OpenCourseWare - How cyberculture is bridging the education gap. (by Dayle)

The internet has a history of being an open and free culture and this holds true for the culture of online education. In 2000 MIT faculty decided the best way to pursue their mission - "to advance knowledge and educate students" was to make all their course materials available online, for free, without the need to even register. They now have 1950 courses published and some amazing stories about how this online material is being used across the world.

Haitian natives Jean-Ronel Noel and Alex Georges wanted to bring renewable energy to Cité Soleil (city of the sun), one of Haiti's poorest shantytowns. "I was able to use OpenCourseWare to learn the principles of integrated circuits .. I didn't want to just copy the circuit without understanding it. MIT OpenCourseWare was different because it explained things step by step. Using OpenCourseWare saved us a lot of time and money."
Today their company, Enersa, has made a difference in their community by training and employing 18 people of Cité Soleil and has made a positive impact on the environment – making solar energy available and accessible in almost 60 Haitian towns and remote villages. (MIT OpenCourseWare site)

Many other institutions have followed suit and a number of 'free universities' are emerging. The University of the People is one such institution currently offering two programs free of charge, Business Administration and Computer Science and boasts academics from Columbia University, New York University and Yale.

Other projects in the 'open and free' spirit include Open Textbooks and the Khan Academy:



Often I hear arguments such as "if I put it online, they won't come to class" but perhaps the opposite is true, if you put good course material online, people are more likely to come to class and more likely to participate in education in general.

Using Facebook to increase social interaction in the face to face classroom (by Dayle)

This is an example of how the online environment can be used to increase social interaction in the face-to-face class.

First year university students often comment on feeling isolated as they move from a highly cohesive high school class environment to large lecture style education. International students also find the first year experience difficult and often feel they can't easily interact with local students. As part of his first year architecture course, McCarthy used the online environment, through Facebook try to break down some of these barriers and help students build social relationships with their peers. A Facebook group was created where students could post images and review and comment on each others submissions. He found that at the end of the course there was an increase in social interaction between the students in the online environment as well as face-to-face.

Comments from the students:
"The best thing about the Facebook galleries was that they got everyone talking from day one - all of a suddent I had all these new friends on Facebook and from there friends in class." (local Student)

"It was great being able to communicate with the other students – due to my language skills I couldn’t do this at first in class, but the galleries helped everyone get to know each other, and by the end of the course I was much more confident." (international student)

The results were quite interesting you can read the article here and a more recent update on the project from the ascilite conference here.

References
McCarthy, J 2009, Utilising Facebook: immersing Generation-Y students into first year university, The Journal of the Education Research Group of Adelaide, Vol 1, No 2, Feb 2009, https://www.adelaide.edu.au/erga/ergo/ergo_v1n2_p39-50.pdf

It's a lonely world out there (by Phil)

During a large scale study exploring student perceptions of barriers to online learning, 47 barriers were identified.

Ok, I won't be discussing all 47 barriers in this post (I will leave the rest for the next 46 posts!)But the disadvantage or barrier that the students ranked as number 1 was the 'lack of social interaction' involved in online learning. The lack of a social environment results in a negative impact on the following:

- likelihood of taking a future online course
- effectiveness of online learning
- enjoyment of online learning
- confidence in online learning
- likelihood of completing a course online

It appears the lack of social interaction is the most important reason people do not want to use online learning. It is also apparent that the online learning through the use of chat rooms, messenger etc. is not as effective and cannot replace real-life student interaction.

"A great deal of learning occurs through the interaction between students and educators. That discussion is lost online" and that "Students don't get to hear other students' opinions and teachers' real-time interpretations."

There is also evidence to suggest that social interaction using online collaborative learning has various pitfalls which also need to be considered before using an online approach to teaching.
Avoid the hassle and stick to the classroom!



