Presenting a collaborative/interactive online course with free, hopefully easy to use, web/IT tools
The goal is to show how to easily create an online, interactive and collaborative course with freely available web tools. In this respect the audience is teachers that either have or are thinking about running an online course. The course that I am going to try to ”translate” into an online environment is a secondary school social studies subject.
The purpose is to hopefully demostrate that it is possible to use a number of free web tools to relativly easily recreate a collaborative course online without the need for an expensive and/or complicated LMS or other software licences. These tools should allow the teacher to follow the activites of the class as well as allowing the class to feel as though they are part of a group working together towards common
goals.
Online technologies to be used:
Blog (Google) inform students what is happening in the course each lesson/day/week.
Google documents to provide an easy place to collect all the ”intellectual property” that makes up the course: lesson plans and instructions, exercises, feedback, assessment, etc. These can be easily published to the blog at the appropriate time, and then preserved if the course is to be run again.
Jing (together with screencast) can be used to record and ”mini-lectures” as well as images.
Slideshare can be used to share presentations (PowerPoint files)
Voicethreads can be used to share images and videos and has a very good system for asynchonous discussion and comment.
Bubbl.us and/or Thinkature for online brainstorming colaboration.
Skype can be used for synchronous activites.
Elluminate at Learningtimes could possibly be used for virtual lessons.
Learning Theory
Social Constructivism is a theory of learning associated with Vygotsky (1978, cited in Corrie, 1995) that emphasises the influence of cultural and social contexts in learning. There is an underlying belief that education is to develop the students’ personality and creativity. Knowledge is constructed through active learning and collaboration with teachers and other learners in authentic and meaningful situations (McInerney & McInerney, 1998). Vygotsky’s theory of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is central to social constructivism in the classroom. The ZPD describes the area of skills or tasks that cannot be performed by the student alone, but can be accomplished with the help of others (University of Houston – College of Education, 2002). Willis, Stephens and Matthew (1996, cited in Rice & Wilson, 1999) discussed four principles of a social constructivist classroom:
learning and development are social collaborative activities,
the zone of proximal development can serve as a guide for curricular and lesson planning,
learning should occur in meaningful contexts, and
learning should be related to a child’s own experiences. (p.29)
There is a large amount of literature that discusses the use of computers and other related technologies with specific regard to the social constructivist theory of learning. There appears to be three main themes within this literature. First, those who believe that computers can and will improve learning through its inherent compatibility and promotion of social constructivism. Second, there are authors who can see the benefit computers do provide to a constructivist method but argue that this should not be to the exclusion of other methods of teaching and learning. Third, the view that the link between computers and constructivism has not been sufficiently researched nor proved, and is possibly not even there. Much of this research has focused on the use of computers in a physical classroom so it may well be unwise to extrapolate all the findings to a virtual, online environment, however I believe that, despite the inherent challenges of students not necessarily meeting each other physically, it is still possible to create an environment there social contructivist learning is possible.
Matusevich (1995) quotes Collins (1991, p.33) stating that ‘Using computers entails active learning and this change in practice will eventually foster a shift in society’s beliefs toward a more constructivist view of education.’ This trend will continue as computers force a constructivist method into play ‘because it is impossible for a teacher to use didactic1 methodology in a technology rich classroom’ (Matusevich, 1995). In agreement with this view is Nicaise (1998), who believes that the transformation in software design and associated technology will lead teachers to consider radically different ways of structuring teaching and learning. In an earlier work Nicaise and Barnes (1996, cited in Tillman, 1998) had stated their belief that technology can facilitate constructivist methods; leading to the later opinion that when advances in technology are combined with research and theory on learning ‘the learning communities of tomorrow will make astonishing improvements’ (Nicaise, 1998, p.115). El-Hindi (1998) notes that the more recent proliferation of material on, and access to, the Internet changes the idea of who the teacher is, and what the teacher does. Learning on the Internet is very compatible with social constructivism as the assumption of learners as active and curious is actively and powerfully supported by the medium. Students can form their own questions and then seek the answers – constructing knowledge in new ways. ‘[T]he old days are gone and… we must move ahead to discover the dynamic of learning on the Internet’ (El-Hindi, 1998, p.699). It would appear that social constructivism is becoming a more widely accepted theory of learning, especially with regard to the expectation of preparing students for the twenty-first century and the ability to use computer and technology that is implicit in this expectation.
Working prototype
My goal is to recreate the first section of the course that I teach in an online environment and through that discover if my goal is attainable.
Evaluation
The goal is to recreate an interactive classroom course in an online environment. Therefore it would be highly beneficial to evaluate both the students learning as well as their perceived perception of the
interactive/collaborative nature of the course. Student learning can be assessed through some form of assessment. I would prefer to use some form of open-ended, free choice project/paper in one of the
areas the course covers as the course I have in mind places much of the responsibility of learning on the student. An anonymous survey followed by a discussion forum based on the results would be my prefered approach for evaluating students’ perception of their learning and the course.
Sources
Matusevich, M. (1995) School Reform: What Role can Technology Play in a Constructivist Setting? [WWW document]. URL http://pixel.cs.vt.edu/edu/fis/techcons.html , viewed on 11 October 2008
Nicaise, M. (1998) Cognitive Research, Learning Theory, & Software Design: The Virtual Library. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 18 (2), 105-121.
Tillman, M. (1998) The Internet, Internet Curriculum Materials, and Constructivist Learning Theory. ERIC Database, Accession Number ED425706.
El-Hindi, A. (1998) Beyond Classroom Boundaries: Constructivist Teaching with the Internet. The Reading Teacher, 51 (8), 694-700.
1
‘A plan of instruction that emphasises precept, principle, doctrine or rule.’ (Good, 1973, p.158)
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