the lower half of the interface. When the navigation button is pushed, the discussion target with the next priority appears.

Figure 9: Interface of discussion navigation tool

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5. Evaluation 5.1 Methodology To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed learning environment and developed tools, an experiment was conducted. Eight undergraduate and graduate students (called examinee a to h), in our laboratory, were chose as examinees, because they had experience creating slides, but did not have enough topic explanation skill.

Examinees were asked to listen to two presentations whose themes were related to our research themes (themes I and II). Audiences were assumed to be computer science undergraduates who did not have enough knowledge about the learning support system or communication support system. After each presentation, examinees were asked to create amendments for each presentation.

A few days later, they were asked to discuss the topic explanation skill based on their amendments. Two groups of four examinees were formed (groups A and B) randomly. The numbers of modifications in amendments for each examinee are shown in Table 1. In both groups, the number of modifying narratives is small compared with the number of modifying the topic contents.

Table 1: The number of modifications in amendments for each examinee

Theme I

Narrative Topic contents Narrative Topic contents

Theme II

Group A a 1 12 2 7

b 2 13 2 13

Group B C 0 6 0 8

D 0 10 2 12

E 1 3 1 4

F 3 5 1 11

G 0 1 1 5

H 1 7 3 2

The discussion environment for each group is shown in Table 2. Both groups start with theme I and then discuss theme II. Group A first discusses without the system, and then uses the system. On the other hand, group B first discusses with the system, and then discusses without the system. In this experiment, threshold of narratives is set as 2 and threshold of contents is set as 3. After both discussions have been finished, they were asked to answer questionnaires. The numbers of discussion targets indicated by the system are shown in Table 3. The numbers of discussion targets for the narrative were small for both groups.

In this experiment, three factors are evaluated; 1) validity of components provided by the slide reconstruction tool, 2) effectiveness of navigation given by discussion navigation tool, 3) validity of discussion targets provided by discussion navigation tool, and 4) effectiveness of proposed learning method in attaining topic explanation skill. In order to evaluate factor 1 and factor 2, questionnaire related to the slide construction tool was used. Factor 3 was evaluated by analysing discussed topics in the discussion without the system and topics in the discussion that should be navigated if the discussion navigation tool was used. Factor 4 was investigated based on the questionnaire related to the topic explanation skill.

Table 2: Experimental environment

First discussion

Second discussion

Group A

Theme I/without system

Theme II/ with system

Group B

Theme I/with system

Theme II/without system

Table 3: Numbers of discussion targets pointed out by system

Narrative

Topic contents

Group A

2

5

Group B

1

6

5.2 Result The results of the questionnaires are shown in Table 4. Examinees were asked select a number from 1 to 5, 5 being the best evaluation and 1 the worst.

[Result of factor 1]

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Tomoko Kojiri et al, Item 1 asks about the usefulness of the slide reconstruction tool. Since most examinees answered 4, sizes of components were proved to be appropriate.

Table 4: Questionnaire results Item Were the sizes of components provided by the slide reconstruction tool appropriate?

Was the narrative pointed out by the system as discussion target appropriate?

Were the topic contents indicated by the system as discussion targets appropriate?

Were you able to have smooth discussion by the navigation of the system?

1 0

2 1

3 1

4 5

5 1

0

1

1

4

2

0

0

0

6

2

0

2

3

1

2

[Result of factor 2]

Based on the results of items 2 and 3, the system could point out valid narratives and topic contents as discussion targets. However, based on the result of item 4, the way of indicating the discussion target was not effective. Some examinees commented that it was inconvenient that the numbers of total discussion targets that would be pointed out by the system were not clear. They were controlling which reasons they would explain for each discussion target. Thus, they could not decide what to discuss for each discussion target, since they did not know which narratives and discussion contents were pointed out. Therefore, in order to allow examinees to control the discussion, a map of the whole view of discussion targets should be prepared.

[Result of factor 3]

The validity of highlighted discussion targets was evaluated by examining discussion targets that were discussed when examinees were not utilizing the discussion navigation tool. The discussed narratives and topic contents were compared with discussion targets that the system derived based on amendments. Table 5 shows the result. The numbers of total discussed targets without the system were 13. In such discussed targets, the system could detect 10 of them successfully. That is, 10 targets detected by systems were all discussed without system. Other 3 targets that could not detected by systems were all topic contents. The way of selecting narratives was also worked in this experiment. The number of examinees who pointed out these topic contents are small. On the other hand, the numbers of targets that were selected only by small number of examinees and were not extracted by the system were 24 in Group A and 13 in Group B. So, examinees mostly discussed targets that were pointed out by many examinees and the way of selecting topic contents was appropriate in this experiment.

[Result of factor 4]

The effectiveness of learning method in topic explanation skill was examined based on the answer of the questionnaire: “What kind of knowledge/skill have you acquired during this learning?” Examinees wrote down the knowledge/skill that they thought they acquired in a free description form. Four examinees answered that they did not acquire particular knowledge/skill, because discussion was specific to the target presentation slide and general discussion explanation skill was not focused. Also, one examinee answered that he acquired discussion skill, not a topic explanation skill, and one examinee answered slide representation skill, such as how to use text layout form. On the other hand, two examinees seemed to acquire topic explanation skill. One examinee answered: “I understood what kind of topic is not necessary.” The other examinee wrote: “I understood that definition of the words should be shown before using them”. Current discussion navigation tool only points out where to discuss but does not indicate how to discuss in order to reach the topic explanation skill. Therefore, for our future, we need to revise the discussion navigation tool to introduce the mechanism that makes the group focus on the general topic explanation skill.

Current experiment was conducted by only 2 groups of 8 examinees. We need further experiment to prove the effectiveness of our method for detecting discussion targets.

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Tomoko Kojiri et al, Table 4: Discussion targets that were discussed without system and that were detected by system

Group A Group B

Number of discussed targets without system Narrative: 1, Topic contents: 5 Narrative: 1, Topic contents: 6

Discussed targets detected by system Narrative: 1, Topic contents: 4 Narrative 1, Topic contents, 4

6. Conclusion In this paper, a learning method for attaining topic explanation skill and its support tools were proposed.

Based on the experimental results, the slide reconstruction support tool was able to decompose a slide into appropriate size of components and provide enough reconstruction functions to represent amendments. On the other hand, the discussion navigation tool could detect narratives and topic contents that were worth discussing. However, author and audiences did not explicitly consider the topic explanation skill during the discussion. They focused on modifying the slide, but did not always consider the understanding levels of audiences.

In addition, the discussion navigation tool currently displays discussion targets one‐by‐one to navigate the discussion. However, examinees could not decide what to discuss, since they did not know the entire scope of the discussion topics. To allow examinees to control the subjective discussion, a map of the whole discussion targets should be generated and displayed.

References Dillenbourg, P. (1999). Collaborative Learning – Cognitive and Computational Approaches. Elsevier Science Ltd. Hanaue, K., Ishiguro Y. & Watanabe, T. (2012). Composition Method of Presentation Slides Using Diagrammatic Representation of Discourse Structure. International Journal of Knowledge and Web Intelligence, Vol.3, No.3, 237‐ 255.

Hasegawa, S. & Kashihara, A. (2012). An Extraction Technique for Presentation Schema Embedded in Presentation Document. Proc. of the 20th International Conference on Computers in Education, 214‐221.

Kamewada, K. & Nishimoto, K. (2007). Supporting Composition of a Presentation by Showing Transitions of Audiences' Attentions, Trans. of Information Processing Society of Japan, Vol. 48, No. 12, 3859‐3872.

Kurihara, K., Mochizuki, T., Oura, H., Tsubakimoto, M., Nishimori, T., Nakahara, J., Yamauchi, Y. & Nagao, K. (2010).

Linearity and Synchrony: Quantitative Metrics for Slide‐based Presentation Methodology. International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces and the Workshop on Machine Learning for Multimodal Interaction, 3301 – 3304.

Maeda, K., Hayashi, Y., Kojiri, T. & Watanabe, T. (2011). Skill‐up Support for Slide Composition through Discussion.

Proceedings of 15th International Conference on Knowledge‐Based and Intelligent Information & Engineering Systems, Part III, LNAI 6883, pp.637‐646‐113.

Okamoto, R. & Kashihara, A. (2012). Back‐review Support System for Presentation Rehearsal Review. International Journal of Knowledge and Web Intelligence, Volume 3, Number 1, 45‐57.

Rowe, L. A. & Casalaina V. (2006). Capturing Conference Presentations, IEEE MultiMedia Vol.13,No.4,76‐84.

Seta, K., Fujiwara, M., Noguchi, D., Maeno, H. & Ikeda, M. (2010). Building a Framework to Design and Evaluate Meta‐ learning Support System. Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Knowledge‐based and Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, Part IV, 163 – 172.

Yamasaki, K., Fukuda, H., Hirashima, T. & Funaoi, H. (2010). Kit‐Build Concept Map and Its Preliminary Evaluation.

Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Computers in Education, 290‐294.

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Learning Potentials of e‐Assessments: Developing Multiple Literacies Through Media Enhanced Assessment Christopher Könitz, Jakob Diel and Jürgen Cleve Hochschule Wismar, University of Applied Sciences Technology, Business and Design, Wismar, Germany christopher.koenitz@hs‐wismar.de jakob.diel@hs‐wismar.de juergen.cleve@hs‐wismar.de

Abstract: Assessments have always been part of scholarly education and thus part of learning processes. Tests, term papers and research results determine deadlines that have a massive impact on learning behavior and types of learning processes. On the other hand, universities want their students to think critically in a Humboldtian tradition. The result is a gap between pragmatic and idealistic ambitions of education. With this paper we will show an approach how modern electronic assessment can support and enable reflexive learning processes and the development of media literacies through video podcasts. Therefore we will give an overview what reflexive learning processes are and how they can be included in e‐assessments. First, we will define the basic terms of our paper: learning, education, Bildung, competence and literacy. Then we want to give a methodological overview that will adapt the research style of Strukturale Medienbildung and neoformalistic analysis to reconstruct media literacies and reflexive potentials through video podcasts. After this methodological introduction we want to demonstrate how this methodological framework can be used for e‐assessments.

Therefore, we will focus on the process of the integration of video podcasts as e‐assessment in language education at Wismar University. We will begin with an explanation of the concept of the APL as starting point for our development.

After that, we will analyze and compare two video podcasts that students have created for assessments in terms of media literacies and reflexive techniques. In a next step we want to show the further development of assessments through neoformalistic analysis. We will show that this methodological approach requires a new thinking about e‐assessment as a cyclic research process.

Keywords: e‐assessment, literacies, learning, bildung, podcast, research

1. Introduction Assessments in universities and schools are both placed in an institutional setting. The idealistic goal of education in a Humboldtian tradition is to fully develop human potentials. The pragmatic goal of education based on the needs of modern societies is to ensure that every pupil and student gains specific knowledge.

Therefore, it is necessary to measure different kinds of knowledge of pupils and students in different contexts with specific assessment methods (Handke/Schäfer 2012, 152f). With the approach of computer and information technology and the change from industrial to knowledge‐based societies the requirements for scholar education have changed. Furthermore, there are new requirements and possibilities for learning settings and assessments. In our paper we will show the possibilities and a qualitative research approach for new audio‐visual forms of assessment in the context of learning processes and education. Therefore, it is necessary to differentiate what learning processes and education are.

2. Learning vs. education vs. Bildung vs. literacy vs. competence In the field of e‐learning there are many related terms like learning, education or literacy. In the German educational context there are additional or different concepts like Bildung or (media) competencies. With this in mind it is necessary to define the terms learning, education, Bildung, competence, literacy and their relation to each other for our further argumentation.

2.1 Learning vs. education Learning is an individual, cognitive process that is related to individuals and aim to certain objects and objectives. Education, on the other hand, is a pedagogic intention that is mainly related to institutions.

Therefore, institutions create explicit and implicit curricula that individuals have to learn to be educated. In German “education” can be translated and differentiated by three main terms:

Erziehung ‐ the transfer of cultural, social and family norms to children

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Ausbildung ‐ the mediation of specific skills and knowledge in institutions like schools, universities or professional schools for specific professions and jobs

Bildung ‐ this term is related to a complex form of learning processes

In our paper and our context we want to use the term “education” in the second meaning. Therefore, we want to introduce the terms media‐competence and media‐literacy as main goals of education. Both terms belong to an institutional pedagogic context. So both can be described as formal learning goals. But there are theoretical differences.

2.2 Competencies vs. literacies In 1998, the German educationalist Dieter Baacke developed the term of "media‐competency“. The pedagogic intention is to enable learner to handle media confidently and critically. Therefore, he designs four dimensions of media‐competence: media‐criticism, media‐knowledge, media‐usage and media‐design (cp. Baacke 1997, 98f). These four dimensions are specified as learning tasks like using a computer or remixing digital content as well as critical thinking about production, distribution and reception of media. In summary, the term media‐ competence refers to a specific pedagogical intention that is output orientated. Those skills and knowledge’s defined as goals of a curriculum can then be graded through the teachers or operationalized by research (cp.

Schaumburg/Hacke 2008, 155).

In the Anglo‐American pedagogical discussion the term “literacy“ is very popular as a central issue in pedagogical institutions. In difference to the term of media‐competence (media‐)literacy includes general cultural skills such as reading, writing, researching, collaborating or remixing (cp. Jenkins et al. 2009, 28f). This means a more general pedagogical intention that Jenkins described in the following way:

„In this context, literacy is no longer read as a set of personal skills; rather, we understand the new media literacies as a set of social skills and cultural competencies, vitally connected to our increasingly public lives online and to social networks through which we operate“ (Jenkins 2010, 100).

From this point of view the term media literacy has an affinity to Humboldtian goals. With that assumption media education can be perceived as Bildung. As we can see, the terms media‐competence and media‐literacy have different pedagogical intentions: learning and Bildung.

2.3 Learning vs. Bildung Therefore, it is necessary to differentiate between the term of learning and Bildung. Following Gregory Bateson's learning theory, Winfried Marotzki makes a distinction between learning and Bildung (cp. Marotzki 1990, 34f). For that reason he differentiates levels which differ in the complexity of the learning processes.

Learning I: simple and direct connections (when the bell rings, class is over)

Learning II: more complex connections and the identification of different framings (when the bell rings and the teacher is nervous, it could also be an alarm)

On top of these basic learning processes Marotzki places the term Bildung. It is a much more complex learning process for the subject that changes the relation to world and one’s self. Therefore, he differentiates between two levels:

Bildung I: The transformation of „weltanschauung“. Individuals have a specific subjective relation to the world („Weltbezug“). The „weltanschauung“ is therefore a frame of human orientation and always a result of individual interpretation. As the individual acquires new perspectives of the world (for example through travel or movies that show other cultures and orientations) it negotiates and evaluates these in contrast to existing experiences. This can lead to a transformation of the frame of interpretation; in that case we speak about Bildung I (cp. ib., 41).

Bildung II: Transformation of the relation to one’s self. A much more complex process is Bildung II. Therefore, an individual has to monitor itself. This is more complex because Bildung II means a reflection about individual habits and attitudes. It is not only the transformation of Weltanschauungen through the transformation of interpretative frames. It is the negotiation of coexistent and dichotomic

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Christopher Könitz, Jakob Diel and Jürgen Cleve Weltanschauungen. The result is not a transformation of an interpretation frame but the transformation of how the individual construct these frames (cp. ib., 43).

In contrast to learning Bildung is a more complex learning process that refers to the handling of uncertainty and reflexivity (cp. Meder 2007, 227 or Jörissen/Marotzki 2009, 24f). For assessments it is relatively easy to measure learning because it is mainly related to knowledge about facts and certain framings. Bildung on the other side is theoretically not measurable because it is related to individual Weltanschauungen and their transformations. In the following chapter we will show our methodological approach that helped us to combine assessments and Bildung.

Figure 1: Overview over the basic terms and their relations

3. Reconstructing Bildung As we mentioned above, measuring Bildung is methodologically impossible. Therefore, we want to show a theoretical approach to get a methodological access to processes of learning and Bildung.

3.1 A theoretical approach to access Bildung In 1990 the German educationalist Winfried Marotzki developed a model that gives a methodological access to processes of learning and Bildung. Therefore, he uses biographical interviews, an established qualitative sociological method, to reconstruct processes of Bildung. The basic thought is that these complex processes can only be reconstructed through individual articulations (cp. Marotzki 1990). The researcher looks out for specific patterns and noticeable problems in the narration of the articulation. On this empirical base follows a hermeneutical step. The researcher interprets these phenomena under a pedagogical perspective and reconstructs specific processes of learning and Bildung. This basic concept was transferred in 2009 by Benjamin Jörissen and Winfried Marotzki into the concept of the Strukturale Medienbildung (structural media education) as a pedagogic research methodology that is focused on medial forms of articulation like pictures, movies and online communities (cp. Jörissen/Marotzki 2009). In its actual development the concept also includes the ability to analyze video games (cp. Fromme/Könitz 2013). For our paper we want to focus on audiovisual and narrative formats in modern assessments like video podcasts. To reconstruct the meaning and the reflexive intentions of these form of articulation the Strukturale Medienbildung takes the methodological inventory of neoformalistic film analysis.

3.2 Neoformalistic film‐analysis At the beginning of the 20th century Russian formalism arised as a critical school analyzing literature through analysis of its form. Later this concept was transferred also to movies. The main concept was to distinguished between fabula and sjuzhet. Thereby, sjuzhet (plot) describes a sequence of events but fabula (story) is the theme, the meaning that is independent of time or order. Defamiliarization in the concepts of formalism is a technique of presenting what is common in a strange, unfamiliar way to obtain a new point of view or a second opinion about a familiar subject.

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Christopher Könitz, Jakob Diel and Jürgen Cleve Neoformalism is known to have evolved from formalism. In 1979 Bordwell and Thompson published “Film Art ‐ An Introduction” in which they focused on film theory, analysis and history. Their book describes a method to analyze films following the basic question: How is something represented? The question, what is represented, is of secondary importance.

Therefore, Bordwell and Thompson assume that movies don't deliver a specific message that individuals just consume. Instead, they think of people as active individuals: “We create the story in our minds on the basis of the cues in the plot” (Bordwell/Thompson 2008, 71). The basic task from a neoformalistic perspective is to reconstruct the basic elements of a movie in connection with cultural and historic conventions like the Hollywood cinema (cp. Bordwell 2006). As basic elements of a movie they mark four elements:

Mise en scène: contains everything in front of the camera such as staging, acting, lighting, setting and costumes.

Cinematography: contains everything that is done with the camera such as camera angles or camera movements.

Editing: contains everything that is done after recording like cuts or fading to create narrative structures.

Sound: contains everything that belongs to the audio level like background music, sound effects or language.

From a methodological point of view there are similarities to the Strukturale Medienbildung. Both analyze medial forms to reconstruct inherent messages and conclusions. In terms of e‐assessments these methodological approaches are limited: they work basically for assessments that are articulated audio‐visually.

3.3 Quality aspects for audio‐visual e‐assessments The adaption of the methodological approaches for audiovisual e‐assessments leads to the question what can be measured by such a kind of analysis. As shown, the neoformalistic analysis of cinematic techniques gives us a clue of how movies or podcast are created. So it provides a method to grade the students’ creative work more objectively. From our pedagogical view this analysis can be used to analyze two central aspects.

Firstly, the method makes it possible to estimate the media literacies of the students. Audiovisual media offer many possibilities to express oneself ‐ formally and informally. Especially complex audiovisual forms of e‐ assessment like video podcasts need different media literacies (cp. Kellner 2005: 274). Through the analysis of mise‐en‐scène, cinematography, editing and sound, the teacher can evaluate the audiovisual quality of a video podcast. Therefore, the teacher must know the technical and temporal limitations in the process of production (for example the camera quality or the time for production).

Secondly, the method makes it possible to describe reflexive potentials. Aside .from the curricular and the technical quality of video podcasts there is a reflexive level that can be described as Bildung. Bildung can be visualized or expressed through cultural references such as quotes, irony or style. With the neoformalistic inventory it is possible to describe the medial form and how this form transports these reflexive thoughts. For an appropriate evaluation teachers have to know specific cultural references and symbols to understand the context. Otherwise a video podcast can be interpreted as irritating.

For the students on the other side, this means that they have to choose an appropriate medial form for their podcasts to tell their stories. Therefore, the teacher must make the quality criteria and the curricular framing transparent to them. Providing a short presentation and a checklist of film design criteria is not only a prerequisite of grading but this also helps the students during the production process through inspiring examples and guidelines. These are meant to improve the communication between the e‐learning centre and the students so that they are able to focus on curricular requirements and intended messages. So our methodology is designed to enabling and developing language skills, media literacies and self‐determination as Humboldtian ideal (see Figure 2).

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Figure 2: Video podcasts as object of reflection to support processes of Bildung

4. Practical implementation With the installation of a production studio at Wismar University in 2012 we were enabled to produce audiovisual materials for e‐learning situations, like captured lessons with teachers of the university. But modern didactics is more than just delivering content to students. It has to enable specific media literacies through the inclusion of the students (Kellner/Share 2007, 63). With that in mind we started collaboration between the e‐learning Centre and the Language Centre at our university. The result is an implementation of video podcasts as a form of e‐assessment. In the following we would like to describe the process of this implementation from institutional requirements to further development.

4.1 The APL – An example for developing modern e‐assessments We implemented the video podcast as form of an assessment into the APL module. APL is the acronym for Alternative Prüfungsleistungen which means “alternative examination formats”. Teachers can decide how they want to assess the students’ knowledge or their skills – e.g. presentations, podcasts, case studies. Six classes of students taught by two teachers have so far been part of our project. Other teachers have also already shown their interest in e‐assessment, because this form of e‐assessment had positive influence on students’ learning motivation (see table 1). 32 students out 41 stated that they have felt a strong positive support of their learning processes during the video‐podcast creation.

In cooperation with two teachers we have developed two different assessment approaches. One teacher defined a restrictive format (recorded presentation) and the other allowed a more open format (narrative, play). But still, both settings train and develop multiple literacies. Therefore, the teachers use a formative assessment.

In general contrast to summative assessment, formative assessment does not focus on a final result but on the learners’ progress in their learning process (cp. Handke/Schäfer 2012, 148). The creation of the video podcasts contains not just the process of producing. In fact, there are four general steps in the creation of video podcasts. The first step contains “information“. The students need to learn the necessary specific vocabulary – architecture or business for example. Additionally the students get a short presentation about basics of filmmaking and neoformalistic criteria. With this in mind the second step is contextualization. Therefore, the students need to make up a story out of possible scenarios that could be part of their professional life after graduation: salary negotiation, business dinner, guided house tour, job interview – to name some examples of stories students already produced. The story has finally to be written as a storyboard or screenplay. The production of the video podcasts will be the third step. Enriched with pictures, graphics or animations the whole process results in an audio‐visual podcast that can be shared with other students or friends after an

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Christopher Könitz, Jakob Diel and Jürgen Cleve evaluation through the teacher. The fourth step is the evaluation through the teacher. In the process of creating the podcast there is a permanent support and feedback as to the foreign language and the concepts for podcasts. The grade is generated in a two‐step process. The video podcast itself weighs 70% and a written analysis 30%. The evaluation of a video podcast contains a group that relates to information, subject‐specific quality and the design of the video podcasts. Additionally, it also contains an individual mark that evaluates the single performance.

Table 1: Results of the survey: The method of video‐podcast creation is graded best in average.

The written analysis is a reflection of the production process. Therefore, the students have the task to explain the background story, prepare a full transcript of the spoken words and take a critical look at the language.

Furthermore, they have to give a feedback on the process of making the podcast (personal experiences, learning effects, challenges).

As results the students produced different video podcasts with different narrative formats. They become our primary audio‐visual research data. In the following we want to show two video‐podcast analyses and compare them with the neoformalistic inventory explained above to show different reflexive potentials and media skills.

4.2 Neoformalistic analysis and comparison For a neoformalistic analysis we have chosen two podcasts that differ in many aspects. The classes have been taught by different teachers so the task differed and the students were studying at different faculties – namely Technology and Design. Hence, the participants came to us with their individual and very different media skills.

The podcasts also differ formally. One is produced by four students like a talk show and the other one is a news show made by one student.

4.2.1 “Days of our lives” ‐ The “talk show“ podcast

Figure 3: The students satirize a trash TV show using stereotypical audio‐visual elements

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Christopher Könitz, Jakob Diel and Jürgen Cleve Framing: This group studied “Architectural Lighting Design” and had attended a seminar on “Business English”.

Part of the module focused on the development of negotiating skills. They therefore developed a talk show featuring the negotiation between the mother and the widow of “Jonathan”, who died and left a heritage. The fourth person acted as a lawyer explaining law of inheritance.

Mise‐en‐scène: All four young women acted in a role stereotypical for the talk show TV format. The young sexually attractive girl (Ms Noriega), the old disappointed mother (Mrs Smith), the nicely smiling host (Ms Sims) and the objective factual expert (Mrs Wellington). Especially, the character of Ms Noriega was convincingly enacted as she was crying instantly or constantly bothering with her hairstyle. In contrast, the actress of Mrs Smith’s character had not learned her text adequately so she fell out of her role from time to time or took a look at her textbook lying on the floor in front of her. But all of them managed their acting quite well. This includes that they knew when to look into the camera to address the audience and when they had to look at each other to simulate a real conversation. This notion was supported by a classical mise‐en‐scène for a typical conversation. Three chairs in a slightly curved row is an arrangement that enables crossing gazes but also addressing the audience through the camera. The scene is completed by a kitschy background image designed by the students.

Cinematography: Writing the screenplay the group precisely described the camera settings they needed to tell their story. So we worked with a total shot and different semi‐close shots to portray the characters during their monologues.

Editing: During the editing of the video the group showed a lot of media skills and knowledge about dramaturgy. The students had created all images themselves and had also brought party pictures as inserts or sound clips for dramatization. They used many of the options a digital production studio offers such as the name overlays (pictures exported with alpha‐channel for transparency).

Sound: Music is used only in the beginning and at the end to underscore intro and outro. In sequences in which they show pictures as evidence of the other person’s misbehavior they added sounds to fake an audience’s reaction like astonishment or disgust.

Conclusion: To conclude the analysis of this podcast, the structure of a talk show is a perfect choice to deal with “negotiation” as a topic. A dispute between opposite parties is inherent to the structure of talk shows.

The group creatively adopted the stereotypical characters and different talk show features such as the cut‐in‐ videos for the lawyer scenes. The group displayed sufficient knowledge about common TV productions and skills to reproduce them.

4.2.2 “Building your own cloud” ‐ The tutorial podcast

Figure 4: The student makes a presentation with minimalistic audio‐visual set Framing: This student is from the “Multimedia” study degree program of the university. Therefore, he is focused on the technical terms which he applies in his presentation. The presentation is about building an own cloud‐server.

Mise‐en‐scène: In contrast to the four girls of the talk show podcast, this student did not act in an artificial role but acted as a professional serious presenter. The setting is oriented to news shows. The presenter and the slide of a PowerPoint presentation dominate the image. Three different image layers enable interaction between the presenter and his slides. The laptop on the table of the bottom of the framing functions as a steering device and prompter. To the style of modern news shows the laptop is a basic accessory suggesting access to the world wide web of information. After the presentation of technical background knowledge the student demonstrates how to install a cloud software on a virtual server and

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Christopher Könitz, Jakob Diel and Jürgen Cleve therefore the image of the laptop is presented in full screen while he simultaneously explains what he is doing.

Cinematography: The camera work is reduced to one single angle. The framing is chosen to show the presenter and the table he is sitting at, both framing the the slides

Editing: Through digital green screen technology the presenter is situated in the foreground, while his presentation and the animated background are behind him. Slides with a lot of details or the whole installation process were presented in full screen. The transitions between the presenter and the full screen settings were faded.

Sound: The student’s voice is the only source of sound.

Conclusion: The neoformalistic analysis shows that the podcast is produced with a minimalistic set in terms of mise‐en‐scène, cinematography, editing and sound. The student delivered a standard presentation in an e‐ learning setting. The talk is didactically well structured and shows academic self‐confidence. The live demonstration of an installation process with multiple software solutions showed different and highly sophisticated media skills in combination with the spoken language. Summing up, the podcast is a good didactical combination of content and form that has its focus on a technical matter. Therefore, in this case it is appropriate to be more content‐concentrated than reflexive.

4.2.3 Comparison Both podcasts show two different modes of storytelling: a narrative fiction and a presentation. The neoformalistic analysis has enabled a comparison of both on a basic audio‐visual level for doing an appropriate evaluation. The comparison has shown that both podcasts were appropriate to their specific contents and audio‐visual forms. In terms of the evaluation criteria both podcasts showed also different media literacies such as the adaption of TV conventions or explain a complicated matter in a specific didactical way. From a pedagogical point of view the first podcast showed some reflexions about production processes in TV and gave them an ironic turn through acting and editing. The second podcast in contrast stays at a formal content level.

In this setting reflexivity was not the main criterion. Both video podcasts were evaluated mainly in terms of language. Media literacies have not been part of the grades yet, although they can tell much about the student’s ability to express one's self. This is why we now discuss further developments of our project.

4.3 Further development Actually we have developed and implemented a quality checklist, based on neoformalistic analysis and our practical experiences to embed the methodological framework in the assessment. This is necessary because the teachers with whom we worked together told us that they don't have the knowledge to evaluate audio‐ visual aspects of video podcasts. Hence, this aspect is actually a minor one. The checklist with the curricular and neoformalistic criteria is also accessible for students. So they can understand what quality criteria are requested. For a further development it is necessary to extend the audio‐visual analysis of student’s podcasts for a wider comparison. This helps us to find out what possibilities and limits different formats of video‐ podcasts have for the goals of Wismar University (see Figure 5). Through this qualitative comparison we will be able to improve different quality criteria for assessments with video‐podcasts.

Figure 5: Developing assessments through qualitative research

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Christopher Könitz, Jakob Diel and Jürgen Cleve To get a deeper understanding how video‐podcasts influence learning processes of students and their learning outcomes we evaluate different methods like surveys as a quantitative method or problem‐centered interviews as a qualitative method (cp. Witzel/Reiter 2012).

5. Conclusion and perspectives Our paper showed that inclusion of processes of Bildung and media literacies are a challenge for modern e‐ learning and e‐assessments scenarios. Therefore, e‐learning and e‐assessments have to be understood and studied as a complex matter. In context of video podcasts we adapted the approach of the Strukturale Medienbildung to show how sophisticated modern assessment can be understood and applied. It opens new ways and methodologies to enable Humboldtian ideals. Students can show and develop skills, knowledge and ways of thinking which are not part of their basic curricula. Douglas Kellner and Jeff Share express this view: “Critical media literacy is not an option, it is an imperative” (Kellner/Share 2007, 68). Therefore the inclusion of these aspects must be part of academic education and assessments. Not only to train and qualify graduates for a professional career but also to educate people so that they can actively participate on the basis of life‐long learning. From a pedagogic point of view life‐long learning isn't just learning of something new when it becomes necessary but it should be a permanent attitude. Furthermore, it includes the important reflection about knowledge to gain orientation for individuals (cp. Mittelstraß 2002, 164). Our approach is a first step to include these requirements. But as shown above, this is a process, i.e. this means it is always under progress.

From this perspective, modern e‐learning and e‐assessment isn’t just the realization of learning theories and didactic models. It is a cyclic improving research process that includes the requirements and needs of teachers and students to develop orientation and social enhancement through Bildung.

References Baacke, Dieter (1997) Mediapedagogy. Basics of Media Communication. (orig. Medienpädagogik. Grundlagen der Medienkommunikation.) Niemeyer, Tübingen.

Bordwell, David (2006) The way Hollywood tells it: Story and style in modern movies. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Bordwell, David and Thompson, Kristin (2008) Film Art. An Introduction. 8th ed., McGraw‐Hill, Boston.

Fromme, Johannes and Christopher Könitz (2013)(in press) Educational Potentials of Computer Games: Thoughts on Analysis and Educational Theoretical Approach Education Theory Aspects of a Media Phenomenon. (orig.

Bildungspotenziale von Computerspielen: Überlegungen zur Analyse und bildungstheoretischen Einschätzung eines hybriden Medienphänomens.) In: Marotzki, Winfried/ Meder, Norbert (2013) Positions of Media Education (orig.

Positionen der Medienbildung). Springer VS, Wiesbaden, pp. 229‐278.

Handke, Jürgen and Schäfer, Anna Maria (2012) E‐Learning, E‐Teaching and E‐Assessment in University Teaching. A Manual. (orig. E‐Learning, E‐Teaching und E‐ Assessment in der Hochschullehre. Eine Anleitung.) Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich.

Jenkins, Henry (2010) Multiculturalism, Appropriation, and the New Media Literacies: Remixing Moby Dick. In: Sonvilla‐ Weiss, Stefan (2010) Mashup cultures. Springer, Vienna, pp. 98‐119.

Jenkins, Henry/ Clinton, Katie/ Purushotma, Ravi/ Robinson, Alice J./ Weigel, Margaret (2009) Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education in the 21st Century. MIT Press.

Jörissen, Benjamin and Marotzki, Winfried (2009) Media Education – An Introduction. (orig. Medienbildung – Eine Einführung). Klinkhardt, Bad Heilbrunn. th Kellner, Douglas (2005) New Media and new Competences: About the Importance of Education in the 21 Century. (orig.

Neue Medien und neue Kompetenzen: Zur Bedeutung von Bildung im 21. Jahrhundert. In: Winter, Rainer (2005) Mediaculture, Criticism and Democracy. The Douglas Kellner Reader. (orig. Medienkultur, Kritik und Demokratie. Der Douglas Kellner Reader.) Herbert von Halem Verlag, Cologne.

Kellner, Douglas/ Share, Jeff (2007) Critical media literacy is not an option. Learning Inquiry. Vol 1, No. 1, pp. 59‐69.

Kristin Thompson (1988) Breaking the Glass Armor. Neoformalist Film Analysis. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. Marotzki, Winfried (1990) Design of a Structural Education Theory. (orig. Entwurf einer strukturalen Bildungstheorie.)

Deutscher Studien Verlag, Weinheim.

Meder, Norbert (2007) The Learning Process as a performant Correlation between Single Units and Cultural World. A Education‐Theoretical Explication of the Term. (orig. Der Lernprozess als performante Korrelation von Einzelnem und kultureller Welt. Eine bildungstheoretische Explikation des Begriffs. Spektrum Freizeit), Vol. 7, No. I&II, pp. 119‐135.

Mittelstrass, Jürgen (2002) Education and ethical Dimensions. (orig. Bildung und ethische Maße). In: Killius, N/ Kluge, J./ Reisch, L. (2002) The Future of Education (orig. Die Zukunft der Bildung). 4. ed., Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, pp. 151‐170.

Schaumburg, Heike and Hacke, Sebastian (2010) Media Competence and its Measuring from the Perspective of Empirical Education Research. (orig. Medienkompetenz und ihre Messung aus Sicht der empirischen Bildungsforschung.) In: Herzig, Bardo/Meister, Dorothee M./Moser, Heinz/Niesyto, Horst (ed.)(2010) Annual of Media Pedagogy 8. Media Competence and Web 2.0. (orig. Jahrbuch Medienpädagogik 8. Medienkompetenz und Web 2.0.) VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden, pp. 147‐162.

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Methodology for Creating Adaptive Study Material Kateřina Kostolányová and Jana Šarmanová University of Ostrava, Ostrava, Czech Republic Katerina.Kostolanyova@osu.cz Jana.Sarmanova@osu.cz

Abstract: Personalised education is a topical matter today and the impact of ICT on education has been covered extensively. The adaptation of education to various types of student is an issue of a vast number of papers presented at diverse conferences. The topic incorporates the fields of information technologies and eLearning, but in no small part also the field of pedagogy. One of the basic building blocks of adaptive education is the storage of study materials. In order to be able to prepare tailored education for every type of student, study material must be prepared in many different variants, in different form. This form should be different from the classic form of text‐books. This article presents the issues connected with the creation of study materials suitable for adaptive education in more detail; the basis for this is the pedagogical analysis of the starting prerequisites applicable in eLearning.

Keywords: study material, adaptation, learning style, creation methodology

1. Topic introduction and current status Computers entered the education process in 1960s. Wave of modernisation brought the so‐called programmed learning to education. The idea of managing teaching as process has been introduced, spawning a number of theoretical researches and practical experiments. Many principles of informatics are often used for building education and teaching (e.g. linear programming, alternative programming, forked programming, adaptive programming, etc.).

At the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) of the Pedagogical Faculty of University of Ostrava, under the research on education with the support of ICT (one of the main research directions of the University of Ostrava) we focused on the personalised education with ICT support.

There is increased interest in personalised education or education tailored exactly to one’s needs, not only in lifelong learning (for extending or improving one’s qualification, or simply out of interest), but also in all levels of school education (almost all pupils can access education through computer).

Publications (Průcha, 2002; Kalhous, Obst, 2009) contain various recommendations, rules or theories that aim to improve and make learning easier. These generalisations however, obscure the individualities of students.

By interconnecting eLearning with the requirement of personalisation we arrive at the term adaptive education; i.e. education adapted to the current requirements, abilities and skills of the students.

Bibliographic search in Czech and foreign information sources (e.g. works of Brusilovsky and others) shows that the field of adaptive education is a current topic, but has only been worked on in partial tasks (adaptive navigation, adaptive presentation, creation of universal student’s profile for various systems, adaptive selection of test questions, etc.). Besides purely pedagogical perspective, adaptive education is often mentioned in connection with information technologies. It is these technologies that take personalisation one step further and help in its practical execution.

New model of learning that should suit the individual needs of students is based on a new paradigm – personalisation of the education environment. The environment takes into account the student’s personal characteristics, their abilities and current knowledge, their style of learning, etc.

2. Basic principles of adaptive education In order for the education to be adapted to specific student’s characteristics, these characteristics must be known (diagnosis of static characteristics of the student) and have a suitable structured study material. Only then can the actual process of managed teaching begin. The whole system can be divided into three basic modules – Student module, Study Material module and Managing module. In the education process, these modules can be substituted by the student, study material and the teacher (Kostolányová, 2011b).

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Kateřina Kostolányová and Jana Šarmanová

Figure 1: Theoretical model of adaptive education To implement the idea mentioned above, a self‐contained theory of individualised education must be created; one that includes the definition of the aggregate of typical independent students’ characteristics (that impact the learning process), definition of the aggregate of teaching methods and styles (that can be used to react to specific characteristics of the student) and can assign optimum learning procedure for each learning characteristic.

Besides functional adaptive LMS (learning management system), study material that can be adapted is necessary for practically executing this idea. This study material is the core of the Author Module.

3. Adaptive study material Author Module is intended for the creation, storing and maintaining of adaptive study materials. When creating the adaptive teaching aid, we can use the general method of dividing textbooks into chapters and subchapters – or in case of e‐learning into lectures. When contemplating the adaptability options, i.e. change of the way of instruction, and creating the adaptive study materials, we stem from the methodology of the creation of distant‐study materials, from the principles of programmed learning and the pedagogical principles of Komensky (Tollingerová, 1968), Gagné and others.

We divide the lectures into thematically united elementary parts, education steps. These individual education steps in the education process represent the sequence of elementary steps of learning. They create certain order in the sense of progress: beginning of the lesson, instruction, exercises, examination, completion. To be able to use this principle in the field of adaptive education, we describe the education process according to R. Gagné. This principle presents events that should be part of any educational unit (course, lecture, class).

When formulating the goals of the instruction we follow the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Goals.

When creating learning exercises, simple or group, authors of study aids follow the recommendations and taxonomy of learning exercises by Tollingerová (1968).

When contemplating the adaptability options of the study materials we also used the methodology of the creation of distant‐study materials. This is where the idea of dividing the study material into partial, smaller units, comes from. We divided the curriculum of one subject into chapters and subchapters. In subchapters, the thematically united elementary parts are called frames. Frame is an elementary education unit that explains one partial topic. It is the frame that is the main object of our focus when structuring the adaptive textbook, with several variants of instruction. For example the frame can deal with a newly introduced term (motivation for its acceptance, definition, explanation, application, example, test questions and tasks for

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Kateřina Kostolányová and Jana Šarmanová solving). Formally speaking, the frame usually corresponds with the lowest level of numbered or otherwise marked paragraphs, or one internet page including multimedia elements.

Table 1: The nine events of instruction Event Gain Attention

Inform Pupils about the Goals

Stimulate Recall of Prior Learning

Present the Material

Guide through Learning

Initiate and Elicit Performance Provide Feedback

Assess Performance Enhance Retention and Transfer to Other Contexts

Procedure, Activity Introduce a problem or a new situation.

Tell a story. Demonstrate a situation. Present a problem that needs solving. Show something in a wrong way (education will then show the correct execution). Emphasise importance, meaning.