References:

http://www.emoderators.com/barriers/stbarr_final_may05.pdf

http://www.allbusiness.com/technology/software-services-applications-internet-social/6537375-1.html

http://www.netwerkopenhogeschool.com/Docs/Faculteiten/OW/Identifying%20the%20pitfalls%20for%20social%20interaction%20in%20computer.pdf

Can we design assessment that makes cheating too hard? (by Dayle)

Is it really Phil at the other end of the internet? I think that as an online teacher you can get a feel (or a phil) for how a student speaks, acts and expresses themselves just as you do in a face to face environment, especially if you carry out continuous assessment (be it formative or summative) rather than just one big assignment at the end. Also, as mentioned in the comments, it is really just as easy for a face to face student to hand in someone else's essay, so this is not a problem unique to e-learning. I agree with Phillips & Lowe (2003), James, McInnis & Devlin (2002) and McDowel & Brown (2001) who see this issue as an opportunity to rethink current assessment methods and develop more effective ways of measuring student learning. However, if you really must assess online using traditional closed book style exams, it is possible according to Talia Carbis, who is currently doing so using webcams and Skype. Also, there is software that will 'lockdown' a browser during a test, plagiarism detection tools that compare student work to thousands of electronic resources and test engines that will randomise questions in any way you like, making it difficult to share answers. For as many ways that technology can make cheating easier, there is a way that technology can make it harder too.

Surely the aim should be to discourage and prevent cheating rather than just detect and subvert it. Assessment strategies such as reflective writing, group assignments, peer assessment, submission of drafts and more generally ensuring tasks are relevant and authentic are some of the ways to minimise cheating (McDowell & Brown, 2001). We also need to explicitly teach and discuss issues relating to online research and academic writing and the importance of using existing literature (and all sorts of online material) correctly through referencing.

Best practice in online learning means using pedagogies that take advantage of the natural use of the online environment. Online assessment tasks need to reflect the same processes and modes used in the learning (Phillips & Lowe, 2003). Putting students who have utilised the internet, multimedia and collaborative technologies throughout their learning in an assessment situation such as an invigilated exam is not an appropriate measuring tool and promotes surface learning (Phillips & Lowe, 2003). Why not use the social and collaborative nature of the internet as part of the assessment? In this course, everybody blogs, everybody comments, everybody links to new relevant material, it is more akin to professional practice and is no longer just a dialogue between teacher and student. I think it would be fairly difficult to cheat in this course. Other ideas for innovative effective online assessment include using wikis, scenario based learning, and many more. The increasing adoption of online learning across all education sectors is an opportunity to rethink assessment, make it more effective and authentic and make cheating unworkable.


References

Carbis, T. 2010, eLearning Australia, Blog, 6 Jan 2010 Supervising an exam via Skype
http://elearningaustralia.net.au/2010/01/supervising-an-exam-via-skype

James, R, McInnis, C, Devlin, M. 2002, Assessing Learning in Australian Universities, Centre for the study of higher education, http://www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/assessinglearning/docs/AssessingLearning.pdf

McDowell, L, Brown, S. 2001, Assessing students: cheating and plagiarism,The Higher Education Academy, http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/York/documents/resources/resourcedatabase/id430_cheating_and_plagiarism.pdf

Moore, C. 2009, 'How to save the world with elearning scenarios', adapted from presentations at Australian Flexible Learning Framework events, http://www.slideshare.net/CathyMoore/how-to-save-the-world-with-elearning-scenarios

Phillips, R, Lowe, K. 2003, 'Issues Associated with the Equivalence of Traditional and Online Assessment', In Interact, Integrate, Impact: Proceedings of the 20th Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.83.7863&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Snelling C, Karanicolas, S. 2008 'Why wikis work: Assessing group work in an on-line environment', In Proceedings of Australian Technology Network Assessment Conference, http://www.ojs.unisa.edu.au/index.php/atna/article/view/298/276

Links
Respondus Lockdown Browser
Turnitin Plagiarism Prevention and Detection Tool
Moodle Quiz Module
ALTC project Transforming Assessment