The use of scaffolding and interactive learning strategies in online courses for working nurses : implications for adult and online education

This paper reviews the foundational litera- ture of contemporary e-learning, with a focus on scaffolding, instructional design, and engagement. These concepts are then considered in two limited case studies, each involving e-learning and adult learners—in particular, nurse-learners. The first case study describes the use of a scaffolding model called Introduction, Connect, Apply, Reflect, and Extend (ICARE) in e-learning for nursing education. The second is a reflection on the use of engagement strategies for the purposes of discourse and learning in a different online nursing context. Because nursing educators were among the early adopters of e-learning, they are important mentors to others who are adopting e-learning strategies at this time. Additionally, the paper is a crossroads publication: it reminds the reader of the imperative to review theory and emerging evidence related to e-learning and to bring key findings to the actual practice of e-learning in order to benefit the adult student. This commitment to theory and practice will enable the evolution of e-learning for all learners, including returning adult learners and working professionals

Qualitative Insights from a Canadian Multi-institutional Research Study: In Search of Meaningful E-learning

This paper reports the qualitative findings of a mixed methods research study conducted at three Canadian post-secondary institutions. Called the Meaningful E-learning or MEL project, the study was an exploration of the teaching and learning experiences of faculty and students as well as their perceptions of the benefits and challenges of e-learning. Importantly, e-learning was conceptualized as the integration of pedagogy, instructional technology, and the Internet into teaching and learning environments. Based on this definition, participants reflected on e-learning in relation to one or more of the following contexts: face-to-face (f2f) classrooms in which instructional technologies (e.g. learning management systems, video and web-conferencing, mobile devices, etc.) are used; blended or web-enhanced learning environments; and fully online learning environments. Data collected for the study included survey data (n=1377 for students, n=187 for faculty); narrative comments (n=269 for students, n=74 for faculty); and focus groups (n=16 for students, n=33 for faculty). The latter two sets of data comprise the basis of this paper. Four major themes emerged based on the responses of students and faculty. Represented by the acronym HIDI, the themes include human connection (H), IT support (I), design (D), and institutional infrastructure (I). These themes and sub-themes are presented in the paper as well as recommendations for educators and administrators who aspire to make e-learning a pedagogically meaningful experience for both learners and their teachers.National League for Nursing/Sigma Theta Tau Internationa

The ACT KeyTrain Program and the ACT WorkKeys Test Performance: An Action Research Study

The purpose of this quantitative action research study was to describe the effectiveness of the American College Testing (ACT) KeyTrain program in the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC), conducted with 50 inmate-student-participants who were enrolled in the Palmetto Unified School District’s Tyger River High School’s (TyRCI) adult education program. The identified problem of practice for this dissertation in practice (DiP) was an evaluation of the effectiveness of this program for one group of low socioeconomic status Black male inmate-student-participants. This evaluation was of vital importance to the Palmetto Unified School District (PUSD) and SCDC because ACT WorkKeys is one of the educational opportunities offered to inmate-students in an effort to improve the reintegration of inmates into society through reduced recidivism. Surveys, questionnaires, ACT KeyTrain curricula, and official ACT WorkKeys scores constituted the data for this research. Inmate-student-participant performance and patterns were described using a statistical t test. A correlation test was employed to describe the predictive ability of the ACT KeyTrain program. The primary research question “How effective is the ACT KeyTrain program at predicting and improving ACT WorkKeys performance for 50 low socioeconomic-status, Black, male inmate-students in South Carolina?” drove the data collected in this study that implies that the ACT KeyTrain program was not effective in improving ACT WorkKeys performance for 50 low-SES Black male inmate-student-participants at TyRCI. However, when accounting for inmate-student “work ethic” (defined and quantified through a quality study time statistic), the data collected in this study showed that the ACT KeyTrain program was somewhat effective in improving ACT WorkKeys performance for 50 low-SES Black male inmate-student-participants at TyRCI. The researcher-participant reflected on the data with the inmate-student-participants to design an action plan for the school. Based on feedback from inmate-student-participants, Tyger River High School will continue to use and expand the use of ACT KeyTrain to prepare inmate-students for ACT WorkKey

IMPROVING PEER LEARNING AND KNOWLEDGE SHARING IN STEM COURSES VIA PATTERN BASED GRAPH VISUALIZATION

High quality education in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) majors expects not only the acquisition of comprehensive domain knowledge, but also the mastery of skills to solve open-ended and even ill-defined problems in real world. Problem-based Learning (PBL) is usually adopted to achieve such goals by encouraging students to learn by solving real-life problems. However, successful PBL requires sustained and in-depth involvement of faculty members, hence making PBL not scalable. Even though discussion forums and Q&A systems can help address the scalability problem of faculty involvement on large class sizes, it introduces new problems. First, as knowledge bases grow in size, the sheer size of the accumulated knowledge makes it harder to locate the desired information. Second, existing knowledge discovery techniques do not provide effective facilities for the capture and reuse of solutions to recurring problems. To address these challenges, we developed MicroBrowser, an innovative and interactive Question & Answer (Q&A) system augmented with pattern-based expertise-sharing interfaces and 2D knowledge graph discussion visualization. MicroBrowser provides a set of pattern-based expertise-sharing interfaces to allow both learners and instructors to refine, reuse, and share knowledge. MicroBrowser also allows learners to browse and navigate important discussions based on topic similarity encoded by node proximity in a knowledge graph. Results of empirical evaluations of our proposed solution show that ask difficulty improves with MicroBrowser when compared with a state-of-the-art Q&A system for knowledge discovery and reuse tasks. In addition, success rate for knowledge discovery tasks using keywords was higher with MicroBrowser. Moreover, we show that, students found the pattern-based expertise-sharing interface easy to use and were able to contribute new knowledge in the form of new knowledge connections and even recommend new design patterns

Graphical scaffolding for the learning of data wrangling APIs

In order for students across the sciences to avail themselves of modern data streams, they must first know how to wrangle data: how to reshape ill-organised, tabular data into another format, and how to do this programmatically, in languages such as Python and R. Despite the cross-departmental demand and the ubiquity of data wrangling in analytical workflows, the research on how to optimise the instruction of it has been minimal. Although data wrangling as a programming domain presents distinctive challenges - characterised by on-the-fly syntax lookup and code example integration - it also presents opportunities. One such opportunity is how tabular data structures are easily visualised. To leverage the inherent visualisability of data wrangling, this dissertation evaluates three types of graphics that could be employed as scaffolding for novices: subgoal graphics, thumbnail graphics, and parameter graphics. Using a specially built e-learning platform, this dissertation documents a multi-institutional, randomised, and controlled experiment that investigates the pedagogical effects of these. Our results indicate that the graphics are well-received, that subgoal graphics boost the completion rate, and that thumbnail graphics improve navigability within a command menu. We also obtained several non-significant results, and indications that parameter graphics are counter-productive. We will discuss these findings in the context of general scaffolding dilemmas, and how they fit into a wider research programme on data wrangling instruction