Allows pupils to organise their minds and prepare for listening, observation or demonstration/doing.

Describe the aims of the lecture, define what they will achieve, show them how they can use it and benefit in future.

Enables pupils to build on their previously gained knowledge and skills, build relations.

Remind pupils of their existing knowledge relevant to this lecture. Create context for things, it facilitates learning and retention.

Divide information into small parts; avoid memory overload.

Use teaching strategies and tasks.

Specify difficulty levels.

Formulate orders on how to learn.

Use varying channels and media, explain the know‐how to pupils.

Learning effectiveness increases, because pupils do not lose time finding the way.

Practice by letting pupils do the tasks on their own using the newly gained behaviour, abilities and knowledge.

Show pupils the correct answers and analyse their reactions.

You can use test, quiz or a comment. Feedback must be specific, not simply “you did good”.

Tell pupils why they did well, provide guidance through their answers.

Test to know whether pupils learned new things.

Inform pupils about similar situations, provide options of further exercises, introduce situations for transfer, revise the lecture.

To be able to adapt to different personalities of students the managing teaching programme (Virtual Teacher) must have the teaching curriculum available in many different forms – similar to an experienced teacher reacting to different levels of knowledge, different talent and approach to learning, reactions, habits and other characteristics of each student.

Of course all types of instruction must be created by a real teacher – author. This will be a multiple times more demanding work than creating a distant‐study textbook and the author must be experienced and creative, able to empathise with different types of students. Teachers also have their own teaching styles. Someone presents complete, continuous lecture, describes and explains everything, applies it in exercises, and then lets students revise the knowledge and apply it. Another teacher trusts their students’ creative input and starts with introducing simple exercises on the given topic. They help students with the solving, guide them and continue with more and more demanding exercises until together they come to the general validity of the learned experience. The aim is for the students to accept the given theory more naturally and remember it better. However, in mass education there will be students who like this approach, and others who do not. For our intelligent, adaptive education, the virtual teacher must have all styles of instruction at hand to be able to choose the best one for a specific student.

Teaching aids must therefore be structured to the minute details, to allow adaptation to the student by selecting the right variants of instruction and the right sequence of its components.

4. Principle of creating adaptive study material The most prominent characteristic of a learning style is the sensory perception type, second most prominent is the quality of understanding of the instruction. We chose these two basic criteria to create frames in different variants – form of instruction for the given type of student’s preferred sensory perception and depth for the level of detail of instruction.

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Kateřina Kostolányová and Jana Šarmanová Therefore every frame must have sensory variants: one with a high prominence of text (for verbal type of student); with many pictures, graphs, charts and animations (for the visual type); with spoken word, audio recordings, communication and discussions (for the auditive type) or creative exercises, constructions, etc. (for the kinaesthetic type).

The second criterion is the division of variants by the depth of instruction. Study materials will be created in the “universal depth”. This will be used as the primary depth. Students unable to comprehend the instruction formulated in this depth will have available a variant of modified instruction (more detailed, from different point of view, etc.) and students motivated by the given topic will have access to interesting facts and specifics of the given topic.

Author of the study material will be creating individual frames in four sensory variants with three different depth variants – 12 variants of one frame in total.

Basic Frame

Variants of the Basic Frame

1 2 3 Depth

Forms ver

vis

aud

kin

Figure 2: Frame variants Variants that only differ in form and depth of instruction would not cover all required differences in the style of instruction. Instruction must react to other differences in personality characteristics of students. By analysing these student characteristics we concluded that instruction also differs in the sequence of partial components of the instruction and continuous testing, or organisation of information.

Adaptation of the instruction style of the frame is possible by dividing the frame into partial components – layers. Layer is such part of the frame that is homogenous from the point of view of the education process (theory, explanation, reinforcement, knowledge assessment, motivation, instruction management) (Kostolányová, 2011a).

We have designated these types of layers:

Instructional – group of layers including the actual instruction of the subject matter (theoretical layer), instruction layer (semantic), revision (fixation layer), layer of theoretical school and real life exercises.

Testing – group of layers for continuous testing of gained knowledge, consisting of questions, school exercises and practical (real‐life) exercises.

Other – such as goals, motivation layer, navigation layer, supporting material layer.

Information on the form and depth of instruction and type of layer must be recorded in metadata. With the use of metadata, the system can choose and manage the right way of teaching.

The instruction style of the frame can be changed by changing the sequence of individual layers, to be in accordance with a specific student’s characteristics. With this type of adaptation, the frame does not lose its general instruction value. Instruction management is done by choosing the sensory variant and by changing the order and depth of layers. Using this approach, the teaching aid can be adapted freely.

5. Methodology for creating adaptive study aids The creation of adaptive textbook is much more demanding than the creation of a classic e‐learning textbook.

We tested this authorial work on several lectures of various types of subjects (technical, informatical,

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Kateřina Kostolányová and Jana Šarmanová language, natural science) and based on the experience of all authors we came up with a methodology which will hopefully make the creation of adaptive study materials at least partially easier for future authors.

For the authorial work on adaptive textbook, it is wise to use classic existing textbook, which use in present lectures, for example. Afterward the following algorithm is advised:

1.For the selected subject create goals, define level of the subject, prepare the curriculum – contents, list of chapters.

2. Divide the chapters and subchapters into parts that correspond, in their scope, with the hourly classes (lectures), and name them.

3. Create goals and the content and level of each lecture; divide the lecture into elementary units (frames), and name them. Frames are the basic framework, starting point of further work. So far, this is a common procedure, suitable for the creation of any textbook.

4. Divide each basic frame to layers for classic instruction in the depth level of 2, “classic” execution, mostly in verbal form:

define goals of the frame,

define contents of the frame,

divide frame instruction into layers, i.e. separate theory (definition of new terms and arguments, new rules, procedures, etc.), theory explanation, fixation layer (different formulation of the instruction, putting new information in context of previous knowledge, etc.),

add layers with solved examples and real‐life examples,

add control questions to test new knowledge – or a group of questions,

add tasks to be solved to test new abilities – or a group of tasks,

contemplate and add motivation layer,

contemplate and add navigational layer,

add publications, if needed.

5. When the division of the basic frame into layers in depth 2 is ready, similarly create variants for depth 3 and depth 1.

To be able to focus on these tasks and not deal with how to write the teaching aid down, we created a form for the authors to facilitate their authorial work on a structured aid (Kostolányová, 2011b). Authors put their teaching texts into it and fill out necessary metadata that are required for the formulation of adaptive algorithms.

6. In conclusion Based on specific characteristics of the students and using properly formulated rules for the adaptive algorithm we can assign specific study material to specific students in a given sequence, thus creating their individual style of instruction. Instruction management is firstly done through choosing a sensory form and then depth of instruction and sequence of individual layers. This way the potential of the multiple‐variant study aids can be used to full by matching the preferred characteristics of individual students.

This theoretical model of adaptive learning is gradually being tested:

Textbook authors confirm the possibility of creating several frame variants divided into layers,

special software (SW) is being developed and gradually implemented, using the theoretically described structure of the authorial database,

variable textbooks are being loaded to this SW and their function is being pilot tested,

process of adaptive education is being simulated using virtual students and study aids,

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Kateřina Kostolányová and Jana Šarmanová Based on this experience, the theoretical model, methodology of authorial work and functionality and meaningfulness can be further modified, first by authors, then the collaborating methodologists, and finally by pilot students. Concurrently, the parameters of the developed SW will also be modified. Key to the realisation of adaptive education that reacts to the learning styles of students and adapts using the already mentioned principles is the use of suitable SW product. Given the character of the process, Learning Management System (LMS) appears to be the best choice. Currently the type of LMS that would have adaptive functions necessary to manage the adaptive part of teaching is not available. Besides the common functions available in LMS, the system should enable:

testing of learning styles of students and recording them,

saving of finely structured teaching aids into lectures, frames, variants and layers,

manipulating these layers in order to be able to provide different students with different way of instruction.

The development of such adaptive LMS has been under way as part of the research focus of the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) of the Pedagogical Faculty of University of Ostrava for four years. This system – Barborka – will have many other functions that are related to the complete education process. It includes the function of Virtual Teacher, i.e. intelligent system that manages the teaching/learning process in accordance with the described principles. Record of the whole education process will serve as valuable feedback. It will enable the correction of characteristics of real life and virtual students and therefore the correction of the assigned teaching style. It will discover erroneous or unsuitably formulated instructional and testing parts of the study aids. Finally it will enable discovery of unsuitably defined principles of assigning a teaching style to a corresponding learning style.

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Gagné, R. (1975). Terms of learning. Praha: SPN. Gardner, H. (1999). Dimensions of thinking: the theory of multiple intelligences. Portál, Praha. ISBN 80‐7178‐279‐3.

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Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiental learning: Experience as the source of learning and development, Engelwood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice Hall.

Kostolányová, K., J. Šarmanová and O. Takács(2009a). Learning styles and individualized e‐learning. Information and Communication Technology in Education. Ostrava: Ostravská univerzita, pp. 123‐127. ISBN 978‐80‐7368‐459‐4.

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Using Twitter, Blogs and Other Web 2.0 Technologies and Internet Resources to Enhance Arabic as a Foreign‐Language Reading Skills Blair Kuntz University of Toronto, Canada blair.kuntz@utoronto.ca

Abstract: This study, which furthers the author's research demonstrating how Web 2.0 technologies enhance Arabic as a foreign language listening skills, now concentrates on the application of Web 2.0 technologies and Internet resources in teaching the other "receptive" language skill: reading. In the past, Arabic instructors focused on teaching reading skills may have used, among other materials, magazine articles, letters, stories, menus, advertisements, reports, recipes and poems.

The Internet and the World‐Wide Web have eased the search for such materials for both teachers and students, while Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, Twitter, YouTube, social networking sites such as Facebook, instant messaging applications such as Skype and Yahoo Messenger, and Arabic‐language captions on YouTube, have opened up new vistas of reading resources. Meanwhile, electronic dictionaries in which students can search for word meanings, are a marked improvement on the old paper Arabic‐English (or other language) dictionaries which necessitates searching for words based on the Arabic 'root'. Such new media have heralded new horizons for Arabic‐language materials that can supplement or replace reading materials found in text‐books, thereby greatly increasing autonomy for both student and teacher. In many university departments, reading is often the language skill most highly‐prized for research purposes. Nonetheless, learning to read Arabic is made more difficult by the peculiarities of the Arabic script and grammar which must be read from right‐ to‐left. Compounding these difficulties are the common problems associated with learning how to read (an acquired skill not mastered by everyone) in someone's first language. While the Internet and Web 2.0 technologies are not a magic panacea for learning reading, they have eased access to a vast archive of reading materials‐‐both in standard and colloquial Arabic‐‐allowing students independently to take charge of their own learning from beginning to advanced levels.

Keywords: foreign‐language learning, Arabic language, Web 2.0, social media, reading

1. Introduction In teaching adult students of a foreign‐language, reading is viewed as one of the four "macro‐skills" which are divided into the "receptive" skills of listening and reading and the "productive" skills of writing and speaking.

In the past, reading instructors of Arabic as a foreign‐language reading instructors , as well as other foreign‐ language reading instructors, might have used, among other mediums, magazine articles, letters, stories, menus, advertisements, reports and poems. In the pre‐Internet era, it was normally the teacher's responsibility to round up such materials; however, in the post‐Internet era, such materials are easily available to both teachers and students, facilitating a "student‐centered" classroom and for students to take charge of their own learning, both of which are important aspects of e‐learning.

However, in addition to the easier access to reading materials provided by the Internet, Web 2.0 technologies have opened up new vistas of reading materials such as blogs, Twitter tweets, Wikipedia articles, comments sections on news sites and comments posted on social media sites such as Facebook. In addition, technologies such as Skype and Yahoo Messenger, for example, provide new avenues to students for both reading and writing. Moreover, in contrast to the traditional reading resources which concentrated on reading Modern Standard Arabic or the classical Arabic of the Quran, these newer technologies offer new avenues for reading colloquial Arabic materials, a phenomenon which was rarely seen in the past.

While many might think that reading, in contrast to listening, for example, is less disquieting (because it is possible to re‐read, to read at one's own pace, to reflect, and re‐consider what one has read); in fact, learning to read a foreign‐language can produce its own "anxiety" (Saito, 1999: 202). Indeed, even Arab students, whose first language is a colloquial Arabic dialect, might also find learning Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) anxiety‐ridden, in part due to the teacher‐centered teaching methods traditionally employed by teachers in the Arab world, but also because even for them MSA is in many ways a second‐language. Therefore, they might also experience anxiety and hesitancy in learning the "other" language.

The same dichotomy exists for non‐Arab speakers students of Arabic as a foreign‐language who also, in effect, learn two languages: first, the formal, standardized languages of MSA, the language that unites Arabic‐ language speakers from Iraq in the East to Morocco in the West and is the language written in newspapers,

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Blair Kuntz novels, and non‐fiction; and second, any number of dialects which in the past were mostly learned by listening since they mostly remained unwritten and not formally studied. As we shall see, however, Web 2.0 technologies have allowed colloquial Arabic languages, in both Arabic and Roman script, to be written and read, although, unlike MSA and classical Arabic, they have not been standardized.

Traditionally, academic universities offering Arabic as a foreign language have placed much emphasis on reading Arabic because students will obviously need to read the language in order to conduct research at an advanced level. Few, however, would concentrate on reading in order to learn colloquial dialects. This paper demonstrates how Web 2.0 technologies can be used to enhance the teaching and learning of reading skills in both Arabic and standard colloquial languages, and illustrates how these tools may be employed in the teaching of Arabic‐reading Arabic skills from introductory to advanced levels.

2. Methodology and context of the study This study, which investigates teaching Arabic‐language reading skills to adult foreign‐language students for whom Arabic is a foreign language, is supported by a critical evaluation of Internet and other scholarly resources concerning both teaching and learning reading in itself and teaching and learning reading Arabic. A review of scholarly educational data bases listing articles dealing with the subject area provides significant information on teaching styles and techniques. The study proceeds with a survey or pertinent Arabic‐language reading resources and strategies and Web 2.0 applications such as blogs, Twitter, wikis, social media sites, instant messaging applications, and YouTube. The discussion appraises the appropriateness of the materials found within these reading resources for use by language learners at varying levels. An examination of a selection of analog and digital text‐books employed in Arabic as a foreign language teaching, with the aim of assessing their efficiency, consolidates the research.

As the researcher is a native speaker of English, the study is most readily accessible to students and teachers of both MSA and English whose first language is also English. Internet web‐sites as well as text‐books cited are designed for native‐language speakers of English learning Arabic. The sources cited in the bibliography are also written in English. Nonetheless, the language‐learning techniques addressed in the paper could also be used foreign‐language by/for teachers and students Arabic whose first language is not English. Indeed, some of the techniques could be applied to Arabic‐language teachers teaching native speakers of Arabic for whom MSA is also another language.

3. Peculiarities of learning to read Arabic as a foreign language While, as we shall see, the Arabic language presents its own unique challenges in learning to read the language, learning to read is an applied skill in the way in which the "receptive" skill of listening and the "productive" skill of speaking are not. Indeed, functional illiteracy is a problem even in advanced industrialized societies. While the causes of illiteracy include poverty, poor implementation of educational programs, high emigration rates, and learning disabilities (Successful Reading 2013), it also remains true that many people included in the category of being literate in fact neither function at a high level of literacy nor do they appear to enjoy the practice. For instance, according to national literacy statistics, half of Americans function at an eighth‐grade reading level or lower (Brown University 2003). Further statistics reveal that in 2007 only one in four Americans read books (Fram 2007).

The dismal state of reading in the United States as an example is further compounded in the Arabic‐speaking world because Arabic speakers themselves must learn another language when they embark on learning MSA or its earlier variant, mostly used for studying the Quran and earlier classical texts, classical Arabic. Indeed, native speakers of a colloquial Arabic language, which can be roughly divided into five major groupings according to geographical region (Salameh, 2011: 50), must approach studying MSA as if it were a foreign language in itself as no one actually speaks it on a day‐to‐day basis although it is the language used in news broadcasts, speeches, newspapers, and official business. Thus, the only way that standard Arabic can be learned is through training, a situation as true for native speakers of one of the Arabic dialects as it is for non‐ Arabic foreign‐language learners. As such, Arabic is known as a "diglossic" language. Harvard Professor Charles A. Ferguson has described diglossia as an occurrence in which in addition to dialects, there is a “very divergent, highly codified (often grammatically more complex) superposed variety…which is learned largely by formal education and is used for most written and spoken purposes but is not used by any sector of the community

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Blair Kuntz for ordinary conversation (Ferguson, 1959: 336)." Other languages which can be considered diglossic include Greek, Swiss German, Haitian Creole, and Chinese.

The implications of diglossia for Arabic speakers learning MSA or classical Arabic mean that they must in fact learn a far more complex separate language even though it does share much vocabulary and grammatical structure with it. Some research has attributed the high level of functional illiteracy in Arab countries to the divergence between spoken and literary Arabic (Ayari, 1996: 243). Indeed, a now rather dated study estimated that between a quarter and half of the total time in elementary Arabic‐language schools was spent on obtaining a bare mastery of standardized Arabic (Bateson, 1967: 112).

More recent studies have confirmed the difficulties in bridging the educational gap between colloquial and standardized Arabic. For example, a study researching illiterate adult Egyptian women concluded that the discrepancy between colloquial and standard Arabic was an obstacle to learning the literary form because many of the adult learners wished to write in the colloquial form (Khahchan, 2009: 656). One might also mention that correct pronunciation of Arabic letters, which can change between colloquial and standard Arabic, is not always mastered by educated Arabs (Greis, 2006: 6). As another researcher, who teaches colloquial Arabic‐speaking seventh‐graders in Beirut has noted, "a great number of students still need extensive help to understand Arabic literature since they come to the seventh‐grade ill‐equipped to read independently (Demachkie, 2011: 220)." The same report indicated that, like the adult Egyptian women, many of the students used the knowledge of their colloquial dialect in order to understand the standard text. The widespread teacher‐centered approach of Arabic‐language teachers, the literary nature of Arabic books, and the fact that many parents pushed their children to study in English and French meant that few students read Arabic books independently and in fact developed an antipathy towards it (Demachkie, 2011: 227). This conclusion is bolstered by a BBC report indicating that some students in Lebanon can no longer even speak colloquial Arabic well because their parents send them to French‐ and English‐language schools. The BBC further reports that the phenomenon is also seen in other parts of the Arab world such as the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Egypt where foreign schools are common (Shawish, 2010). The BBC report should be tempered with the knowledge that this occurrence is largely restricted to wealthy students whose parents can afford the high tuitions associated with foreign‐language schools. It should also be mentioned that despite such dire reports, standardized Arabic is still very much robust in newspapers, satellite television, radio, and books and periodicals.

For non‐Arab students learning Arabic as a Foreign Language, the difficulties associated with learning to read are obviously different than speakers of Arabic dialects who share at least some knowledge of vocabulary and grammatical structure. Unlike students from Arab countries who are required to study the language, those students who have chosen to study Arabic, especially those who have chosen to study it for religious reasons, are unlikely to approach the task with antipathy. Nonetheless, because Arabic uses a different writing system which is written from left to right, is different grammatically, and has fewer cognates than other languages, the student of Arabic is likely to experience some “reading anxiety" (Alhaqbani, 2012: 232). However, as a study following students of Japanese discovered, perhaps students of Arabic might be more motivated and psychologically prepared for studying the difficult script than those studying more conventional languages (Saito, 1999: 213). Nevertheless, as the same study demonstrated, a high percentage of foreign‐language students of Japanese, Russian, and French "all agreed that the hardest part of learning the languages … is learning to read (Saito, 1999: 213)."

Students of the Arabic‐language in Arab world, and, unfortunately at many universities in the English‐speaking world, where teachers are often chosen for their academic, rather than their teaching abilities, have largely been taught using the "grammar‐translation method" which focuses on "reading accuracy, acquisition of vocabulary, and memorization of words and language rules (Alhaqbani, 2012: 231)." Practitioners of foreign‐ language learning in general have moved towards a communicative method of language‐learning (including "global reading strategies") which emphasizes a student‐centered classroom, interactive teaching methods, and student autonomy educating students how to learn rather than what to learn. For reading strategies, this involves global reading strategies such as the teacher setting the stage for the item being read (such as previewing the text content, introducing vocabulary, prediction activities); problem‐solving strategies (breaking up the text, finding the main idea); and support reading strategies such as taking notes, reading aloud; using a dictionary, and discussion as a whole class (Alhaqbani, 2012: 237; Kawabata, 2007).

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Blair Kuntz The most popular text‐book for foreign‐language students of Arabic in North America has become al‐Kitaab fii Ta'allum al‐'Arabbiya: A Textbook for Arabic which was prepared at Emory University in Atlanta, published in 1996 and later expanded in a second edition in 2004 by Georgetown University Press. The third edition, published in 2011, now teaches Egyptian and Levantine dialects mixed into the MSA lessons and a companion website. The text‐book revolves around two fictional college‐age students and cousins, Maha who lives in New York and Khaled who lives in Cairo. Maha's father is a translator at the United Nations and holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California and her mother is an admissions secretary at New York University (Tinari, 2004: B5). The textbook moves predictably with chapters of increasing difficulty. It does use a communicative approach, making it a marked improvement over its most popular predecessor Modern Standard Elementary Arabic which contains readings which now seem dreary and boring. Nonetheless, al‐ Kitaab suffers the limitations of most text‐books in not really encouraging experimentation. In this case, the textbook also can be accused being American‐centric. Obviously, supplementary reading material utilizing authentic texts would be a major improvement for encouraging student autonomy. Meanwhile, online text‐ books for foreign‐language speakers of Arabic also face the same limitations.

While the communicative method of language‐learning utilizing "global reading strategies" has become predominant in Western Europe and North America, especially in teaching English and other Indo‐European languages using Roman script, one researcher, Gunna Funder Hansen, criticizes the method for not being totally applicable to learning and teaching Arabic and suggests that the communicative pedagogical method does not recognize the "bottom up" difficulties Arabic learners face in learning an unfamiliar writing system which in itself is a complex process (Hansen, 2010: 567). Hansen also suggests that the morphological structure in Arabic as well as the absence of short vowels necessitates a different approach. Hansen suggests that automatic word recognition in Arabic requires practice to achieve automatic recognition, and thus that the communicative approach, which focuses on top‐down reading strategies such as skimming and guessing from context obscures the need in reading Arabic to emphasize automatic word recognition as a crucial sub skill (Hansen, 2010: 579).

4. Web 2.0 and other internet technologies related to teaching and learning Arabic as a foreign language Like most of the world, the Internet in the Arab world has witnessed profound changes in communication, dissemination of information, and education. For example, participants in the recent "Arab Spring" partook freely in the wired world employing, like the rest of the world, Twitter and social media to bring about their objectives. In the process, they provided much reading material from a variety of new technologies.

Indeed, one of the first positive accomplishments, given that learning vocabulary is often one of the biggest challenges in learning Arabic, is the plethora of electronic dictionaries that are now available. In the past, for instance, English‐language students studying Arabic most often relied on Hans Wehr’s A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic which was and is the most complete Arabic‐English dictionary. One of the major problems, however, was that users were forced to search for words via their alphabetical root rather than by alphabetical searching by word. In the case of “hollow” verbs with long vowels, this can be confusing. The dictionary does not contain colloquial words and is missing newer standard words, but it is now available in electronic form.

Other electronic dictionaries are searchable by word.

A more useful Web 2.0 tool for learning foreign languages is Twitter, the online social networking service and micro‐blogging service created in 2006 that enables its users to send and read text‐based messages of up to 140 characters known as “tweets”. Registered users post tweets through the web‐face interface, SMS, or a range of applications for mobile devices. Certainly the limited and compressed 140 characters would seem to offer a perfect tool for concentrating on word recognition in Arabic using authentic text. Furthermore, the service would appear advantageous to both beginner and advanced students with beginning students concentrating on the limited 140 characters, while more advanced students following the links provided to more advanced articles.

The uses of Twitter for language‐learning are many. For instance, it can help classroom management by providing reminders and schedules and, for beginning students of foreign languages, the teacher can activate student mobiles to provide the “Word / Expression for today” in the target foreign language (Ushigusha, 2011).

For example, in Arabic the teacher could write ‫ﻟﺤﻈﺔ ﻣﻦ ﻓﻀﻠﻚ‬: It means One moment please! Advanced

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Students could also be made to follow Arabic tweets, a task which has been made easier with the knowledge that a 2011 report indicated that Arabic is the fastest growing language on Twitter (Messieh 2011). For example, of the approximately 180 million tweets posted on a daily basis in October 2011, 2.2 million were posted in Arabic. Although this represents only 1.2 per cent of all public tweets, the growth rate between 2010 and 2011 was a staggering 2,000%. Arabic is now the eighth spot on the list of top languages using Twitter.

Indeed, after analyzing over three million tweets, gigabytes of YouTube content and thousands of blog posts, a study concluded that social media played a central role in the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt in 2010 and 2011 (Howard, 2012: 2). Social media also played a prominent role in uprisings in Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Oman. Obviously, a class following the tweets disseminated during the uprisings in real‐time would have an exciting source of reading material not found in perhaps outdated texts in textbooks.

Arabic‐language bloggers (a blog is an electronic journal kept by a blogger who regularly updates the journal) also used the Internet to criticize governments in Egypt and Tunisia. Indeed, after the Egyptian government attempted to close down social media sites, the Muslim Brotherhood relied on bloggers in London whose services could not be taken offline. Like Twitter, more and more Arabs are relying on blogs, an occurrence providing both teachers and students another up‐to‐date source of reading materials allowing students to become interactive and post their own comments in the target language. Certainly, blogs also present new ways of learning for teachers of foreign languages. For example, students in the language classroom can participate in the blogging community as both readers and writers. In addition, as one researcher states "if students are able to choose a blog on a topic that interests them they may be more likely to read them outside class (Ducate, 2005: 413)." Advanced students might also read blogs written in English by expatriate Arab speakers who link to articles written in Arabic, a practice often employed by the blog‐post angryarab.blogspot.com.

Social websites such as Facebook also offer a rich source of reading materiald. For instance, Facebook also played a prominent role in the uprisings of the Arab Spring. For instance, nine out of ten Egyptians and Tunisians surveyed in March 2011 said they were using Facebook to organize protests or spread awareness about them and all but one of the protests ending up happening (Huang 2011). Like Twitter, the number of posts has surged in the Arab world, especially in countries witnessing uprisings. Naturally, the growth in the number of Arabic Facebook users has led to Facebook pages in Arabic on a number of topics including politics, literature, history, culture, technology and science which in turn are more likely to lead to reading material of a more intellectual nature.

Yet another way to encourage reading is to acquire Arabic‐speaking Facebook friends and read their posts. For example, one Arabic‐speaking Facebook friend, who posts quite frequently in Facebook wrote the following post:

‫اﻟﻜﻠﻤﺎت آﺎﻟﻤﻼﺑﺲ ﻳﺠﺐ أن ﻧﺠﺮﺑﻬﺎ ﻋﻠﻰ أﻧﻔﺴﻨﺎ ﻗﺒﻞ أن ﻧﺨﺮج ﺑﻬﺎ ﻟﻠﻨـﺎس ﻓﻜﻼهﻤﺎ ﻳﻌﻜﺲ‬ ‫!ذوق اﻹﻧﺴﺎن وأﺧﻼﻗﻪ‬ [Words are like clothes. It is necessary to try them on ourselves before we publicize them because both of them reflect people’s tastes and their morals!]

Yet another Web 2.0 application for reading is YouTube, an application that one usually associates with listening. However, recent research indicates that videos with captions can benefit foreign‐language students (Winke, 2013: 254). However, although the foreign‐language learners tend to read captions a majority of the time they are watching the video, the deviations may depend on the foreign‐language studied. As the authors of the study note, students of Arabic spend more time reading the captions than students of Spanish and Russian. "Complex morphology in Arabic might be the heart of this", the authors re‐iterate "as could be differences between English and Arabic writing systems (Winke, 2013: 264)." The problem with extending the positive aspects of captioning to YouTube videos is that the study cited tracks foreign‐language captions being applied to videos which have been dubbed in that language. In contrast, most sub‐titled videos found on YouTube are for Arabic‐languages videos sub‐titled in English and English‐language videos sub‐titled in Arabic.

It remains untested whether reading captions in Arabic and watching a movie in English is too difficult for anyone but advanced‐level students.

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Blair Kuntz The final utility of the new Web 2.0 technologies for learning Arabic is that they have allowed colloquial Arabic to be actually read, in both Arabic and Roman script, on a wide scale. In the past, colloquial Arabic was seldom written and thus seldom read except in a few published books. The problem for both reading and writing colloquial Arabic is that it has not been standardized in either Roman or Arabic script; nonetheless, it is improvised and, for the most part understood, within the colloquial language community. Native speakers commenting on online news websites, for example, often make comments in colloquial Arabic or a mixture of colloquial and standard Arabic. The same is true for users posting updates and status reports on sites such as Facebook. For instance, in response to the posting posted above, written in Modern Standard Arabic, comparing words and clothes, one Facebook friend commented in colloquial Arabian Gulf Arabic:

‫آﻼﻣﻚ آﺘﻴﺮ ﺣﻠﻮ‬ which means “your words are very beautiful.” Other Facebook friends, also Gulf speakers, post comments in a mixture of Modern Standard Arabic and colloquial. For instance, another Facebook friend posted the following post on the occasion of the Muslim “Feast of the Sacrifice”:

‫آﻞ ﺳﻨﻪ وأﻧﺘﻮ ﻃﻴﺒﻴﻦ و ﻣﻦ اﻟﻌﺎﻳﺪﻳﻦ ﻟﻜﻞ ﻓﺮﻧﺪاﺗﻲ اﻟﺤﻠﻮﻳﻦ ﺑﻤﻨﺎﺳﺒﺔ اﻟﻌﻴﺪ ﻳﻨﻌﺎد ﻋﻠﻴﻜﻢ ﺑﺎﻟﺼﺤﻪ و اﻟﻌﺎﻓﻴﻪ ﻳﺎرب‬ [I hope that every year you will be happy and best wishes to all my beautiful friends on the occasion of the holiday and I wish you all good health and vigor by the grace of God]

Here, the writer uses a mixture of colloquial and Modern Standard Arabic, the colloquial being most pronounced in the use of the word “frandat” which Arabizes in the plural the English word “friends”.

Yet another Facebook wishes his friend Happy Birthday by stating in Roman script:

w 38baal 100 sana ya rab w enta tamam (Y) yalla meta al party :D ?

[May God keep you well for a hundred years. Well then, when is the party :D?]

Here the writer is using the “Arabic chat” alphabet in Roman script which has become popular in instant messaging applications such as Yahoo Messenger or Skype and mobile phone text messaging. In Arabic chat, developed at a time when it was only possible to communicate using Roman script, letters of the Arabic alphabet with no English equivalence were assigned numbers or capital letters. Yet another technology known as “IM Arabic” allows users to communicate using chat technologies by transliterating Latin script. Thus it is quite possible for someone to chat in the colloquial using Roman script while someone responds in Arabic script. Nor is it necessary to know chat Arabic. Instead one can improvise according to the sound of the word in Roman script and the person with whom one is chatting will most likely understand. However, this is not always the case. For instance, another Facebook friend of Algerian origin, who speaks the Maghrebi dialect of North Africa, comments on a photograph of him and his friend: PATRA MA3 AL3RBI KHOYA RABI M3AH MA3 HARAGA. As someone who is not acquainted with the Maghrebi dialect, all that can be understood is that the Facebook friend is with his friend in Patra, Greece. It is no help to consult the authoritative A Dictionary of Moroccan Arabic published by Georgetown University Press as it uses a different transliteration system, while the Facebook translation function understandably is of no use for colloquial Arabic. However, someone teaching the Maghrebi dialect would no doubt find posts such as these most useful.

5. Discussion and conclusions Although reading is a highly‐prized skill necessary for research and higher education, it is not a skill acquired thoroughly by everyone even though it is one of the graphic skills, along with writing, that is often emphasized in foreign‐language classrooms. Learning to read can produce its own anxieties for first‐language reading acquisition. Indeed, readers who do not read well in their first language are unlikely to read well in another language.

In the Arab world, where students must learn another language—albeit one that does bear grammatical similarities with their first language—the divergence between their colloquial language and the standardized language causes its own difficulties which are not improved by the teacher‐centered and outdated pedagogical models of many Arabic language schools teaching Modern Standard Arabic. Alas, even some Arabic students of MSA develop antipathy towards it and gravitate towards other European languages such as English and French.

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Blair Kuntz Foreign‐language students of Arabic are not likely to be un‐motivated (after all, they chose to study the language), but certainly the Web 2.0 technologies of Twitter, blogging, social messaging sites, and instant messaging are likely to contribute to their motivation, enhance their learning experience, and reduce “reading anxiety”.

Although this paper is a critical survey, it could provide a springboard for other qualitative and quantitative research methods such as questionnaires (multiple choice, closed, open), conducting interviews, testing and learning logs so that the research can be brought into classroom practice. Other questions for further research might include: does reading captions in Arabic for a film in English improve reading and vocabulary in Arabic?

Does chatting on Skype or Yahoo Messenger with a native speaker improve reading, especially in the colloquial Arabic languages? Will using Web 2.0 technologies mentioned in this paper improve motivation in classrooms in the Arab world?

Certainly, however, using Web 2.0 technologies has almost become a necessity in today’s wired world.

Moreover, they can be used as tools to help produce students who take charge of their own learning, one of the most important aspects of successful foreign‐language learning.

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The use of Social Networks by Universities for Communication at Institutional Level Wolfram Laaser, Julio Gonzalo Brito and Eduardo Adrián Toloza Worldwide Education, Wels, Austria wolfram.laaser@wwedu.com gonzalo.brito@gmail.com etoloza@yahoo.com

Abstract: In the current debate about the use of social networks for teaching, it is often not taken into account that universities and faculties have become very active at different levels of engagement on selected social networks during the last few years. However, the movement has for the most part until now not followed a concise strategy or clear concepts.

The aim of this article is to look at the way social networks are used for official communication at the institutional level of some selected Spanish speaking universities and to determine the different approaches used at each institution, in addition to observing their organizational implications. The authors have made a thorough analysis of the state of the practice by comparing the web presence with respect to social network usage at five universities in Argentina, Mexico and Spain. The analysis was complemented by interviews with responsible academics in this area to obtain authentic descriptions of the actual usage and the related problems. It must be pointed out that the objective was not to analyze whether social networks can be used for teaching or whether social networks should replace current learning management systems.

Based on related research, the results are discussed and summarized. Furthermore, recommendations for future actions are formulated. The main implication is to organize support units to monitor social networks and to train personnel in designing appropriate web information. Moreover, the strategic value of activities on social networks will have to be assessed more systematically and should be documented regularly. Finally, research on different stakeholders concerning preferences as well as discussion of potential obstacles and problems with respect to communication via social networks has to be intensified. Internal training for the monitoring and diffusion of concepts are equally important.

Keywords: social networks, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, online learning, Hispanic Universities, web presentation, academic communication

1. Addressing the social networks at Ibero‐American universities The motivation to conduct research on the institutional use and implementation of social networks at universities resulted from an online seminar on Educational Technology conducted at Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina (Laaser et al. 2012). In a preliminary inquiry process, we found many publications related to the use of social network projects in teaching at the K‐12 and college level. There were, however, only few published reflections about communicative use at the institutional level of public and private universities.

On the other hand, it is worth noting that most universities have taken advantage of social networks to reach their students in the last few years, in particular Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more recently Google+.

The first step was to study the websites of a selected sample of five universities. The intention was to analyze the visible and documented practice of those websites as available to the public. Based on the aforementioned analysis, the authors requested access to the experts and those responsible for policies and strategies related to the use of social networks at each institution. The selected sample included five Ibero‐American universities. The identified institutions were: Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires (Argentina), Universidad de Guadalajara (Mexico), Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, (Spain), Universidad Nacional de Quilmes (Argentina) and the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey (Mexico).

The semi‐structured interviews were conducted at a distance via web conferencing using Skype and the iFree Skype Recorder software. The software was used to record the audio in order to facilitate transcription. Prior to the interviews a semi‐structured questionnaire was sent to each of the interviewees.

Given the fact that our intent was not to monitor and improve the learning achievements, but rather to analyze social communications within various groups of participants, we preferred to use the term “Communication Analytics” which can be regarded as a subset of “Academic Analytics”, defined by Educause as “the analysis of data to help educational institutions monitor progress on key institutional goals, such as student retention, faculty productivity, and the impact of outreach and engagement” (Educause 2012). From

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Wolfram Laaser, Julio Gonzalo Brito and Eduardo Adrián Toloza this point of view, we will discuss the figures and statistical methods available and so analyze the impact of the obtained data on social networks.

2. Results of the interviews and web analysis 2.1 Efficient use of social networks Perhaps the most referenced comment in the inquiry is the usefulness of social networking for opening discussions and to establishing closer ties (without anonymities) based on feelings and emotions. However, to be effective this requires "immediate feedback" and "active listening", i.e. a dialogue open to permanent revisions and adaptations, with appropriate language and an attractive design that invites participation.

Therefore it is important, that a team of actors take care of these channels and that they are fully involved in the service. The awareness of this aspect is growing. The problem is that the organizations lack sufficient staff for such purposes.

2.2 Actors in networks In general, only student participation on the social networks is of interest to this analysis and as such is exclusively considered, along with the development of information and content for students in the institutional context. However, it is necessary to make a more widespread use of social networks for other stakeholders as well and targeting and exploiting specific information channels. Thus, social networks can also include institutional groups like administrative staff and faculty, not only in order to strengthen ties with students, but also to promote the development of communities of practice within a university.

2.3 Lack of institutional strategies concerning implementation of social media It was found that there are currently few reflections in the context of the analysis conducted on

How to relate social networks to the goals of the university in the areas of teaching, research and administration. (An exception is the qualitative plan UNED, although as of yet it does not have operational objectives).

How to use social networks to increase relational capital, knowledge capital, and corporate identity.

Attempts to incorporate activities within social networks into the knowledge management system of the university are missing.

These shortcomings are reflected in the parallel use of different networks like Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.

The same information is published at the institutional websites without adaptation to the selected channel and its target group.

Reviewing some of the many causes mentioned by the interviewees, the un‐reflected adoption of social media without previous research on the use, advantages and current limitations prevailing emerged prominently.

There is, in this regard, a lack of studies about current use and the way users benefit from, and act on, the information exchange. There are also no previous discussions reaching a consensus about institutional policy guidelines concerning the "corporate design" and appropriate "netiquette" for social networks. There are no records of the different activities of the chairs and faculties in social networks.

Establishing a common institutional profile is extremely difficult at medium‐sized to large universities, since it is virtually impossible to standardize and channel the information of the decentralized institutes /colleges/schools. Furthermore, a possible central control is contradictory to the philosophy of liberty which forms part of social networks – it also opposes academic freedom.

We found that support tools and statistics are rarely used to measure the actual impact of these communication channels, although some "communication analytics" and "info graphics" are offered by website providers. Furthermore, the lack of acknowledged indicators or "benchmarks" to measure the success or failure concerning the institutional objectives was confirmed.

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Wolfram Laaser, Julio Gonzalo Brito and Eduardo Adrián Toloza Lectures, workshops, research grants and other incentives to promote the educational use of social networks, in an institutional context, are widely missing.

2.4 Underutilization of the bidirectional channel advocated by networks From the information gathered, it appears that central actors today, such as students and teachers, have little influence on decisions about a university’s publications on social networks. Thus, for example, proposals and calls for open participation in the design of the flag of the UBA (National University of Buenos Aires) or similar appeals, are more the exception than the rule.

Instead of invitations for collaboration, what we mostly see is a dissemination of information about events, research achievements, examination dates, library services or personal success stories. The sites mostly contain information already published on the official website.

2.5 Problems of moderation, validation and use of information on social networks Due to its open characteristic, universities exert little control over social networks. The individual university, from a traditional view, becomes more vulnerable and more exposed. Furthermore, it is often a fact that students have more confidence in their peers, and therefore receive information faster from them than from the institution itself. Among the main reasons for the use of social platforms by college students are: having fun, meeting and connecting with friends, receiving current information on administrative issues or launching and running political campaigns.

As in other areas, parallel accounts are also set up. It can become difficult for students to discern which information is safe. Therefore the active participation of the institution may be essential. A strategy to reduce the substantial cost of monitoring is reported from several British universities momentarily employing students to monitor network activity (Swain 2011).

Also remarkable in this context is the effort made by UNED to "screen" the information about an individual university in different networks. Again, this underlines the lack of qualified staff and training to take over an active role on behalf of the institution. Furthermore we were able to observe a lack of adequate knowledge about interference and scope of actions, particularly with respect to the concept of "moderation" to be applied in contrast to facilitation and management in the proper LMS environments (Learning Management Systems).

