Blending Learning: The Evolution of Online and Face-to-Face Education from 20082015

In 2008, iNACOL produced a series of papers documenting promising practices identified throughout the field of K–12 online learning. Since then, we have witnessed a tremendous acceleration of transformative policy and practice driving personalized learning in the K–12 education space. State, district, school, and classroom leaders recognize that the ultimate potential for blended and online learning lies in the opportunity to transform the education system and enable higher levels of learning through competency-based approaches.iNACOL's core work adds significant value to the field by providing a powerful practitioner voice in policy advocacy, communications, and in the creation of resources and best practices to enable transformational change in K–12 education.We worked with leaders throughout the field to update these resources for a new generation of pioneers working towards the creation of student-centered learning environments.This refreshed series, Promising Practices in Blended and Online Learning, explores some of the approaches developed by practitioners and policymakers in response to key issues in K–12 education, including:Blended Learning: The Evolution of Online and Face-to-Face Education from 2008-2015;Using Blended and Online Learning for Credit Recovery and At-Risk Students;Oversight and Management of Blended and Online Programs: Ensuring Quality and Accountability; andFunding and Legislation for Blended and Online Education.Personalized learning environments provide the very best educational opportunities and personalized pathways for all students, with highly qualified teachers delivering world-class instruction using innovative digital resources and content. Through this series of white papers, we are pleased to share the promising practices in K–12 blended, online, and competency education transforming teaching and learning today

Optimizing LMS CANVAS for Interactive Online Learning Perceived by the Students

Recently, technology has been an integral part of education. Teachers must use technology into their teaching practices in order to adapt to society's digital revolution. One of the strategies that can be implemented by the teachers is utilizing Canvas as one of Learning Management Systems (henceforth LMS) in their course. This study aims to investigate the students’ perception towards the use of Canvas to promote interactive online learning. Implementing case study as the research design, this study involved 77 students as the participants, and used both questionnaire and semi-structured interview to collect the data. In this study, the quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, while the qualitative data were analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings of this study revealed that students accessed Canvas ranging for less than 1 hour to more than 2 hours in a week.  They accessed it mostly to join some learning activities designed by the teacher, including reading the learning modules, joining online discussion, and doing the assignments given by the teachers. They also believe that during the online learning, Canvas is an easy-to-use LMS, and it provides a lot of features that help them learning. Besides, they also agree that Canvas is effective to provide them the opportunity have an interactive learning experience. In addition, they also perceived that using Canvas motivated them, and make the learning process more interesting. Therefore, teachers can optimize various features provided by Canvas to make the teaching and learning process in online setting become more interactive, interesting, and effective.

Optimizing the virtual classroom: A case of intensive English course in the Next Normal

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, online learning has automatically become a normal practice of the “Next Normal”. Intensive English is a compact three-week course offered to get first-year students ready for university study. Online learning was something new for both students and instructors. A key challenge in online learning was how to make virtual classroom as lively and interactive as possible. The aim of this study was thus to design an instructional program which integrated various technological tools and applications to optimize the virtual classroom. The 63 first-year students from two intact sections of Intensive English were used as participants of the study. A technology acceptance model (TAM) questionnaire (Davis, 1989; Hernandez, 2021) was adapted to assess the effectiveness of the instructional program. The results of the study revealed that all of the participants achieved the overall objective of the course and the target CEFR’s A2 level. They found their online learning experience rewarding. They were satisfied with this online learning experience and were willing to participate in similar online learning in the future. Additionally, recommendations for further research were discussed

Towards a user oriented analytical approach to learning design

The London Pedagogy Planner (LPP) is a prototype for a collaborative online planning and design tool that supports lecturers in developing, analysing and sharing learning designs. The tool is based on a developing model of the components involved in learning design and the critical relationships between them. As a decision tool it makes the pedagogical design explicit as an output from the process, capturing it for testing, redesign, reuse and adaptation by the originator, or by others. The aim is to test the extent to which we can engage lecturers in reflecting on learning design, and make them part of the educational community that discovers how best to use technology‐enhanced learning. This paper describes the development of LPP, presents pedagogical benefits of visual representations of learning designs and proposes an analytical approach to learning design based on these visual representations. The analytical approach is illustrated based on an initial evaluation with a small group of lecturers from two partner institutions

FORGE: An eLearning Framework for Remote Laboratory Experimentation on FIRE Testbed Infrastructure

The Forging Online Education through FIRE (FORGE) initiative provides educators and learners in higher education with access to world-class FIRE testbed infrastructure. FORGE supports experimentally driven research in an eLearning environment by complementing traditional classroom and online courses with interactive remote laboratory experiments. The project has achieved its objectives by defining and implementing a framework called FORGEBox. This framework offers the methodology, environment, tools and resources to support the creation of HTML-based online educational material capable accessing virtualized and physical FIRE testbed infrastruc- ture easily. FORGEBox also captures valuable quantitative and qualitative learning analytic information using questionnaires and Learning Analytics that can help optimise and support student learning. To date, FORGE has produced courses covering a wide range of networking and communication domains. These are freely available from FORGEBox.eu and have resulted in over 24,000 experiments undertaken by more than 1,800 students across 10 countries worldwide. This work has shown that the use of remote high- performance testbed facilities for hands-on remote experimentation can have a valuable impact on the learning experience for both educators and learners. Additionally, certain challenges in developing FIRE-based courseware have been identified, which has led to a set of recommendations in order to support the use of FIRE facilities for teaching and learning purposes

An Immersive Telepresence System using RGB-D Sensors and Head Mounted Display

We present a tele-immersive system that enables people to interact with each other in a virtual world using body gestures in addition to verbal communication. Beyond the obvious applications, including general online conversations and gaming, we hypothesize that our proposed system would be particularly beneficial to education by offering rich visual contents and interactivity. One distinct feature is the integration of egocentric pose recognition that allows participants to use their gestures to demonstrate and manipulate virtual objects simultaneously. This functionality enables the instructor to ef- fectively and efficiently explain and illustrate complex concepts or sophisticated problems in an intuitive manner. The highly interactive and flexible environment can capture and sustain more student attention than the traditional classroom setting and, thus, delivers a compelling experience to the students. Our main focus here is to investigate possible solutions for the system design and implementation and devise strategies for fast, efficient computation suitable for visual data processing and network transmission. We describe the technique and experiments in details and provide quantitative performance results, demonstrating our system can be run comfortably and reliably for different application scenarios. Our preliminary results are promising and demonstrate the potential for more compelling directions in cyberlearning.Comment: IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia 201

Using Appropriate E-learning Systems to Optimize Teaching and Learning

The aim of this systematic research project was todetermine the utility of various learning management system toolsand correlate them with known factors of student success. Threedistinct principles were assimilated to derive a framework forusing web-based modes to improve student success. Thisframework was then supported via evidence found in theliterature and practical experience. The three principles, orstatements, were: 1) “Five factors are found to play a significantrole in student achievement: high expectations, demonstratedconcern, structure, information, and collaboration.” 2) “It iswidely agreed that student engagement and active learning play amajor role in student success.” 3) “Learning management systemsare known to be good administrative tools and informationrepositories, but the question is whether they actually improvestudent learning.” Specific tools, such as forums, quizzing, andsimulations were correlated with various predictors of studentsuccess. The framework was applied and demonstrated effectivefor improving student success