Teaching and learning in live online classrooms

Online presence of information and services is pervasive. Teaching and learning are no exception. Courseware management systems play an important role in enhancing instructional delivery for either traditional day, full-time students or non-traditional evening, party-time adult learners enrolled in online programs. While online course management tools are with no doubt practical, they limit, however, live or synchronous communication to chat rooms, whose discourse has little in common with face-to-face class communication. A more recent trend in online teaching and learning is the adoption and integration of web conferencing tools to enable live online classrooms and recreate the ethos of traditional face-to-face sessions. In this paper we present the experience we have had with the adoption of the LearnLinc® web conferencing tool, an iLinc Communications, Inc. product. We have coupled LearnLinc with Blackboard®, for the online and hybrid computer science courses we offered in the past academic year in the evening undergraduate and graduate computer science programs at Rivier College. Twelve courses, enrolling over 150 students, have used the synchronous online teaching capabilities of LearnLinc. Students who took courses in the online or hybrid format could experience a comparable level of interaction, participation, and collaboration as in traditional classes. We solicited student feedback by administering a student survey to over 100 students. The 55% response rate produced the data for this paper\u27s study. We report on the study\u27s findings and show students\u27 rankings of evaluation criteria applied to hybrid and online instructional formats, with or without a web conferencing tool. Our analysis shows that students ranked favorably LearnLinc live sessions added to Blackboard-only online classes. In addition, how they learned in live online classrooms was found to be the closest to the hybrid class experience with regard to teaching practices they perceived as most important to them, such as seeking instructor\u27s assistance, managing time on task, and exercising problem solving skills

Transition to online learning by a teacher education program with limited 4IR affordances

This study used the community of inquiry (CoI) framework and the affordances of Internet of things (IoT) to explore how the faculty of education of a rural campus of a university transitioned from face-to-face to online modes of instruction. In this qualitative interpretive study, data were collected through open-ended questionnaires from four purposely selected teacher educators and five final-year bachelor of education preservice teachers. Thematic content analysis techniques were used to analyze the data collected. The findings indicated the tensions experienced by the teacher educators as they negotiated the limited IoT affordances to ensure effective teaching, cognitive, and social presence in the newly formed online classrooms. Some of the tensions included the choices that were made on whether to use synchronous or asynchronous modes of instruction and the selection of effective communication modes. The teacher educators used a combination of the official learning management system (LMS) tools of the university and a social media platform as way of navigating the limited 4IR environments experienced by the preservice teachers

MANAGING A MIXED SKILL CLASS

In a digital environment students need to manage different types of skills - cognitive, emotive and manual. When working in a mixed-skill class the differences between student abilities can disrupt the rhythm and style of the learning process and demand flexibility in the teaching approach that is adopted

Exploiting connectedness in the informatics curriculum

The power of modern communication technology gives us an opportunity, as Informatics educators, to enhance our ability to develop our students' skills in virtual teamworking. We discuss why virtual teamworking is as relevant for students in traditional campus-based universities as it is in a distance learning context. We highlight some of the questions to be answered, and some of the problems to be overcome, in the context of our experiences in designing and delivering a virtual teamworking course at the UK Open University

Exploring the impact of an online learning community to support student teachers on school placement

This paper documents the design, implementation, and evaluation of an online learning community (OLC), within the Republic of Ireland, which set out to support student teachers in a hybrid space during their school placement experience. Guided by qualitative research, data collection methods included interviews and analysis of students’ forum postings. Key findings illustrated that the OLC provided a valuable learning context for student teachers. The presence of cooperating teachers, as online tutors, as well as a higher education institute tutor was recognised as critically important for facilitating the OLC. A significant conclusion to this study is that hybrid spaces, that are aligned with the practicum, can provide opportunities for dialogic reflection and enquiry within a community of learners. With the increased attention of adopting online pedagogical approaches, stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper offers two research-based design principles to facilitate OLCs that support student teachers on school placement

Relationships Among Higher Education EFL Student Perceptions Toward Fully Online Language Learning and Computer Self-efficacy, Age, Gender, and Proficiency Level in Emergency Remote Teaching Settings

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to explore Chilean higher education English as a foreign language (EFL) students’ perceptions toward components of their fully online learning experience and their computer self-efficacy during the CoVID-19 pandemic and assess how these variables are influenced by age, gender, and language proficiency. Method: Participants of the study were 236 undergraduate students (110 males and 126 females) who took a fully online EFL course in a professional institute in Chile. Likert-scale questionnaires were used to gather data on perceptions toward fully online language learning components (online participation, collaborative group work, instructional materials, and learning strategies and styles) and computer self-efficacy (CSE). Findings: Participants held overall positive views toward fully online language learning components but had negative views toward online participation. Findings revealed significant relationships between computer self-efficacy and perceptions toward fully online language learning components. The perceptions that learners held toward fully online courses seem to be unaffected by gender and proficiency level, although gender did impact CSE. Implications for Theory and Practice: Feeling disconnected from peers and the learning experience in general can lead to negative attitudes toward online learning as well as feelings of isolation. Learners may feel unmotivated, frustrated, and discouraged to continue participating in the course. Teachers can nurture a sense of community in the classroom by facilitating dialogue, providing timely feedback, moderating student discussions, and building social networks around learners. It is also important to promote healthy levels of computer self-efficacy that can positively influence perceptions toward group work and learning strategies. Conclusion: Emergency remote teaching can have a negative impact on online participation. As more educational institutions provide their students with online options for attending classes, teachers should focus on increasing peer collaboration and interaction

Teaching Environmental Management Competencies Online: Towards “Authentic” Collaboration?

Environmental Management (EM) is taught in many Higher Education Institutions in the UK. Most this provision is studied full-time on campuses by younger adults preparing themselves for subsequent employment, but not necessarily as environmental managers, and this experience can be very different from the complexities of real-life situations. This formal academic teaching or initial professional development in EM is supported and enhanced by training and continuing professional development from the major EM Institutes in the UK orientated to a set of technical and transferable skills or competencies expected of professional practitioners. In both cases there can be a tendency to focus on the more tractable, technical aspects of EM which are important, but may prove insufficient for EM in practice. What is also necessary, although often excluded, is an appreciation of, and capacity to deal with, the messiness and unpredictability of real world EM situations involving many different actors and stakeholders with multiple perspectives and operating to various agendas. Building on the work of Reeves, Herrington and Oliver (2002), we argue that EM modules need to include the opportunity to work towards the practice of authentic activities with group collaboration as a key pursuit. This paper reports on a qualitative study of our experiences with a selected sample taken from two on-line undergraduate EM modules for second and third year students (referred to respectively as Modules A and B) at the Open University, UK where online collaboration was a key component. Our tentative findings indicate that on-line collaboration is difficult to ensure as a uniform experience and that lack of uniformity reduces its value as an authentic experience. Whilst it can provide useful additional skills for EM practitioners the experience is uneven in the student body and often requires more time and support to engage with than originally planned