On the other hand, as reemerges in all interviews, the issue of the privacy of students participating in social networking is important, and must be respected, especially when related to violence. Another point is the handling of copyright. Regrettably, training/workshops to address these issues and to clarify the universities´ position are not offered.

2.6 Social media vs. learning platforms Comparison with the existing learning platforms (LMS) is a recurring theme in all the interviews. In this regard there are many aspects to be considered in order to obtain the maximum benefit from each of the brands.

Often LMSs are referred to as a closed environment where students are focused solely on the content, which is the opposite to the open format and interactive relationship offered on social networks.

However, the technical and communicative facilities offered by both types of platforms (LMS and social networks), if properly configured, do not support the above mentioned differences. Therefore, simplistic statements about social networks as compared to LMSs should be avoided. This situation highlights the issue of pedagogical planning and management for both types of platforms in the university context.

Certainly, there has been widespread usage of social networks among students. According to a survey by the Ministry of Education 72% of Argentine boys between 11 and 17 years are participating in social networking (Carbajal 2012).

Therefore, it is considered more appropriate to focus on developing a corporate strategy that combines the potential of LMSs with that of social networks to complement and supplement each other.

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Wolfram Laaser, Julio Gonzalo Brito and Eduardo Adrián Toloza

2.7 Media unit vs. management team of social networks Some marked rivalries can be observed between existing units for educational media development and new staff responsible for social networks e.g. when defining tasks such as designing pages on Facebook or Google+.

As in the previous cases, these events highlight the fragmentation inside universities; they also highlight the necessary revision of corporate strategy regarding means and resources.

2.8 Need to develop indicators to measure the impact and reach of social networks As mentioned before, it is essential to measure the impact of interventions on social networks. Although applications in the educational context are rare, as seen from the interviews and in the process of surveying information, there are several basic web indicators about interactions and communication available from social network websites as shown in the table below.

Indicator

UdG

UNED

Quilmes (Virtual)

UBA

ITESM

(1) Enrollment

205.507

260.079

6.500

293.358

96.832

(2) FB likes

186.763

39.543

3.416

30.960

283.416

(3) People talking about

3.184

766

130

645

6.584

(4) Followers on Twitter

19.221

25.235

602

27.132

14.844

(5)Tweets sent

4.160

3.819

382

5.993

377

(2) / (1) as %

90,9

15,2

52,6

10,6

292,69

(5) / (4) as %

21,6

15,1

63,5

22,1

2,5

Figure 1: Indicators calculated for the universities interviewed (original numbers updated from August to December 2012) Some of the social networking platforms provide administrators with statistical metrics of the web site, as plotted in the following screenshot:

Figure 2: Activity summary FB page of the proposal for Open University of Austria, July 2012

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Wolfram Laaser, Julio Gonzalo Brito and Eduardo Adrián Toloza The information gathered should be carefully interpreted, especially with respect to the number of “likes” on Facebook. For example, it can be difficult to differentiate between students’ postings and comments and postings by external users. Providers often give cumulative figures for page log‐ins etc., which may cover different time spans. Unfortunately only limited information is given about how the provider calculates the figures. Furthermore, it is difficult for an institution to know about all the activities of its units on Facebook or other networks. It is difficult to calculate exact figures at the institutional level.

TotemGuard Blogs (2012) proposes the index "Comments that talk about" divided into the number of "likes".

This does not really measure the frequency or quality of communication, since comments compared to pure statements of interest or just sympathy, may represent different purposes. Another problem is that "likes" and “comments” can refer to very different screen items. On the other hand a relationship between tweets and the people who have follower status on Twitter seems to be more valid. Also, in this case, it is debatable as to whether these figures can really measure the frequency or quality of communication with the university. Users are often not clearly identified or traceable. As a first approach re‐tweets compared to followers may possibly be used. It can be assumed that a re‐tweeted comment was considered really relevant to and/or by the re‐ tweeter.

3. Some related research results As our topic is still very recent, it proved difficult to find studies by the site provider with comparable focus.

Fortunately, we at least found one recent study about social networks (Kohrn et al. 2012). This study had a related objective and applied a similar approach to ours. Expert interviews were trans‐scripted and activities on social networks investigated. The sample was taken from 28 German Universities located in the State of Lower Saxony. The focus was different and concentrated more on the use of social networks for marketing university services to potential students. The authors came up with some results that find correspondence in our own analysis.

Firstly, practically the same relevant social networks were selected for research, namely Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. All universities included in the sample were using Facebook, but only 46 % used Twitter. The same percentage (46 %) holds for the institutions that have a proper YouTube Channel (Kohrn et al. 2012, p. 343). In terms of activity the authors report that institutions for fine arts and private universities are more active on social networks than public universities are. Secondly, they state that measuring the number of “comments that talk about…” in Facebook and the number of Tweets in Twitter as compared to student enrollments shows a certain inverse correspondence between size of the institution and activity level. However, the authors acknowledge the fact that the database is not always completely consistent (Kohrn et al. 2012, p. 344).

Several German studies confirm that the Internet is the main source for young student applicants’ decision building (Willich, Buck, Heine & Sommer, 2011, p. 4). Interest in the desired academic subject, image, resources and study careers on offer is the most relevant aspect for the final selection. Ranking seems to be less relevant. Hence a good marketing for this target group can attract students and reduce uncertainties.

Social Media Marketing focuses on confidence, brand building and information support. The final objective is to generate a user who is a multiplier and an advocate for the institution. Furthermore, the importance of creating and monitoring specific target groups is emphasized.

There are similar observations also with respect to some other points mentioned in our own study. Regarding data security and protection of privacy, the authors confirm that a lot of unsolved issues still exist. In addition, the legal situation is far from being clear. Germany is known for its relatively strong protection of personal data. It is not surprising that the university administrations staff responsible recommends not using social media plug‐ins as far as possible, and not creating fan pages until all legal issues can be solved.

For the institutional level the authors state that relevant resources for management of social networks are usually attached to the marketing section of the university and do not constitute a separate organizational unit. All in all, the study concludes that universities are well aware of the relevance of social media but that their activities remain provisional and casual – due to the fact that the resources allocated are small, and that many of the administrators hesitate to make a clear decision about how to deal with the phenomenon of social networks.

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4. Towards a concise strategy of using social networks at institutional level Based on the foregoing analysis, it can be stated that the effective implementation of social networks at universities context is at the nascent stage. In this way, and considering the cases presented, the role of students at universities is one of a passive consumer receiving one‐directional user information rather than that of a producer‐consumer. Participation is limited to posting comments or requesting institutional and/or academic information and receiving feedback.

4.1 Formulate a strategy Without design and implementation of a strategy and a path of action, universities will not be adequately prepared for entering social networks. The strategy has to link the activities on social networks to the university’s objectives with respect to teaching, research and administration and will need to show specifically how its "intelligence capital," "relational capital" and "identity capital "can be increased. For this reason, a continuous monitoring and reporting of all activities on social networks carried out by members of the university is essential.

It is certainly worthwhile asking how much they talk about the university, what the related issues are, and what kind of attitude is shown (positive, negative or neutral) in order to determine the proper position and to take immediate action if needed.

As a minimum, the plan should describe how the institution is going to communicate; with which topics it wants to position itself; what type of content should be published; how many times a day new information should be provided; and said plan should perhaps be complemented by a contingency plan for conflict management.

4.2 Being active on various social networks Presence on social networks should be available at least on the following social platforms: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Google+. It is also important to relate and link different social networks. Overall we propose a functional use of the different networks:

Facebook and Google+: Publication of current information; talking to students, alumni and potential candidates; games to initiate and promote discussion.

Twitter: Short content publishing; high interaction with people; information about current administrative problems; examinations; competitions, events and contact with chair professors.

LinkedIn: To date this network is not exploited in an organized manner by the university but it has an interesting potential for offering job opportunities to graduates, training programmes and business contacts or facilitating the search for potential grants. A certain shortcoming in creating specific communities of practice including those that incorporate actors from outside the university is noticeable.

YouTube: Can show the university in its environment, infrastructure and teaching. It can share topics of interest, such as research achievements of teachers and students, with a broader audience.

4.3 Set specific interest groups In order to provide personalized information based on the interests of the groups surveyed, different target specific groups should be organized e.g. for students, staff, faculty, alumni.

In this regard, a concrete example can be obtained from an internal report by Worldwide Education Austria (Krennmair 2012): Worldwide Education – an educational institution in Austria – describing the formation and activities of a variety of groups on Facebook. There are, for example, groups dealing with WWEDU issues for all students as well as more specific groups for alumni, staff and stakeholders, in which news on relevant current events is published. The group moderators answer questions. Furthermore, regionally oriented groups have been established that are often used by students to organize meetings. This model can be extended to form communities of practice or business contacts (reports on internships, job development, etc.).

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4.4 Adapt communication style to the channel We believe that communications on social networks should use appropriate language, more colloquial than an official report, but without complete informality. They must also adapt to the habits of customers in the format of messages as imposed by the channel used.

The ability to focus on social media without specific stimulus decreases continuously as established by Jeffrey Gitomer in his book "Social BOOM " claiming that a user spends an average of 9 seconds on a commercial / publication, before he continues reading or look for a new theme (Gitomer 2011).

Link the activity of social networks to official websites in order to integrate activities and improve the position in the ranking of search engines is also recommendable. Regarding the frequency of publication, this will depend on the platform, we recommend postings at least 2‐3 times a day to keep up the interest of the target population.

4.5 Deliver value, assess and provide feedback to the process on a permanent basis It is important to assess and review communication processes on networks continually; reviewing promotes activities that produce added value for users. Thus, the establishment and analysis of indicators is crucial for the effectiveness of the actions set through these communication channels, in addition to interpreting/understanding its evolution and contribution to the overall strategy of the enterprise. In this regard, a significant number of tools are available for monitoring automated social networking accounts and for discovering more about visitors/participants.

Basic metrics provided by the platforms often appear after a first reading as mere indicators without much relevance to the academic activity. However, if properly used and combined, they can provide essential information and involvement of greater importance than that obtained by the traditional formal channels used by the universities. For example, it is possible to establish metrics focused on access to published content and knowledge about data such as: from which devices the published content is accessed; at what times; what subsequent action took place (if it came from another network and was re‐published); how long users spend on the site/service; the number of comments for each post published or updated; web traffic from other social networks, to name those most employed on widespread platforms.

As stated above, the generic indicators provided by social networking platforms can be supplemented by other services and/or monitoring statistical tools (all free versions), incorporating more information in order to adjust the results and to calculate ratios for each institution if deemed necessary. In this sense, the tool list is large and must also provide account management services. Among these, the most referred to within social networks are: Crowdbooster, Buffer, Pagelever, HootSuite and TwitStats. It should be mentioned that the tools listed above are not yet available for Google Plus. However, Google+ as well as earlier platforms offer a complete statistical report like Google Analytics Service, and provide innovations such as Multi‐Channel Funnels, showing communication overall as well as by different channels.

Tools that display statistical information are added to the monitoring tools. The new word for this type of program is "info graphics" and some examples of such applications are Easel.ly, Stat Planet, Wordle or Creately (Karbach 2012).

4.6 Promote collaboration and invite content creation Universities should invite teachers and students to create content for dissemination on social networks aimed at current and prospective student interests. The purpose would be to show the personality of the campus.

The university defines the type of information it wants to be exhibited with an index in the Google search engine. However, recent research claims that although students may contact co‐students for issues related to their studies, they are reluctant to contact instructors (Echo 360 2012). A study with 2,835 respondents from 11 institutions in the United States and Australia found that the majority of students continue to prefer to keep their academic and social life separate. Nearly three in five stated their preference in 2011 (Dahlstrom 2011, p. 25). Finally, it has been reported that the learning outcomes of Facebook users are minor when compared to others, because they study less (Tarantino 2012).

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Wolfram Laaser, Julio Gonzalo Brito and Eduardo Adrián Toloza On the other hand calls for specific activities and contributions on social networks such as in the case of proposals for the flag design at UBA, or proposed controversial topics for debate, can result in massive responses and represent an often‐missed opportunity to engage students.

4.7 Having a team responsible for social networks The design and management of social networks should be better supported to obtain greater benefit, taking into account the special characteristics of each platform. Facebook page design requires other skills than those required for the preparation of a PowerPoint lecture. For example, for an adequate design and concept it is useful to know the characteristics and differences between "groups" and "pages" in Facebook; a topic that is certainly not widely known in the university context (Pasquini 2012). Therefore, professional development is needed.

It is also important to establish good design in social networking profiles. Special care must be taken with the image that is reflected on the networks; as users are accustomed to fresh and attractive images, very rigid representations simply will not work. For the above‐mentioned tasks both good cooperation with the media section and shared use of existing resources are urgently required.

4.8 Increase research and promote the creation of communities of practice It is necessary to actively promote the implementation of research into, and experience of social networks in the university context, accompanied by adequate socialization and diffusion mechanisms (enhanced by incentives such as awards and other recognition), which allow sharing of the experience gained, whilst at the same time encouraging the development of communities of practice.

4.9 To use advertising is not bad Allowing advertising on Facebook or another platform to promote the proper institution or related organizations is entirely valid. It is recommended that appropriate, attractive pictures and messages chosen to build trust and urge people to become interested in the university and its programmes are selected. In times of high competition among universities, the use of social networks for marketing and advertising can be a powerful outreach. On the other hand we have to state that a university has no influence on added commercial advertising, which no doubt will also appear on its website.

5. Conclusions We conclude in view of the results of our study that the use of social networks is not just a question of “fashion” The university cannot ignore visible changes and new communication patterns. Therefore it is important to reflect the potential of these new media critically and on the basis of research. The proper handling of the institutional use of social networks requires that these be embedded in the organizational framework of a university, and that actions taken be related to the objectives of the university. Motivation, training and funding are also necessary to overcome deficits in the knowledge about social networks and the effects which the networks will have on all the members of the university.

Social networks are not able to remedy deficiencies of contemporary university structures. However, applied in a thoughtful way, they can help to relate the university to the rest of society and thereby return to an ancient notion about the classical role of universities in society, which include imbibing social formation beyond the pure consumption of lecturing content.

Acknowledgements The authors thank Bernhard Blacher, Otto Benavides and Patricia Ann Henrich for valuable hints and editing support.

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Retrieved July 09, 2012, from http://kmi.open.ac.uk/publications/pdf/kmi‐11‐01.pdf.

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Wolfram Laaser, Julio Gonzalo Brito and Eduardo Adrián Toloza Carbajal, M. (2012, Julio 23). La generación de las conexiones múltiples. p. 12. Retrieved July 11, 2012 from http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elpais/1‐199322‐2012‐07‐23.html.

Dahlstrom, E., (2012) ECAR, Study of undergraduate students and information technology, 2012, Educause, Retrieved July 08, 2012, from http://www.educause.edu/ecar Echo 360 White Paper (2012), Blended Learning Technology: Connecting with the online‐all‐the‐time student. Retrieved October 11, 2012, from http://resourcesecho360.com http://resources.echo360.com Educause (2012) Retrieved October 07, 2012, from http://www.educause.edu/library/academic‐analytics Ferguson, R. (2011) The State of Learning Analytics in 2012: A Review and Future Challenges Retrieved October 13, 2012, from http://kmi.open.ac.uk/publications/pdf/kmi‐12‐01.pdf Gitomer, J. (2011). Social Boom: The principle of "social media”. FT Press Karbach, M. (2012). Eight Free tools for Teachers to Make Awesome Infographics, EducationalTechnology and Mobile Learning. Retrieved July 06, 2012, from http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elpais/1‐199322‐2012‐07‐23.html Kohrn, A. Griesbaum, J,, Mandl, T. (2012) Social‐Media‐Marketing an Hochschulen. Eine vergleichende Analyse zu Potenzialen und dem aktuellen Stand der Nutzung am Beispiel niedersächsischer Hochschulen, in: Digitale Medien, Berlin (Waxmann) 2012, p. 335 ‐ 350 Krennmair, S. (2012) Social media@wwedu, Internal Report. Wels 2012.

Laaser. W., Brito, J. G. , Toloza, E. (2012) El uso de redes sociales por parte de las universidades a nivel institucional. Un estudio comparativo. RED, Revista de Educación a Distancia. Número 2012. Retrieved December 10, 2012, from http://www.um.es/ead/red/ Pasquini, L. (2012). Face book for learning communities. Retrieved July 01, 2012, from http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elpais/1‐199322‐2012‐07‐23.html Swain, H. (2012). Social media presents challenges to universities. The Guardian, Monday July 20th 2012. Retrieved July 21, 2012, from http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elpais/1‐199322‐2012‐07‐23.html Terantino, J. M. (2012) , 850 Million Users Worldwide: Should we use Facebook for Education? IEEE Learning Technology Newsletter Vol. 14, Issue 2, April 2012 TotemGuard. (2012). Infografía: éxitos y retos en el uso de las redes sociales en las universidades. Retrieved July 05, 2012, from http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elpais/1‐199322‐2012‐07‐23.html Willich, J., Buck, D., Heine, C. & Sommer, D. (2011). Studienanfänger im Wintersemester 2009/10: Wege zum Studium, Studien‐ und Hochschulwahl, Situation bei Studienbeginn. HIS: Forum Hochschule, Nr. F06/2011. Retrieved July 20, 2012, from http://www.his.de/pdf/pub_fh/fh‐201106.pdf

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Developing Active Collaborative e‐Learning Framework for Vietnam’s Higher Education Context Long Le1, Hao Tran1 and Axel Hunger2 1 Faculty of Information Technology, HCMc University of Education, Vietnam 2 Department of Computer Engineering, University of Duisburg‐Essen, Campus Duisburg, Germany longld@hcmup.edu.vn haotv@hcmup.edu.vn axel.hunger@uni‐due.de

Abstract: Earlier e‐Learning applications were mainly serving the field of higher education, and until now the most of the universities have already offered the choice to use some forms of e‐Learning in their training process. But how to take advantage of e‐Learning effectively in teaching and learning still causes headache to many educators and experts. Since 2010, Vietnamese government has developed policies to reform teaching and learning at university to solve the weaknesses and limitations of Vietnamese education system. In fact, the renewal of teaching methods and integrating technology into teaching is one of the top concerns. Therefore, many e‐Learning systems have also been built up and employed in Vietnam universities but mainly stop at the level of using technology or available tools of the LMS/CMS (such as Moodle, ATutor, and Sakai) and no pedagogical strategy has been made specifically for Vietnam’s higher education context yet. The article suggests a framework – Active Collaborative e‐Learning Framework (ACeLF), which is the foundation to develop e‐Learning systems for engaging Vietnamese undergraduates. The proposed framework focuses on developing the strengths of self‐study, collaborative, and community activities; and solving the limitations of learning resources and collaborative environment for students. It is especially appropriate for individuals whose learning styles are different in Vietnam’s culture. The framework has been tested in a few practical courses at the HCMc University of Education (Vietnam) from 2011 via Active‐Collaborative e‐Learning System (ACeLS).

Keywords: e‐learning, learning management system/course management system (LMS/CMS), adaptive e‐learning, e‐ learning framework, pedagogical strategy

1. Introduction Most institutes all over the world have been choosing to make use of a particular form of e‐Learning for their program. However, with regards to efficiently applying e‐Learning in teaching and learning, there are still many problems for the majority of educators and experts in this area (CERI 2005)(Arabasz et al. 2003), specially in such developing countries as Vietnam. Through survey, researchers have shown that e‐learning offers many benefits thanks to helping instructors and participants gain the necessary skills for work and social life in the 21st century (Minedu 2009)(Vilaseca & Castillo 2008). E‐Learning applications can support the suitability and effectiveness of education by enabling the system to be more flexible in the ways in which learning appears, i.e. "where," "when", and "how". This system can also integrate all education activities for each individual or group of people to learn and work on‐line or off‐line, synchronize or desynchronize via computer networks, personal computers or other electronic devices. Therefore, the design and development of high‐quality e‐ Learning system is currently one matter of interest, in which criteria of the quality of the system are the efficiency and the link between the system and participants.

The article analyzes the need for building a model of online teaching and learning that is appropriate for Vietnamese universities’ context and involves learners in the system. Active‐Collaborative e‐Learning Framework (ACeLF) is proposed, including three main parts: methodology, general architecture, and models of learning activity. ACeLF aims to solve the problem on building an online environment that supports really useful to learner through the learning activities, information recommendation, check and assessment.

2. Problems and related works The training form of e‐Learning has been being spread all over the world, from developed countries (like the United States, Northern Europe, and Australia) to developing countries (in Asia). This form of training, through practical application, has revealed its advantages (such as learning participants, learning time, learning space), but there also exists some limitation regarding the interaction between instructor and student; learning activities, especially self‐study (Morgan 2003) (Arabasz et al. 2003) (Allen and Seaman 2009). Through practical applications, the researchers have proved that e‐learning education has brought many benefits in the teaching

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Long Le, Hao Tran and Axel Hunger and learning activities, helping students gain necessary skills for their career in the 21st century (Minedu 2009)(Vilaseca & Castillo 2008)(Means et al. 2009)(WorldWideLearn 2010). The success of e‐learning involves using the models of Instructional Design. Thanks to this application, e‐learning system presents the link between instructional content with other learning activities in the same system, to offer the best services and tools to learners (Reiser 2001). Recently, more research aiming at developing e‐learning system has also emphasized the attention to two problems; one is the integration of pedagogical component on the system, i.e. how to attach pedagogical principles instructional content and learning activities; the other is the adaptation of the system to learners’ personal activities in different context of teaching and learning (Horton 2006)(Chew 2009)(CDS Inc. 2005)(Khan 2007)(Kenuka 2007)(Wang et al. 2010).

On the other hand, the adaptive system has been being applied widely in various fields such as information filtering, e‐commerce, recommender system (Montaner 2003) and even e‐Learning (Mödritscher et al. 2004).

In such systems, each user is modeled thanks to a profile to display their personal characteristics, so‐called user profile. Depending on an application area, a user profile of each system stores different information to fully describe the user’ individual characteristics. The applications using profile help learners to provide resources or advise them on education according to their own ability and knowledge base; it has developed into a specialized application areas, Artificial Intelligence in education (Beck et al 1996), along with the application form such as: Adaptive and Intelligent Computer‐assisted Instruction (AI‐CAI), Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS), and Adaptive and Intelligent Web‐based Educational System (AIWBES) (Brusilovsky&Peylo 2003).

Each system has a specific learning goal, is applied in a specific context, and use one (or more) intelligent techniques to support teaching, particularly personalizing self‐study on the system. The intelligent applications are designed with four main components: (1) tutor module (consisting of two components, domain knowledge and expert model), storing learning content knowledge and the system teaching scripts; (2) pedagogical module, providing component models of learning‐teaching process or pedagogical strategies; (3) student mode, storing user model, demonstrating the features and personal learner’ characteristics; and finally, (4) communication model, communicating with the outside of the system (Beck et al. 1996) (Brusilovsky et al.

2007).

Therefore, research has focused on the design of high‐ quality e‐Learning systems through the development of models, the general architecture framework such as: e‐Learning Framework (Khan 2007), ELF (Wilson et al.

2004), A Common Framework for E‐Learning Quality (Anderson 2005), Pedagogical Models for E‐Learning (Dabbagh 2005), A Strategy Framework for Designing E‐Learning System with Focus on University Entrepreneurship (Asgarimehr et al. 2012), California eLearning Framework (CCSESA 2011). The models themselves are meant to integrate pedagogy and adaptation of the system in the teaching and learning activities. However, it is still difficult to deploy and apply e‐Learning in many countries on the continent, including Viet Nam, because:

Limitation of the conditions, such as training mechanism, infrastructure, human resources, development costs, especially in developing countries as Vietnam.

Limitation of technology. Although there have been certain developments in technology and standards in e‐Learning, the design and construction of an e‐Learning system still depends entirely on the competence of the designer and the educator.

Issues of context in each country, or each different individual learner: the education system of each country about the training programs of each sector / work, cultural values and people’s personality in each country/ continent, work and study habits are different, so there is hardly a model or architecture framework which is suitable for all different contexts as stated.

To resolve the problems mentioned above, the aim at building an adaptive e‐Learning system (Fröschl 2005) which engages learners in the learning activities is also an approach to improve the quality and productivity of online training.

3. Methodology and pedagogical strategy of ACeLF 3.1 Analysis of the teaching and learning context in Vietnam’s universities In recent years, the renewal of college education in Vietnam has been of interest but has been carried out through particular government policies. However, the actual situation of teaching and learning in Vietnamese universities have a lot of limitations according to local and international articles, reports, analysis and research

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as of Giang Bach (2008), Nguyen A.H. (2002), Nguyen B.H. (2003), Nguyen C.K. (2008), Stephen et al (2006), Tra My (2008), and Vallely & Wilkinson (2008), namely inefficient teaching and learning in universities, the out‐of‐ date and impractical training programs and subjects, inaccuracy in determining standards of graduates and evaluating the effectiveness of college’s academic programs, lack of skills in doing research and implementing by lecturers, lack of skills in career and soft skills in students, etc. These leads to the following worrying statistics:

more than 50% of students are not really confident in their learning capability;

over 40% of students say that they are incapable of self‐study;

nearly 70% of students claim that they are incapable of teaching themselves; and

nearly 55% of students said that they are not really involved in learning.

Besides, a great number of universities in Vietnam have applied e‐Learning programs in their training programs, most of the time extending training programs (such as in‐service, and special training). Online training involves mainly up/downloading lessons, reference documents, exercises/projects for self‐study. A more advanced system is the use of online lessons in forms of video clips for online or offline viewing. With such systems, individual activities or group/collaborative activities and sharing communities such as group discussions, blogs, database, glossaries, journals and wiki are almost new and unfamiliar with Vietnamese students. They are not aware of the benefits online activities bring to their learning; that is why the number of students actively involved in a positive way is very low. Students are unfamiliar with self‐study activities and teamwork through computers and internet, one main reason of which is that the teaching process of at all levels in secondary schools in Vietnam has not integrated technology synchronously and systematically, especially in the field of online training.

Another cause to be concerned is that the socio‐economic conditions in regions in Vietnam are not similar and thus learning conditions and infrastructure service of education are also different. Through field survey, students (such as students at HCMc University of Education) come from various regions in the country (rural, urban, remote region). As a result, their learning conditions studying and learning background are very different, especially in applying and exploiting information technology in learning, both off‐line and on‐line.

Some students may have the ability to use and exploit technology well, but also many of the students are computer and Internet illiterate. Experiments with ACeLS carried out by the writers show: (ACeLS 2011).

concentration on viewing and download documents related to courses (95%);

concentration on certain online activities such as forum, and chat (70%);

where is the scientific focus (90%) and as the late science, the more sparse (approximately 5%);

most students join the system only because of their instructor’s requirement at the end of the course (80%); and

a large number of students still believe that learning via online systems is no fun or offer no apparent benefits (40%).

So as to build an e‐learning system which is appropriate for the context of Vietnam, it is necessary to pay attention to the needs of learners for online learning activities. By analyzing the current situation, we suggest some of learner’s needs (Petty 2009) as follows:

a supply of full documents and learning resources;

detailed and thorough instructions of learning activities;

specific criteria for assessment;

regular monitoring and supervision, and instant feedback from instructors;

regular information about the learning process and the online process; and

competition in groups or classes..

3.2 Methodology Methodology for building framework is based on the big idea of models: blended‐learning, TPCK (Mishra & Kohler 2008)(Wang et al. 2010) and the following basic requirements:

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enthusiasm of participants when taking part in the system;

collaboration in a team and a learning community; and

two‐way interaction between learners and instructor (with the supported system).

ACeLF with a pedagogical strategy is shown in Figure1 with three spindles; learning environment, instructional system, and participants (Le et al. 2010).

In the blended environment, instructional process are divided into two parts:

A traditional learning environment with direct communication between participant inside and outside the classroom.

Online learning environment attached to a Web‐based course of a particular LMS/CMS.

Figure 1: The pedagogical strategy of Active Collaborative e‐Learning Framework (ACeLF) For a course, the ratio of length of studying two environments depends on course designers or instructors.

According to the author’s experimental research (ACeLS 2011), the rate was 1:3, which means the amount of time spent on online learning is three‐time as much as that on class meetings.

In traditional learning, based on print materials such as textbooks, and reference books, the instructor organizes, guides and directly controls activities inside / outside the classroom to transfer knowledge to students. Through the teaching process in the traditional classroom and direct communication channels, instructors grasp the characteristics and capabilities of learners (profile) to be able to design appropriate learning scenarios.

Within the context of online learning activities (through a particular LMS/CMS), the instructional system is divided into two components, which are online course and learning activities, in which:

On‐line documentation are designed in many forms and presented differently, for example, the interactive courses enable self‐study or self‐research but not downloading; lectures or handouts organized topic/week enable downloading. Besides, in each course supplementary materials should be prepared, such as a detailed syllabus, manual guide for the system, and self‐study guidance. All the documents are provided for learners at the beginning of the course.

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Self‐studied activities or self‐paced learning. Activities are designed so as to have students receive the record and support from the system, as well as supervision and direct feedback from instructors. Providing suitable resources or advising learners on information depend on the profile and information about self‐ paced learning of each individual learner.

Group‐based activities. This includes regular organization of learning groups and learning activities (with the involvement of instructors, or by topics). Instructors participate with the group with the role of a supervisor and guider. This time the system acts as a virtual member, who could be a virtual tutor or a virtual student to join the group and offer consultancy.

Collaborative activities. This includes learning activities with values of sharing and community. The system and instructors serve as members of the course community and consultancy.

Online training system needs additional participation of two elements, student modal and tutor model.

Student model. This is the model providing learner profile and group profile in the system. The information gathered from learners/groups through data collection is used in the activities of system consultancy and service supply. Typical user model (i.e. learner profile) in the teaching context of Vietnam is published in other works of the author (Le et al. 2009).

Tutor model, (including expert model and domain knowledge). This is teaching scripts of an instructor or pedagogical expert, which are designed to help learners acquire knowledge through self‐study, self‐study or group work. Through tutor model, the system can compare (automatically) results of learners with the results of instructors, recognize what learners find difficult to solve so as to support learners. The domain knowledge stores knowledge for instruction which is organized and structured, including content knowledge and learning content. This can lead to different teaching script depending on the design of Instructional designers; this section is based on a number of projects by the author (Le et al. 2010, 2011).

Recommending activities of system are divided into 3 stages in the semester course, (1) starting stage (about 3 ~ 5 first weeks), exploiting information from learner profile to provide initial consultations primarily in the form of messages and warnings; (2) stage of mid‐semester (about 7 ~ 10 continued weeks ), using learner profile (individual information is updated) and log file of system to provide some advices to learner periodically; and (3) the final stages (about 3 ~ 5 final weeks), exploiting information from learner profile, log file, and grade book to provide the advices to learners. In summary, pedagogical strategy of ACeLF is to build online learning activities in an efficient manner, combine with counseling ‐ monitoring of the system and teachers so that learners can engage closely with the system, and how learners notice that the system is truly useful for their study and research.

4. ACeLF: General architecture and learning activity’s model Architecture overview of Active Collaborative e‐Learning Framework (ACeLF) consists of 4 modules, including: (see Figure 2)

Content knowledge (M1) – basic knowledge or core knowledge, such as Knowledge Graph – KG (Le et al.

2011) to supply and support for (M2) and (M3). For M2, M1 is the foundation for the construction of different learning content, while for M3, M1 provides the necessary knowledge base in learning activities with advice of the system.

M1

Learning Contents

M2

M4

(e-Course + Resources)

Core Content Knowledge (KG/Sub-KG) Learning Activities

M3

(Self-study, Group, Collaborative)

LMS/LCMS (other VLEs)

Figure 2: The general architecture of Active Collaborative e‐Learning Framework (ACeLF)

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Learning Content knowledge (M2) – knowledge for self‐study, such as e‐Course (Le et al. 2010) and other forms of learning resources.

Learning activity module (M3). This includes three groups of learning activities – self‐studied activities, group‐based activities and collaborative activities.

Figure 3: The learning activity’s model of Active Collaborative e‐Learning Framework (ACeLF).

Recommending and monitoring module (M4) – This does such tasks as:

support for teacher: track and monitor individual learners, groups learners during the whole course in the process of online learning. Allow feedback to each individual, group, and the whole class; and assess the degree in which the system is attached based on statistics (at the start / end of the course) at the end of the module.

support for student: provides and advise on personal information.

provide information about personal profiles, online learning process, and the results of learning activities within the system in the form of message or notification; enable comparison between personal learning outcomes with those of groups and class; and

consult about how to learn (learning style, learning conditions), study habits (time and duration), attitudes toward learning (styles, ways of working), and learning tasks (learning activities are necessary/unnecessary) for each individual based on the learner profile and log file in forms of digital documents or specific advice.

The learning activity’s model of ACeLF is described by Figure 3, including 4 key modules: expert knowledge; student model; teaching and learning; and user interface.

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Figure 4: Home page of a practical course – Feb,2012

5. Proposed system and experimentations For a system that provides services based on ACeLF, we use CMS Moodle to build our system – Active Collaborative e‐Learning System (ACeLS – version 1.0). The proposed system is developed, and part of it is shown in Figure 4, link: http://2learner.edu.vn/ACeLS. Account for testing: guest01, password: Abcd@123.

The system was piloted and applied in many practical course during academic year: 2011‐2012, 2012‐2013.

Figure 5: Student home page of ACeLS – version 2.0 When learners are to study, he uses a page shown in Figure 4, Figure 5 (with version 2.0). Learning activities are organized with pedagogical strategy as follows,

Common activities for full course, including self‐studied and collaborative activities such as daily discussion, private journal, course glossary, etc.

Course overview activities, including the activities which provide course’s information and learning resources such as course syllabus, documentations and learning materials, setting norms, teacher’s guidance for online learning, etc.

Topic/week activities, including self‐studied, group‐based and collaborative activities for every topic/week, and they are depended on course designer and real learner’s needs.

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Long Le, Hao Tran and Axel Hunger Figure 5 also shows student home page of ACeLS – version 2.0 with full functions of proposed ACeLF in which it supports teaching and learning more effectively in online environment through recommending activities automatically from system to participants.

Figure 6: Screen of recommendation for student Figure 6 shows screen of recommendation for student with provided information, including individual profile (1), advice message (2), learning result of learner (weekly) and it is compared with different results such as learner’s group, orther group, full class (3), chart of learning progress periodically (4).

Figure 7 shows screen of teacher monitoring functions with supported information, including course information such as current week number, participant number (1), monitoring course information such as list of learners who need to inform message or warning information, statistics for number of learners who complete exercises/projects (2), statistical charts of learning activities (3), learning progress (4).

6. Conclusion From the perspective of IT developers, the article has suggested a framework (AceLF) as a basis for developing adaptive e‐learning system in the context of teaching and learning in Vietnam’s universities. Through implementation and initial settings, the ACeLS application developed by proposed framework takes place during blended courses in the 2012‐2013 semesters at the faculty of Information Technology, HCMc University of Education, focusing on exploiting learners’ learning activities (with link http://2learner.edu.vn/ACeLS). It has showed positive results in terms of feedback from participants – over 80% of learners appreciated the usefulness of the systems, and satisfied with the closely connection between learners and learning activities.

Currently, the system should continue to be tested in practical courses basing on the 2nd version ACeLS with new link, http://2learner.edu.vn/ACeLS2. The system is developed with full functions of ACeLF, especially it focus on recommending activities to learner.

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Figure 7: Screen of teacher monitoring functions

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Anderson J. (2005). ‘A Common Framework for E‐learning Quality’. In quality criteria for e‐learning, Insights Thematic Dossiers (EUN). Source: http://insight.eun.org/ww/en/pub/insight/thematic_dossiers/qualitycriteria.htm Arabasz, P., Pirani, J., A., Fawcett, D. (2003) ‘Supporting E‐Learning in Higher Education’. Research Study from the EDUCAUSE – Center for Applied Research, Vol.3 – http://educause.edu/ecar Asgarimehr M. et al. (2012), ‘A Strategic Framework for Designing E‐Learning System with Focus on University Entrepreneurship’. International Journal of Computer Science Issues, Vol. 9, Issue 1, No 1, January 2012 ISSN (Online): 1694‐0814 www.IJCSI. Source: http://www.ijcsi.org/papers/IJCSI‐9‐1‐1‐129‐138.pdf Badrul H. Khan (2007). ‘E‐Learning Framework’, Flexible Learning in an Information Society, IGI Global, 2007, ISBN 978‐1‐ 59904‐325‐8. Source: http://asianvu.com/bk/framework/ Beck, J., Stern, M., Haugsjaa, E. (1996), ‘Applications of AI in Education’. In ACM Crossroads Student Magazine . Last Modified: Tuesday, 23‐Jan‐01 15:19:13, Location: www.acm.org/crossroads/xrds3‐1/aied.htm Brooks, C., Greer, J., Melis, E., Ullrich, C. (2006), ‘Combining ITS and eLearning Technologies: Opportunities and Challeneges’. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS), Taiwan.

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Telepresence as Educational Practice in the Third Teaching‐Room – a Study in Advanced Music Education Karin Tweddell Levinsen, Rikke Ørngreen and Mie Buhl Aalborg University, Copenhagen, Denmark kale@learnin.aau.dk rior@ learnin.aau.dk mib@hum.aau.dk

Abstract: The use of Video Conferencing (VC) in educational settings is presently taking off and most research and case studies report that participants find themselves comfortable in the mediated context. However, as the use of VC becomes more common, challenges emerge that affects both the participants’ experience of closeness and contact ‐ also called telepresence – and the learning outcome in negative ways. We have found that some challenges to telepresence appear to the participants as opaque and intangible and leave them without appropriate prerequisites to act in useful and meaningful ways. During 2011 and 2012 we have conducted a research and development project: Telepresence as educational practice in the Royal Danish Academy of Music (RDAM) educations in collaboration with RDAM and their international partners within VC‐based teaching and learning in the domain of world excellence advanced music education.

The study draws on action design involving specially designed teaching scenarios with experienced teachers who are novices to VC. The scenarios include iteration of a series of designed activities, which allow experiments with interventions aimed to develop VC‐based designs for learning in collaboration with teachers and technicians at the RDAM‐end. The cases address individual tuition. Our data collecting methods include: Written reports from students, MindTape sessions, Skype interviews, focus group interviews via VC, video recordings and observation of both VC and conventional sessions.

Although the study aims at advanced music education, we find the project and findings of relevance to VC‐based teaching in general. Our findings suggest that telepresence encompasses the technicians’ practise when facilitating the teaching sessions, while the concept displays shortcomings regarding the interpersonal relations and interaction between teacher and student(s). In order to encompass the VC‐based teaching situation more fully we introduce the concept the third teaching‐room. Additionally we have found that VC‐based teaching may not only affect the teacher‐student relation and agency in the third teaching‐room but may also challenge the teachers’ practice in conventional settings. In this paper we present our research findings and theoretical development regarding telepresence and the third teaching‐room as they relate to VC in teaching situations.

Keywords: telepresence, third teaching‐room, video conferencing, multimodality, design for learning, music education

1. Introduction Due to globalization, distributed campuses and technological development, distance learning performed as Video Conference (VC) teaching is becoming a common practice. In Denmark we see a growth in VC‐based teaching in higher education (surgery, nursing, language teaching, ICT and learning); vocational education (teacher, social and health, and electricians education); and even high school. The teaching may vary from lectures for audiences to dialogue based teaching, student centred PBL‐based and collaborative learning setups.

Teaching music at the advanced level using VC is a relative newcomer in this context. Since 2009 the Royal Danish Academy of Music (RDAM) has run a development project in which instrumental and vocalist teaching take place in RDAM’s technological advanced VC‐environment (VCE) in collaboration with international partners of world excellence, e.g. opera vocalists, instrumental soloists, members of philharmonic orchestras, conductors and composers. Video and sound is transmitted through Internet2 that offers high performance transmission and minimum delay. At first, the implementation of VCE was experienced as “business as usual”.

However, challenges for the pedagogic everyday practice for students, teachers and technicians gradually emerged as they did not experience a clear distinction between technical and human factors. Therefore, a research perspective was established in early 2011 as a pre‐project aiming at a large scale research project in terms of identifying appropriate research questions and a research strategy (For details see Ørngreen et al (2012)). The resulting project Telepresence as educational practice in the Royal Danish Academy of Music educations, running in 2012‐13, focussed on the use of VC regarding individual music tuition in the domain of world excellence classical music education. The presented findings stem from our data analysis during the spring 2013.

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2. Literature study RDAM and their partners had found it difficult to find help solving their experienced challenges. We encountered the same difficulties in our pre‐project during our literature studies.

