Online collaborative learning in tertiary ICT education to enhance students' learning in Malaysia

This study investigated the nature of students’, and student group, interactions through the incorporation of an online collaborative learning (OCL) initiative, with its aim to enhance students’ learning in a Malaysian tertiary classroom. In order to contribute to knowledge and understanding about the nature and quality of OCL, the learning processes and outcomes were drawn predominantly from Harasim’s model, with inclusion of a socio-cultural framework aimed at enhancing learning outcomes for undergraduate science and ICT education students. Harasim’s model of OCL that was used in the intervention includes steps to setting up the stage and a system for Idea Generating (IG), modeling and guiding the OCL discussions for Idea Organizing (IO), and evaluating and reflecting the OCL discussions for Intellectual Convergence (IC). The interactions in OCL were analysed through four dimensions: participative, interactive, social, and cognitive in support of the students’ cognitive, social and emotional development. The OCL intervention in this study was conducted through an ICT education course in a Malaysian university that required OCL discussions for 13 weeks: the first four weeks were intra-group work discussions (Task 1), followed by four/five weeks of inter-group work discussions (Task 2), and the remaining four weeks were for the final intra-group work discussions (Task 3). The OCL intervention was aimed at facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration and interaction between students from Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics majors through the university’s Learning Management System (Moodle), which provided the shared space for the OCL discourse and tools for collaboration. A total of nine groups of four to six students (N=46) were involved in this study. In order to evaluate the OCL intervention using a holistic view, an interpretive approach that included the collection of quantitative and qualitative data was adopted to frame the collection and analysis of the data. Quantitative data were obtained from online questionnaires, together with online data based on the frequency of students’ posts in participative, interactive, social, and cognitive dimensions. Qualitative data were gathered via interviews with students (group and post-course interviews) and lecturers, and online transcripts that included online postings and students’ online journal entries. These data were collected and analysed in order to triangulate the findings and to help the researcher assess the extent to which the intervention was successful in enhancing students’ learning. The findings from the study revealed the nature of students’ interactions in OCL correspond with particular socio-cultural views that students’ interactions are characterised based on the participative, interactive, social and cognitive dimensions in support of the students’ cognitive, social and emotional development. From a socio-cultural perspective, the outcomes that arose from the study included: • The socio-cultural learning constructs have been useful as a framework for the analysis of the OCL intervention based on the participative, interactive, social and cognitive dimensions. • The affordances of the OCL group work helped the students’ in their group work. • The constraints of OCL influence the communication methods, and interaction styles used by students in achieving task goals through group work in the OCL intervention. The findings also show students’ interactions and student group interactions were an important part of the learning process. The implementation of OCL intervention into the course can lead to the facilitation of the student group learning process as well as supporting their cognitive, social and emotional development, and potential constraints from the technology (e.g. Internet connection) or the lack of social and verbal cues (e.g. facial expression) can lead to different working methods of communication for achieving task goals and different styles of interactions. Overall, the findings of the study indicate the value of OCL in a tertiary classroom to enhance learning

Reuse of Digital Learning Resources in Collaborative Learning Environments

With background in the proliferation of Information- and Communication Technologies(ICTs) in educational institutions, there is a growing interest in deploying ICT that complies with specifications and standards for learning technologies in these institutions. A key to obtaining the benefits of cost-efficiency and quality that motivate this interest is reuse of digital learning resources. Despite the significant efforts being made in design and deployment of learning technology standards facilitating the reuse of learning resources, the phenomenon of reuse is understudied. Central standardization initiatives originate in the requirements for training in large corporations and the US military. My research is concerned with learning resource reuse in educational institutions, with a particular interest in pedagogical approaches emphasizing the social aspects of learning. The central aim of my research is to develop a conception of reuse that facilitates systematic analysis of learning resource reuse in ICT-mediated collaborative learning environments. This aim locates my research at the intersection between learning technology standardization and the research area of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL). The theoretical basis for my research is sociocultural perspectives on human learning and development. This perspective contends that the process of learning is essentially a social process, situated in cultural and historical contexts. The sociocultural understanding of technological agency, that human actions are mediated by artifacts, has fundamentally shaped my understanding of learning resource reuse. I have used the more specific approach of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory as my analytical framework,which implies that I have studied the students, teachers, and technology designers’ engagement with learning resources as activity. The empirical basis for the research is formed by three interpretive case studies. Two of the case studies were carried out on an introductory course on object-oriented programming at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, during two consecutive semesters. The third case study was conducted on the development of a framework for technology-enhanced inquiry learning at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. The most important contribution of my research is that it brings the issue of how learning resources are reused in educational institutions into the foreground. The intermediate conv cept of reuse developed in this thesis informs the two research areas CSCL and learning technology standardization. It serves as a mechanism for discussing the issue of scalability of CSCL systems, and provides empirically informed perspectives on reuse to the learning technology standardization community. I argue that standardization will become more relevant for CSCL research as experimental CSCL systems are brought into educational institutions and help shape the everyday practice in these institutions. Learning technology standards represent an opportunity for the CSCL research community to reify findings on productive collaborative interactions, and to implement sustainable CSCL systems in educational institutions. The conception of reuse can be used in deliberations on standards deployment in educational institutions. It can help guide decisions on which learning resources to design according to standards, and the findings on how the specifications SCORM and IMS Learning Design accommodate collaborative learning approaches can assist decision-makers in choosing appropriate mechanisms for facilitating reuse of learning resources. For the design of learning technology standards, the conception of reuse offers an opportunity to think about how well the standards reflect reuse practice. The findings on how learning resources are reused can also be used for redesigning standards with respect to reducing complexity. In addition to the findings on reuse, my empirical research on social interactions in distributed CSCL settings has yielded new insights on the communicative conditions constituted by CSCL environments in the problem domain of university-level introductory objectoriented programming. My research pays particular attention to how the mediating ICTs shape these interactions, as well as taking other aspects of the learning situations into account

A Lightweight Approach for Flexible Group Management in the Classroom

In this paper we describe a session management system for setting up various collabora- tive classroom ,scenarios. The approach ,is addressing the additional workload ,of administrating classroom networks on the teacher, which is an important aspect for teachers' willingness to im- plement technology enhanced,learning in schools. The system facilitates preparation of classroom scenarios and the adhoc installation of networked collaborative sessions. We provided a graphical interface, which is usable for administration, monitoring, and for specification of a wide variety of different classroom ,situations with group work. The resulting graphical specifications are well suited to be re-used in the more formal learning design format IMS/LD; this is achieved by a auto- matable transformation of the scenarios to LD documents. Keywords: Collaborative classroom scenarios, lightweight classroom orchestration, learning de- sign, shared workspaces