Telepresence is a central concept used to describe VC and other computer mediated environments. Draper (1998) defines telepresence in two ways: 1) a technology that allows the projection of a person to a remote environment; or 2) a personal experience of either being present in the remote environment (typically manipulation of robots) or being present in a mediated environment. In 2004 and again in 2009 an extensive State of the Art‐Study of VC found a majority of case studies in the report genre and few in‐depth research studies, especially within surgery and nursing (Greenberg 2009). In 2011‐12 we found this still to be the case.

We found a few studies focusing on the participants’ experience and learning from a phenomenological perspective within surgery (Augestad & Lindsetmo 2009) and performing arts (Bailey et al. 2009, Orman & Whitaker 2010, Penalba et al 2011). Some of the early findings that have become shared knowledge in the field of VC are also found in the pre‐project and the full‐scale RDAM‐study. Most studies, including ours, report that participants express surprise of how easily they adjust to the VCE. As Marrow et al. (2002) we have found that VC scaffolds students’ reflexivity and ability to solve problems. We have found the same advantages as Maruping & Agarwal (2009) in terms of immediate feedback, repertoire of multimodal sign systems and sense‐ modalities, synchronous communication and social closeness, along with the effect of delay on dialogue‐ functions as turn‐taking, sequencing and repairment (Ruhleder & Jordan 2001, Marrow et al. 2002), which again affect the experience of trust and telepresence (Ruhleder & Jordan 2001). Their conclusion, which we also documented, is that the teaching situation and the students learning are highly dependent on mutual trust, which again relies on the quality of experienced telepresence during the sessions. Like Hedestig & Kaptelinin (2005) we found that breakdowns are unavoidable and that rather than trying to eliminate them, they must be overcome in order to maintain and facilitate the shared VCE as a place where humans can be and interact, instead of a space or a configuration of individuals and artefacts. In the process of maintaining the participants’ experience of place in the learning situation, we have ‐ in line with Hedestig & Kaptelinin ‐ found that technicians become important facilitators of place regarding both technical and collaborative breakdowns.

The few recent examples of research that address telepresence as a personal experience or from a learning perspective originate from performing arts. The e‐Dance project (Bailey et al. 2009) is a complex sensory VCE that creates “a context for telepresent, distributed performance, and … a data repository for choreographic reflection in/on process” (p. 2794‐5) and allows choreograph and dancers to collaborate over distance. The e‐ Dance project has no educational perspective so far but explores new collaborative practices made possible by telepresent technology and finds that the environment challenges both the dancers embodied experience and the choreographer’s craft (ibid p. 2805). The Opera eLearning Project aims at a VCE for teaching advanced level master classes for vocalists in combination with asynchronous blended learning resources and strives to reproduce the conventional master class as seamless interaction, to overcome distance and allow students to meet great masters (Penalba et al. 2011). So far, data are not analysed from a music education perspective.

Both projects focus on telepresent technology but where the e‐Dance project explores new ways of agency through telepresent technology, The Opera eLearning Project aims at reproducing the conventional opera master class. Where the participants in The Opera eLearning Project adjusted to the VCE, the e‐Dance project found challenges regarding the dancers’ embodied experience and the choreographer’s craft. We have only found one study that explores VC and telepresence from an educational perspective regarding music education. In a large quantitative study Orman & Whitaker analysed VC classes regarding: “sequential patterns of instruction, focus of attention, amount and type of performance, eye contact, and other nonverbal behaviors” (Orman & Whitaker 2010, p. 4) and found that students performed/played more frequently (22%) and that eye contact increased during distance lessons.

Greenberg (2009, p 12) divides the literature into two positions that correspond with the recent studies mentioned above: either there is/ is not a significant difference between VC and conventional teaching.

However, in our pre‐project we found both positions (Ørngreen et al 2012):

There is no difference. The participants claim that VC sessions are just like conventional lessons; they experience being together in a shared place just as they are used to.

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There is a difference. When the experience of closeness is disturbed, the participants may find themselves without appropriate prerequisites to act in useful and meaningful ways; they experience hyper‐focus during and fatigue after VC sessions that differ from conventional settings.

These aspects are not addressed in the literature and we agree with Greenberg (2009) who explains the lack with reference to Joy (2000): “… most researchers in the field fail to control for critical factors, such as pedagogical method, prior student knowledge, and teacher and student ability”. Thus, the pre‐project identifies areas where the RDAM project may contribute with knowledge that addresses fundamental challenges and options regarding VC‐based teaching and learning. This is the point of departure for project Telepresence as educational practice in the Royal Danish Music Academy.

3. Research design and data collection The research focus of project Telepresence as educational practice in the Royal Danish Music Academy became the impact of VC‐based mediation on the participants experienced telepresence, forms of dialogue, re‐mediation of tacit and embodied knowledge, and management of cultural differences as both challenges and options. The project aimed to explore, identify and develop resilient and sustainable Design for Learning‐ principles and teaching practices in VCE. Accordingly the empirical research was designed as typical VC‐based teaching scenarios that served a double purpose: 1) study the impact of mediation on teaching and learning; 2) serve as an organisational framework for development of the educational practice from both the experience and technology perspective on telepresence.

As described earlier, telepresence refers to the individual experience of being present within a mediated or in a remote environment, or the technology that allows remote representation of a person. However, one person may have the feeling of telepresence while others may not have it at all. Accordingly, telepresence as an individualized concept cannot embrace the mutually shared feeling of togetherness in a mediated environment, which is a precondition for successful performance of interpersonal interaction (Ruhleder & Jordan 2001, Augestad & Lindsetmo 2009). In order to distinguish the digital mediated environment as a space of elements (actors and artefacts) from the mutually shared experience as a place where humans can be and interact (Hedestig & Kaptelinin 2005), we introduce the third teaching‐room. By the third teaching‐room we mean: The mutually shared feeling of being and doing together in an individual and mentally constructed merge of the VC‐mediation, the near and the remote locations. Based on the pre‐project and these reflections, the research questions became:

Which factors influence the establishment and consolidation of teaching practice of respectively the novice and the experienced teacher in the third teaching‐room?

Which factors influence the establishment of telepresence and sustainable strategies for pedagogy and design for learning?

Which new pedagogic approaches and designs for learning can be explored and developed as meaningful challenges for the learner?

Due to the explorative nature of our research interest and the nature of the field, the project was designed as a research and development project within the frame of participatory action research (Argyris & Schön 1996, Reason & Bradbury 2007, Nielsen & Nielsen 2010) rather than a hypothesis driven approach. Participatory action research implies close collaboration between researchers and participants and relies on mutual trust.

The method allows the researchers to come close to the participants’ professional life‐world with a minimum of disturbance. Thus, in the project we collaborated to design interventions in an iterative process driving both the development of and research into the teaching practice and appropriate VC‐based designs for learning and pedagogical principles.

We designed three scenarios. Due to practical reasons only one was realised but then in three variations.

These were followed for 4 VCE‐sessions and a conventional face‐to‐face session for comparison. All sessions were documented through observation at the RDAM‐end and recorded as split‐screen video showing both ends simultaneously. In order to facilitate the transformation of experiences into new interventions, the following activities were iterated: 1) (new) experiences; 2) video observation by participants reporting incident of special interest; 3) MindTape dialogue between researcher and teacher; 4) design of experiments; 5) feedback on experiments. MindTape is a dialogue‐driven method, where the researcher probes and questions the teacher about why's and how's of their experience, actions and behavior under the stimulus of replaying

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Karin Tweddell Levinsen, Rikke Ørngreen and Mie Buhl the recorded session (Nielsen & Christiansen 2000). The data includes written reports from students, 2 MindTape sessions with teachers, 6 student interviews using Skype, 2 VCE‐based group interviews with technicians, video recordings and observation of 36 VCE‐sessions and 9 conventional sessions, continued dialogue with teachers and technicians at the RDAM‐end, and knowledge sharing workshops, which also included teachers working with VCE who were not part of the project. In order to use our data in the workshops and in scientific presentations, we have entered into ethical agreements with all institutions, individual teachers, and students

4. The scenarios and findings As mentioned above we only succeeded in realising one scenario. This scenario involved three experienced teachers being novices to VCE: 1) cello with 3 students from New World Symphony in Miami; 2) piano with 3 students; and 3) vocalists with 4 students, all from Cleveland Institute of Music. The teachers who are all internationally acknowledged performers teach at RDAM and participated from Copenhagen. In the following we present findings that are shared between the variations, followed by findings that relate to the individual variation.

As generally found and documented again in The Opera eLearning Project, the participants found VCE and the third teaching‐room a pleasant and functional learning environment. In the Opera project master classes, where participants do not necessarily establish personal relations, participants felt comfortable, while in our project they felt that they got to know each other through the 4 VCE‐sessions. They adjusted quickly to the slight delay and established a flow and intensity comparable to the experience of conventional sessions.

However, as in the e‐Dance project the adjustment involved changes in the teacher‐student interaction, their embodied experience with their instrument and performance and the teachers’ professional practice. In conventional sessions we found that the teacher touch and correct the student’s physical posture, point at or even write in their score, direct the tempo by tapping and express the feel of the music by waving hands and they play together with the student. In VCE‐sessions we found distinct turn‐taking and an increase in eye contact just as Orman and Whitaker (2010). They also found that students played more in the mediated sessions. Here we found that whether students perform more or less, and in longer or shorter sequences depends on the instrument, types of compositions or the student’s level rather than on the environment.

During the knowledge sharing workshops, some of the findings came as a surprise for the teachers.

According to Penalba et al. (2011, p 2) a master class is not oriented towards teaching the instrument as mastering at a high degree of proficiency is a precondition. They claim, with reference to studies in music education, that “… the teacher is devoted to reviewing beyond the technique the interpretation of the musical repertoire, conducting the expression …, the emotions and artistic quality of the performance, often using images and metaphors that make it easier for the student to understand the feeling required …”. We found the same focus on interpretation and artistic performance in conventional sessions, but as mentioned above we also found that even at this advanced level, corrections involved interventions regarding the students embodied technique, e.g. the vocalists’ physical posture, the cellists’ fingering and the pianists’ use of the shoulder – that is, teaching both body and instrument. Accordingly, in the VCE‐sessions, the non‐verbalised communication had to be remediated into metaphor loaded dialogue and made explicit through gesturing and sign‐making exceeding the use of metaphors and images according to Penalba et al. In conjunction with the findings above, we learned from the RDAM project that tacit elements that are difficult to remediate may vanish unnoticed from the practice.

Finally we found that the conventional sessions was dominated by an instructional approach challenged in the VCE‐sessions and forcing the teachers to modify their teaching practice towards a constructivist approach.

Analysis of the video recordings revealed that the distinct turn‐taking and increased eye contact in the VCE‐ sessions produced dialogues between teacher and student. As the teacher could not point, write or demonstrate on top of the students playing, the students had look in the score and formulate suggestions themselves as words and through the instrument as input to what became reflective dialogues. Again, this is an example of changes unnoticed by the participants. In this case we find that something new emerges in the teaching session: A place for reflectivity. Confronted with these findings during a knowledge sharing workshop, the teachers explained that they actually might be more reflective regarding their teaching practise in terms of what to focus on during a session and the balance between teacher and student agency. They also found that the benefits of this new reflectivity may inspire their conventional sessions towards a more constructivist

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Karin Tweddell Levinsen, Rikke Ørngreen and Mie Buhl practice. One teacher expressed that the students might understand and remember more if they write in their score themselves, rather than having difficulties pointed out by the teacher.

4.1 Cello In the specific sessions we found differences related to the multimodal sign‐systems and multi‐sensory systems involved, along with the physical positioning between teacher and student due to type of instrument that affected the VCE‐sessions differently. We found that the more direct similarities between conventional and mediated sessions, the less impact of mediation on the teacher‐student interaction, their embodied experience and the teachers’ professional practice.

Figure 1: Screen dump of Split screen recording showing far‐end (Miami) and near‐end (Copenhagen) We found cello to be most easily transferred to VCE as the participants are placed front towards each other in both conventional and VCE‐sessions, while body posture and hand movements are visible in detail in both total and medium camera views (Figure 1).

Here we touch the opposing views on VCE found in the literature study: There is/is not a difference. In our study we found experiences grading from no difference to a lot of difference. According to Dolezal (2009, p.

213) “the human subject is an embodied subject, woven into the fabric of the world … such that in matters of perception and experience one cannot be said to precede the other.” Being a lived body is a lifelong learning process, meaning our interpretations are plastic and according to Armel and Ramachandran (2003) they are categorized by the central nervous system as a part of our bodily self from earliest childhood. As long as these categorizations are not challenged seriously, we adjust and modify our plastic embodied experience without even noticing. When the setup, as in the eDance project or more subtle during incidents in our VCE‐sessions, disturb the body schema we have to change our perception of the lived body and reconstruct even at the level of our central nervous system. However, in order to do so we have to become conscious of the disturbance or mismatch and we have to work consciously to adapt our body schema to the new experience. In 1896 spectators of a moving picture of a train coming towards the camera were frightened and unconsciously guided by their embodied experience of how to act to danger – they did not want to be run over by the train.

In order to percept the train as a representation of a train, people had to change body schema on a deeper level. In the case of moving images people saw the machinery and learned to percept the representation. The challenge for VCE is that, figuratively speaking, “the machinery” = third teaching‐room is invisible and in some cases people keep “running away from the train”. Here we find that methods as MindTape (Nielsen & Christiansen 2000), peer to peer supervision and knowledge sharing reveal “the machinery” and help to produce the conscious awareness necessary for working on the body schema.

4.2 Vocalist For vocalists, their full body is the instrument and both teacher and students need to see the full body posture as well as facial details. In conventional sessions the student and teacher have to build trust in order to feel comfortable when physical closeness trespass their personal zone of proximity. In the VCE‐sessions this is remediated to extreme close‐ups of facial details. Telepresent technology affords this but being object to or viewer of these extreme close‐ups may personally and socially challenge the experienced telepresence and accordingly also the experience of the third teaching‐room. The sound is another challenge as the voice sound is closely connected to the singer’s body posture, control of breath and body movement. Therefore, it becomes an issue how different the transmitted sound is from its source in the far‐end. Although Internet2

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Karin Tweddell Levinsen, Rikke Ørngreen and Mie Buhl offers the highest quality of sound transmission, the physical acoustics in near‐ and far‐end together with the technicians choice of representing the sound through mixing, affect the shared experience of sound in the third teaching‐room and the participants’ frame of reference. During a knowledge sharing workshop we learned that these issues are also relevant to wind instruments and even that some instrumental sounds are interpreted as noise by the telepresent technology and subsequently suppressed.

Figure 2: Split screen recording. The teacher and the student work with tensions in the student’s jaw From this we learn that the experienced third teaching‐room does not depend on a naturalistic mediation striving to reproduce the real thing. Being in the third teaching‐room is a matter of being able to see and hear what is needed when it is needed and being able to act and interact in appropriate ways. In order to achieve this, the technicians have to be sensitive to the relation between telepresent technology and the participants experience and run a parallel third facilitators’ room where they collaborate without disturbing the teacher and the students.

4.3 Piano Piano differs from cello and vocalists as the teacher and student are always placed side by side in conventional sessions. Here observations revealed that direct eye contact and speech are rare, while awareness of gestures using peripheral focus is dominant. Often the teacher plays on top of the student to attract attention, stands behind the student making hand gestures in the student’s peripheral view, or underlines details in the score with a pencil while the student is playing. Peripheral focus, marking with a pencil or pointing cannot be transferred to VCE. These activities have to be re‐mediated and with piano we saw that the construction of the third place came to rely heavily on eye contact and metaphor loaded speech. In order to solve this challenge we experimented with camera settings (figure 3 and 4). We found a specific solution in the piano case where both teacher and student(s) felt comfortable and during a knowledge sharing workshop we learned that these issues are also relevant for church organ.

The general finding is that in VC‐sessions the student(s) and the teacher do not necessarily need identical telepresent technology setups. Both parties need a setup to supports eye contact during dialogue. Where teachers need overall and detailed views of students, students need to maintain awareness of the teacher and to catch cues while playing. With the technology satisfactorily set up we found that if the teacher forgot to maintain eye contact when commenting on critical issues, e.g. the student’s embodied feel for the piano, the third teaching‐room became an unpleasant place for the student. This is an example of the importance of the concept the third teaching‐room. As both breakdown and repairment is a matter of mutual rebuilding trust they cannot be embraced by the individually oriented concept telepresence.

5. In conclusion The literature study pointed at two opposing views regarding VCE and telepresence: There is/ is not a difference. However, we found that the participant experienced (almost) no difference while our analysis revealed a graduation of differences from minor to rather radical changes that all seemed to happen unnoticed. We have not yet identified elements of importance that have vanished, but we have found that the reflectivity emerging in the VCE‐sessions was not recognized as a driver of learning. Reflectivity as an option

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Karin Tweddell Levinsen, Rikke Ørngreen and Mie Buhl for teaching was first recognized during the knowledge sharing workshop where some of the teachers began to see advantages of applying constructivist teaching practice in conventional sessions too.

Student Technician

NearFar-

Teacher

Camera- and screen positions support eye contact

Figure 3: Copenhagen setup. Red arrow: Teacher ‐ student eye contact. Green arrow: The teacher follows his own near‐end representation. In the background: the technician

Figure 4: Split‐screen recording. The teacher follows body posture on the total and fingering in the close‐up picture‐in‐picture. The student uses her far‐end monitor for sideways glances and peripheral views of the teacher The apparent simplicity of the cello sessions led us towards an understanding of the mechanism producing the phenomenological experience of no difference even when differences are obvious. The challenge for VCE‐ teaching is that we as humans rely on our body schema, which produces blind spots regarding these differences until we are forced to make changes. We found that the teachers need to see “the machinery” from the outside in order to become conscious of where and how they can develop their teaching practice.

The vocalist sessions were more complex and from that we learned that the experience of telepresence and the third teaching‐room depend on available and affordable options for agency and interaction, rather than naturalistic mediated representations. Finally we found in the piano sessions that teachers’ and students’ needs are different and this should be considered when designing for teaching and learning in VCE. In all these processes, we found that technicians in both ends play an important role as mutual creators of the third teaching‐room, facilitators of trust and turn‐taking, as they perform the sound and image mixing, as well as being caretakers of technical breakdowns during sessions.

Acknowledgements The project is supported by research funds from the Danish Ministry for Culture and The Royal Danish Academy of Music special development funds. Thanks to students, staff and technicians from The Royal Danish Academy of Music. Thanks to students, staff and technicians from Cleveland Institute of Music, Ohio and New World Symphony in Miami, Florida.

References Armel, K.C. and Ramachandran, V. (2003) “Projecting sensations to external objects: Evidence from skin conductance response”, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Vol 270, No. 1523, pp. 1499‐1506.

Argyris, C. and Schön, D.A. (1996) Organizational Learning II: Theory, Method, and Practice. Reading, Mass.: Addison‐ Wesley.

Augestad, K.M. and Lindsetmo, R.O (2009) “Overcoming Distance: Video‐Conferencing as a Clinical and Educational Tool among Surgeons”, World Journal of Surgery, Vol 33, pp 1356–1365.

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Draper, J.V, Kaper, D.B. and Usher, J.M. (1998) “Telepresence”, Human Factors, Vol 40, pp 354‐375.

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Hedestig, U. and Kaptelinin, V. (2005) “Facilitator's Roles in a Videoconference Learning Environment”, Information Systems Frontiers, Vol 7, No.1, pp 71–83.

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Marrow, C.E, Hollyoake, K., Hamer, D. and Kenrick, C. (2002) “Clinical supervision using video‐conferencing technology: a reflective account”, Journal of Nursing Management, Vol 10, No. 5, pp 275–282.

Maruping, L.M. and Agarwal, R. (2004) “Managing team interpersonal processes through technology: a task‐technology fit perspective”, Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol 89, pp 975–990.

Nielsen, J. and Christiansen, N. (2000) “Mindtape: A Tool for Reflection in Participatory Design, Proceedings of Participatory Design Conference: Designing Digital Environments, November 28 ‐ December 1, 2000, New York. 2000. pp 309‐313.

Nielsen, B.S., and Nielsen, K.A. (2010) ”Aktionsforskning”, in Brinkmann, S. and Tanggaard, L. (Eds.), Kvalitative metoder, København: Hans Reitzel, pp 97‐120.

Orman, E.K. and Whitaker, J.A. (2010) “Time Usage during Face‐to‐Face and Synchronous Distance Music Lessons”, American Journal of Distance Education, Vol 24, No. 2, pp 92–103.

Penalba, A.F., Rojas‐Rajs, T., Lorente, P., Iglesias, F., Fernández, J. and Monguet, J. (2011) “A telepresence learning environment for opera singing: distance lessons implementations over Internet2” [online], Interactive Learning Environments ‐ The online platform for Taylor & Francis Group content, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10494820.2011.584322.

Reason, P. and Bradbury, H. (2007) Handbook of Action Research, 2nd Edition, London: Sage.

Ruhleder, K. and Jordan, B. (2001) “Co‐Constructing Non‐Mutual Realities: Delay‐Generated Trouble in Distributed Interaction”, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Vol 10, No. 1, pp 113‐138. Ørngreen, R., Levinsen, K., Buhl, M., Solak, T., Jakobsen, M. and Andersen, J. (2012) ”Videoconferencing in Music Education at the Conservatory Level”, Designs for learning 2012, 3rd International Conference Exploring Learning Environments, 25‐27 April 2012, Copenhagen, Denmark: Conference Proceedings. pp. 133‐135.

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An Empirical Study on Faculty Perceptions and Teaching Practices of Wikipedia Josep Lladós, Eduard Aibar, Maura Lerga, Antoni Meseguer and Julià Minguillon Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain jlladosm@uoc.edu eaibar@uoc.edu mlergaf@uoc.edu ameseguer@uoc.edu jminguillona@uoc.edu

Abstract: Some faculty members from different universities around the world have begun to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool in recent years. These experiences show, in most cases, very satisfactory results and a substantial improvement in various basic skills, as well as a positive influence on the students' motivation. Nevertheless and despite the growing importance of e‐learning methodologies based on the use of the Internet for higher education, the use of Wikipedia as a teaching resource remains scarce among university faculty. Our investigation tries to identify which are the main factors that determine acceptance or resistance to that use. We approach the decision to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool by analyzing both the individual attributes of faculty members and the characteristics of the environment where they develop their teaching activity. From a specific survey sent to all faculty of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), pioneer and leader in online education in Spain, we have tried to infer the influence of these internal and external elements. The questionnaire was designed to measure different constructs: perceived quality of Wikipedia, teaching practices involving Wikipedia, use experience, perceived usefulness and use of 2.0 tools. Control items were also included for gathering information on gender, age, teaching experience, academic rank, and area of expertise. Our results reveal that academic rank, teaching experience, age or gender, are not decisive factors in explaining the educational use of Wikipedia. Instead, the decision to use it is closely linked to the perception of Wikipedia's quality, the use of other collaborative learning tools, an active attitude towards web 2.0 applications, and connections with the professional non‐academic world. Situational context is also very important, since the use is higher when faculty members have got reference models in their close environment and when they perceive it is positively valued by their colleagues. As far as these attitudes, practices and cultural norms diverge in different scientific disciplines, we have also detected clear differences in the use of Wikipedia among areas of academic expertise. As a consequence, a greater application of Wikipedia both as a teaching resource and as a driver for teaching innovation would require much more active institutional policies and some changes in the dominant academic culture among faculty members.

Keywords: Wikipedia, open resources, faculty perceptions, web 2.0, online collaborative environments

1. Wikipedia as an open educational resource The greatest impact the Internet has had on university education is the vast availability of open educational contents ‐ course materials, study guides, collections of exercises, etc. ‐ accessible on the network for everyone and for free. This phenomenon has its roots in what has been called the Open Educational Resources movement, which began in 2001 with the creation of the initiative OpenCourseWare (OCW) at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

MIT's initiative has spurred many universities everywhere to start similar projects and thus contribute to the international movement of open educational resources. But in recent years, the emergence of the so‐called Web 2.0 has opened up a wide range of new possibilities for the network, hitherto unsuspected directions, which may also end up influencing decisively in learning processes. Among other effects, Web 2.0 initiatives have blurred the traditional boundary between producers and consumers of information.

Wikipedia represents precisely the junction where these two trends converge. On the one side it is a gigantic open repository of knowledge and information ‐ with great potential for use in learning processes at all levels of education ‐ and on the other side, it has become a prime example of collective construction of knowledge, through a virtual platform that facilitates collaboration on an unprecedented scale.

This paper is structured as follows: Section 2 describes previous studies involving the use of Wikipedia in higher education, highlighting the main perceptions and attitudes of faculty. In Section 3 we present our model for the main factors affecting Wikipedia usage. In Section 4 we review the most important findings categorizing

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2. Wikipedia in higher education Wikipedia is currently the most important website for general consultation and is contributing positively to learning processes, both inside and outside academia. In the university context, in fact, is one of the most employed resources by students who use it regularly as a reference tool and to carry out different assignments and tasks (see Brox (2012) and Hawkins et al. (2001)). This is due not only to the quality of many of his articles, but to the easy access to its contents, the hypertext structure that facilitates navigation and the abundance of references and sources, according to Alonso et al. (2013) and Jaschick (2007). Based on a representative online survey among 4,400 students from German universities – return rate 40% ‐ Wannemacher and Schulenburg (2012) found that 80% of them use Wikipedia on a regular basis and 60% use it frequently or very frequently.

But despite students’ broad and intensive use, the attitude of university faculty does not seem so positive. In general, academics perceive Wikipedia with scepticism. It is known that many academics believe, for example, it is illegitimate to cite Wikipedia as a source, because their articles do not have a clear and identifiable authorship, and therefore it is difficult to verify their content (Engel et al. (1995). Unfortunately, empirical studies on faculty perceptions and uses of Wikipedia in learning environments are few and quite limited in scope.

Based on a survey to 14 university instructors, An and Williams (2010) identified both educational benefits and major barriers of using 2.0 tools. Among benefits they mention fostering of interaction, communication and collaboration among students, improving of writing and technological skills, the ease of use and flexibility and a new role for teachers as facilitators of learning rather than distributors of knowledge. The major barriers are a perceived uneasiness with openness among some students, the lack of institutional technical support for faculty and the time needed to learn and manage new tools.

Dooley (2012) notes that faculty negative attitude towards Wikipedia is usually based on a perception of inaccuracy in its content and also on its potential for discouraging students from using other more reliable sources of information. Her survey ‐ with 105 respondents‐ shows that only 7% use Wikipedia frequently for teaching or research tasks. In a similar vein, another study (Chen (2010) identifies credibility as university faculty main concern on Wikipedia and highlights academic disciplines as a key factor in explaining attitudes towards Wikipedia. This study also shows that age correlates with more negatives views and that faculty who frequently use other online resources are more sceptical on Wikipedia.

In a qualitative study based on five interviews (Bayliss 2013), the author proposes two main causes of the cautionary and cynical attitude towards Wikipedia: first, the lack of knowledge and poor understating of Wikipedia editing processes and policies by academics and second, a negative attitude toward collaborative knowledge production when occurring outside academia. Along the same line, Knight and Pryke (2012), after a survey to 133 faculty, state that the main reasons for academics to distrust Wikipedia is its obvious departure from “conventional models of scholarship”. They mention the no‐need of accreditation for contributors, the possibility of anonymous editing, the absence of formal pre‐publication peer review, and the blurred authorship of entries. Most faculty members tend to favour a ‘low‐stakes’ use by students – as initial scoping of an issue ‐ over more high‐stakes – as citing facts or as serious source of knowledge and references.

Other possible explanations of the negative attitude towards Wikipedia have to do with its particular way to produce and assess knowledge content – a paradigmatic instance of so‐called commons‐based peer production (Benkler, 2006). Beyond specific accuracy and credibility concerns, a more fundamental conflict on epistemological and power grounds is detected by several authors (see Black 2008, Chen 2010 and Eijkman 2010). Based on a survey with 99 respondents, Eijkman’s study (2010) shows that a majority of academics show “a blend of relatively cautious acceptance and/or gentle discouragement” towards Wikipedia.

Surprisingly the study finds a slight negative correlation between knowledge of Wikipedia and favourable views of it, and a that ‘soft‐science’ academics – allegedly more prone to a social constructivist view of knowledge – show a more negative attitude than their ‘hard‐science’ fellows. His main point is nevertheless that Wikipedia has become for faculty members a symbol of opposition to the traditional power‐knowledge arrangements in academia.

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3. Factors affecting Wikipedia usage as a teaching tool In order to analyse the teaching usage of Wikipedia we have mainly drawn on previous scholarship on consumer behaviour. This strand of research tries to describe the processes by which individuals or groups select and use particular goods and services. The decision to use a service is usually explained as a composite of individual differences and the impact of environmental influences. There are different models trying to explain user behaviour (Engel et al. 1995, Kotler 2000, Hawking et al. 2001) but most of them classify influencing factors according to social, cultural, personal and psychological categories.

In this paper, we analyse the use of Wikipedia by academics as a decision‐making process involving the selection and use of a specific informational instrument or service. We claim that this decision process is based both on internal and external factors. Internal elements are those having to do with personal processes and with the psychological features of individual faculty members. External elements are those involved in the interactions with other academic colleagues and with the institutional settings in which they work.

We have grouped all these potential influencing factors in four main categories: institutional, social, personal and psychological.

The usage and quality perception of Wikipedia could be deeply influenced both by the institutional framework where faculty work and by the different academic cultures and subcultures – mainly knowledge disciplines or areas – to which they belong. These institutional factors are usually connected with the prevailing attitudes, norms, values and social habits in those contexts. Thus, cultural differences between universities or among academic disciplines can affect the behaviour of faculty regarding Wikipedia. For example, as UOC is an online university, its faculty could be more prone to the usage of open resources and collaborative teaching technologies. But since university faculty are also active members of broader scientific communities, it remains to be seen to what extent institutional affiliation is more important than membership of a specific knowledge area or research field.

Different social factors may also have an impact on academics’ behaviour. Faculty members hold different status and play different roles in universities, depending on the groups, schools, departments or categories to which they belong. This kind of factors may surely have an impact on their perceptions, behaviours and decisions as it certainly happens in many other institutional settings. But being science and academic life a social milieu where the formal and informal opinion of peers is a basic element for status and career progression, the influence of colleagues as a reference group is likely to be a very relevant issue. Reference groups include people that individuals compare themselves with and therefore may have a decisive influence in shaping their attitude and behaviour. Since in the context of academia colleagues often become role models, the decision process to use Wikipedia in teaching matters could be heavily affected by the proximity to faculty who happen to be seen as leaders in learning methods.

Personal factors can also affect faculty behaviour and perceptions. In this category we include certain characteristics associated with individuals’ features, past experiences and professional status. In particular, we have paid special attention to age, gender, teaching experience, academic rank and contact with the business sector – especially important in our study since almost one third of the universe we have surveyed is composed of part‐time faculty having their main employment outside the university.

Finally, our analysis also considers motivations, perceptions and the specific beliefs and attitudes of faculty members towards Wikipedia, as potential factors affecting their decision to use it as a teaching tool. The literature on consumer behaviour (see for example Hawking et al. 2001) shows that these, often called, psychological factors have an important role in shaping users’ decisions, so it seems very suitable to analyse their influence in the university context of our study. As motives are internal forces that orient people towards a goal or a need, both the intention and the actual use of Wikipedia would be greater when faculty members perceive this informational resource as useful and appropriate for solving their problems and necessities.

4. Aims and research DESIGN In the context of the Wiki4he project, we are undertaking an investigation (http://oer.uoc.edu/wiki4HE/about/) in order to systematically analyze, using a comprehensive empirical study, the perception and attitudes of university faculty from different scholarly areas towards Wikipedia. The

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Josep Lladós et al. study aims to investigate relationships between these perceptions and several faculty characteristics to establish the extent to which the sceptical attitudes are related to disciplinary or generational factors on the one hand, or to an implicit conflict between the standard scientific or academic epistemological stands and the specific peer‐to‐peer culture of Wikipedia (as a paradigmatic example of content production in a collaborative open network), on the other.

The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (http://www.uoc.edu), launched in 1994, is a pure virtual online university, physically located in Barcelona, that provides official university training and degrees. Its educational model is based on personalized attention for students and an intensive use of IT. At present the university is providing higher education to more than 60,000 students, by means of a hierarchical structure composed of (approximately) 250 full‐time teachers and almost 2,000 part‐time associate teachers – some of them also teaching in other non‐virtual universities and all of them being considered as faculty members in this study. As a pioneering university, UOC provides all community members with a Virtual Campus where all teaching activities are carried on, including the use of web 2.0 tools such as blogs or wikis. As the central part of this study, we have launched an online survey to all faculty members of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in order to know perceptions, attitudes and real usage of an open collaborative environment such as Wikipedia.

As shown in Table 1, from a universe of 2,128 individuals we got 800 valid responses. For a confidence level of 95%, and the assumption of maximum uncertainty (p = q = 0.5), the margin of error is 2.74%. The questionnaire was designed to measure different factors, mainly: perceived quality of Wikipedia, teaching practices involving Wikipedia, usage experience, perceived usefulness and use of 2.0 tools. Control items were also included for characterization purposes.

The questionnaire was organized in two parts. The first part aimed at collecting data on: gender, age, area of expertise, PhD degree, years of experience in university teaching, academic rank and Wikipedia registered membership.

The second part, with 41 questions, aimed at gathering information on the different aspects that can affect the (teaching) use of Wikipedia in higher education. These questions had to be answered via a 5‐point Likert scale.

Depending on the nature of the questions, this scale referred to the level of agreement or disagreement with a statement (1="Strongly disagree" and 5="Strongly agree") or to the frequency of certain actions (1="Never" and 5="Very often").

Table 1: Technical information on the questionnaire Study universe

Faculty members of the Open University of Catalonia

Study universe size

2,128

Method

Online survey sent to the universe, with no quota groups

Sample size

800

Sampling error

±2.74% for overall data in the case of maximum uncertainty (p=q=0.5). Confidence level 95%.

Resulting sample

Not weighted

Date of launching

November 19th, 2012

Data collection

From November 19th to December 3rd, 2012

In order to design the final version of the questionnaire an exploratory qualitative study was carried out involving twelve interviews to faculty members – selecting two from each of the six main schools at our university. Comments and suggestions were collected this way and helped to improve the survey until it reached its final form. These interviews were conducted between October 12th and 16th 2012.

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5. Findings We begin by describing the main variables used in the study. Table 2 shows the name and description of each variable.

Table 2: Variables used in the analysis Name USEa

OUTb

Description Teacher uses Wikipedia to write learning materials and/or to elaborate learning activities Articles in Wikipedia are reliable and/or updated and/or complete, and/or the edition process in Wikipedia is reliable

PERF2

Teacher contributes to blogs

IMG1

Wikipedia is well considered among colleagues

IMG3

Colleagues do use Wikipedia

EXP5

Teacher uses wikis to work with the students

VIS1

Learning activities with Wikipedia improve visibility

UserWiki

Teacher is a registered user in Wikipedia

Gender

Male/Female

Domain

Area of expertise

Profile

UOC academic rank

PhD

Teacher holds a PhD

Experience

Years of academic experience

Age

Age

Values This variable results from the sum of two initial variables. Values range from 2 to 10.

This variable results from the sum of four initial variables. Values range from 4 to 20.

This is an original variable from the questionnaire. Values range from 1 to 5.

This is an original variable from the questionnaire. Values range from 1 to 5.

This is an original variable from the questionnaire. Values range from 1 to 5.

This is an original variable from the questionnaire. Values range from 1 to 5.

This is an original variable from the questionnaire. Values range from 1 to 5.

This is an original variable from the questionnaire. Values are: 1=Registered user / 0=Non‐registered user.

This is an original variable from the questionnaire. Values are: 1=Male / 0=Female This is an original variable from the questionnaire. Values are: 1=Arts & Humanities / 2=Sciences / 3=Health sciences/ 4= Engineering / 5=Law / 6=Social Sciences This a variable derived from other variables in the questionnaire. Values are: 1=UOC full professor / 2=Other This is an original variable from the questionnaire. Values are: 1=Holds a PhD / 0=Does not hold a PhD This a variable derived from other variables in the questionnaire. Values are: 1=less than five years / 0=five or more than five years This a variable derived from other variables in the questionnaire. Values are: 1=less than 40 years old / 2=between 40 and 49 years old / 3=50 or more

Since the survey was conducted in an online university that provides higher education and training by means of a very heterogeneous combination of full‐time and part‐time associate professors, we conducted an analysis of variance (ANOVA) to test if differences in the educational use of Wikipedia (USEa) were associated with personal and professional characteristics of faculty, including their declared affiliation to broad knowledge fields or areas of expertise.

The results are shown in Table 3. Only in the case of gender and area of expertise the differences among groups are statistically significant, at a level of confidence of 95%. However, this is not the case for differences in age, experience, or academic rank. The mean value of the male group is higher (4.14 versus 3.65) and this is also the case of engineering (4.40) compared to the other areas of expertise (3.85). For confirmatory purposes, a multiple linear regression analysis has been carried out on the whole sample for modelling the relationship between the intensity in Wikipedia teaching use and a set of variables. These variables encompass the different social, cultural and psychological factors that could affect the decision process, as discussed in the previous section. The model also includes those variables that have already shown significant differences in the ANOVA analysis in order to control the effect of these personal factors. Since the variable Domain is a

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Josep Lladós et al. qualitative non‐ordinal variable, we have transformed it into a dichotomic variable. We also include in the model a new variable (Engin) that takes value 1 when the individual belongs to the engineering area of expertise and 0 in the opposite case.

Table 3: ANOVA analysis on characterization variables Variable Gender Domain Profile Experience Age

F statistic 12.547 3.674 0.359 0.081 0.416

P‐value 0.000 0.003 0.549 0.776 0.660

It is noticeable that all parameters are statistically significant (P‐value < 0.05), except in the case of the control variables, Gender and Engin (see Table 4). Hence, a new regression analysis was conducted where these two variables were eliminated from the model. As expected, regression results, in Table 5, show that the intensity in the educational use of Wikipedia is positively associated not only with specific characteristics of faculty members but also with environmental influences.

The R2 of the model shows that just 36.10% of the variability of the dependent variable can be explained with the independent variables in the model. Hence, although the model is globally significant (F=53.958, with a P‐ value of 0.000), we have to take into account that some relevant variables may be omitted in the model.

Table 4: Regression analysis with characterization variables Model

(Constant) OUTb PERF2 IMG1 IMG3 EXP5 VIS1 UserWiki Gender Engin

Standarized Coefficients St. Error Beta 0.297

0.024 0.142 0.050 0.175 0.082 0.085 0.075 0.142 0.049 0.144 0.076 0.162 0.178 0.144 0.124 0.032 0.171 0.018 a. Dependent variable: USEa

Coefficients B ‐0.761 0.092 0.260 0.167 0.272 0.208 0.346 0.787 0.123 0.093

t ‐2.565 3.790 5.231 2.029 3.632 4.245 4.530 4.431 0.992 0.544

P‐value 0.011 0.000 0.000 0.043 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.322 0.587

t ‐2.452 3.823 5.203 2.248 3.668 4.240 4.528 4.526

P‐value 0.014 0.000 0.000 0.025 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000

Table 5: Regression analysis without characterization variables Model

(Constant) OUTb PERF2 IMG1 IMG3 EXP5 VIS1 UserWiki

Standarized Coefficients St. Error Beta 0.294

0.024 0.143 0.050 0.174 0.081 0.093 0.075 0.143 0.049 0.144 0.076 0.161 0.177 0.147 Dependent variable: USEa

Coefficients B ‐0.720 0.093 0.258 0.182 0.274 0.207 0.344 0.802

Not surprisingly, those teachers with registered membership in Wikipedia are more prone to employ it for educational purposes in their teaching activities. In the same way, academics whore are more familiar with the use of Web 2.0 tools – mainly blogs and wikis‐‐ are also more likely to use Wikipedia for teaching purposes.

Nevertheless, the decision of use is mainly affected by factors considered as psychological (such as individual perceptions of quality and usefulness), social (such as those involving the presence of role models) and cultural (such as colleagues’ perception of quality). On one side, the perceptions of quality and usefulness seem to be quite decisive. On the other, the reference groups are also strong determinants for the usage decision.

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Academic colleagues seem to act as role models promoting o discouraging Wikipedia use as a teaching tool. As Dlouhy & Dlouha (2012) have indicated for the Czech Republic, sometimes higher education is built on tradition and rather conservative principles which motivate that the use of Wikipedia is not seen as compatible with academic discourse. We can speculate that the current limited teaching use of Wikipedia among university faculty is probably linked to a slow and rather informal dissemination process, mainly fuelled by direct contact and proximity with other faculty who have already use it with satisfactory results. Besides, a poor understanding of the edition and revision processes in Wikipedia and a negative attitude towards its particular way of openly sharing and producing knowledge – strikingly different from the usual academic and scientific model ‐ could be limiting the scope of Wikipedia diffusion at universities.

To confirm the presence of this specific trend in academic culture, we have included in the model a new variable (PROF) that identifies part‐time associate professors who have got their main job outside the university. This variable takes value 1 when a faculty member is also working outside the university (0 in the opposite case). Regression results in Table 6 show that the educational use of Wikipedia is higher among this group. In any case, the critical attitude towards Wikipedia is not associated with academic rank, since faculty members with a PhD degree are not those showing less Wikipedia usage. Hence, an adverse attitude towards Wikipedia seems to be more associated with external influences than with faculty qualification, age or 2 academic experience (see Table 6). By introducing these two new variables in the model, goodness of fit R increases up to 36.90% and the statistical significance of all coefficients (with associated P‐values lower than 0.05) confirms the hypothesis.

Table 6: Regression analysis with academic rank and PhD variables Model

(Constant) OUTb PERF2 IMG1 IMG3 EXP5 VIS1 UserWiki Prof PhD

Standarized Coefficients St. Error Beta 0.318

0.024 0.142 0.049 0.174 0.081 0.093 0.074 0.144 0.049 0.141 0.076 0.161 0.177 0.144 0.145 0.098 0.144 0.094 Dependent variable: USEa

Coefficients B ‐1.072 0.092 0.257 0.183 0.275 0.203 0.343 0.788 0.375 0.361

t ‐3.374 3.806 5.202 2.264 3.696 4.161 4.537 4.465 2.594 2.511

P‐value 0.001 0.000 0.000 0.024 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.010 0.012

The model is globally significant (F=43.299, with a P‐value of 0.000). The Durbin‐Watson statistic (2.073) indicates that there are not AR(1) autocorrelation problems in the model (dL=1.8498 and dU=1.9019). With respect to multicollinearity, we obtain Variance Inflation Factors (VIF) for all variables that are below the upper bound of 10 (see Table 7). These results show that we do not have multicollinearity problems.

Table 7: Multicollinearity analysis Variable OUTb PERF2 IMG1 IMG3 EXP5 VIS1 UserWiki Prof PhD

VIF 1.476 1.176 1.794 1.601 1.212 1.333 1.105 1.502 1.495

6. Discussion The aim of this research was to explore the factors affecting the use of Wikipedia as a teaching tool in Higher Education institutions. The selection of a decision‐making process approach seems to be appropriate since our analysis provides evidence that a combination of cultural, social and psychological factors is certainly relevant.

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Our research findings show that the educational usage of Wikipedia is more associated with environmental influences than with faculty basic individual characteristics. Thus, factors such as academic rank, teaching experience, age or gender, do not seem to be enough relevant. Instead, the decision to use it seems to be partially inspired by the perception of Wikipedia's quality, the use of other collaborative learning tools, an active attitude towards web 2.0 applications, and connections with the professional non‐academic world.

Situational context is also very important, since the use is higher when faculty members have role models in their close environment and when they perceive Wikipedia is positively valued by their colleagues. In practice, this external influence could work as a network of innovation, since the sharing of relevant and useful information and the dissemination of good practices among faculty might encourage the use of Wikipedia as a source of educational innovation. Some of the attitudes, practices and habits explored in our survey seem to diverge for different scientific disciplines, since we have also detected clear variations in the use of Wikipedia across areas of academic expertise. The sceptical view some faculty members show on the free, collaborative and open sharing nature of knowledge and their apprehension about Wikipedia’s quality are also restricting its educational use.

A greater application of Wikipedia, both as a teaching resource and as a driver for teaching innovation, would require both much more active institutional policies and some changes in the incumbent academic culture among faculty members –something much more difficult. Some recommendations could be made to improve perceptions and attitudes. First, it is essential to increase the understanding of Wikipedia, its policies and procedures. Second, it would be also necessary to directly stimulate Wikipedia usage by (a) promoting active contribution among both students and faculty and (b) granting greater recognition to teaching innovations involving it. Finally, it would also be helpful to encourage the use of (a) online collaborative tools for teaching and (b) open knowledge repositories for publishing academic outputs and resources.

References Alonso, Mª I. and García, J. (2013) “Colaboración activa en Wikipedia como método de aprendizaje” (Using Active Collaboration in Wikipedia as a Learning Tool), Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia, Vol 16, No 1, pp. 13‐ 26.

An, Y‐J. and Williams, K. (2010) “Teaching with Web 2.0 Technologies: Benefits, Barriers and Lessons Learned”, International Journal of Instructional Technology & Distance Learning, Vol 7, No 3, article 4.

Bayliss, G. (2013) “Exploring the Cautionary Attitude toward Wikipedia in Higher Education: Implications for Higher Education Institutions”, New Review of Academic Librarianship, Vol 19, No 1, pp. 36−57.

Benkler, Y. (2006) “The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom”, Yale University Press, New Haven.

Black, E.W. (2008) “Wikipedia and Academic Peer‐Review – Wikipedia as a Recognized Medium for Scholarly Publication?”

Online Information Review, No 32, pp. 73−88.

Brox, H. (2012) “The Elephant in the Room: a Place for Wikipedia in Higher Education?”, Nordlit, No 30, pp. 143−155.

Chen, H‐L. (2010) “The Perspectives of Higher Education Faculty on Wikipedia”, The Electronic Library, Vol 28, No 3, pp.

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Chen, S‐L. (2010) “Wikipedia: a Republic of Science Democratized”, Albany Law Journal of Science and Technology, Vol 20, No 2. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1826325 [Last checked: May 15th, 2013] Dlouhy, J. and Dlouha, J. (2012). “Wiki Strategies for a more participatory learning envirnment in Csech education”. Paper presented at the 11th European Conference on e‐Learning ECEL‐2012, Groningen.

Dooley, P. (2010) “Wikipedia and the two‐faced professoriate”, Wikisym’10 proceedings of the 16th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, Article No. 24. ACM New York.

Eijkman, H. (2010) “Academics and Wikipedia: Reframing Web 2.0+ as a Disruptor of Traditional Academic Power‐ Knowledge Arrangements”, Campus‐Wide Information Systems, Vol 27, No 3, pp. 173−185.

Engel J.F., Blackwell, R.D. & Miniard, P.W. (1995) “Consumer behaviour”, Dryden Press, New York.

Hawkins, D.I., Best, R.J., Coney, K.A. (2001). Consumer behaviour. New York: McGraw.Hill.

Jaschick, S. (2007) “A stand against Wikipedia”, Inside Higher Education, January 26th. Available at: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/01/26/wiki [Last checked: May 15th, 2013] Knight, C. and Pryke, S. (2012) “Wikipedia and the University, a case study”, Teaching in Higher Education, Vol 17, No 6, pp.

649−659.

Kotler, P. (2000) “Marketing management”, Millenium edition, Prentice‐Hall, Upper Saddle River (NJ).

Lim, S. (2009) “How and Why Do College Students Use Wikipedia?” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vol 60, No 11, pp. 2189−2222.

Wannemacher, K. and Schulenburg, F. (2010) “Wikipedia in Academic Studies: Corrupting or Improving the Quality of Teaching and Learning?” In: Ebner, M. and Schiefner, M. (eds) Looking Toward the Future of Technology‐Enhanced Education: Ubiquitous Learning and the Digital Native, IGI Global, Hershey, pp. 295−311.

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How to Motivate Adult Learners Through e‐Learning: Some key Insights From Research Case Studies Kevin Lowden1, Rahela Jurković2 and Peter Mozelius3 1 School of Education, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK 2 WYG Consulting, Zagreb, Croatia 3 Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden Kevin.Lowden@glasgow.ac.uk rahela.jurkovic@wyg‐c.eu mozelius@dsv.su.se

Abstract: In 2011, the Council of the European Union set out five priorities for adult learning over the period 2012‐14.

Within this context, our paper draws on the findings of a number of research case studies to investigate whether technology and e‐learning can improve the quality of adult education and, in particular, whether they can engage learners and promote motivation to learn. The aim of the article is to reflect on approaches used in the case studies to explore and discuss how selected models of learning and motivation for adult learners might be supported and enhanced by contemporary ICT and technology enhanced learning (TEL). The main research approach used to provide evidence for the article is a case study strategy with three case studies across two sites or units; the Stockholm unit and the Glasgow/Zagreb unit. The Stockholm unit comprises of a description and analysis of a web‐based course for multimedia programming with participants across various age groups and a considerable geographical spread. The Glasgow/Zagreb unit is based on emerging results from the ongoing Grundtvig Learning Project (ITELEAD) that, among other partners, includes the University of Glasgow /Scotland and an adult learner provider WYGS / Croatia. Our emerging findings indicate that ICT/ TEL can be used to support learning in adult education when approached from a collaborative and social constructivist approach. We also posit that while ICT/ TEL can play a role in facilitating learning and promoting motivation to learn other factors, which are common to promoting learner engagement in general, must also be addressed.

Keywords: motivation in adult education, lifelong learning, technology enhanced learning, e‐learning, game‐based learning, blended learning

1. Introduction and context Finding innovative models for successful lifelong learning is an important issue to address.

The recent economic crisis, the constant need for new skills and the demographic changes facing Europe have highlighted the key role of adult learning in lifelong learning strategies and have helped to provide an impetus for measures that increase adult participation in learning and so improve economic competitiveness, employability but also social inclusion and active citizenship.

The European Commission highlights the key challenges facing adult learning: The potential of adult learning has not been yet fully exploited: participation in lifelong learning varies greatly and is unsatisfactory in many EU countries and well below the EU target for average participation in lifelong learning (15% by 2020 for adults aged 25‐64). In 2011, average participation was 8.9%... only six EU countries had reached or exceeded the target participation rate. Participation also decreases substantially in the case of low‐skilled and older adults. (http://ec.europa.eu/education/lifelong‐learning‐policy/adult_en.htm) These concerns are reflected in the European Agenda for Adult Learning’s five priorities for adult learning in Europe for 2012‐14 (Council of the European Union 2011 pp5‐6) and range from promoting lifelong learning to promoting equity, social cohesion and active citizenship. For their fulfilment, the three core priorities of the European Agenda require the involvement of motivated learners.

A key issue underpinning these priorities is how do we design learning and motivate adults to participate in learning? This is particularly relevant for those groups that traditionally have proved difficult to engage in learning. As Steel (2006: 789) highlights, there is an extensive literature on what motivates learners and adults to participate in learning. These cover intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2000), sociocognitive constructs, such as expectancy‐value theory (e.g. Wigfield & Eccles, 2000) and self‐efficacy (e.g. Zimmerman,

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Kevin Lowden, Rahela Jurković and Peter Mozelius 2000) and achievement goal theories (e.g. Ames, 1992; Dweck & Leggett, 1988; Meece, 1991). This paper is not the place to debate the range of learning motivation concepts and theories. However, our related case studies draw on promising theories in this field including ARCS (Keller and Suzaki 1988) and a social constructivist theoretical framework pertinent to education (e.g. Nystrand, 1996,Corden, 2001, Matsumara, Slater & Crosson, 2008)

Technology enhanced learning

Technology‐enhanced learning (TEL), formerly entitled e‐Learning, has the goal to provide socio‐technical innovations that promote learning and associated practices that are address challenges of time, place and pace. Building on descriptions of e‐learning provided by HEFCE (2005 and 2009), the JISC (2010) definition of Technology Enhanced Learning is given as the provision of a reliable technology environment which provides learning opportunities wherever the learner chooses.

The need to equip European citizens with new skills is recognized in all the most recent EC documents as well as the importance of ICT in acquiring these skills (Europe 2020 Strategy, New Skills for New Jobs communication, Innovative Europe strategy). There is, therefore, great interest in exploring the potential of ICT and TEL as a facilitator for innovation and change in European lifelong learning and as a way to increase the digital and key transversal skills of European citizens.

There are many challenges facing this area of research and practice, especially in translating concepts into practice. While much research has focused on higher education and schools, it has indicated that the types of pedagogy used in many education settings have remained unchanged when innovative technologies have been introduced (eg Gilly 2005). For many in society, particularly young people, technology is an everyday part of their lives, facilitating access to information, communicating with others and, potentially empowering them. In contrast, technology, particularly in adult education has yet to reach its potential in learning contexts (JISC 2004). The potential is great, however, for TEL to address inequalities in adult education through promoting adults’ access to learning via appropriate technologies. Our project case studies seek to address this issue.

Game‐based learning

Playing games as a pedagogical idea was introduced theoretically at university level in the 1970s by Jean Piaget (1973) and Lev Vygotsky (1978) but studies on play and games started earlier in 1938 when the Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga published his ideas on man as a playing being. In the book Homo Ludens Huizinga presents play as an essential and important activity in human culture (Huizinga, 1938). Even if the main ideas in Huizinga’s book are on human playing rather than on gaming (Rodriguez, 2006) the book has influenced modern game research in articles on various topics from online multiplayer games like World of Warcraft (Golub, 2010) to traditional offline games like Football (Zivanovic et al., 2010)

However, play and logic are two different phenomena and there must be a distinction between playing and gaming (Rodriguez, 2006). Games are unlike free play and are defined by rules and with abstract challenges that result in quantifiable outcomes (Kapp, 2012). In a broad sense educational games might be defined as the set of games that are designed to teach someone something and that almost any initiative that combines games with education can be considered as Game based learning (GBL). (Moreno‐Ger et al., 2008). In computer science and programming education GBL can be divided into two categories where the first one is a pedagogical idea based on students learning to program by playing educational games. The second category that is discussed in this article is an approach where students learn to program by constructing their own computer games.

2. Aims and methodology Our research aims were to look at a range of evidenced examples of where adult learning was using innovative ICT and TEL and explore how these might be promoting adults’ learning and motivation to learn. In addition, we then wanted to apply a specific motivational theory (ARCS) and a social constructivist theoretical framework to better understand the processes involved in these examples and to posit suggestions regarding the use of ICT and TEL in adult education. It is important to note that we were not attempting to provide a guide on ‘how to use ICT in adult education’ per se but rather we hoped to draw on selected examples of ICT/

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Kevin Lowden, Rahela Jurković and Peter Mozelius TEL in adult education to look at certain motivational theories to illuminate issues and strategies that can inform this topic area.

The key research questions derived from these aims were:

what can a selection of examples of ICT/ TEL use in adult education across a number of countries and in different contexts tell us about the how these technologies can enhance learning and motivation to learn?

are there common issues and factors influencing the use of ICT/ TEL approaches across these various contexts?

are the ARCS motivational theory and a social constructivist theoretical framework useful in understanding how ICT and TEL might facilitate adults’ learning and willingness to learn?

do the selected examples and emerging findings provide lessons for those concerned with adult education practice and policy?

Research methods

The overall research approach used was a case study strategy where a case study is defined as an empirical inquiry exploring real world contemporary phenomena (Yin, 1989). Case studies are typically conducted with researchers investigating and/ or evaluating a process, programme or activities in depth using various appropriate methods for data collection (Creswell, 2009). This is done in a research design where taking different sources of evidence together and taking account of context will provide a deeper understanding of the investigated phenomenon (Remenyi, 2012). Our case studies of innovative ICT and TEL entailed a range of methods to gather the required data and information which included: a limited literature review/ web search of education practice in our respective countries that has used ICT/ TEL; email enquiry and telephone interviews with practitioners as well as key education representatives to explore issues in more detail and highlight contextual issues and characteristics of innovative and ‘good practice’ regarding using ICT and TEL in education; collating and analysing secondary data and documentary evidence across the case studies, including analysis of students’ postings in on‐line forums in the virtual learning environment and course statistics retrieved from the DSV’s (Swedish case study) internal course management system. It should be noted that at the time of writing this paper the Scottish/Croatia case study was still underway and the relevant findings reported here draw on emerging examples and themes.

3. The case studies The three case studies and their respective examples of ICT/ TEL identified and researched, while distinct in terms of their contexts, can be seen as offering valuable insights on whether the deployed ICT/ TEL enhanced the education experience of the adult learners and improved their motivation to learn. Also, the case studies provided sufficiently detailed data to explore whether any factors promoting learning and motivation were likely to be transferable.

Glasgow/Zagreb unit:

This consisted of two case studies. In Zagreb, we analysed a successfully evaluated model of raising the employability capacities of unemployed persons with disabilities, run by the Croatian institution URIHO, Institution for Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment of Persons with Disabilities. In Glasgow, an innovative Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) called MOLE was studied.

The URIHO Virtual Workshop

The URIHO Virtual Workshop is a training firm and also a model that aims to improve work and social skills and the abilities of unemployed persons with disabilities. The model consists of improving, through training, participants’ knowledge, competences and skills in the area of finance, commerce and administration, and of offering them working experience. Importantly, the Virtual Workshop uses ICT/ TEL in providing simulations of real‐work situations in distribution and sales of fictional products and services, financial and administrative management, marketing and PR activities. In addition, the participants are involved in active learning group learning and teamwork that includes a focus on problem solving and fostering their communication skills. The

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Kevin Lowden, Rahela Jurković and Peter Mozelius Virtual Workshop technology and programmes with kept up‐to‐date IT systems are networked with other similar training firms to enhance knowledge exchange and market intelligence.

MOLE (Moodle Offender Learning Environment)

As part of a Grundtvig Learning Project, the Glasgow University partner has been involved in scoping innovative examples of ICT/ TEL for adults as well as looking at how proven TEL approaches and pedagogies for young people and professionals can be appropriated for vulnerable adult groups. One example the team identified was MOLE, a virtual learning environment (VLE) delivered via the Moodle platform. Unlike most VLEs, it is an offline resource maintained by Motherwell College in Scotland, to be used in prisons by offenders and staff. The College provides an offender learning and skills service in seven of 14 public sector prisons. The Scottish Government (2011a) recognised the disproportionate number of young adults (16 to 25 years old) entering the justice system and becoming detained within the prison service. The review identified a need for prisoners to remain in education, to continue their learning and acquire new skills. Research by Cooper (2008) and Craig (2003) highlighted that this group of adults and indeed other adults in Scotland, face particular barriers to adult education because of a ‘mindset’ that means they fear failure and are worried about ‘getting it wrong’, particularly when learning in front of their peers. In the MOLE programme, each prison learning centre focused on the skills needed by individuals to enter the community following a custodial sentence, and move into a positive destination e.g. education, training or employment.

The technology aspect in MOLE comprised of a VLE based on Poodle (Portable Moodle) configured to operate offline (a requirement demanded by the prison service) on a local area network (LAN). Working with prison staff, the college populated the courses with content by writing and supplying learning and teaching resources, assessments and SCORM packages (a collection of standards and specifications for web‐based e‐learning).

Through this, individual courses and facilities were offered via e‐learning/ interactive material covering a wide range of primarily vocational courses such as business and administration; computing (basic to intermediate); English competency; mathematics (basic/ life skills to university entrance level); hospitality and advanced study including university entrance level and Degrees.

The VLE also provided information on other further and higher education courses, so that offenders can consider progression at a later stage. MOLE was designed with the learner in mind, with accessibility considerations meaning that it caters for those with additional support needs. Likewise, prison staff can also use MOLE to share information or to engage in their own training and professional development.

Stockholm unit:

The analysis and discussion in this unit has been based on a summer course on programming at the Department of computer and systems sciences (DSV) at the Stockholm University. DSV has a tradition of building computer games in programming courses, and after the establishment of a Computer Game Development programme in 2005 games are finally seen as more constructive than distractive. But in the introductory programming there is not much game based learning and programming techniques have been taught with traditional exercises and assignments.

IB910C / Multimedia programming in Python

The Stockholm case study is the IB910C / Multimedia programming in Python course. A summer course in Sweden is seldom part of a programme curriculum and can for that reason be designed more freely and experimentally. IB910C / Multimedia programming in Python is a course where game construction with multimedia techniques is the main setup for students to learn important basic imperative programming techniques in the Python programming language. IB910C is developed to be a distance course given in the Moodle environment with streaming lectures and recorded tutorials providing information for the students’ independent work with four assignments and a project. But experience and feedback from earlier course batches revealed that an introduction lecture given face‐to‐face and open computer halls for students working together with assignments improves the outcome.

The course is provided during 10 weeks from June to August with a workload corresponding to 5 weeks or 7.5 ECTS. Students come from all over Sweden and from various age groups. In the summer of 2013 the youngest

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Kevin Lowden, Rahela Jurković and Peter Mozelius student was 20 years and the oldest 67. There are also large variations in the student’s pre‐knowledge where some students only have the required earlier basic programming experience and others are close to completing civil engineering IT‐programmes.

Almost everything in the course is based on games and how to build games in the Python programming language. Two course books, one mandatory, have all their chapters based on code examples for runnable computer games. The mandatory book Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner (Dawson, 2010) introduces basic programming concepts like variables, selection, iteration, Boolean condition and data structures by constructing classical computer games like Hangman and Tic Tac Toe. The programming techniques are also explained in traditional lectures and recorded and provided in a streaming online format in the Moodle environment. Four assignments that all students have to solve are also designed to have a game or a multimedia component as the solutions that should be submitted in a Moodle assignment drop box. In these assignments students learn to use multimedia and programming techniques that later can be reused and extended in the final course project. The design idea for the project game is discussed online in a forum before the implementation starts. At the end of the course participants test and give feedback on each other’s beta‐ versions of the games before the final submissions.

4. Findings and discussion Glasgow/Zagreb unit:

In Zagreb, the URIHO Virtual Workshop demonstrated a good example of an efficient integration of people with disabilities into the labour market and a simulated working environment that was enhanced by various ICT. The Workshop also involved evaluation of the participants’ outcomes following their training. Out of all participants who have been evaluated as employable at the end of the Workshop, 62% found an employment within three months after the completion of the training.

The research found that adults’ motivation to attend the training stemmed from the fact that the training was perceived as likely to be useful to them, mainly in vocational and employability terms, but also in terms of promoting their wider life skills. An important feature for adults was also that the individual approach each educational model takes ensured that the courses and training were tailored to each learner’s needs, capabilities and skills. Monitoring the learner’s progress and evaluating their outcomes helped to guide adults, permit tutors to intervene when necessary and assess how well the URIHO had addressed adults’ needs. Taken together, this holistic and needs‐based approach resulted in motivated learners who typically achieved the ultimate goal of their education; finding employment.

Initial findings from the Scottish MOLE initiative indicate that there were a number of positive outcomes directly related to the use of the programme (JISC, 2013) including promoting offenders’ motivation to engage with learning as well as providing opportunities for meaningful progression to further and higher education opportunities. In particular there has been an increase in access and inclusion for all prisoners to the online curriculum and increased retention within learning via the use of technology. The learning content and delivery is more closely aligned with the further and higher education sector and is providing greater progression to these sectors. Offenders are using MOLE to learn at their own pace using technology whilst enhancing their own digital literacy skills. They are learning how to learn and improving their confidence to take up other learning opportunities.

In Scotland, the Mole initiative has revealed a number of challenges in attempting to introduce TEL into this particular context. The course designers state that working in a secure environment was problematic. This included ‘issues with access to servers to the use of USB drives in prisons’. This was addressed by the team working closely with SPS officers and the learning centre staff to ensure digital media and systems complied with the prison services’ protocols and regulations and working within the SPIN (Scottish Prisons Internal Network) and linking with the College’s Moodle system. This has led to discussions on the creation and use of a secure USB drive to allow staff to create materials outside of the learning centres and then transfer these materials and courses to MOLE without the use of CDs/DVDs.

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The basic course concept built on the idea of learning to program by game construction appears to work for all age groups but there are variations in the type of games that are built. Older students often make educational games for their children with basic multimedia effects but with pedagogical ideas and user‐friendly interfaces.

There is also the ‘Commodore 64 generation’ that builds replicas of the games that they played in their youth with graphics and navigation imitating a Commodore 64 interface. Sprite based ‘Shoot them up games’ tend to be a project that males mainly choose. The course evaluation responses indicated that many students appreciated the current format and pedagogy, where students are relatively free in their choice of game design. However, some students struggled when there were no clear guidelines provided and, here some standard game ideas had to be given.

The pass rate for the course was the highest ever for online courses, including summer courses on programming given by DSV. With minor variations the pass rate has been about 65% during the last years and one year, with a rainy summer, more than 70% completed the course. How difficult the students find the course was dependent on participants’ earlier programming experience and one explanation for the high pass rate could be that some students had a more pre‐knowledge than what was required to join the course. One reason for the course being popular and having a high pass rate is the attractive concept of game‐based learning for these adults but another explanation might be that there are relatively few programming courses in Sweden where Python is the programming language.

5. Conclusions To explore our research aims and questions we synthesise our key findings and apply our conceptual lens.

While the case studies presented here are quite different in their focus and target groups of learners, they present insights regarding how we design and use technology to enhance learning approaches and promote access and success in learning.

The Stockholm case study has shown that the concept of learning to program by analysing and building digital games works and can be particularly successful. In heterogeneous student groups it appears that it is worth developing courses that are less formal and that encourage an exploring and more creative learning style.

Courses where computer games are involved seem to engage younger adults; however, the challenge is not to get participants to enrol but rather to support them to complete the course. Here, ICT/ TEL approaches need to be augmented with face‐to‐face learning sessions.

The Zagreb and Glasgow case studies indicate that learners’ initial mindset and dispositions and levels of confidence are factors influencing motivation to learn and that ICT/ TEL approaches can address these to facilitate positive outcomes. In the URIHO Virtual Workshop case study learners were often motivated by the potential of improvement to their employment prospects and TEL was then used in simulation of workplace activities to optimise their preparation for employment and develop their employability skills and attributes. In the case of the MOLE, the learners’ initial mindset acted as a barrier to learn was strongly influenced by a lack of confidence and a fear of failure in front of peers. Here TEL in the form of a VLE enabled educators to offer a range of educational content to young adult offenders who could learn at their own pace and individually. This removed their fear of initial failure in front of peers that a ‘traditional’ learning classroom context might have presented.

Looking at the our findings from a social constructivist theoretical framework we can argue that effective learning for adults, and arguably in general, occurs when learners are given opportunities to engage in shaping their own learning through practical experience as part of the learning process and the Learning and development is a social, collaborative activity. In the case studies the educators, used ITC/ TEL to create or enhance a context for learning in which learners could become engaged in interesting activities that encouraged and facilitated learning. Across the cases studies, providers sought to engage the adults using a range of ITC/ TEL approaches tailored to the requirements of the learners and augmented with collaborative face‐to‐face sessions including practical activities. In the case of the more vulnerable groups this was often grounded in an interdisciplinary context that helped to promote their broader life skills. We would argue that these examples indicate that ICT/ TEL facilitated the transmission of concepts and interactivity that leads to the social construction of meaning and learning. The active learning approach and dialogue facilitated by

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Kevin Lowden, Rahela Jurković and Peter Mozelius technology promoted learners motivation to learn and confidence to engage the education opportunities. This is in line with constructivist studies (e.g. Barab, Dodge, Thomas, Jackson, & Tuzun, 2007; Weber, Maher, Powell & Lee, 2008)

Our case study findings also suggest that the principles of the ARCS motivation model are useful in understanding why adults were motivated to learn and sustained their participation. The approaches, particularly that used in the Stockholm case study secured learners’ attention via inquiry arousal and creating an investigative approach. All case studies provided relevant course material, related to wider situated knowledge and promoted confidence via ICT/ TEL, iterative feedback and different learning experiences that reinforced one another.

Given the varied nature of the learning programmes in the case studies we can ask are there any common themes or issues regarding using ITC/ TEL in adult education, particularly to motivate and engage learners who are often distinctly different in their circumstances and needs? Firstly, one of the emerging findings is that although the programmes and their learners and contexts are quite different, ICT/ TEL approaches have enabled learners to access learning resources in a way that suits their own time and circumstances (e.g. the Moodle courses in the Swedish and Scottish cases). In the case of the offenders, this approach and the ability to learn individually helped to promote their self‐confidence to participate. As they achieved their motivation to engage in further learning, even involving higher and further education destinations increased.

Another, and perhaps one of the most striking themes across the case studies, is that the various ICT/ TEL resources and learning strategies have also had to be supported by face‐to‐face sessions that can involve group work to reinforce their learning and facilitate social skills. For example, in the Swedish case study, experience and feedback revealed that an introduction lecture given face‐to‐face and open computer halls for students working together in groups with their assignments improved their learning outcomes. Indeed, online courses without any blended learning components were seen by adults as a potentially cold, lonely and too virtual an environment. Discussion fora, virtual seminars and online facilitation can therefore, be valuable when learners get stuck in course activities. In the Croatian case study, the individual’s learning via the ICT platforms and programmes was augmented with face‐to‐face guidance and active learning group learning and teamwork to fostering their problem solving and communication skills. However, there are caveats to this. In the case of the Scottish case study, the adult learners were prisoners with often severe self‐confidence issues and performance avoidance. Therefore, face‐to‐face and group work was, at least initially, less necessary, until a level of confidence had been established.

For vulnerable groups in the Scottish and Croatian case studies the focus of their adult learning was often on promoting access to sustainable, independent living including accessing the labour market. Here ICT/TEL was able to enhance their learning and outcomes in two important ways. Firstly it provided platforms that allowed access to relevant learning content required to improve their skills and acquire qualifications recognised by employers and education providers. In these two examples, the ICT/TEL also facilitated adults’ ability to learn how to learn, using technology whilst enhancing their own digital literacy skills. Secondly, it allowed effective assessment and monitoring that informed guidance and mentoring.

Our case studies suggest that adult educators should look at their pedagogies to ensure that they take advantage of ICT / TEL approaches to maximise their potential to reach different groups of adult learners and facilitate their learning, their skills, motivation and confidence to pursue further learning and achieve their aspirations. However, it is crucial to note that while ICT / TEL can play a role in facilitating learning and promoting motivation to learn, other factors that many an adult educator will be familiar with are also extremely important. We suggest that ICT/ TEL approaches are not a solution alone, rather they need to be considered as part of a holistic learning and teaching package that is co‐constructed with adult learners and other relevant stakeholders to reflect their needs, develop appropriate pedagogies and assessment procedures. As Professor Richard Noss, TEL Director, London Knowledge Lab states.

Technology of itself doesn’t enhance learning. It depends how the technology is designed and implemented; how educators are supported to use it; how outcomes are measured; what communities are in place to support it (http://tel.ioe.ac.uk/about‐3/ ).

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Training Teachers to Learn by Design, Through a Community of Inquiry Katerina Makri1, Kyparisia Papanikolaou1, Athanasia Tsakiri2 and Stavros Karkanis2 1 School of Technological and Pedagogical Education (ASPETE), Athens, Greece 2 Technological Educational Institute (TEI) of Lamia, Lamia, Greece kmakrh@ppp.uoa.gr kpapanikolaou@aspaite.gr tsakiri@teilam.gr sk@teilam.gr

Abstract: As eLearning is evolving into a mainstream, widespread practice, adopted by higher education institutions worldwide, much effort is geared towards the articulation of models and strategies for eLearning implementation in formal st education settings. In the field of pre‐service teacher education, a rising challenge is to equip the “21 century teacher” with the necessary toolset of skills, competencies and mindsets to grapple with the idiosyncrasies of the new generation of “millenials”. To this purpose, what still remains an open issue is the degree of innovation afforded by specific eLearning designs, in a field where traditional teacher training pedagogies co‐exist with eLearning‐specific ones. This article proposes a synthesis of two eLearning‐specific models, the Community of Inquiry (COI) Model, based on the Practical Inquiry Model introduced by Garrison, Anderson, & Archer (2000) and the Learning by Design framework (LbyD), based on the conceptualization of ‘New Learning’, as articulated by Kalantzis & Cope (2012). Both models were invented with new and learning styles and circumstances in mind. The six‐month introductory course on “Pedagogical designs with ICT” was offered by the School of Pedagogical and Technological Education (ASPETE) and implemented with 20 trainee teachers at the Higher Education Technological Institute (TEI) of Lamia, located in another geographical area of Greece. In this context, elements of the COI framework were employed as tools both for designing and for evaluating the contents, structure and activities of the eLearning course. Two elements of the framework, teaching and cognitive presence were the axes supporting the course structure, whilst the kinds of activities we aimed at promoting the most were discussion, collaboration and reflection. The LbyD framework served as an awareness enhancement mechanism for trainee teachers to formulate, collaboratively negotiate and finally express pedagogical scenarios integrating the meaningful use of technology. The discussion of this experience is supported by a preliminary analysis on the basis of COI‐based questionnaires distributed to students, written free‐text student feedback, asynchronous discussion transcripts and final students’ products in the form of learning scenarios integrating the use of technology.

Keywords: community of Inquiry, blended learning, learning design, teacher training, course design

1. Introduction / background Innovation in higher education has been promoted as an imperative, some of the challenges accentuating the urgency of change being the evolution of sophisticated internet technologies, the new generation of learners, the demands of the global knowledge economy, and the shock of the current economic crisis.

With current advances in technology, the change of paradigm becomes more feasible in more fundamental ways. E‐learning in its various forms has been promoted as a catalyst for change in higher education, on the ground of a range of arguments of socio‐economic nature (Bates, 2005). In this line of action, almost the totality of higher education institutions have adopted Learning Management Systems (LMSs), digital platforms for both pedagogical and administrative purposes which offer a standard ‘one size fits all’ e‐learning solution at most universities (Steel & Levy, 2009). However, research on LMS use over the past 20 years has pinpointed the fact that they replicate the dominant e‐learning paradigm of industrial e‐learning, a model characterising the first stages of e‐learning development, imposing an inherently hierarchical structure that is based on a top‐ down, uni‐directional flow of power and communication on the educational environment. This approach has been characterised by Tony Bates, a pioneer educator and e‐learning systems designer as the «black box educational philosophy» (Bates, 1986, p. 432).

An alternative to the «black box» metaphor is the «network» metaphor (Harasim et al, 1995), representative of a completely different educational rationale. The computer, under this lens, is a channel of communication between the tutor and the students through which the orchestration of learning is mediated. (Bates, ibid., p.

45).

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A technological solution supporting the «network metaphor» is the integration of participatory web technologies (Web 2.0) into existing organisational infrastructure. It is argued that Web 2.0 could enable universities to “reinvent” themselves through more collaborative approaches to learning, innovations in teaching practices, and improved quality of student learning (Conole & Alevizou, 2010).

A pedagogical solution supporting a more open metaphor for online learning is based on the notion of communities. Communities fully or partially supported by digital tools have found fertile ground in the field of teacher education, either as components of broader training mechanisms, or as means of delivery of distance education per se (Najafi & Clarke, 2008). Their development has been related from the early 90s with effective professional development and substantial professional discourse (Darling‐Hammond & Ball, 1997). The added value of communities – based on a review of 14 in service programmes by Zhao & Rop (2001) and another of 24 academic and in service programmes by Barnett (2002) ‐ lies in:

the modulation of teacher isolation

the exchange of ideas and experiences

the dissemination of innovative practices and teacher support throughout their implementation

the development of interest groups around pedagogical issues

the facilitation of reflective dialogue around teaching

In a nutshell, rhetoric related to the infusion of innovation in higher education brings to the forefront notions such as collaboration, communication and reflection in communities.

The scope of this research project relates to the above identified issues by proposing a synthesis of perspectives for the purpose of designing and implementing a blended learning approach. Adopting Garrison and Vaughan’s (2008) definition of blended learning as an “organic integration of thoughtfully selected and complementary face‐to‐face and online approaches and technologies”, we attempt to articulate a framework including elements from the Community of Inquiry framework for meaningful online learning (COI), (Garrison et al, 2001) and the “Learning by Design” approach to designing learning activities (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012).

1.1 Cultivating a design‐like attitude in trainee teachers Today’s generation of young teachers are digital natives (Prensky, 2001), used to communicating with peers on a regular basis through multiple Internet technologies, cell phones, and other handheld tools. They have also been raised and educated in the modern western world where a common contemporary image of professionalism is collaborative group work: professionals sharing their experience, knowledge and expertise to solve complex problems.

New teachers are expected to adopt fundamental changes in the way they carry out their professional duties, many of which relate to the integration of digital technology in their teaching (Beetham, 2008). The management of technology‐supported classroom investigations is logistically difficult, compounding the already existing challenges posed to teachers by student‐driven classroom work, e.g. task management, providing individual guidance to several students simultaneously, and coordinating students who work at different paces (Edelson, 1998). As suggested by Beetham (ibid.), the integration of ICT fosters a more ‘planful’ and even ‘design‐like’ attitude on the part of practitioners, who suddenly have to make explicit many aspects of their practice that would emerge ad hoc in a live learning and teaching situation. A paradox, however, impeding smooth integration of already acquired ICT skills in teachers’ practices lies in the fact that, though studies in OECD countries place teachers amongst the most skilled technology users, they appear unable to take advantage of their competence and apply it to the way they teach (OECD, 2008). Especially with regards to Web 2.0 tools, it is striking to note that, despite their proliferation of their added value in educational literature (Redecker, 2009), there is very little work that examines how educators might make sense of the wide range of Web 2.0 tools available in the context of learning design, so that they can appropriately select and apply Web 2.0 tools that match the learning requirements of their curriculum (Bower et al, 2011).

Finally, approaches gaining momentum from a training standpoint are approaches centering on teachers’ design practices. A characteristic of design‐based teacher training activities is the acknowledgement of the importance of “pedagogical design capacity”– (PDC), a term used by Brown (2009), to describe “teachers’

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Katerina Makri et al. capacity to perceive and mobilize existing resources in order to craft instructional contexts”. The move to design‐based activities has implications for trainee‐teachers, as well as instructors (Mishra & Koehler, 2006).

With regards to trainees, they have to engage in the construction of artefacts, which is often located in the interplay between theory and practice, between constraints and trade‐offs, between designer and materials and between designer and audience (Mishra & Koehler, 2003). Trainees actively engage in practices of inquiry, research and design, in collaborative groups to design tangible, meaningful artefacts as end products of the learning process (Blumenfeld et al., 1991). The actual process of design is the anchor for around which the rest of the class (and learning) unfolds. This evolving artefact is also the test of the viability of individual and collective understandings, conceptions and ideas of the project.

With regards to teacher educators, design cannot be taught in conventional ways: design is experienced in activity, design depends on recognition of design quality, it entails a creative process, it is understood in dialogue and action, and involves reflection in action (Mishra, Zhao, & Tan, 1999; Schon, 1987).

The Learning by Design framework (LbyD) which is based on the conceptualization of ‘New Learning’ (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012) was used as a common language among teachers to enable communication and co‐construction of learning environments enhanced with technology. The framework introduces eight ‘knowledge processes’ (i.e. types of activities) (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012): (i) Experiencing the known, (ii) Experiencing the new, (iii) Conceptualizing by naming, (iv) Conceptualizing with theory, (v) Analyzing functionally, (vi) Analyzing critically, (vii) Applying appropriately, and (viii) Applying creatively. The mindful and appropriate deployment of the range of Knowledge Processes through a course is intended to foster higher order thinking skills and deeper learning for students. For teacher trainees, the mapping of these processes to specific activities and digital tools functions as a design awareness enhancement mechanism, aiding the meaningful integration of ICT in their learning designs.

1.2 Community of inquiry The Community of Inquiry framework (COI), Garrison et al, 2001), based on John Dewey’s progressive understanding of education is a process model of online learning which addresses the online educational experience as a result of the interaction of three presences – social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence (Swan, Garrison, & Richardson, 2009). Participation in a COI involves the (re) construction of experience and knowledge through the critical analysis of subject matter, questioning and challenging of assumptions. This definition is based on the premise that an educational learning experience is both collaborative and reflective.

This instrument consists of three separate coding schemes to identify each kind of social, cognitive, and teaching presences in textual discourse.

Social presence is the ability of the participants in the COI to project their personal characteristics into the community, thereby presenting themselves to the other participants as ‘real people’ (Garrison et al., 2000, p.

94). Social presence is a support for cognitive presence. The social presence coding scheme has three categories: affective, open communication and group cohesion. These categories are defined "in terms of the participants identifying with the community, communicating purposefully in a trusting environment and developing interpersonal relationships" (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2001, p. 7).

Cognitive presence "is the extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse in a critical community of inquiry" (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2001, p.

5). The scheme has four categories: triggering event; exploration; integration; and resolution. They represent the phases of an inquiry process in a collaborative learning environment. Triggering event is the initiation phase of a critical inquiry where an issue, dilemma or problem is identified or recognized. The next phase is exploration, where learners tend to grasp the nature of the problem and move to explore relevant information. In the integration phase learners construct meaning from the ideas generated in the exploratory phase. The last phase of the critical inquiry model is resolution, which indicates a resolution of the dilemma or problem that caused the triggering event.

Teaching presence comprises of "the design, facilitation and direction of cognitive and social processes for the purpose of realizing personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes" (Anderson et al.,

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2001, p. 5). The scheme has three categories: The first category, ‘design and organization’ considers the role of a teacher during the planning and designing process of online learning activities. The other two categories — ‘facilitating discourse’ and ‘direct instruction’ — investigate signs of teaching presence during students’ engagement in learning activities.

The COI is a generic theoretical framework that must be viewed as a means to study collaborative constructivist educational transactions – be they in online, blended or face‐to‐face environments. The validation of this framework would also suggest that it can also be used as a rubric to test for functioning communities of inquiry (Garisson, 2011).

Recent research has also employed the COI framework as a informing design rationale for online instructional design of educational experiences (Fusco et al, 2011; Shea & Bidjerano, 2009).

For the purposes of this research, the COI framework is used both as a design tool, and as an evaluation mechanism for a course addressed to teacher trainees.

2. Research design In the design rationale proposed in this section for training pre‐service teachers on Technology Enhanced Learning, we adopt a view of teachers as designers of innovative content working individually and collaboratively, discussing and interacting with the instructors and their peers, both online and in f2f settings.

This rationale guided a six‐month pre‐service teacher‐training course on Technology Enhanced Learning, provided by ASPETE in collaboration with TEI of Lamia, in the context of the graduate certificate in Informatics taking place in Lamia. The course took place between September 2012 and January 2013 with 18 participant teacher trainees. The course builds on participants’ content knowledge, considered a prerequisite, as it is their third year of specialisation in Informatics. It is based on the concept of learning design throughout its duration, this translating in practice in the process of collaborative work towards the development of a tangible and usable learning design in their field of expertise, properly addressing their future students. The elements of this learning design are presented in the following subsections.

2.1.1 Structure of learning designs The design template trainees are provided with is the WebQuest scheme (Dodge, 1995). Underlying the WebQuest strategy is a central inquiry‐oriented activity that is described in a web‐based format (Abbit & Ophus, 2008). The content of a WebQuest activity is divided into several sections, including: (a) Introduction, (b) Task, (c) Process, (d) Evaluation, and (e) Conclusion. Core elements that form a part of every WebQuest are a scaffolding structure that encourages student motivation and facilitates advanced thinking with integration of an enriched set of learning resources (March, 2007).

2.1.2 Pedagogy underlying learning designs The Learning by Design framework (LbyD, see section 1.1) (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012) is used as a common language among teachers to enable communication and co‐construction of learning environments enhanced with technology.

2.1.3 Technology integration in learning designs Two representative categories of Web 2.0 tools are used by trainees as objects to be integrated in their WebQuest learning designs. These are a) representation tools, such as timelines, wordclouds and concept mapping tools and b) digital storytelling tools, such as comics and interactive posters.

2.1.4 Orchestration of learning activities on the basis of cognitive and teaching presence Moodle is used as the main technological infrastructure where the learning experience sits on. Throughout 12 weeks, trainees complete individual assignments, form small (3‐member) groups and work in collaborative assignments, participate in online asynchronous discussions and teleconferencing sessions, as well as in f2f workshops inbetween. The online discussions take place in parallel to the f2f workshops and teleconferencing sessions, at specified times. F2f workshops were under the responsibility of the TEI of Lamia staff, whilst online discussions and teleconferencing sessions were led by ASPETE staff.

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With regards to cognitive presence, the course is organised on the basis of the hypothesis that a learning design experience can align with the same cognitive process described by Garrison et al (2001). Specifically, the triggering event is the design problem posed to trainees during the first two weeks of the course. There follows a quite extended period of exploring ideas, tools and resources, in order to craft an instructional rationale around the chosen theme of trainees’ WebQuest. Integration is expected to start manifesting towards the final weeks of the course, when participants have produced a first draft of their designs and are in the process of synthesizing their complementary expertise in order to reach a final product, represented by the resolution phase, during the final two weeks of the course. Table 1 maps course topics to respective activities.

With regards to teaching presence, we view it as supporting the process of design and the respective cognitive process dictated by the COI model in the ways shown in Table 1. Specifically with regards to the first two weeks, the dominant teaching presence category was that of Design and organisation: trainee teachers were introduced to the Moodle platform, created their online profiles, engaged in an introductory conversation about their expectations from the course and were also introduced to the course syllabus and activities.

Design and facilitation co‐existed with the triggering event stage of cognitive presence. During the core weeks of course (weeks 3 – 8), teaching presence focused on a synthetic effort both to facilitate discourse and to directly instruct. The latter is manifested through presentations in f2f workshops and in teleconferencing sessions, whilst the first was a continuous input in online discussions taking place in parallel to the f2f meetings. Finally, during the final weeks of the course (9‐12), we believe teaching presence mostly facilitated discourse: prompted discussion, reinforced student contributions, sought consensus / understanding, clarified ambiguities and resolved issues.

Table 1: Mapping of teaching and cognitive presence to course items Week

Topic

Cognitive presence stage Triggering event

Teaching Presence categories Design and organisation

Teleconferencing session

Triggering event

Design and organisation

Direct instruction

Facilitating discourse

Learning Activity 1

2

Presentation of the Moodle environment Presentation of the WebQuest structure and WebQuest examples Building a website for the WebQuest

F2F Workshop

3,4,5

Web 2.0 tools: 1) graphical representations (word clouds, timelines, concept maps) 2) digital story telling (comics, interactive posters)

3 F2F Workshops

Online: discussion on the usefulness and the appropriateness of various Web 2.0 tools for their own field

Exploration

6

Choosing a topic (curriculum‐based, from school textbooks or interdisciplinary) Designing activities for their WebQuest, based on the Learning by Design framework

F2F Workshop

Exploration

Teleconferencing session

Online: discussion on mapping specific learning activities (according to the LbD framework) to Web 2.0 tools

Exploration

7

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Direct instruction

Facilitating discourse Direct instruction

Facilitating discourse

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Week

Topic Learning Activity

8

9

10 11 12

Searching for appropriate Web material (sources) for their WebQuest Editing multimedia materials (images and sound) for their Webquests Group work for completing projects Group work for completing projects Presentation of projects

Online: posting at least two web resources they consider useful and pedagogically appropriate and commenting on them

F2F Workshop

Online: F2F Workshop discussion of final project F2F Workshop drafts and feedback Teleconferencing session

Cognitive presence stage Integration

Integration

Integration Resolution Resolution

Teaching Presence categories Direct instruction Facilitating discourse Facilitating discourse

Facilitating discourse Facilitating discourse Facilitating discourse

3. Results and discussion Cognitive presence in online discussions was examined in two ways: first, through mapping the quantity of participants’ comments to the five respective discussions throughout the course (figure 1).

Figure 1: Mapping comments to course discussions Despite the large number of participants’ posts in the first discussion, they were mostly of a social nature, representing participants’ need to acquaint themselves both with the medium of communication and with each other and the tutors. The second, third and fourth discussion forums weren’t densely populated, as shown by the scarce comments during the respective weeks and their nature was in most cases exploratory. A degree, however, of integration seems to have taken place during weeks 10‐12, where teachers started sharing their final designs with tutors (in separate group forums). Indicative of the integration phase is the following comment, 7th in a thread of 8 comments, 4 by the tutor and 4 by the student group. The comment is a reply to the tutor’s prompt to articulate which knowledge processes are activated in the group’s WebQuest, and which Web 2.0 tools are used towards this purpose: “We thought we had finished our WebQuest, but that was before the session about Learning by Design and cognitive processes. After this lesson, we tried to change the WebQuest so as to include as much cognitive processes as possible, with respective Web 2.0 tools. For example, by getting students to use the timeline, we think we activate the “conceptualising with theory”

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Katerina Makri et al. process. And by getting them to publish their presentations on Slideshare, we activate the “applying appropriately” process. Finally, we put a chat, with which we think we activate the “analysing critically” process, but we aren’t sure we’ll keep this”.

The comment indicates the end of a long exploration towards integrating all members’ opinions and ideas to the purpose of a final proposal.

Another group’s comment is of a more exploratory nature, approaching, however, integration: “I agree with [name], because after a lot of debate, we tried to fit more activities in our WebQuest fields. But I still don’t agree about the use of a blog. I think classroom discussion would be much more interesting for the pupils”.

The group participants, in this message, seem overwhelmed by the effort to match educational goals to specific Web 2.0 tools and indicate this by declaring the main point of a disagreement within the group.

Indicative, finally, of the exploratory nature of most posts during the middle weeks of course (discussions 2, 3 and 4), are the following posts: “How exactly are we to integrate Web 2.0 tools with specific knowledge processes? They don’t fit with our design” “Here is a web link we found useful for our students”.

The first post brings to the front a pedagogical issue troubling the group, whilst the second one is in fact a statement of something the group did. Neither posts than that of the tutor’s received feedback other and both belong to what has been referred to in the literature as “serial monologues”.

The second way we attempted to evaluate cognitive presence was through participants’ feedback to the survey designed to measure student perceptions of each of these presences (Swan et al., 2008; Swan et al, 2012). The survey consists of 34 items, 13 for teaching presence, 9 for social and 12 for cognitive presence.

Responses to the items were to be provided on a five‐point Likert type scale ranging from 1=strongly disagree; 5=strongly agree. The 34‐item COI survey instrument was employed to evaluate the contents, the structure and the activities of the “Pedagogical designs with ICT” distance learning course, under the three COI Framework’s elements: teaching, social and cognitive presence.

Mean responses for the 34 items ranged from 2.86 for Item 25 (I felt motivated to explore content related questions.) to 4.43 for Item 21 (I felt that my point of view was acknowledged by other course participants).

Teaching presence items collectively gave a mean score of 3.86. Social presence items gave a mean score of 3.88. Latter, cognitive presence items yielded a mean score of 3.46.

Standard deviations ranged from 0.48 for Items 30 and 31 (Learning activities helped me construct explanations‐solutions / Reflection on course content and discussions helped me understand fundamental concepts in this class) to 1.31 for Item 26 (I utilized a variety of information sources to explore problems posed in this course).

4. In conclusion Redesigning the course for the next academic year is currently in process, as is another similar course taking place at the moment in ASPETE. The preliminary findings reported in this paper point to a) changing the nature of tasks during weeks 3‐8 (“exploration and integration phases”), b) infusing more asynchronous conversation and respective moderation strategies, however difficult this has proven to be, given the blended character of the course. With regards to teaching presence, facilitating discourse will (during weeks 3‐8) in some instances, be prioritised over direct instruction, as some of the tasks have proven too restrictive for the students to allow them room for opinion sharing and discussion. Another parameter considered to be taken into account is social presence. This hasn’t been a design guideline so far, on the premise that the course already accounted for participants’ social accounts during f2f meetings. However, elements in trainees’ discussions in all threads indicate a tendency for online socialization, worthy of further investigation.

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Acknowledgements Τhe research “Design, Implementation and Evaluation of Blended Learning Scenarios in a Teacher Training Context Accommodating their Individual Psychological Characteristics (BleSTePsy)” is implemented through the Operational Program “Education and Lifelong Learning” and is co‐financed by the European Union (European Social Fund) and Greek national funds.

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Usefulness of Feedback in e‐Learning From the Students’ Perspective María‐Jesús Martínez‐Argüelles1, Dolors Plana‐Erta1, Carolina Hintzmann‐Colominas1, Marc Badia‐Miró2 and Josep‐Maria Batalla‐Busquets1 1 Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Barcelona, Spain 2 Universitat de Barcelona. Barcelona, Spain mmartinezarg@uoc.edu dplana@uoc.edu chintzmann@uoc.edu mbadia@ub.edu jbatalla@uoc.edu

Abstract: Functionality of feedback in pedagogical processes has been broadly analyzed in face‐to‐face learning, although to a lesser extent than in on‐line learning. Narciss (2004, 2008) distinguishes two dimensions within the feedback, the semantic dimension and the structural dimension. This article aims to analyze, from the student’s perspective, the semantic dimension of feedback in a virtual learning environment (VLE). Firstly, importance that VLE students give to feedback and its degree of personalization is analyzed. Later, the object of analysis is usefulness that students deem feedback should have, paying special attention to each of its semantic sub‐dimensions (Narciss, 2004). A survey was conducted among students of Business Administration degree of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). 182 students took part, divided into two groups (pilot and control). It was proved that 90% of students give great or very great importance to reception of feedback from their tutors, a relevance they consider to be higher than the one in a face‐to‐ face environment. This percentage is around 75% with regard to importance given to the level of personalization of feedback. The development of a factor analysis has revealed that usefulness of personalized feedback perceived by the students can be subsumed under two large dimensions: the one that makes learning (related to its semantic dimension) easier and the motivational one (by allowing an easier and more fluid communication with the tutor, contributing not to leave the course, etc.) The latter dimension has also proved to be key in order to attain improvements in the students’ satisfaction with the learning process. This research was funded by the Catalan government and the UOC, within the framework of projects to Improve Teaching Quality (ITQ).

Keywords: feedback, VLE, students, semantic dimension, motivations, satisfaction

1. Introduction In the framework of the process to adapt new degrees to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), the student becomes the protagonist of his/her learning process, which is carried out by fulfilling learning activities. In this context, as shown in the UOC’s (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) education model, the function of accompaniment and personalized relationship between teacher and learner is essential in order for each student to really attain the objectives and the competencies associated to each particular subject, and the program in general.

The UOC is a totally virtual university. One of the basic characteristics of its educative pattern is to encourage a range of continuous assessment activities to every subject that is part of the diverse learning programs. The underlying idea is that the student attains the objective and competencies inherent to each subject by carrying out the different proposed activities, jointly with a set of multiplatform materials which go along with the learning process. These continuous evaluation activities are called Continuous Assessment Activities (PAC, for its acronym in Catalan).

The elaboration of these PACs is, therefore, the axis of the student’s work. Each activity is evaluated by the tutor with a mark, which is sent to a private space only shared by the tutor and the learner. Furthermore, as these PACs are evaluated systematically and rigorously, they become the most direct and automatic channel for the student to receive a clear information on whether he/she is attaining the previewed goals or not, as well as to identify mistakes he/she is making and what he/she is lacking.

Nevertheless, one of the aspects of the UOC’s learning model that students were more dissatisfied with in recent years is the absence of a personalized feedback to the continuous assessment activities they have submitted (Martínez et al., 2010). Existent literature shows difficulties arisen when feedback is provided in

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María‐Jesús Martínez‐Argüelles et al. teaching and learning processes. One of these difficulties is related to the contents of feedback. This is about deciding which is the adequate feedback and which the best way to make it available to the student, since the student’s aim is to do his/her best in developing his/her learning process (Gibbs et al., 2004). Few are the authors that have studied this aspect within virtual learning environments until now, for instance Espasa (2008 and 2010), Guasch et al. (2010) and Alvarez et al. (2011). And here is where our study is placed. Taking as starting point the definition of the concept of feedback given by Susanne Narciss in her multiple scientific works (Narciss, 2004 and 2008; Narciss & Huth, 2004 and 2006; Narciss et al., 2004), this study is focused on the semantic dimension of feedback.

1.1 Semantic dimension of feedback in UOC’s degree in business administration The semantic dimension of feedback refers to the contents it transmits, and has been studied in non‐virtual environments by several authors such as Kluger and DeNisi (1996), Kramarski and Zeichner (2001), Kulhavy and Stock (1989), Mason and Brunning (2001) and Narciss (2004). In virtual environments it has been tackled by Espasa (2008). Given our study’s objectives and characteristics, we use the taxonomy elaborated by this author, which includes four semantic sub‐dimensions of feedback (from the lesser to the major degree of complexity) that are not exclusive amongst them. Such sub‐dimensions are:

S1. Error identification and correction: the feedback informs about the correction of errors made.

S2. Correct answer: the feedback shows the correct answer or gives the right solution.

S3. Task improvement: the feedback recommends contents and strategies in order to improve the work, or the test that has been submitted.

S4. In‐depth information: the feedback suggests in‐depth information in order to continue to move forward in learning in the future.

Out of these four sub‐dimensions, our analysis will focus on the first three (error identification and correction, correct answer and task improvement) as they are the most inherent to initial subjects in the framework of graduate studies.

In order to improve the learning process, feedback requires (Kulhavy, 1989; Espasa, 2010; Mory, 2004 and Gibbs & Simpson, 2004) the following elements 1 or/and 2, where the teacher assesses whether the answer is correct or not (Verification feedback)n and 3, where the teacher offers guidelines towards the correct answer (Formative feedback).

In most of the subjects that make up the UOC’s Degree in Business Administration, feedback made by the tutor includes the following sub‐dimensions:

Guidelines to the answer: once the term to submit the continuous assessment activities is over, a correct or oriented answer is provided (or rather “a correct solution” among those possible) to the whole group of students in the classroom. Thus, students can carry out a self‐assessment activity, comparing this solution to the contents of the activity they submitted. This category of feedback fully coincides with sub‐ dimension 2 of the feedback’s semantic dimension.

Specific feedback: In the virtual classroom each tutor has a tool (continuous assessment registry ‐RAC‐) that allows the sending of (written) comments to each student. But often, groups are of 70 students or more and there is the commitment to correct and comment on the activity in a term no longer than a week. Therefore, a personalized input to every student becomes very costly (difficult) since it is highly time‐consuming. Instead, a comment on the most frequent and common mistakes made by the students in their activities is provided in the virtual blackboard of the classroom (public space). Despite it does not individualize the comment; obviously this kind of feedback can be assimilated to the first semantic sub‐ dimension.

Answer to doubts: Moreover, each tutor answers doubts raised by students on the activities and contents they refer to. This could be labeled as a reactive, non‐proactive feedback. This kind of input aims at Therefore, according to literature, in order to improve the learning process and to motivate students, implementation of personalized inputs becomes a key factor, so as to offer a differential treatment according to their own diversity.

On the contrary, elaborating personalized inputs of four or more continuous assessment activities by the tutors, with classrooms of approximately 70 students, is often a non‐sustainable task due to the time it

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María‐Jesús Martínez‐Argüelles et al. requires taking into account that the estimate and demanded dedication of tutors is a maximum of two hours per day.

Our project analyses the efficiency, from the student’s and the tutor’s point of view, of different ways (text, video, screen‐shots, annotated PAC) to give feedback to students' continuous assessment activities in order to implement sub‐dimension 3. This article shows results obtained from the student's viewpoint.

2. Methodology The study of feedback impact and the analysis of hypotheses raised will be based on surveys answered by students that took part in the pilot tests, as well as academic results. With the already mentioned specific aim, a pilot test was designed in order to analyze the results and the students' assessment on the use of multimedia tools to provide personalized feedback. The pilot test's design was double‐sided. On the one hand, the technical side that focused on making feedback feasible by the tutor, and, on the other, the teaching side that focused on how to make it have a major impact on the student.

When implementing the pilot test, these criteria were followed:

Eight subjects as different as possible were selected, so that implementation of multimedia feedback could be evaluated according to the typology of the subject of the Business Administration Degree.

The pilot test focused on one of the subject's classrooms in order to check its real impact, while other control classrooms of the same subject were maintained

Previous information from the involved students was searched in order to analyze their profile, preferences and predisposition to receive a better feedback and the importance they give to the amount and quality, among other aspects.

Bearing in mind the diverse technical existing options when giving feedback (video, audio and video or commented screen‐shots), we opted for trying different tools in different subjects so that these could better adapt to the subject's needs.

Feedback in the pilot test was only implemented in specific evaluation tests, searching to maximize its usefulness. In the rest of tests the option was for written feedback.

In all cases, feedback is linked to the correction of evaluation tests.

We also take into account the size of the group due to the fact that this is a critical point.

Taking these elements into account, we have also implemented a set of technological innovations with the objective of making elaboration of multimedia feedback (both video and audio) easy. To do that, a LANGblog integration was developed in this application for mark registration. Thus, in a short space of time the options of audio and video recording have been incorporated to the continuous evaluation registry as well as the option to upload a file to those tutors that opted for screen‐shooting. Although this agile integration makes implementation of the pilot test of multimedia feedback possible, it is not a scalable or accurate solution in the long term. The objective was to allow a quick and easy sound and video recording as well as its editing and ulterior visualization by the students.

3. Results The UOC students’ profile has modified substantially in recent times. The tendency shows clearly that the average age has significantly lowered as a result of changes that society is going through.

Such changes also imply a variation on the approach adopted by students when following their learning process. Longer working days and less available time to devote to studying, has limited the students’ participation in the different spaces they have for In this sense, one of the elements of the utmost importance some years ago, feedback amongst students from their interventions in the forum under the teacher’s guidance and coordination, is now secondary.

As said, these students work mostly full‐time, and they usually have a low (less than 8 hours per week) dedication to subjects as well as a big diversity as regards the number of subjects they have signed on each semester.

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The process followed consisted of a first survey at the beginning of the year, with the aim to detect and describe perceptions students have about feedback before it really takes place, and a second survey once the subject had finished, where the impact got from implementing this feedback was compared to the effect it might have had.

The main results obtained are:

The fact of receiving feedback from the teacher‐tutor is valued as very important. Apart from the fact that access to solutions is already a first feedback, them being commented and adapted to each student’s specificities is valued very highly by them. In this sense, it is highly appreciated that the teacher’s feedback focusses on particular aspects where the student had some difficulties whereas it skips those correctly solved by the student. Personalization of feedback is double‐sided. Apart from the elements already mentioned, when trying to encourage continuity of the learning process, motivational aspects must be taken into account.

Quality of the feedback received is significantly valued. On the contrary not much importance is given to quantity neither to the tool through which it is received (RAC, board, mailbox, etc.), nor to the format or the moment they received the feedback.

Figure 1: Value importance of the following aspects Only an approximate 18% of students agree or totally agree that there is no need of personalized feedback if there are standard complete solutions to PACs’ questions. They think this feedback must help them to improve their answers in future PACs (more than 90%), by explaining concretely the mistakes made. On the other hand it is to be noted that although they think it is good to receive feedback as soon as possible once they have submitted the continuous assessment test, almost 60% of students would agree on receiving it later if this was personalized.

Figure 2: Show your level of conformity with the following statements

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Once the semester is over and teachers have implemented personalized feedback, based on the criteria and methodology mentioned in the introduction, we will analyze the results of surveys that will be answered by students.

Main results obtained are the following: (a) All students perceive they are receiving feedback, both those in the control classroom and those in the pilot classroom. None of them considers he/she has received excessive feedback, and only an approximate 10% thinks it is insufficient. This percentage is reduced to less than half in the pilot classroom. This shows that UOC already gives high importance to feedback, although it is not completely personalized and students perceive it that way. Nevertheless the satisfaction degree is higher in the pilot test than in the control classroom; around 80% of students in the pilot test and 70% in the control classroom are satisfied or very satisfied. This reveals that the way towards personalization of feedback helps to give a higher satisfaction to students.

Figure 3: I consider feedback received with relation to PACs to be

Figure 4: My level of satisfaction with personalized feedback I received is (b) It is noticeable that as new ways of feedback are introduced, the student values them positively and becomes more demanding, expecting to receive these e‐feedbacks in next continuous assessment tests. Thus, students in the pilot test were relatively less satisfied as regards written feedback; they have seen other kinds of feedback and this has reduced their level of satisfaction with written feedback. On the contrary, other kinds of formats, such as video, are better valued.

(c) It can be observed that there is a significant difference between importance given to feedback by students of control classrooms and by those of the pilot, the one given by the latter being higher. Seemingly, taking part in the pilot test allowed them to foresee potentialities and positive effects of feedback in this context.

(d) Finally, it is to be outlined that if we focus on usefulness of personalized feedback perceived by students, we observe that pilot test’s students value, above all and significantly more than control classrooms’ students, the fact that it served them to identify mistakes made in the PAC (almost 80% to 60%). Therefore, using personalized feedback through multimedia tools facilitates identifying mistakes made by the student in his/her learning process (first semantic dimension of feedback), and hopefully this will contribute to improve such process.

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Figure 5: Value if you consider more or less adequate and useful each of the following formats of feedback according to the subject’s characteristics. (text message)

Figure 6: Value if you consider more or less adequate and useful each of the following formats of feedback according to the subject’s characteristics. [video format message]

Figure 7: Compared to a face‐to‐face course, I think that feedback is more important in an on‐line course It is also remarkable that students that received this personalized feedback think it served them particularly to have an easier communication with their tutors, to clarify specific doubts about the subject and not to give it up. These aspects highlight importance of personalized feedback.

A further step on the feedback application impact analysis in classrooms is to see what the students’ satisfaction is, once it has been implemented. Presuming that results of the satisfaction variable move within a scale of 1 (min) to 5 (max) we can see that there is higher satisfaction among students that received a personalized feedback (see Table 1). Parameters included in this exercise are not statistically significant and this can be due, in some cases, to the reduced number of observations they have. In any case, we think it is still relevant to show existent discrepancies since they show current tendencies.

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Figure 8: The personalized feedback I received served me to: [Identifying mistakes made in the PAC]

Figure 9: Personalized feedback I received served me to...

Table 1: My level of satisfaction with personalized feedback is: Group

N

Average

Pilot Control

75 102

4,03 3,89

Deviation rate ,854 1,151

Average rate error ,099 ,114

In the same line, it will be relevant to analyze what lies behind these possible differences, looking in detail at elements which were useful to students after receiving the personalized feedback. To that end, we proposed the following answers to the question: Complete the statement: personalized feedback that I received served me to: Clarify specific doubts about the PAC, Identify mistakes made in the PAC, Know how not to fall in the same mistakes made in the PAC, Direct me on how to solve next PACs, Understand better the subject’s basic concepts, Complement the subject’s teaching material, Motivate me to study and complete PACs, Do not give the subject up, Feel more supported by the tutor and Have an easier communication with the tutor.

Results of the territorial analyses show two satisfaction factors (see Table 2), which explain 80% of the total variance. The first factor, that explains 70% of the variance, includes variables of concepts and material, and they are defined as Semantic Dimension factor. The second factor, that explains 10% of the variance, includes variables of motivation and communication with the tutor and is defined as Motivation and Communication factor.

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Table 2: Matrix of rotated components Complete the statement: personalized feedback that I received has served me to:

Component 1 2 ,872

[Clarify specific doubts about the PAC] [Identify mistakes made in the PAC]

,811

[Know how not to fall in the same mistakes made in the PAC]

,808

[Direct me on how to solve next PACs]

,733

[Understand better the subject’s basic concepts]

,824

[ Complement the subject’s teaching materials]

,834

[Motivate me to study and complete PACs]

,858

[Do not give the subject up]

,831

[Feel more supported by the tutor]

,811

[Have an easier communication with the tutor]

,678

Note: Extraction method: Analysis of main components. Rotation method: Normalization Varimax with Kaiser.

Rotation converged on 3 iterations.

As already mentioned, the first factor, defined as Semantic Dimension, includes variables related to identification, answer and learning of the students’ doubts, regarding the subject’s basic concepts. The second resulting factor, named Motivation and Communication factor, gathers together those motivational variables that, though with no direct impact on the evaluation results, have an incidence on the continuation of studies by the student, with direct results on the rate of students that follow continuous assessment. In on‐line studies, this dimension is critical since one of the main elements that affect continuation of studies is, precisely, to impel students’ motivation all along the year so they can overcome difficulties as they appear during the semester.

Table 3: Matrix of components transformation Component 1 2

1 ,777 ‐,629

2 ,629 ,777

Note: Extraction method: Analysis of main components. Rotation method: Normalization Varimax with Kaiser.

After analyzing all these factors, we kept the aforementioned values of each factor that follows a standard distribution with an average 0 and standard deviation 1. With all this information we can calculate the sub‐ groups average, that is to say, we can observe each of the factors’ behavior for classrooms where the pilot test was developed and control classrooms that allow us to correct possible deviated biases of the feedback positive impact. We think that in cases in which averages of pilot groups are significantly higher than those in control groups, the signification degree of innovations brought by the feedback are positive because they get a higher degree of satisfaction.

Table 4: Main statistical results by factors and groups

REGR factor 1 REGR factor 2

Deviation rate

Average rate error

Sig

,082

,927

,109

0,355

,063

1,052

,108

72

,133

1,068

,126

0,134

95

,101

,938

,096

Group

N

Average

pilot

72

control pilot

95

control

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It can be noted in both factors that the degree of satisfaction is higher in classrooms where pilot tests took place with respect to control classrooms although this degree of satisfaction is certainly higher as regards the second factor. Therefore, again, the motivational factor appears as very relevant. This lets us confirm the importance this factor has when saving students from giving up in on‐line environments and, thus, when following continuous assessment and, hence, getting the subject’s global best result.

4. Conclusions Following, some of the major conclusions drawn from perceptions students have about feedback they receive currently on continuous assessment tests are detailed:

In general, students give more importance to feedback in an on‐line learning than in a face‐to‐face learning.

Students give more importance to quality of feedback and the degree of personalization rather than to the amount or the moment they receive it. But, above all, they give importance to the fact of receiving feedback from the tutor.

Students receive generic solutions to PACs in any case. That is to say, the second semantic dimension of feedback is covered. Despite this, they consider they need to receive a more personalized feedback since presently these two dimensions are not well covered. They think that such feedback will make them improve resolution of their future assessment tests (third semantic dimension) as well as facilitate detection of made mistakes (first semantic dimension). This fact shows the need to go deeper into personalized feedback since this would be the way to deal with all semantic dimensions of feedback.

On the other hand, they outline the motivational effect of feedback, this aspect becoming a deterrent to abandoning the subject.

Following, assessment given by students to feedback received in the pilot test is shown:

In no case, students consider excessive or inaccurate the feedback they received. Instead, some of them considered it was insufficient.

Students think that feedback they received served them particularly to make communication with tutors easier, to clarify specific doubts about the subject and not to give it up.

Students showed very “practical” in the sense that they value, above all, usefulness of the feedback they received, much more than the kind of feedback or the channel (audio, video, etc.). In fact, regardless of the used channel, the fact to be able to consult any time feedback given to a particular activity and, even, the possibility to print it out is positively valued by students.

Implementing this kind of feedback leads the student to become more demanding and not to value written feedback that much. He/she claims more often to have a personalized and multimedia feedback.

From the student’s perspective, it is necessary to go deeply into personalization of feedback, since thus, all semantic dimensions of feedback could be addressed, and presently this aspect is not well covered. On the other hand, implementing feedback has on the student a clear motivational effect, which had not been sufficiently evidenced by other researches. Such effect needs not to be underestimated, particularly within an on‐line environment, where abandonment of studies rates are usually very high. This personalized feedback helps to increase the student’s feeling that he/she is being accompanied during the learning process, thus reducing the feeling of loneliness that is usually associated with this learning type.

In short, implementing personalized feedback has a relevant impact on the student, who values it because it makes his/her learning process easier, it motivates him/her not to give up and encourages communication with the teacher‐tutor.

Acknowledgements This article is the result of a collective work resulting from the project “Cap a l'e‐feedback" directed by María Jesús Martínez Argüelles, funded by the Open Office of Innovation (Vice‐presidency of Research and Innovation), MQD and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (IN – PID 1013). We are grateful to the work done by the rest of members of the project: Ernest Pons, David Trelles Bertran and Antoni Mangas. We also want to thank the collaboration of Anna Espasa Roca when improving the methodological work around feedback. And

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María‐Jesús Martínez‐Argüelles et al. we want to thank as well the financial support given by the Economics and Business Studies of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

References Alvarez, I., Espasa, A., & Guasch, T. (2011). The value of feedback in improving collaborative writing assignments in an online learning environment.Studies in Higher Education, 1–14.

Espasa, A. (2008). “El Feedback en el marc de la regulació de l’aprenentatge: caracterització i anàlisi en un entorn formatiu en línia”. Doctoral Thesis. On line, available at: http://www.tdx.cat/browse?value=Espasa+Roca%2C+Anna&type=author Espasa, A. (2010). Time factor in e‐learning and assessment. eLearn Center Research Paper Series, (1). Retrieved from http://elcrps.uoc.edu/ojs/index.php/elcrps/article/view/issue1‐espasa Gibbs, G., Simpson, C. (2004). Conditions under which assessment support students’ learning. Learning Teaching in High Education. 1, 3‐31.

Guach, T., Espasa, A. & Alvarez, I. (2010). Formative e‐feedback in collaborative writing assignments: the effect of the process and time. eLC Research Paper Series. 1, 49‐59 Kluger, A.N. & DeNisi, A. (1996). “The effects of feedback interventions on performance: A historical review, a meta‐ analysis, and a preliminary feedback intervention theory”. Psychological Bulletin, 119(2), 254‐284.

Kramarski, B. & Zeichner, O. (2001). “Using technology to enchance mathematical reasoning: Effects of feedback and self‐ regulation learning”. Educational Media International, 38 (2‐3), 77‐82.

Kulhavy, R.W. & Stock, W.A. (1989). “Feedback in written instruction: the place of response certitude”. Educational Pyschology Review, 1(4), 279‐308.

Martínez, M.J.; Juan, A.A. & Castan, J. (2010). “Using the Critical Incident Technique to Identify Factors of Service Quality in Online Higher Education”. International Journal of Information Systems in the Service Sector, 2(4), 57‐72.

Mason, J. & Brunning, R. (2001). Providing feedback in computer‐based instruction: what the research tell us. University of Nebraska‐Lincoln: http://dwb.unl.edu/Edit/MB/MasonBruning.html Mory, E.D. (2004). Feedback research revisited, Handbook of research on educational communications and technology,2, 745‐783.

Narciss, S. & Huth, K. (2004). How to design informative tutoring feedback for multimedia learning. A H. M. Niegemann, R. Brünken & D. Leutner (Eds.), Instructional Design for Multimedia Learning (pp. 181‐195). Münster: Waxmann.

Narciss, S. & Huth, K. (2006). Fostering achievement and motivation with bug‐related tutoring feedback in a computer‐ based training for written subtraction. Learning and Instruction, 16(4), 310‐322.

Narciss, S. (2004). “The impact of informative tutoring feedback and self‐efficacy on motivation and achievement in concept learning”. Experimental Psychology, 51(3), 214‐228.

Narciss, S. (2008). “Feedback strategies for interactive learning tasks”. A J.M. Spector, M.D. Merrill, J. Van Merriënboer & M. P. Driscoll (Eds.). Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology (Aect). New Jersey (EUA): Lawrence Erlbaum.

Narciss, S., Körndle, H., Reimann, G. & Müller, C. (2004). Feedback‐seeking and feedback efficiency in web‐based learning– How do they relate to task and learner characteristics? A. P. Gerjets, P. A. Kirschner, J. Elen, & R. Joiner (Eds.), Instructional design for effective and enjoyable computer‐ supported learning. Proceedings of the first joint meeting of the EARLI SIGs Instructional Design and Learning and Instruction with Computers (pp. 377‐388). Tuebingen: Knowledge Media Research Center.

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Trust as an Organising Principle of e‐Learning Adoption: Reconciling Agency and Structure Jorge Tiago Martins and Miguel Baptista Nunes Information School, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK jorge.martins@sheffield.ac.uk j.m.nunes@sheffield.ac.uk

Abstract: This paper examines how academics developing a trusting behaviour towards e‐learning adoption. It inductively explores perceived risks and enablers involved in e‐learning adoption, within the context of Portuguese Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). The findings indicate that the interplay between institutionalism and individualism has strong implications in the success or failure of e‐learning mainstreaming strategies, as perceived by academics. In practical terms, the results reported in this paper suggest that HEIs should pay more attention to context‐sensitive trust building mechanisms that strike a balance between (1) academics’ commitments, values and sense of self‐worth, and (2) centrally‐ planned policy, rules, resources and exhortations that enable action.

Keywords: organisational trust, e‐learning, adoption, agency, structure

1. Introduction The objective of the study reported in this paper is to investigate the non‐linear nature of relationships between inhibitors and enablers of academics’ attitudinal alignment towards e‐learning with particular emphasis on the social dimension of alignment and the development of appropriation strategies, in the context of Portuguese Higher Education Institutions.

This objective is contributory to the wider purpose of understanding “what is going on” in Portuguese academics’ attitudinal alignment towards e‐learning and the very general nature of this question is a symptom of the phenomenon’s complexity. The researchers’ aim is not to restrict the area of study to a narrow number of variables, but rather to expand it in such a way that contextual aspects are included.

This endeavour will naturally deal with the complexity and uncertainty resulting from the consideration of people and their interrelations with an organisation, as defended by Trauth (2001).

In the case of e‐learning adoption in Higher Education Institutions, despite previous research into critical success factors (White, 2007; McPherson and Nunes, 2008) and the identification of enablers and barriers to adoption, the complexity and uncertainty surrounding the Portuguese context remains uncovered and begs for synthesisation of data into a theoretically solid whole, which will occur through the unearthing and explanation of the basic social processes that academics use to resolve the problem of e‐learning appropriation.

Benbya and McKelvey (2006:287) suggest that alignment “is a continuous coevolutionary process that reconciles top‐down rational designs and bottom up emergent processes of consciously and coherently interrelating all components of the Business/IT relationship at three levels of analysis (strategic, operational and individual) in order to contribute to an organisation’s performance over time”.

Applied to the specific problem of academics’ perceptions of e‐learning, the issue of alignment is a dynamic process and not an end state. It is subsidiary of the external environment and of factors within the organisation itself.

Considering the cognitive dimension of attitude alignment, expressed by individuals’ “shared representations, interpretations and systems of meanings among parties” (Nahapiet and Ghosal, 1998:244), the purpose of the study will be addressed through the following research questions:

What are the individual, strategic and operational factors that impact on Portuguese academics perceptions of e‐learning?

What are the trust barriers that hinder academics’ confident e‐learning adoption?

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How can perceived risks and vulnerabilities be mitigated in order to allow academics to enact trust in e‐ learning?

To answer these research questions, the following research objectives were set:

To review the concept of e‐learning and to describe what is understood by effective practice in relation to e‐learning in Higher Education;

To uncover the meanings and socially constructed perceptions underlying Portuguese academics’ attitudes towards e‐learning ‐ a research problem unanswered by the existing literature, hence available for inductive explanation through the theoretical inscription of clusters of symbolic acts, emerging from academics’ sense making and experiential accounts.

Following this introductory section, a review of the literature aimed at developing the researchers’ theoretical sensitivity to the topic of e‐learning is presented in Literature Review section. The section deals mainly with providing operational definitions and with reviewing the literature for the specific issues of institutional approaches to e‐learning mainstreaming; focuses of academics’ resistance to e‐learning; and motivational strategies for academics.

The section on Methodology introduces Grounded Theory as the methodology used within this research, and explains the research design that was followed. In this section, the researchers present the rationale for having chosen an inductive method, discuss the theoretical concepts that inform the method and introduce the series of analytical techniques that were used to induce a theory grounded in data.

What follows next is the presentation of findings of this research, in the form of trust barriers that hinder academics’ confident e‐learning adoption. It lays the empirically‐grounded foundation – composed of codes and categories ‐ for an emergent theory that explains how e‐learning perceived risks and vulnerabilities can be mitigated in order to allow academics to enact trust in e‐learning.

The last section offers a summary of key points with the identification of implications for practice.

2. E‐learning in higher education: A theoretically‐sensitising review of the literature The objective of this review is to develop the researchers’ sensitivity to the existing literature surrounding technology‐enhanced learning environments in Higher Education, more specifically the challenges and opportunities of online learning environments alongside traditional face‐to‐face teaching. Furthermore, a subsection of the review addresses the changes underway in the Portuguese Higher Education sector.

The review attempts to examine the concept of e‐learning by looking at definitions and explanations, and ventures in exploring issues related to (i) institutional approaches to e‐learning mainstreaming; (ii) focuses of academics’ resistance to appropriation; and (iv) motivational strategies for academics.

The major difficulty with providing an operational definition of e‐learning is related to the use of the term as an all‐encompassing catch‐phrase that largely designates the application of computer technologies to education in a diversity of contexts: face‐to‐face classrooms, blended courses, mediated distance‐education or purely online learning environments.

Despite the trend surrounding the term ‐ mostly because computer technologies and the internet are enabling individuals to search for information, learn about educational contents and topics of personal interest and to communicate and collaborate with each other (Carliner and Shank, 2008) – e‐learning “has not really revolutionised learning and teaching to date. Far‐reaching, novel ways of teaching and learning, facilitated by ICTs, remain nascent” (OECD, 2005).

However the challenge of brining all these elements of innovation into a holistic framework and promoting an understanding of educational technologies in context remains, at least partially, unadressed (Ehlers & Schneckenberg, 2010; Hopbach, 2010; NAHE 2008).

Despite the existence of consensus around the idea that a “model of sustainable e‐learning should be student‐ centred and grounded on a clear ethical sense of contribution and participation in the shared management of a learning experience” (Teixeira, 2011), changes are slow in HEIs.

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Jorge Tiago Martins and Miguel Baptista Nunes Similarly, despite the acknowledgement that the use of technology in flexible ways provides answers to challenges of global sustainability and internationalisation (Ala Mutka et al., 2010), strategic and organisational change issues undermine the uptake of educational technology.

For the purpose of this study, e‐learning is defined as the following: “the use of new multimedia technologies and the Internet to improve the quality of learning by facilitating access to resources and services as well as remote exchanges and collaborations” (European Commission, 2001).

Despite being a political definition, and despite being somehow dated, this operational definition is sufficiently ample to describe the use of any online technology in learning and teaching; and to accommodate a diversity of educational modes of delivery: online courses, participation in hybrid courses enhanced with online contents, activities and interaction between students and instructors, or simply the use of the internet to access contents, develop skills or access information.

Being consistent with the definition presented above, Wagner, Hassanien and Head (2008) summarise the key dimensions of e‐learning, the extent and the attributes of technology use in course delivery, and the types of processes involved (vide Table 1).

In the context of traditional, campus‐based universities – the exact context in which this research developed – institutional rationales for blended learning are dominant, mostly because of the flexibility of provision, a better support for learner diversity, perceived efficiency gains, and enhancement of the campus experience (Sharpe et al, 2006).

Lameras et al. (2012:155) advance a similar argument: “as digital technologies become ever more pervasive in the learning and research environments of all academic disciplines, blended teaching is becoming a major focus of interest in universities’ educational development initiatives”.

Table 1: The dimensions of e‐learning (adapted from Wagner et al., 2008) Dimension

Attribute

Process

Example

Synchronicity

Asynchronous

Content delivery occurs at a different time than receipt by the student.

Content delivery occurs at the same time as receipt by students.

Students use an application at the same physical location as other students and/ or the instructor.

Students use an application at various physical locations, separate from other students and the instructor.

Students work independently from one another to complete learning tasks.

Students work collaboratively with one another to complete learning tasks.

All work is delivered via technology; there is no face‐to‐face component.

E‐learning is used to supplement traditional classroom learning.

Lecture mode delivered via e‐ mail Lecture delivery via webcast

Synchronous

Location

Same place

Distributed

Independence

Individual Collaborative

Mode

Electronic only Blended

Using technologies to solve a problem in a classroom Using technologies to solve a problem from different locations Students complete e‐learning modules autonomously Students participate in discussion forums to share ideas An electronically‐enabled distance‐learning course In‐class lectures are enhanced with hands‐on computer exercises.

However, the successful and suitable use of this type of systems is highly dependent on a better understanding of how they transform the practice of academics. The emergence of patterns of failure in e‐learning implementation is not uncommon (Driscoll, 2008). They revolve mainly around organisational barriers (inadequate support of e‐learning efforts); pedagogical problems (programs failing to achieve targets); technical problems; or under‐funding of e‐learning projects.

But it is the apparent divorce of the e‐learning academic literature with learning theories that determines a use of technology in education essentially technology‐driven rather than theory‐driven (Ravenscroft, 2001).

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Jorge Tiago Martins and Miguel Baptista Nunes This very same issue is addressed by Nichols (2003), who calls for the emergence of a new rationale for the implementation of e‐learning approaches, based on pedagogical advantages and on the need to “establish theory not evaluation, principles not practice, pedagogies, not applications”.

These concerns emerge as academics are growingly being asked to teach online without adequate support, professional development and sufficient understanding of the relevant pedagogical methods. This situation is not compatible with the critical role of academics in developing and delivering e‐learning courses.

Wilson and Christopher (2008) describe how academics face several concerns when engaged in situations where e‐learning complements traditional on‐campus instruction. Amongst the most salient are constraints of time, expertise to teach online, career impact, recognition and reward. For this reason, academics must develop confidence in e‐learning and see the personal and professional pay‐off for their investment.

3. Methodology Considering the expected outcomes of this study, the attempt at understanding of the “mechanisms guiding faculty behaviour regarding educational technology” (Moser, 2007:66) followed an inductive approach, allowing theory to emerge based on academics’ experiential accounts and lending the inquiry useful insights about the development of e‐learning appropriation in practice. Ultimately, academics’ sense making and decisions on appropriation are based on subjective perceptions of reality and of the university as organisational and environmental surroundings.

In terms of methodology, fidelity to the idiosyncratic nature of the context and emphasis on the production of understanding about social phenomena are particular strengths of Grounded Theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967), as it provides a structured approach to “the gathering and analysis of human experiences and the associated interrelations with other human actors, coupled with situational and contextual factors” (Coleman and O’Connor, 2008:775).

Accordingly, Grounded Theory was adopted as the methodology in conducting this research, for its capacity to provide deep insights and understandings of academics’ perceptions, as well as of the assumptions underlying their behaviour and richness of lived experiences.

If e‐learning and educational technologies have, as Garisson and Andersen (2000:25) argue, a disruptive function, “precipitating a rethinking of what it means to teach and learn in higher education”, then such an impact in outcome expectations must translate into constraints and enablers of teacher adoption, that are worth rendering visible through building a theory or, as Strauss and Corbin (1994:274) maintain, through achieving “plausible relationships proposed among concepts and sets of concepts” and “discovering process – not necessarily in the sense of stages, but in reciprocal change in patterns of action/ interaction and in relationship with changes of condition, either internal or external to the process itself”.

In this research, opportunities for theory‐building were construed from academics’ perceptions – elicited by informants’ accounts of events ‐ concerning links between decision making, action and self‐reported e‐learning appropriation and embeddedness processes. The discovery of a multi‐level ontology encompassing the structured social context of the university was concomitant to handling meanings, capturing respondents’ situational definitions and attempting at developping a data‐grounded theory – an iterative, time consuming process, complete only when core categories are stabilised and saturated.

In terms of data collection, the study used semi‐structured in‐depth interviews to collect Portuguese academics’ views, perceptions and anxieties. Sampling efforts focused on the identification of a relevant community of practice, composed of academics in Portuguese public HEIs, teaching at BA/ BSc Level, and affiliated with Faculties where e‐learning appropriation manifested itself in considerable depth. Moreover, studying this community of academics allowed the researchers to examine a specific intra‐organisational dynamics (Strauss et al., 1985), reinforced by a common professional and occupational world.

The sampling technique employed in this research therefore required selecting informants who were knowledgeable about the topic and who were willing to share their experiences with the researchers. Data collection efforts developed in two stages: a first interview round comprised 14 interviews; and a second

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Jorge Tiago Martins and Miguel Baptista Nunes interview round comprised 51 interviews. During the latter stage, 3 informants interviewed during the first interview round have been revisited to ensure the validity of ongoing coding and analysis.

The analytical process involved open, axial and selective coding strategies (Strauss and Corbin, 1998), which translated into breaking down interview scripts into units of meaning, starting with descriptive categories, reappraised for sets of irradiating relationships, ultimately condensed – through the analytical steps of constant comparison – into higher order categories of holistic explanatory power.

Concerns raised by informants in the course of interviews were representative of their professional category.

They addressed change management practice, as globally there was the perception that HEIs had not adequately positioned themselves for the introduction of e‐learning systems. In terms of theory building, the most significant categories emerging from interviews referred to change burdens resulting from changes in practice required by e‐learning, and to erroneous institutional mainstreaming policies. It emerged strongly from data that an unrewarded extension of the teaching presence and the fading of traditional expectations for engagement in teaching and learning is a source of anxiety, stress and mistrust in e‐learning by academics.

These change burdens result in disruptions to academics’ professional praxis and require changes in institutional attitudes, management and reward schemes.

4. Findings In order to answer the research question introduced in the Introduction ‐ What are the individual, strategic and operational factors that impact on Portuguese academics perceptions of e‐learning? ‐ this section presents trust barriers that hinder academics’ confident e‐learning adoption, and lays the empirically‐grounded foundation for the proposed theory that seeks to explain how perceived risks and vulnerabilities can be mitigated in order to allow academics to enact trust in e‐learning.

Before moving on to the explanation of findings, it is important to establish that academics’ conceptual understanding of e‐learning contained in this section refers to the web‐based provision of supplementary resources and activities – mostly through virtual learning environments ‐ for courses that are conducted predominantly along traditional lines: “I am happy with a blended learning teaching arrangement and find that it works extraordinarily well. E‐learning complements the campus‐based instruction and conversely campus‐based instructions’ strengths are not obliterated. Teaching entirely online and in real time is a possibility today, but I don’t think videoconferencing can serve as a direct replacement to the richer opportunity to interact with tutors and peers on a face to face basis” (Q2:8:6).

Therefore the purpose of this preamble is to avoid ambiguity in terminology, since academics apply the concepts of e‐learning and blended learning interchangeably, and to describe the convergent use – within traditional campus‐based HEIs ‐ of digital learning environments to facilitate communication, knowledge sharing and knowledge exchange, collaboration and tutorial support between students and tutors.

“I have no doubts about the suitability of e‐learning for Higher Education. It is my preferred teaching arrangement because I realise that the preparation and delivery of traditional on‐ campus teaching is constrained by time frames and limited working facilities. Even if I found it productive and beneficial, from a student development point of view, to extend the duration of a campus‐based learning activity, there are regulations about the length of teaching sessions, which I cannot exceed. Nevertheless it was frustrating to realise that students’ learning and personal development opportunities would sometimes be frozen, suspended in time or forever lost because of such constraints. Blended learning brings a conciliatory solution to this problem because the physical dimension of the learning environment is prolonged into a virtual dimension, where activities, discussions and resources are extended and can develop more freely” (Q36:11:18).

To describe and explain barriers to e‐learning adoption in a systematic manner, an explanatory model was developed based on the three stages of coding proposed by Strauss and Corbin (1998), previously explained in the Methodology section, and now detailed in Appendix 1. More specifically, open coding developed as a process of identification or mapping of barriers to trust in e‐learning, as perceived by academics.

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Jorge Tiago Martins and Miguel Baptista Nunes As the level of abstraction in coding progressed, trust barriers were aggregated according to whether they reflected either an agentic or an institutional orientation (axial coding), and then grouped in sequentially progressive levels of trust that culminate in a conceptualisation of trust in e‐learning through organisational learning (selective coding). Organisational learning is understood here as organisationally regulated collective learning process in which individual and group‐based learning experiences concerning the improvement of organisational performance and/ or goals are transferred into organisational routines, processes and structures, which in turn promotes academics’ trusting adoption of e‐learning.

Ultimately, the model presented here – and summarised in Appendix 2 ‐ conceives e‐learning as a means of strategic renewal in HEI. It attempts to explain e‐learning adoption as a process. Our perspective is psychological‐organisational, by simultaneously focusing on the overcoming of individual and organisational behaviours that prevent or hinder e‐learning adoption.

The multilevel character of the model is evidenced by bringing together individual and organisational levels of analysis – this duality was very vivid across interviews with academics ‐ further conceptualised through coding as actional‐personal or structural‐organisational spheres.

This multilevel nature is particularly important to understand the tension between academics’ individual experiences in a changing environment and HEIs’ response, actionable in the strategies employed to transfer experiences from individual level into organisational routines, structures and processes.

The model presented here postulates three processes by which the different levels of trust in e‐learning (individual and organisational) are bi‐directionally connected:

Trust to change: this is the process of developing new insights and ideas concerning e‐learning based on personal experiences. It is located within individuals and it is extracted through analysing the ways in which academics explain their insights through words and actions to themselves and to others.

Trust to integrate: this step takes place when a shared understanding among individuals is achieved, allowing for coherent and collective action across the organisation.

Trust to institutionalise: this state refers to the consolidation and implementation of shared understandings in systems, structures, rules, procedures and strategies, which guide organisational action.

To be more specific, the institutionalisation of e‐learning implies embedding it in the structures, routines and strategies of the organisation.

The three processes of changing, integrating and institutionalising are used to characterise the overcoming of the specific barriers to e‐learning adoption that they aggregate. They were identified during the selective coding stage (vide Appendix 1).

However, there is a deeper dualism permeating all three stages, which was identified during axial coding (vide Appendix). It deals with power, identity and influence, and it affects the perception of costs and benefits that academics associate with e‐learning. This dualism is that of agency versus structure. On the one hand, there are barriers to trust in e‐learning that fall under an ‘actional‐personal’ sphere (agency). These are marked by individual thinking, attitudes and behaviour, and by self‐interested/ self‐governed action, such as the barrier “occupational mindsets”, which refers to the constituent aspects of academic identity as self‐perceived, namely the ways in which academics understand and conceptualise their role in universities: “I think that most academics still haven’t realised that the functional attributes of their jobs have changed a lot. They still do not enact what is now circulating theoretically as the new pedagogical stance – that of the teacher as a facilitator. But in practice that is what students really need from their teacher: a guide on the side more than a sage on stage, to help them select and transform information into applicable knowledge. Furthermore, an extension of the teaching presence as a direct consequence of e‐learning is inevitable” (Q48:29:49).

On the other hand, there are barriers to trust in e‐learning that fall under a ‘structural‐organisational’ sphere (structure). These are characterised by existing routines, structures and practices and are expressed culturally in the formulation of strategic intent, in formal regulations as well as in the processes of decision‐making, dominance and discipline.

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Jorge Tiago Martins and Miguel Baptista Nunes Subsequently, this sphere is divided into ‘strategic’ and ‘operational’ levels. The ‘strategic level’ refers to how HEIs envision their leadership position and how, in response to this vision, they establish the criteria that will be used to chart progress. This requires an active management process that includes the ability to focus organisational attention on the essence of a shared vision, the ability to motivate people by communicating the value of targets, the ability to make room for individual and team’s contribution in the formulation of targets, and the ability to sustain commitment by providing operational definitions and allocating resources.

An example of the difficulties encountered at strategic level is offered by the barrier “Low learning and teaching oriented values”, which refers to the traditional undervaluing of teaching as opposed to research: “E‐learning introduces a major pedagogical challenge because in online environments students experience a technologically mediated access to learning objects. And we are all accustomed to and trained to respond to a face to face instructional situation, which is completely different. E‐ learning is mainly based on facilitation and on the creation of contexts for interaction” (Q28:7:13).

Turning to operational performance, the ‘operational level’ refers to how organisations translate strategic direction into operational reality, creating competitive advantage in the process. It describes how initiatives that are closely associated with organisations’ strategic direction are targeted to receive increased managerial attention, greater financial and technical support, and additional resources in the form of staff training and motivation, which are necessary to sustain high‐priority endeavours. An example of the difficulties encountered at operational level is offered by the barrier “Inconsistency between adoption goals and quality criteria to measure them”, which refers to the lack of logical connection between e‐learning adoption – introduced as an institutional goal – and responsive quality assurance and quality enhancement mechanisms: “No one has clear picture about the performance of e‐learning at institutional level, no one knows for sure if it is being effective, efficient or if its affordances are being exploited to the maximum. No one knows if it is not more than a documents repository. Value and impact are not really measured” (Q9:34:42) Components of the external organisational environment were not ignored and were assimilated into the ‘structural‐organisational’ sphere, as it is considered that the environment represents parts of the social and material world that the organisation perceives as relevant. The organisation filters out perceived changes and developments in the external environment (for example technological innovations, governmental policy or new ideas generated by specific groups in society) and decides whether or not to integrate them as organisational products and practices. This decision is not dissociable from culturally endorsed forms of authority, rather being its reflexion, hence the importance of analysing societal‐environmental factors as components of the structural‐organisational sphere.

5. Conclusions The conclusions presented in the section above are directly responsive to the lived experience of Portuguese academics. However, the validation of such conclusions requires that the research questions that initially guided the investigation (vide Introduction) are now revisited.

The first in a set of three questions was ‘What are the individual, strategic and operational factors that impact on Portuguese academics perceptions of e‐learning?’. The findings advanced in this paper answer this question by proposing that the encounter between academics and the management of HEIs is paramount in overcoming perceived sources of risk/ mistrust associated with the adoption of e‐learning, which operate as barriers. Thus, an efficient approach to implementing e‐learning must integrate and support the dialogue between these two groups. These complexities seem to be present in academics’ preoccupations and anxieties and were expressed in terms of their aspiration for: (1) a people‐centred approach focusing on information, participation, training and communication; (2) existence of supportive administrative systems and the alignment of e‐learning solutions with organisational policies and infrastructures.

Accordingly, the overcoming of actional‐personal and structural‐organisational barriers is a condition of confident and trustful adoption of e‐learning, following a progressive integration of: (1) individual academics’ capacity to develop new insights and ideas concerning experiences of e‐learning (trust to change); (2) academics’ capacity – as a professional group ‐ to achieve shared notions of validity for e‐learning experiences (trust to integrate); and (3) the institutional capacity to embed e‐learning in HEIs’ structures, routines and strategies (trust to institutionalise).

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Jorge Tiago Martins and Miguel Baptista Nunes The second research question introduced in the opening section of this dissertation was ‘What are the trust barriers that hinder academics’ confident e‐learning adoption?’, and is answered with the identification of 55 barriers, broadly divided into ‘actional‐personal’ and ‘structural‐organisational’ dimensions.

Actional‐personal barriers to trust in e‐learning refer to academics’ individual thinking, attitudes and behaviour, and self‐interested/ self‐governed action.

Structural‐organisational barriers are characterised by existing routines, structures and practices and are expressed culturally in the formulation of strategic intent, in formal regulations as well as in the processes of decision‐making, dominance and discipline. This group of barriers is further divided into strategic and operational levels. The strategic level refers to HEIs’ ability to sustain commitment by focusing organisational attention on e‐learning, providing operational definitions, making room for individual contributions, and allocating resources. Operational barriers refer to how HEIs translate strategic direction into operational reality, creating competitive advantage in the process.

Finally, the answer to the last research question ‐ ‘How can perceived risks and vulnerabilities be mitigated in order to allow academics to enact trust in e‐learning?’ ‐ comes in the form of the emergent substantive theory of ‘trust through organisational learning dialectic’. This substantive theory is situated in the “historical, local and interaction context of the area of study” (Charmaz, 2006:xii), which is the context of Portuguese Higher Education Institutions.

In brief, the theory posits that a mix of informal and formal structures is necessary to manage the risk and uncertainty perceived by academics, when endeavouring to implement e‐learning at institutional level.

Academics’ trust in e‐learning is achieved when HEIs provide opportunities for local dialogue and consultative fora to reflect on the fundamental values and purposes of e‐learning. The purpose of these is to identify points of convergence and conflict with e‐learning until the purpose, value and process of e‐learning becomes both ingrained in academics’ practice and embedded in the operational routines of HEIs.

Appendix 1: Coding stages and the emergence of codes, categories, near‐core categories and core category

SELECTIVE CODING

TRUST THROUGH

Trust to change

AXIAL CODING

OPEN CODING

Actional‐ personal confidence

Insufficient intrinsic motivation Definitional profusion Perceived lack of relative advantage Unrealised managerial and delivery efficiency Unrealised pedagogical value Epistemological disagreement Technological determinism Occupational mindsets Student‐centred learning paradigm Diverse knowledge bases Ownership and control of knowledge Defensive routines Risk avoidance culture Resistance to innovation Prejudice

Structural‐ organisational assurance

Strategic

Erosion of high status professional identity

Monolithic academic culture Outdated management‐held core values Cost‐cutting driven policy Governmental patronage

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SELECTIVE CODING

AXIAL CODING

ORGANISATIONAL LEARNING DIALECTICS

OPEN CODING Market‐driven adoption

Operational

Trust to integrate

Actional‐personal confidence

Bureaucratic overload and internal fragmentation Measurable goals and performance feedback

Lack of functional and technical expertise Extended teaching presence Temporal frames of work Unprepared students Self‐interest and opportunistic behaviour

Structural‐ organisational assurance

Strategic

Operational

Pervasive research culture Low learning and teaching‐oriented values Lack of recognition Low levels of participation and communication Power structures and relations

Perceived incompatibility with work rules and regulations Forced top‐down change Insufficient incrementalism

Trust to institutionalise

Actional‐personal confidence

Unfulfilled autonomy to design learning experiences Superstitious learning Past experiences of failure and conflict Bounded rationality Reputation risk Increased visibility Leakage of confidential information

Structural‐ organisational assurance

Strategic

Fear of administrative control and disciplining Lack of clear mandate for implementation Inconsistent organisational strategy Misalignment with educational strategy Turfism Lack of organisational homophility

Operational

Lack of a responsive normative system Insufficient reward Intellectual property rights Inconsistency between adoption goals and success criteria to evaluate them Inadequate specialised services Underestimated organic development

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Appendix 2: The three‐layered model of trust, integrating codes, categories, near core categories, and core category

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Wagner, N., Hassanein, K., & Head, M. (2008). “Who is responsible for E‐Learning Success in Higher Education? A Stakeholders' Analysis”, Educational Technology & Society, 11(3), 26‐36 White, S. (2007). “Critical success factors for e‐learning and institutional change – some organisational perspectives on campus‐wide e‐learning”. British Journal of Educational Technology, 38(5), 840‐850.

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Smart Environments for Learning – Multi‐Agent Systems Approach Peter Mikulecky University of Hradec Kralove, Rokitanskeho 62, Czech Republic peter.mikulecky@uhk.cz

Abstract: Smart environments for learning, as a result of intensive research in the area of Ambient Intelligence, deserve also attention of the large community oriented on e‐learning and technology enhanced learning. Smart environments could be naturally considered to be a new level of computer enhanced learning, offering a number of new interesting facilities. The famous IST Advisory Group (ISTAG) Report started from 2001 a decade of various research initiatives in the rapidly growing area of ambient intelligence. It introduced also a smart environment example in the form of a scenario – Scenario 4: Annette and Solomon in the Ambient for Social Learning. That was a vision of a learning environment, based on a position that learning is a social process. According to the original description in the ISTAG report, the Ambient for Social Learning (ASL) is an environment that supports and upgrades the roles of all the actors in the learning process, starting with the roles of the mentor and the students as most concerned parties. The systems that make up the ASL are capable of creating challenging and interacting learning situations that are co‐designed by the mentor and students in real‐time.

Students are important producers of learning material and create input for the learning ‘situations’ of others. In other words, the ASL is both an environment for generating new knowledge for learning and a ‘place’ for learning about learning.

The scenario certainly was a nice incentive for a number of new initiatives focused on more or less successful attempts to design and introduce various types of smart environments capable to support different aspects of learning process.

However, these attempts have not been too systematic and some of the environments designed are not smart environments in the full meaning of this word. As multi‐agent systems are the most frequently used approach towards smart environments design in general, we are convinced that a really systematic approach towards reflecting all desirable functionalities of smart learning environments must be based on a well‐designed multi‐agent architecture. In the paper we intend firstly to map the recent state of the art in the area of smart environments designed for learning. In the second part of the paper we wish to map the desirable functionalities of an “ideal” smart environment for learning, and propose a number of different multi‐agent architectures capable of reflecting the functionalities and creating a base for the smart environment. The concluding part of the paper will summarize the results and formulate some problems that are still open.

Keywords: ubiquitous learning, learning environments, multi‐agent architectures, smart environments

1. Introduction Without any doubts any Ambient Intelligence (AmI) application bringing new ideas and approaches into educational process at every level of education deserves a special attention. Smart environments for learning, as a result of intensive research in the area of Ambient Intelligence, deserve also attention of the large community oriented on e‐learning and technology enhanced learning. Smart environments could be naturally considered a new degree of computer enhanced learning, with a number of new facilities. The area of Ambient Intelligence can be studied from several perspectives. As (Bures, Cech, and Mls 2009) pointed out, besides its technological perspective, social perspective, or ethical perspective, we can also identify an educational perspective. The educational perspective deals with problems and challenges related to proper education in relevant Ambient Intelligence areas.

A more general overview of the Ambient Intelligence possibilities in education brings our recently published book chapter (Mikulecky et al. 2011). The objective of the paper is to identify and analyse key aspects and possibilities of Ambient Intelligence applications in educational processes and institutions (universities), as well as to present a couple of possible visions for these applications. A number of related problems are discussed there as well, namely agent‐based Ambient Intelligence application architectures. Results of a brief survey among optional users of these applications are presented as well. The conclusion of this research was that introduction of Ambient Intelligence in educational institutions is possible and can bring us new experiences utilizable in further development of Ambient Inteligence applications.

The famous ISTAG Report (Ducatel et al., 2001) started in 2001 a decade of various research initiatives in the rapidly growing area of ambient intelligence. It introduced also a smart environment example in the form of a scenario – Scenario 4: Annette and Solomon in the Ambient for Social Learning. That was a vision of a learning environment, based on a position that learning is a social process. According to the original description in the ISTAG report, the Ambient for Social Learning (ASL) is an environment that supports and upgrades the roles of all the actors in the learning process, starting with the roles of the mentor and the students as most concerned parties. The systems that make up the ASL are capable of creating challenging and interacting learning

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Peter Mikulecky situations that are co‐designed by the mentor and students in real‐time. Students are important producers of learning material and create input for the learning ‘situations’ of others. In other words, the ASL is both an environment for generating new knowledge for learning and a ‘place’ for learning about learning.

The scenario certainly was a nice incentive for a number of new initiatives focused on more or less successful attempts to design and introduce various types of smart environments capable to support different aspects of learning process. However, these attempts have not been too systematic and some of the environments designed are not smart environments in the full meaning of this word.

As multi‐agent systems are the most frequently used approach towards smart environments design in general, we are convinced that a really systematic approach towards reflecting all desirable functionalities of smart learning environments must be based on a well‐designed multi‐agent architecture. Therefore this paper is devoted to an analysis of some recent solutions of smart learning environments based on agent or multi‐agent approaches. We propose a new multi‐agent architecture aiming at achieving the “ideal” architecture inspired by the ISTAG Report (Ducatel et al., 2001) scenarios.

2. The Annette and Solomon scenario As already mentioned above, according to (Ducatel et al., 2001), the Scenario 4: Annette and Solomon in the Ambient for Social Learning was a vision of a learning environment – the Ambient for Social Learning (ASL), based on a position that learning is essentially a social process. It is a vision of an intelligent classroom supporting and upgrading roles of all the actors in the learning process, with a special accent on the roles of the mentor and students as the most important roles in the whole process. The systems that make up the ASL are supposed to be capable of creating challenging and interacting learning situations that are co‐designed by the mentor and students in real‐time. One of basic assumptions here is that students are important producers of learning material and create input for various learning ‘situations’ of other colleagues. From this point of view, the ASL is both an environment for generating new knowledge for learning and a ‘place’ for learning about learning. Of course, the ASL is also a physical space (a room or a group of rooms) together with all of its ambient facilities, including many linkages with similar places. Its layout and furnishing is flexible and diverse, so that it can serve the learning purposes of many different kinds of groups and individuals.

An important assumption about the ASL is, that the system must not only be user‐friendly; the main criterion for their development is ‘usefulness’ (cf. Ducatel et al., 2001). In this case with a very complicated set of goals, however, it is not obvious how this usefulness has to be evaluated beforehand. The Ambient for Social Learning is therefore conceived as a ‘learning system’ that is growing and improving simply by using it.

As (Ducatel et al., 2001) pointed out, a number of specific technologies would be needed for the ASL implementation, among others the following ones:

Recognition (tracing and identification) of individuals, groups and objects.

Interactive commitment aids for negotiating targets and challenges (goal synchronisation).

Natural language and speech interfaces and dialogue modelling.

Projection facilities for light and soundfields (visualisation, virtual reality and holographic representation), including perception based technologies such as psychoacoustics.

Tangible/tactile and sensorial interfacing (including direct brain interfaces).

Reflexive learning systems (adaptable, customisable) to build aids for reviewing experiences.

Content design facilities, simulation and visualisation aids.

Knowledge management tools to build community memory.

Of course, some other technologies, not so important for the sake of this paper would be needed. For a detailed description see the original ISTAG report (Ducatel et al, 2001). Our description here is just a review of issues that are necessary for our further contemplation.

3. Related works There is a vast of various solutions aiming to develop a really smart learning environment and introduce it into the practice. We published already an analysis of several possible solutions in (Mikulecky, 2011) or (Mikulecky,

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Peter Mikulecky 2007) however; the aim of this paper is somehow different: we wish to concentrate on agent‐based solutions, more precisely, on solutions, based on exploitation of multi‐agent architectures. Firstly, let us review some more general approaches.

An important problem in each smart environment is the problem of how the environment evaluates users’ needs and how it assigns preferences to them. Actually, when many users are involved in a ubiquitous environment, the decisions of one user can be affected by the desires of others. This makes learning and prediction of user preference difficult. To address the issue, Hasan et al. (2006) propose an approach of user preference learning which can be used widely in context‐aware systems. The approach based on Bayesian RN‐ Metanetwork, a multilevel Bayesian network to model user preference and priority is used here.

With a somehow similar aim our papers (Tučník, 2010) and (Tučník and Mikulecký, 2010) are focused on decision making of agents in multi‐agent environments, with a special accent on multi‐agent based modelling of smart environments. The on‐going research related to that is oriented on further study of multi‐criteria decision making in autonomous decision making, especially when multiple entities (users or agents) are present at the same time. Solution of conflicts, negotiation, settings of user preferences, multiple objectives, setting priorities, etc. are the main areas of interest in our further research.

When the necessity of user preferences appears, usually new location‐based services can be adapted to accomplish this task. For this the ubiquitous system needs to know user profiles, likings, and habits. But in the case when the user moves, this information must be made available at the new location of the user. Either the user carries the data on wearable or portable computers or the smart environment takes responsibility for transporting them. Related to this, it is proposed in (Bagci et al., 2007) that a smart environment takes care for storing and sending the personal information. The person in this approach is always accompanied by a mobile virtual object in the smart environment. So location based services adapted to personal profiles can be offered. The paradigm of mobile agents, used in this approach, ideally fits into the decentralized approach. The mobile agent constitutes a virtual reflection of the user and carries personal information which enables the agent to perform various services for the user. Additionally the mobile agent can use the environmental information which is provided by the local ubiquitous system. Moreover, the movement of the mobile agent should be in this approach faster than the movement of the person. This fact helps to solve a couple of related problems.

An idea of recognition of a current situation and behaviour of a user, as well as an unobtrusive satisfaction of his needs underlies the Ambient Intelligence. Integration of diverse computation, information and communication resources into a united framework is one of the important issues at design of ambient intelligence and it identifies the modern tendency to transition from smart devices to an ambient intelligent space. Multimodal interfaces provide natural and intuitively comprehensible interaction between a user and intellectual devices, which are embedded into the environment. All the means should be hidden, thus the user can see only the results of intellectual devices activities and concentrate attention on her/his work. Rondzhin and Budkov (2009) describe a development of an intelligent meeting room as a distributed system with the network of intelligent agents (software modules), actuator devices, multimedia equipment and audio‐visual sensors. The main aim of the room is providing of meeting or lecture participants with required services based on analysis of the current situation. Awareness of the room about spatial position of the participants, their activities, role in the current event, their preferences helps to predict the intentions and needs of participants.

Context modelling, context reasoning, knowledge sharing are stayed the most important challenges of the ambient intelligent design of this kind of rooms.

Another example of a different approach towards intelligent learning environments can be found in (Winters, Walker and Rousos, 2005). They defined an intelligent environment as any space where ubiquitous technology informs the learning process in an unobtrusive, social or collaborative manner. In their paper, two ubiquitous devices for use in such an environment were presented: the Experience Recorder and the iBand. The Experience Recorder is an embedded system that records the paths travelled by users – i.e. trails – in a particular place, for example at a museum or trade fair. It then recreates this visit in digital form, for example as a personalised website, enhanced for learning. The iBand is a wearable bracelet‐like device that exchanges information about its users and their relationships during a handshake. Winters, Walker and Rousos (2005) stressed that the challenge of ubiquitous computing was to design and build systems for augmenting human capabilities rather than to replace them. In the context of learning, any ubiquitous computing tool cannot be

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Peter Mikulecky viewed as deskilling the user. It must encourage skills development in a manner in which the learner is comfortable and engaged with.

4. Multi‐agent based approaches There are a number of relevant results, based on multi‐agent approach. Let us review here some of them, that seem to be important for our contemplation.

One of the basic concepts in agent‐based approaches seems to be that of pedagogical agents. According to (Fenton‐Kerr et al, 1998), pedagogical agents are program modules that make use of artificial intelligence approaches to provide timely, contextual help or instruction to a learner. The reason behind is, that learners accessing educational software programs can be overwhelmed by the amount and complexity of the content, which can have a negative impact on the learning process. Therefore, they could need assistance in navigating and understanding the information such programs present. Pedagogical agents are used for composing intelligent tutor schemes, which may employ multiple agent modules, each given a unique task that satisfies part of an overall learning objective.

As Serçe (2008) pointed out, pedagogical agents are autonomous agents that support human learning by interacting with students in the context of the learning environment. They extend and improve upon previous work on intelligent tutoring systems in a number of ways. They adapt their behaviour to the dynamic state of learning environment, taking advantage of learning opportunities as they arise. They can support collaborative learning as well as individualized learning, because multiple students and agents can interact in a shared environment.

Jafari (2002) introduces the following three types of pedagogical agents to assist teachers and learners and to expand the capabilities of LMS into an intelligent teaching and learning environment:

Digital Teaching Agent

Digital Tutor

Digital Secretary.

Anyway, there is many various implementations of pedagogical agents, a concise review can be found in (Serçe, 2008). As an example, pedagogical agents are used in a solution, published recently by Mhiri and Ratté (2009). The authors proposed an intelligent environment for human learning (called the AARTIC project) that assists software engineering students in their assignments. The system resolve real problems: for the students, too much time to complete each assignment, for the teacher, too many students to offer any personalized help. Moreover, because students find themselves in a precarious situation (the concepts are new and complex), they rely on old primary reflexes: zero collaboration or planification. The proposed system aims to help the student in the understanding of concepts by suggesting examples. Two pedagogical agents compose the adaptive aspect of the system. The first monitors students’ activities in the environment. The second allows the teacher to observe the performance of each student and of the class as a whole. The environment also emphasizes collaboration.

Turgay (2005) proposed a multi agent system based distance learning architecture modelled using object oriented Petri net. The system has flexible, agile, intelligence and cooperation features. The system components are teachers, learners, and learning resources. Inter component relations are modelled and reviewed using the Petri net method. In the architecture, the following four types of agents are proposed: student agent, teacher agent, course agent, and resource agent. The suggested activities are perception, modelling, planning, coordination and task or plan execution. The agents provide system execution and coordination. The resulting architecture is only sketched in the paper, describing just a couple of basic features.

Kristensen, Bech, and Dyngeland (2013) have recently proposed a multi‐agent e‐learning platform, initially based on the Concept Map idea. Their basic issue is that the main goal of the teaching process is to develop knowledge at the learner. A methodology to structure and model the learning process is a means to achieve this. One widely used tool for organizing, representing and building knowledge is Concept Map (see, e.g.

Gardener, 1993). It is a tool well suited for representing knowledge structures. However, it does not address the dynamic process of learning. Therefore, Kristensen and his colleagues (2013) used an enhanced concept

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Peter Mikulecky called Dynamic Concept Map (DCM). Eventually they proposed a multi‐agent implementation of the DCM using the Gaia methodology for designing multi‐agent systems. The implementation itself was realized using JADE, an Java based FIPA complaint platform for implementing agent architectures.

The paper (Viccari, Ovalle, Jiménez, 2007) presents a description of the environments of individualized learning, based on the Intelligent Tutoring Systems, the Computer Supported Collaborative Learning, Multi‐ Agent Systems and the artificial intelligence techniques called Instructional Planning and Case‐Based Reasoning. Further on, a Multi‐Agent System environment is presented, that aims to support the teaching/learning process including all previous artificial intelligence elements.

Another example of agent based architecture of a smart environment for e‐learning is the system ISABEL described in (Garruzzo, Rosaci and Sarné, 2007). The ISABEL is a sophisticated multi‐agent e‐learning system, where the basic idea is in partitioning the students in clusters of students that have similar profiles, where each cluster is managed by a tutor agent. When a student visits an e‐learning site using a given device (say, a notebook, or a smart phone), a teacher agent associated with the site collaborates with some tutor agents associated with the student, in order to provide him with useful recommendations. Generally, these systems use a profile of the student to represents his interests and preferences, and often exploit software agents in order to construct such a profile. More in particular, each student is associated to a software agent which monitors her Web activities, and when the student accesses an e‐learning site, his agent exploits the student’s profile interacting with the site. In this interaction, the site can use both content‐based and collaborative filtering techniques to provide recommendations to the student’s agent by adapting the site presentation.

The just described idea of students’ clusters is very much similar to the idea of grouping students with the similar level of study results, as proposed in the original scenario Annette and Solomon (Ducatel et al., 2001).

We shall use a similar mechanism also in our solution below.

An interesting solution was presented in the form of a PhD Thesis by Serçe (2008). Her thesis presents a multi‐ agent system, called MODA, developed to provide adaptiveness in learning management systems. The conceptual framework proposed in the thesis is based on the idea that adaptiveness is the best matching between the learner profile and the course content profile. The learning styles of learners and the content type of learning material are used to match the learner to the most suitable content. The proposed system uses seven learning agents: LMS Interface Agent, Learning Agent, Content Adapter Agent, Course Profile Agent, Learner Profile Agent, Researcher Agent, and Agent Manager. They were developed in JADE in conformity with the FIPA standards for intelligent agents.

In this chapter, we presented just a few of agent‐based solutions published recently. Other approaches can be found e.g. in (Neji and Ben Ammar, 2007), (Virvou and Kabbasi, 2002), (Wang and Wu, 2011), (Webber and Pesty, 2002), or (Yang, 2006). Related material can be found also in our recent papers (Mikulecky, 2012a, 2012b, 2013).

5. Suggestion of a multi‐agent solution to the Annette and Solomon scenario As Virvou and Kabassi (2002) stressed, agent‐based solutions have been widely used in learning environments playing different roles or perform certain specific tasks, such as capturing the user’s characteristics. However, the majority of agent based architectures consist of a single agent. The main disadvantage of such an approach is that the agent’s knowledge, computing resources and perspective is limited. These problems can be avoided by multi‐agent systems.

The Annette and Solomon Scenario (Ducatel et al., 2001) is a vision of a sophisticated smart learning environment, but it is hard to imagine it without large utilisation of ambient intelligence technologies and approaches. One of the popular approaches in deploying smart environments is that of multi‐agent system applications. There is a lot of experience with architectures of smart environments, based on a broad exploitation of multi‐agent systems and their advantages. Therefore we consider such an approach to be quite naturally applicable also in the case of the Annette and Solomon Scenario.

Further on, we firstly present a list of issues for our proposal, and then we suggest a number of agents and their functionalities, concluding the chapter with some open problems that are awaiting a solution. Our

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Peter Mikulecky proposal will be purely conceptual, postponing the more detailed and elaborated solution to further research activities.

Let us recall the short description of the Ambient for Social Learning: the Ambient for Social Learning (ASL) is an environment that supports and upgrades the roles of all the actors in the learning process, starting with the roles of the mentor and the students as most concerned parties. Therefore the basic conceptual design of the ASL architecture will be based on the following logic: the system will identify each student entering the ASL, then it will recognize his/her actual study results, it will look for other students on the similar level of actual study achievements and try to create a cluster of those students. Further on the most adequate content for the actual study tasks fulfilment will be found and suggested to the students’ cluster as their study program for the following couple of hours (according their study programme). A mentor assigned to the particular students’ cluster will follow the students’ progress and achievements; he/she will be consulting possible adjustments in the actual study tasks with the ASL.

With regards to this short characteristic, we propose a multi‐agent architecture of the underlying system as composed from the following three layers:

Individual Learners’ Layer (ILL)

Social Learning Layer (SLL)

ASL Resources Layer (ARL)

The Individual Learners’ Layer will take care about the students enrolled into the programme that is performed using the Ambient of Social Learning. For each individual student a LearnerAgent will represent that student in the system. It will identify the student, manage his/her contacts with other students via their LearnerAgents and communicate with the MentorAgent, representing the mentor, assigned to that individual student. It is worth stressing that a number of students can be assigned to one mentor; therefore one MentorAgent can be assigned to whole group of LearnerAgents.

The Social Learning Layer is responsible for the social learning facility of the Ambient of Social Learning. It means that this layer will try to evaluate individual students’ study achievements and their competencies, and on this basis the layer will organize suitable clusters of the students. We suggest here to have a number of GroupAgents representing suitable clusters (or clusters, which are likely to be created after evaluation of students’ tracks). The GroupAgents will communicate with GroupManagingAgent, which, after communication with individual LearnerAgents, will recommend composition of the particular cluster to the most suitable GroupAgent. The GroupAgent will then coordinate all the relevant activities of the particular students’ cluster (group), ensuring them access to all the necessary resources that are offered by the ASL Resources Layer.

The ASL Resources Layer is taking care about all the ASL resources, especially appropriate learning contents, but also all the technical resources (computing and communication facilities, presenting and recording facilities, etc). This will be done through specialized agents as well.

As we mentioned above, this is just a conceptual suggestion of a possible multi‐agent architecture for the ASL. The further elaboration is inevitable and is in progress recently.

6. Conclusions The multi‐agent architectures for smart learning environments are very popular and frequently used recently.

In our paper we present a review of several existing papers related to multi‐agent solutions of smart learning environments. Finally, we present a conceptual proposal of a three layered multi‐agent architecture for a smart learning environment, based on the famous Annette and Solomon Scenario proposed in the classical ISTAG Report (Ducatel et al, 2001). It is clear that our proposal is just a conceptual one. Three layers of the agent architecture seem to be a reasonable top level of the architecture; however, it is necessary to elaborate lower levels more carefully and in a detail. The proposal needs further discussion and critics; it will be elaborated and deepened soon.

Acknowledgements The research has been partially supported by the Czech Scientific Foundation, grant No. P403/10/1310 as well as the FIM UHK Excellence Project “Agent‐based models and Social Simulation”.

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Assessment of Virtual Learning Environments by Higher Education Teachers and Students Luísa Miranda, Paulo Alves and Carlos Morais Instituto Politécnico de Bragança, Bragança, Portugal lmiranda@ipb.pt palves@ipb.pt cmmm@ipb.pt

Abstract: This research focuses on the problematic of the use of virtual learning environments in a higher education institution in the north of Portugal. In this study, we set the scientific and pedagogical background of virtual learning environments, and we analyze the responses obtained from an online questionnaire conducted to 536 subjects, all teachers and students at that same higher education institution, namely 347 students and 189 teachers. The research questions of this study were set out in order to assess the frequency with which the higher education students and teachers of that institution access virtual learning environments, the value they assign to those environments as well as to their integrated tools, and also to assess the influence of users’ computer skills on their access to virtual learning environments. Considering the computer skills classification of each subject of this study, three independent categories were created, both for teachers and students, associated with basic skills, intermediate skills and advanced skills, respectively. In this paper we adopt a descriptive and inferential data analysis, using the recommended statistical procedures. Results show that the majority of teachers and students access the institution’s virtual environment on a daily basis. However, there are significant differences between teachers who have intermediate computer skills and those who have basic skills, as the percentage of teachers with intermediate skills accessing the virtual learning environment everyday is higher than that of the teachers who have basic computer skills. No significant differences were found among students as far as the relation between virtual learning environment access and computer skills is concerned. With regard to the assessment of the virtual learning environment, more than 80% of the teachers consider that the use of the institution’s virtual learning environment is valuable to send messages or notices to students, provide the teacher’s office attendance hours, provide a schedule of activities, provide students’ assessment, provide the plan of students’ activities, and allow students to access resources and submit assignments online. The aspects valued by more than 80% of the students were: checking exam results and receiving messages or notices from teachers. The importance of this study is mainly related to knowledge sharing with the scientific community concerned with the implementation of virtual learning environments, based on the assessment of a specific situation which involved higher education students and teachers. Although the results cannot be generalized within the scope of other institutions as the sample belongs to one institution only, the study provides indicators which may represent an asset for future studies concerning the assessment and use of virtual learning environments and the digital tools they provide in the higher education context, as well as for the understanding of the relation between the use of these environments and their users’ computer skills.

Keywords: e‐learning, virtual learning environments, digital resources, tools, higher education

1. Introduction Information and communication technology (ICT) has represented a real revolution in almost all the areas and scopes of human activity. In each field of activity, ICT has played several roles, among which that of a tool of communication and promotion of interaction among people and between people and organizations.

We highlight the virtual learning environments (VLEs) as an organizing element which concentrates a big part of the teaching and research work in higher education. These environments generally constitute a coherent whole which involves several dimensions, among which we stress the use and assessment of the digital tools which integrate them. Therefore, in the context of higher education, and in order to understand the assessment that students and teachers make of VLEs, a research work was developed, aiming to answer the following questions:

How often do higher education students and teachers access virtual learning environments?

Does the users’ computer skills level influence their access to virtual learning environments?

What value do higher education students and teachers assign to virtual learning environments and to the tools which constitute them?

The answer to these questions may help to support options of use and adequacy of ICT to higher education institutions’ educational goals. As Naveh, Tubin and Pliskin (2010) point out, understanding how the organizational factors correlate to the use and satisfaction of VLEs may help academic institutions to get higher

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Luísa Miranda, Paulo Alves and Carlos Morais return on their investment in these environments. By knowing the VLE access and use frequency, as well as the value assigned by its main users, it is easier not only to define policies of VLE use in higher education institutions but also to implement the features which students and teachers value the most.

2. Virtual learning environments Virtual learning environments (VLEs) have become the core for innovation and for educational change. As referred by Kukulska‐Hulme (2012), “time of change” has become a popular refrain in the speech about higher education. The author highlights that the advances of technology and services based on technology will change experiences and the public’s expectations as far as knowledge access and sharing is concerned, adding that the higher education institutions have to provide more online learning and content as well as more effective tools to find and use contents.

So that good results with information and communication technologies (ICT) may exist, their use must be supported by effective pedagogical frameworks which enable the gathering of increasingly more information, the improvement of information processing as well as its diffusion to any individual in the world (Del Val, Campos and Garaizar, 2010).

In all teaching levels, each teacher must try to provide and enhance quality learning to their students.

According to Ellis et al. (2009), higher education researchers and teachers who try hard for their students to get good learning results can hardly be successful without using ICT. The authors highlight that it is still difficult to understand which the best way to use ICT is in order to enable students to involve more deeply and intentionally in learning. Similarly, and regarding the use of e‐learning 2.0, Karasavvidis (2010) claims that students will have to be more active and participatory, and they will have to take more responsibility and control over their learning so that they can become more self‐determined, open to cooperation, willing to share and exchange, committed to participation in online communities as well as to the construction of meanings in shared tasks.

The implementation of ICT in any institution must be carefully thought up and planned, although in many cases, as pointed out by Mahdizadeh, Biemans and Mulder (2008), educational institutions do not pay enough attention to questions such as how, what and why ICT must be implemented.

According to McGill and Hobbs (2008), ICT have increasingly influenced higher education, since their role has changed from being supplementary to being the core of teaching and learning. Thus, ICT represents an essential element to the creation of learning environments technologically advanced, about which Brooks (2011) highlights that evidence strongly suggests that, regardless all the other factors, ICT has a significant and positive impact on students’ learning. Van Schaik, Martin and Vallance (2012) add that technology can and must be applied in a useful way to change students’ role, turning them into active participants in their own learning and enabling teachers to assume a supportive role to students in several modalities. In other words, the adequate use of ICT in learning environments can enable students to change a passive learning model into an active learning model.

Considering the complexity and the dimensions that a VLE can incorporate, it is not easy to find a consensual definition of VLE. However, it is essential to analyze and value several approaches, so that each user, namely students, teachers and researchers can explore the parts of each approach which better meet their aims.

Virtual learning environments and their associated tools provide students and teachers with great conditions for the promotion of joint dialogue and reflection. Conde et al. (2012) suggest that both students and teachers use means of communication available in their learning contexts to perform learning activities and improve their results.

Brown (2010) suggests that there are authors who claim that VLEs have only had a small impact on the higher education pedagogy, although they consider them a great commercial success but likely to be replaced by Web 2.0, as they consider the latter more suitable for individualist styles as well as students and teachers’ abilities and needs. The same author adds that Web 2.0 has the potential to change the nature of learning and teaching in a substantiated way, namely through the creation of learning networks which may challenge the role of traditional institutions more effectively than prior technologies.

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Luísa Miranda, Paulo Alves and Carlos Morais On the other hand, according to Palmer and Holt (2012) in a study which involved 6800 responses during the period between 2004 and 2011, the classifications of VLE satisfaction increased significantly in all the assessed items.

Information and communication technology has the potential to revolutionize the classroom and enable the acquisition of higher skills such as setting out problems; drawing up questionnaires; and organizing, evaluating and building knowledge. However, it also enhances movements of superficial memorization and coverage of contents (Bonk and Zhang, 2008).

The use of ICT in formal teaching and learning contexts at higher education level, and especially the use of VLEs as well as of the tools which integrate them demands quite a lot of persistence, knowledge and flexibility.

According to Tucker and Morris (2011), the approaches to the implementation of flexible education integrate five categories of flexibility: knowledge; time; content; access requirements; and pedagogy. Each program can integrate flexibility elements from each of these categories, which implies that any teaching and learning configuration is flexible in some way.

3. Methodology This study assumes characteristics of the quantitative research paradigm as far as its nature is concerned, and it highlights aspects related to the use of a virtual learning environment (VLE), namely the Sakai environment, adopted since 2008 by the Portuguese higher education institution where the study was carried out.

This study presents descriptive and interpretative features. Data collection procedures consisted of carrying out two online questionnaires, one for students and another one for teachers. The questionnaires were carried out in the last semester of the 2011/2012 school year in the institution where the researchers work. The Sakai community was responsible for drawing up and validating the questionnaires and 24 higher education institutions were involved in the process. The study involved 536 subjects of the same institution, among which 347 undergraduate students and 189 higher education teachers, all of whom accepted the request to answer the questionnaires.

The sample of students was obtained within a population of 6943, which corresponds to 5% of the institution’s students. Among these subjects, 63.7% are female and 37.3% are male. The sample of teachers was obtained within a population of 502 teachers, thus corresponding to 38% of the institution’s teachers. Among these subjects, 45.5% are male and 54.5 are female. The computer skills of the sample subjects were classified into basic, intermediate and advanced skills. Within the students’ sample, 11.5% have basic computer skills, 70.6% have intermediate skills, and 17.9% have advanced skills. Within the teachers’ sample, 16.4% have basic skills, 65.1% have intermediate skills, and 18.5% have advanced skills.

The results are presented according to the sequence of the research questions. We present a descriptive data analysis, followed by an inferential analysis of the situations in which such analysis is required.

4. Results With these results we intend to present the achievement of the goals set for this research, namely understand the assessment that both students and teachers make of the virtual learning environments (VLEs). As referred

by Palmer and Holt (2010), understanding which VLE elements are used and valued by students and teachers will represent an essential element for effective decision making as far as future investments in e‐learning are concerned.

The results are presented according to the following topics: higher education students and teachers’ perceptions regarding VLEs access frequency; the influence of students and teachers’ level of computer skills on the VLEs access; higher education students and teachers’ assessment of VLEs and their integrated digital tools.

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4.1 Higher education students and teachers’ perceptions regarding virtual learning environments access frequency 4.1.1 Assessment of the access frequency to virtual learning environments The assessment of the access frequency to VLEs focused on the students and teachers’ perceptions regarding access to the VLE to which they are connected.

In Table 1, we present the results concerning access to the institution’s VLE. From observing Table 1 we conclude that the institution’s VLE is used on a daily basis by a high percentage of students (59.4%) and teachers (47.1%). Also, the percentage of students accessing the VLE is higher than that of teachers. If we consider the sum of the percentages associated with the options “everyday” and “few times per week”, we can see that the vast majority of students (82.7%) and teachers (81%) access the VLE on a weekly basis.

Table 1: Access to the institution’s VLE During this semester, you have accessed the institution’s VLE: Students (n=347) Everyday (once or more) 59.4% Few times per week 23.3% Once a week 6.9% Few times per month 3.7% Few times per semester 5.5% Never 1.2%

Teachers (n=189) 47.1% 33.9% 12.2% 2.1% 3.7% 0%

4.1.2 The influence of students and teachers’ level of computer skills on the VLEs access Over the last two decades, particularly, a huge effort has been put into the creation, diffusion and use of digital Technologies. In general, educational institutions have already adhered to these technologies, but they present different levels of knowledge concerning the VLEs access, use and benefits. After classifying the computer skills of the sample subjects of this study into basic, intermediate, and advanced, we analyze the influence of these skills on the variables under study.

In Table 2, we present the relation between the teachers’ computer skills and the access frequency to the VLE. Table 2: Relation between the teachers’ computer skills and the access frequency to the VLE Computer skills

Basic (n=31) Intermediate (n=123) Advanced (n=35)

Teachers’ access to the institution’s VLE

Total

%

Never

% 0.0

Few times per semester % 57.1

Few times per month % 0.0

Once a week % 26.1

Few times per week % 16.7

Everyday

% 11.2

0.0

14.3

50.0

60.9

59.1

75.3

65.1

0.0

28.6

50.0

13.0

24.2

13.5

18.5

16.4

In order to assess the influence of computer skills on the access to the institution’s VLE, the groups of teachers were named as follows: teachers with basic skills (TBS); teachers with intermediate skills (TIS); teachers with advanced skills (TAS). The subjects’ computer skills were considered as an independent variable, and the score obtained by each subject in the assessed items was considered as a dependent variable. The numerical scoring was given to the items as follows: Never (0); Few times per semester (1); Few times per month (2); Once a week (3); Few times per week (4); Everyday (5). According to this numerical scoring, the higher the score is, the higher the access frequency to the institution’s VLE is.

By applying Levene’s test of homogeneity of variance, and considering the equality of variances among the teachers’ groups (TBS, TIS, TAS) as a null hypothesis, we found that it is possible to reject the null hypothesis at a significance level of 0.033, which means that there is no equality of variances. Therefore, in order to compare the means of the three groups, we used Welch and Brown‐Forsythe’s test, with which it was possible to reject the null hypothesis of equality between the three groups’ means by a significance level of 0.012 and

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Luísa Miranda, Paulo Alves and Carlos Morais 0.013, respectively. Thus, it is possible to say that there are significant differences in the VLE access depending on the teachers’ computer skills.

By comparing each pair of groups using Levene’s test of homogeneity of variance, we found that an equality of variances is assumed between the groups TBS and TAS, and the groups TIS and TAS. By applying Tukey’s test, we found that there are no significant differences between the means of each pair of the teachers’ groups compared.

Between the groups TBS and TIS, the equality of variances is not assumed. Therefore, Tamhne’s T2 test was used to compare the means, and the results show that there are significant differences between the two groups (sig 0.04).

Based on these results, it is possible to say that there are significant differences between the teachers who have basic computer skills and those who have intermediate computer skills as far as VLE access is concerned.

What stands out from observing Table 2 is that there is a higher percentage of VLE access among the teachers who have intermediate skills than among those who have basic skills.

A similar analysis of students’ scoring was carried out concerning the influence of their computer skills on their access to the institution’s VLE. The groups of students were named as: students with basic computer skills (SBS); students with computer intermediate skills (SIS); and students with advanced computer skills (SAS).

In Table 3, we present the relation between the students’ computer skills and the access frequency to the institution’s VLE. Table 3: Relation between the students’ computer skills and the access frequency to the VLE Computer skills

Basic (n=40) Intermediate (n=245) Advanced (n=62)

Never

% 25.0

Students’ access to the institution’s VLE Few times per Few times per Once a Few times semester month week per week % % % % 21.1 23.1 4.2 12.3

Everyday

% 10.2

Total

% 11.5

25.0

63.2

69.2

75.0

69.1

72.3

70.6

50.0

15.8

7.7

20.8

18.5

17.5

17.9

After carrying out an analysis similar to that described above when comparing teachers’ groups, we found that there are no significant differences between the score means obtained by each pair of students’ groups. In other words, there is no evidence that the students’ computer skills have an influence on the access frequency to the institution’s VLE.

4.2 Higher education students and teachers’ assessment of VLEs and their integrated digital tools The use of VLEs and of the digital tools which constitute them depends on the answers that they can provide to their potential users, as well as on the value that those users assign to them, namely with regard to the answer to educational goals which enable the interaction between teachers and students. As Albirini (2006) points out, when the universities promote the use of ICT, they need to understand the teachers and students’ attitudes towards its use.

Therefore, we will assess the value assigned by higher education students and teachers to the institution’s VLE concerning interaction, the submission of assignments, and the access to contents and support tools to the courses.

4.2.1 Interaction As far as interaction is concerned, we present, in Table 4, the value assigned by undergraduate students to the VLEs for the development of interaction with their teachers.

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Luísa Miranda, Paulo Alves and Carlos Morais Table 4: Value assigned by students to the use of the institution’s VLE for the interaction with teachers (n=347) For the interaction with teachers, the VLE is valuable to ... Not used % Check the schedule of activities 6 Receive messages or notices 1 Do online tests 29 Check exam results 1 Use the plan of activities 12 Check the teacher’s office attendance hours 7 Participate in groups 20 Monitor my progress 17

Disagree % 5 1 10 1 5 4 6 9

Neutral Agree % % 13 76 3 94 23 37 3 95 15 68 12 77 21 54 23 52

By observing Table 4, it is possible to say that the most valued aspects as far as interaction with teachers is concerned are: checking exam results; receiving messages or notices; checking the teacher’s office attendance hours; and checking the schedule of activities.

Bearing in mind that the VLEs can be a meeting place between teachers and students, we also assessed the value assigned by teachers to the VLE concerning interaction. Data is presented in Table 5.

Table 5: Value assigned by teachers to the use of the institution’s VLE for the interaction with students (n=189) For the interaction with students, the VLE is valuable to ... Not used % Provide the schedule of activities 4.2 Send messages or notices 2.1 Provide online tests 32.8 Provide exam results 4.8 Provide a plan of activities 7.4 Provide the teacher’s office attendance hours 5.8 Create and monitor working groups 22.2 Monitor their progress 18.5

Disagree % 1.6 1.1 6.3 4.8 2.6 0.5 1.6 4.8

Neutral Agree % % 9.0 85.2 2.1 94.7 20.6 40.2 9.0 81.5 9.0 81.0 5.8 87.8 15.3 60.8 25.4 51.3

The data in Table 5 enable us to infer that the aspects most valued by a higher percentage of teachers as far as interaction with students is concerned are: sending messages or notices; providing the teacher’s office attendance hours; providing the schedule of activities; providing exam results; and providing a plan of activities. Stress should be laid on the fact that both students and teachers, with the due adaptations, seem to value the same aspects of VLEs as far as interaction is concerned.

4.2.2 Submission of assignments and access to contents The value assigned by students and teachers to the submission of assignments and the access to contents is presented in Table 6.

Table 6: Value assigned by students and teachers to the institution’s VLE for the submission of assignments and access to contents For the submission of assignments and access to contents, the VLE is valuable to ...

NU % Submit assignments 9 Submit part of my assignments 14 Share parts of the assignments with colleagues 18 Cooperate with colleagues in the fulfillment of tasks 18 Read or comment on colleagues’ assignments 20 Ask questions before the lesson 16 Ask questions during the lesson 21 Ask or answer questions after the lesson 12 Share contents with colleagues 18 Access bibliographic resources 10 Provide feedback on the course 15

Caption: NU – Not used; D – Disagree; N‐ Neutral; A – Agree

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Students (n=347) D N % % 3 11 8 19 9 20 8 21 12 24 11 20 21 23 7 17 9 20 5 13 7 20

A % 78 60 53 53 44 53 35 64 54 72 58

NU % 5.8 10.6 18.5 9.5 21.2 7.9 24.3 6.3 15.3 3.7 11.6

Teachers (n=189) D N % % 2.1 4.2 1.6 13.8 4.2 24.9 1.6 11.1 10.1 32.8 3.2 15.3 18.0 28.0 2.6 12.7 3.2 23.3 1.1 6.3 2.6 11.1

A % 87.8 74.1 52.4 77.8 36.0 73.5 29.6 78.3 58.2 88.9 74.6

Luísa Miranda, Paulo Alves and Carlos Morais With regard to the submission of assignments or the access to contents, the three aspects valued by a higher percentage of students and teachers are: submitting assignments and accessing bibliographic resources, and asking or answering questions after the lesson. This analysis shows similar results to those obtained in previous studies (Mahdizadeh, Biemans and Mulder, 2008; Palmer and Holt, 2012).

4.2.3 Support tools to courses The assessment of the digital tools which integrate the institution’s VLE was made by higher education teachers and students. In table 7, we present the assessment made by both students and teachers.

Data in Table 7 show that the VLE tools most valued by a higher percentage of students are: resources; notices; messages; and assignments, thus confirming results obtained in previous studies (Carvalho, Areal and Silva, 2011; Palmer and Holt, 2010).

Table 7: Students and teachers’ assessment of digital tools as a support to the courses The following tools are valuable as a support to the courses Schedule Notices Resources Assignments Online tests Drop box Messages Forums Roster Search Summaries

Students (n=347) NU % 18 1 1 6 29 23 4 29 10 21 13

D % 5 1 1 2 5 4 1 7 3 4 3

N % 24 3 2 7 21 20 6 23 25 22 16

Teachers (n=189) A % 53 94 96 86 45 52 90 40 62 52 69

NU % 20.1 0.0 0.5 4.2 36.5 18.5 2.1 31.2 1.1 14.3 1.6

D % 2.1 0.0 0.0 0.5 4.8 2.6 2.1 3.2 0.5 3.2 0.5

N % 15.3 1.6 1.1 9.5 22.8 13.2 4.8 21.7 3.2 14.8 5.3

A % 62.4 98.4 98.4 85.7 36.0 65.6 91.0 43.9 95.2 67.7 92.6

Caption: NU – Not used; D – Disagree; N‐ Neutral; A – Agree

The Institution’s VLE tools most valued by a higher percentage of teachers are: resources; notices; messages; roster; and summaries.

5. Conclusions The results are supported by data obtained through questionnaire, in a study which involved 347 undergraduate students and 189 teachers at a Portuguese higher education institution, and which focused on these subjects’ perceptions regarding the access frequency to the institution’s virtual learning environment and the assessment they made of that same environment. The following conclusions were drawn from this study.

The percentage of students who access the institution’s virtual environment on a daily basis is higher than the percentage of teachers.

The computer skills of the participants in this study were classified, by themselves, into basic skills, intermediate skills, and advanced skills. Both students and teachers were divided into three independent groups according to that classification. The percentage of subjects accessing the institution’s virtual learning environment on a daily basis is higher among both students and teachers who have intermediate computer skills than among those who have advanced or basic skills. However, when comparing the various groups of students and the various groups of teachers, significant differences were found only between the teachers who have intermediate skills and those who have basic skills. In this regard, a higher percentage of teachers who have intermediate skills were found to access the VLE on a daily basis.

The virtual learning environment assessment was made taking into account aspects related to interaction, the submission of assignments and the access to contents and support tools to the courses.

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Luísa Miranda, Paulo Alves and Carlos Morais As far as interaction is concerned, the aspects most valued by a higher percentage of students were: checking exam results; receiving messages or notices; checking the teacher’s office attendance hours; and checking the schedule of activities. With regard to the interaction with students, the aspects most valued by a higher percentage of teachers were: sending messages or notices; providing the teacher’s office attendance hours; providing the schedule of activities; providing exam results; and providing a plan of activities.

Considering the submission of assignments and the access to contents, the aspects most valued by a higher percentage of both students and teachers were: submitting assignments; accessing bibliographic resources; and asking or answering questions after the lesson.

Among the virtual learning environment support tools to the courses, the ones valued by a higher percentage of students, over 90%, were: resources (as a support to the courses); notices; messages; and assignments.

The virtual learning environment tools valued by a higher percentage of teachers, over 90%, were: resources (as a support to the courses); notices; messages; register; and summaries.

The conclusions of this study cannot be generalized within the scope of other institutions since all the subjects taking part in this study belong to the same institution. However, it gives a set of indicators which should be taken into account for future studies, namely concerning the influence of users’ computer skills on the access to the institution’s environment, and the assessment of virtual learning environments as well as of the digital tools which integrate them.

References Albirini, A. (2006) “Teachers’ attitudes toward information and communication technologies: the case of Syrian EFL teachers”, Computers & Education, Vol. 47, No. 4, pp 373–398.

Bonk, C. and Zhang, K. (2008) Empowering online learning: 100+ activities for reading, reflecting, displaying, and doing, San Francisco: Jossey‐Bass.

Brooks, D. (2011) “Space matters: The impact of formal learning environments on student learning”, British Journal of Educational Technology, Vol. 42, No. 5, pp 719–726.

Brown, S. (2010) “From VLEs to Learning Webs: The Implications of Web 2.0 for Learning and Teaching”, Interactive Learning Environments, Vol. 18, No. 1, pp 1–10.

Carvalho, A., Areal, N. and Silva, J. (2011) “Students’ perceptions of Blackboard and Moodle in a Portuguese university”, British Journal of Educational Technology, Vol. 42, No. 5, pp 824–841.

Conde, M., García‐Peñalvo, F., Rodríguez‐Conde, M., Alier, M., Casany, M. and Piguillem, J. (2012) “An evolving Learning Management System for new educational environments using 2.0 tools”, Interactive Learning Environments, pp.1–17 Del Val, J., Campos, A. and Garaizar, P. (2010) “LMS and Web 2.0 tools for e‐learning: University of Deusto ‘s experience taking advantage of both”, IEEE Education Engineering (EDUCON), pp 1751–1757.

Ellis, R. A., Hughes, J., Weyers, M. and Riding, P. (2009) “University teacher approaches to design and teaching and concepts of learning technologies”, Teaching and Teacher Education, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp 109–117.

Karasavvidis, I. (2010) “Wiki uses in higher education: exploring barriers to successful implementation”, Interactive Learning Environments, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp 219–231.

Kukulska‐Hulme, A. (2012) “How should the higher education workforce adapt to advancements in technology for teaching and learning?”, The Internet and Higher Education, Vol. 15, No. 4, pp 247–254.

Mahdizadeh, H., Biemans, H. and Mulder, M. (2008) “Determining factors of the use of e‐learning environments by university teachers”, Computers & Education, Vol. 51, No. 1, pp 142–154.

McGill, T. and Hobbs, V. (2008) “How students and instructors using a virtual learning environment perceive the fit between technology and task”, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, Vol. 24, No. 3, pp 191–202.

Naveh, G., Tubin, D and Pliskin, N. (2010) “Student LMS use and satisfaction in academic institutions: The organizational perspective”, The Internet and Higher Education, Vol. 13, No. 3, pp 127–133.

Palmer, S. and Holt, D. (2010) “Students’ perceptions of the value of the elements of an online learning environment: looking back in moving forward”, Interactive Learning Environments, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp 135–151.

Palmer, S. and Holt, D. (2012) “Trajectories of engagement: a repeated cross‐sectional investigation of student perceptions of an online learning environment”, Research in Learning Technology, Vol. 20, pp 253–‐265.

Tucker, R. and Morris, G. (2011) “Anytime, anywhere, anyplace: Articulating the meaning of flexible delivery in built environment education”, British Journal of Educational Technology, Vol. 42, No. 6, pp 904–915.

Van Schaik, P., Martin, S. and Vallance, M. (2012) “Measuring flow experience in an immersive virtual environment for collaborative learning”, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, Vol. 28, No. 4, pp 350–365.

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Learning by Building – the Lunarstorm Generation Constructing Their own ePortfolios Peter Mozelius Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, Sweden mozelius@ dsv.su.se

Abstract: An ePortfolio has sometimes been defined as a collection of digital artifacts combined with demonstrations and descriptions of the artifacts. Another definition is that an ePortfolio is a web‐based collection of work, descriptions of the work and reflections over the work. Several studies have showed that student ePortfolios can be a useful tool for learning and assessment tool in eLearning and in online courses. They can in courses at university level serve at least three different purposes, as learning systems for professional development, for formative as well as summative assessment and as employment portfolios after the course is completed. It has been widely discussed in research which software systems and ePortfolio frameworks an educational organisation should purchase and use. Some researchers recommend Open source systems, others licensed software and there are also solutions that are integrated in virtual learning environments. Less has been investigated in research about the more constructionist approach of students designing and building their own ePortfolios as part of the learning process. Lunarstorm was a commercial Swedish social networking website that started around the millennium shift. Five years later Lunarstorm was Swedens largest web community with more than 10 percent of the Swedish population as active members. The Lunarstorm members were mainly teenagers using chats to communicate and creating their own multimedia presentations with tools provided in the online environment. Lunarstorm was shut down in 2010 but many former members have kept their interest for web technologies and entered various Computer science programmes. The aim of this study is to describe and discuss how students’ construction of online ePortfolios can be an integrated in the assessment process of a web programming course. This study has been carried out with a case study approach where data has been gathered by group discussions, interviews and analyses of ePortfolios.

Findings show that the constructionist idea of students building their own ePortfolios works for Computer science students in general and for former Lunarstorm members in particular. Further some students claimed that the ePortfolios extended with CVs have been valuable in applications for employment and further studies. From a teacher’s perspective the ePortfolios reflections and work descriptions can be useful as an anti‐plagiarism strategy in the attempt for a fair examination.

Keywords: eportfolio, elearning, constructionism, Lunarstorm, technology enhanced learning

1. Introduction ePortfolios can in a wider sense be defined as a digitised collection of artifacts combined with demonstrations and descriptions of the artifacts. Another definition is that the ePortfolio is a web‐based collection of work including the author’s reflections over the work (Lorenzo & Ittelson, 2005). As pointed out by Hartnell‐Young & Morriss (1999) ePortfolios can serve at least three purposes: as tools for formative and summative assessment, as learning systems for professional development and as employment portfolios. From a subject matter expert’s perspective they can also be useful for course evaluation (Lorenzo, G., & Ittelson, 2005).

The importance for educational organisation to chose suitable ePortfolio systems has been widely discussed in research (Wilhelm et al., 2006) (Meeus et al., 2006), some researchers recommend Open source systems (Brown et al, 2007) others licensed software (Strudler & Wetzel, 2005) and there are also solutions that are integrated in virtual learning environments (Queirós et al., 2011). Less has been investigated in research studies about the more constructionist approach of students designing and building their own ePortfolios as a course assignment and part of the learning process. There are reports of students extending wikis and blogs (Chen et al., 2005) or using developing tools like Dreamweaver (Chang et al., 2011) but not with the idea of students constructing the ePortfolios from scratch.

This article is based on a case study of a course on web programming where the students create their own ePortfolios in one of the mandatory assignments. The portfolios are built with HTML5, CSS, JavaScript and jQuery in an implementation where code is written manually. In a voluntary course assignment students can improve their final grades by generating the ePortfolio with the use of the Django framework. Beside from a storing and describing the solutions of other course assignments the ePortfolio should also contain a presentation of the student and his/her CV.

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1.1 Aim The aim of this study is to describe and discuss how students’ construction of online ePortfolios can be an integrated part of the assessment process of a web programming course.

2. Lunarstorm Lunarstorm was the name of a commercial Swedish social networking website that started around the millennium shift. Five years later Lunarstorm was Swedens largest web community with over 10 percent of the Swedish population as active members. The Lunarstorm members were mainly teenagers with an average age of 18 (Saks & Sandström, 2005). All members had their personal page where they could present themselves with text and images (Dunkels, 2003) and there were built‐in blogs, chats and discussion fora for communication with other members (Skog, 2010).

In Swedish media Lunarstorm was mostly discussed as a dangerous environment where the members were exposed to pedophiles and sexual invitation but there is no evidence for that the Lunarstorm community had more problems than web communities in general (Skog, 2010). The positive aspects of Lunarstorm activities have been less reported but there are some studies evaluating the unformal online courses that were given for members above 18 (Bergenholtz, 2007). This study will focus on the informal learning amongst Lunarstorm members while using blogs, wikis and creating their personal web page (Krypin). During its peak in 2005 Lunarstorm had around 300000 Pro members paying for extra services but between 2005‐2008 83% of the members left (Smålandsposten, 2010). The teenagers left for other web communities like Playahead and in 2010 Lunarstorm finally was shut down. However, many former Lunarstorm members have kept their interest for web design and web technologies and entered various Computer science programmes.

3. The case study and methods for data collection The overall approach for this research is a case study, with the case study strategy defined as an empirical inquiry investigating a real world phenomenon (Yin, 1989). A case study should also be seen as a method where a case, a process or an activities is explored in depth using a blend of data collection methods (Creswell, 2009) with the idea of combining different data sources striving to generate a deeper understanding of the analysed phenomenon (Remenyi, 2012).

This case study is based on the course ID:WEBPROG that is a mandatory programming course for students taking the programmes for Interaction design and IT for market communication at the Department for computer and systems sciences at the Stockholm University. ID:WEBPROG is a course given in blended mode where traditional lectures and teaching sessions are combined with recorded material and online activities in the online learning platform Moodle. Around 100 students from the programmes for Interaction Design and IT and Market Communication took the course in the 2013 spring semester and some of them only by distance.

All assignments can be found and submitted online in the Moodle platform where the students’ solutions also will be corrected and given feedback. Facilitation is given traditionally in dual mode with traditional face‐to‐ face sessions in computer halls combined with online discussions in the Moodle virtual learning environment.

A course that has a focus on object‐orientation and web programming with students uses Python, JavaScript, HTML5, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), jQuery and the Django framework to be able to solve a mix of mandatory and voluntary assignments. The overall course objective is to increase the knowledge about construction of object‐oriented and web‐based interactive systems. All assessment is based on programming tasks and there is no written exam. All assignments and course activities can be completed online in distance mode but there are traditional teaching and learning sessions available as well in a dual mode setup. There are large variations in the students pre‐knowledge but all students have completed an introductory programming course. At the end of the course all students have to attend an examination seminar where solutions to the course assignments should be presented and discussed with the ePortfolios as a presentation framework. The e‐Portfolios should also include a presentation of the student and a CV with the idea that these e‐Portfolios in the future could be linked in to job or research project applications. In the portfolios students are also supposed to give feedback on teaching, learning and the solved assignments.

Data has been collected in a mix of group discussions at examination seminars, informal interviews, in an online evaluation questionnaire and from online discussion fora in the Moodle environment. At five examination seminars per year between 2011 ‐ 2013 students’ earlier experience of Lunarstorm was discussed

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Peter Mozelius and related to their work with the ePortfolios and other course assignments. Some students that for longer periods have been Lunarstorm members were interviewed and in the course evaluation questionnaire two questions on Lunarstorm activities and ePortfolios were inserted.

4. Findings and discussions At most examination seminars around 75% of the students have been former Lunarstorm members and with an even higher percentage for the 2012 batch and students born in 1990. In the Interaction Design programme there are more former Lunarstorm members than amongst students from the programme for IT and Market Communication. The gender balance for former Lunarstorm member is close to 50/50 but for one of the batches with slightly more girls.

The assignment where the ePortfolio should be built with HTML5, CSS, JavaScript and other client side techniques is by far the most popular of all. Assignments on object‐orientation and algorithms are clearly less popular and the voluntary assignment where the portfolio should be generated with server side techniques in the Django framework were in the 2013 batch only solved by 5% of the course participants. Other voluntary assignments on jQuery and HTML5 techniques got far more solutions and in general client side techniques seem to interest students more than assignments based on server side solutions. Compared to assignments on object‐orientation where course participants often try to spend as little time as possible on the solutions students rather tend to overdo their ePortfolios. Especially in the 2012 course batch several students got in time trouble at the end of the course due to the large amount of time that they spent on design and construction of the ePortfolios. All answers so far in the 2013 course evaluation indicates that the mandatory ePortfolio assignment is the most popular.

Figure 1: Part of the start page from an ePortfolio created by a former Lunarstorm member On the question where students are asked to compare the idea of using existing ePortfolio template solutions Instead of building their own almost everyone answered that they prefer to build their own ePortfolios.

Students’ CVs and presentations are in general well written and the ePortfolios are surprisingly well designed.

The use of graphics, the layout, the choice of font families and colour schemes are nicely combined and often more sophisticated and according to professional standards than in a virtual learning environment like Moodle. In the interviews students answer that they learnt about different fonts and how colours are represented with hexadecimal numbers as Lunarstorm members. During the Lunarstorm era they redesigned their presentation pages frequently and also tried basic image handling. Compared to other students the former Lunarstorms seem to have an intuitive feeling for colour schemes and how to combine various fonts to font families. Moreover, they definitely enjoy practical web design more than students in general.

From a teacher’s perspective the ePortfolios also have a multipurpose functionality. At the same time as the assignment is a valuable examination of students’ acquired skills in HTML5, CSS and JavaScript the required

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Peter Mozelius work descriptions and reflections serve as an anti‐plagiarism strategy. The portfolio should contain a menu system where the solutions to all the course assignments have to be described in detail and in cases where students have submitted copied solutions this can often be detected by the work descriptions. From a student’s perspective a well constructed ePortfolio could in the future serve as employment portfolios and an artifact that will last longer than the course period. When the ePortfolios earlier have been built by students on other programmes at Department for computer and systems sciences the portfolios have sometimes been linked as appendices in job applications. Some students from the Interaction Design 2012 batch got summer jobs partly by sending links to their ePortfolios in emails to employers. Other students from the no longer existing ITK programme have used their ePortfolios in applications for master programmes at universities outside Sweden. For the highest grades in the Bologna scale the ePortfolios should also include interactive graphical solutions, games and a blog built with HTML5, CSS, jQuery and the Django framework. All solutions should be demonstrated and described in the portfolio.

5. Conclusions Findings show that the constructionist idea of students building their own ePortfolios instead of using ready mades have advantages both from students’ and teachers’ perspectives. The concept seems to works for Computer science in general and for former Lunarstorm members in particular. Besides from the pedagogical idea of ‘learning by doing’ the descriptions of how the course assignments were solved serve an anti‐ plagiarism strategy. Furthermore the created ePortfolios are artifacts that will last longer than the actual course and could serve as repositories for the results from more or less all courses in a programme as well as employment portfolios after a completed programme. Lunarstorm got quite a bad reputation in Swedish media for being a doubtful environment for children and teenagers. Both the unformal and the informal learning in the Lunarstorm community are of value for students at university level even if the former members’ pre‐knowledge not can be compared to the skills of students that have been taking dedicated ICT‐programmes in specialised secondary schools.

References Bergenholtz, J. (2007) ”Folkbildning på ungdomssajt–utvärdering av fyra kurser på LunarStorm” Brown, M., Anderson, B., Simpson, M., & Suddaby, G. (2007) “Showcasing Mahara: A new open source eportfolio”, Proceedings ascilite Singapore, 82‐84.

Chang, C. C., Tseng, K. H., Yueh, H. P., & Lin, W. C. (2011) “Consideration factors and adoption of type, tabulation and framework for creating e‐portfolios”, Computers & Education, 56(2), 452‐465.

Chen, H. L., Cannon, D., Gabrio, J., Leifer, L., Toye, G., & Bailey, T. (2005) “Using wikis and weblogs to support reflective learning in an introductory engineering design course”, Human Behaviour in Design, 5, 95‐105.

Creswell, J. W. (2009) Research Design, Qualitative, Quantitative and Mixed Methods Approaches, Sage Publications Inc, ISBN: 978‐1‐4129‐6557‐6 Dunkels, E. (2003) ”Vad är nätkulturer? En introduktion till ett forskningsfält” (What are Net Cultures) Gibson, D., & Barrett, H. (2003) “Directions in electronic portfolio development”, Contemporary Issues in technology and Teacher Education 2(4), 559‐576 Hartnell‐Young, E., & Morriss, M. (1999) “Digital professional portfolios for change”, Arlington Heights, IL: Skylight Professional Development Lorenzo, G., & Ittelson, J. (2005) ”An overview of e‐portfolios” ELI paper, 1, 2005.

Meeus, W., Questier, F., & Derks, T. (2006) ”Open source eportfolio: development and implementation of an institution‐wide electronic portfolio platform for students”, Educational Media International, 43(2), 133‐145.

Queirós, R., Oliveira, L., Leal, J. P., & Moreira, F. (2011) ”Integration of eportfolios in learning management systems”, Computational Science and Its Applications‐ICCSA 2011 (pp. 500‐510). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Remenyi, D. (2012) Case Study Research, Academic Publishing International Limited, Reading, United Kingdom, ISBN: 978‐ 1‐908272‐40‐9 Saks, D., & Sandström, M. (2005) ”Lunarstorm ‐ A studie of it’s meaning and popularity among Swedish youth” Skog, D. (2010) ”Mjukvarumiljöer för gemenskap: En studie av nätgemenskap, teknik och kultur” (Doctoral dissertation, Umeå University) Smålandsposten (2010) ”Vad hände med Lunarstorm?” http://www.smp.se/ung/vad‐hande‐med‐ lunarstorm%281821813%29.gm (retrieved 22/05/2013) Strudler, N., & Wetzel, K. (2005) ”The diffusion of electronic portfolios in teacher education: Issues of initiation and implementation”, Journal of research on technology in education, 37(4), 411‐433.

Wilhelm, L., Puckett, K., Beisser, S., Wishart, W., Merideth, E., & Sivakumaran, T. (2006) ”Lessons learned from the implementation of electronic portfolios at three universities”, TechTrends, 50(4), 62‐71.

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13th European Conference on e-Learning Aalborg Universitet Copenhagen Denmark Copenhagen, 30-31 October 2014 For further information contact info@academic conferences org info@academic-conferences.org Or telephone +44-(0)-118-972-4148