Academic performance & student engagement in level 1 physics undergraduates

At the beginning of academic year 2007-08, staff in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Glasgow started to implement a number of substantial changes to the administration of the level 1 physics undergraduate class. The main aims were to improve the academic performance and progression statistics. With this in mind, a comprehensive system of learning support was introduced, the main remit being the provision of an improved personal contact and academic monitoring and support strategy for all students at level 1. The effects of low engagement with compulsory continuous assessment components had already been observed to have a significant effect for students sitting in the middle of the grade curve. Analysis of data from the 2007-08 class showed that even some nominally high-achieving students achieved lowered grades due to the effects of low engagement. Nonetheless, academic and other support measures put in place during 2007-08 played a part in raising the passrate for the level 1 physics class by approximately 8% as well as raising the progression rate by approximately 10%.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure

Improving the effectiveness of tools for Internet-based education

This report presents results of a study of a class of high-school teachers learning about the Internet in an internet-based course called "Internet Overview". The course was implemented using a prototype of a new web course development tool called Moodle that uses constructionist referents to model engagement of the participants with course content and each other. The intention of the research was to identify areas to improve Moodle as a tool to build and run effective internet-based courses. The action research focused on the factors affecting the level and quality of participation in the course, as well as the quality of reflective thinking, interactivity and cognitive support. An online survey of the students, combined with voluminous texts and records created by all participants of the course, led to interviews with students selected for their interesting responses. These texts provided the data with which I attempted to understand how various factors affected the experiences of learning and teaching in this internet-based course. The results suggest that Moodle as it stands is relatively successful as a tool to produce structured content with workbook-like responses. Two areas needing the most improvement are internet knowledge and student interaction. This encourages me to continue development on two fronts: firstly the Internet Overview course as a tool for students to learn about the Internet; and secondly, functions within Moodle to encourage and manage educational discourse among a class of students within its content-based framework

MOODLE: Using learning communities to create an open source course management system

This paper summarizes a PhD research project that has contributed towards the development of Moodle - a popular open-source course management system (moodle.org). In this project we applied theoretical perspectives such as "social constructionism" and "connected knowing" to the analysis of our own online classes as well as the growing learning community of other Moodle users. We used the mode of participatory action research, including techniques such as case studies, ethnography, learning environment surveys and design methodologies. This ongoing analysis is being used to guide the development of Moodle as a tool for improving processes within communities of reflective inquiry. At the time of writing (April 2003), Moodle has been translated into twenty-seven languages and is being used by many hundreds of educators around the world, including universities, schools and independent teachers

Creating a professional community of reflective inquiry: Tales of reform via the World Wide Web

In this paper we explain the ongoing development of our web-based teaching and illustrate how, over 3-4 years, key critical events precipitated the incremental transformation of our online teaching. Our narrative tells how we moved from inviting voluntary student participation in online collaboration to requiring and assessing participation. How we struggled with achieving the right balance between individual and collaborative student learning. How we developed increasingly powerful conceptual tools (metaphor, autobiography, framing, re-visioning) for engaging students in critical reflective inquiry. How we engaged students as managers of their online discourse community. We illustrate how our collaborative action research into the transformative possibilities of innovative web-based teaching has taken us forward as teachers and learners

Interpretive analysis of an internet-based course constructed using a new courseware tool called Moodle

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Developing understandings: Web-Based learning and critical (self) reflection in teacher education

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Monitoring the development of a professional community of reflective inquiry via the World Wide Web

An ARC Small grant has enabled us to develop a questionnaire - the Constructivist On Line Learning Environment Survey (COLLES) - to support the use of the World Wide Web for teaching in higher education, especially for postgraduate professional development programs for which social constructivism is a key referent of instructional design. The efficacy of innovative Web-based teaching for engaging distance learners in a community of reflective inquiry can now be evaluated by including a measure of learners’ perceptions of their on-line classroom environment. The COLLES comprises the following scales. •Professional Relevance - the extent to which engagement in the on-line classroom environment is relevant to students’ professional worldviews and related practices; •Reflective Thinking - the extent to which critical reflective thinking is occurring; •Interactivity - the extent to which communicative interactivity is occurring on-line between students and between students and tutors; •Cognitive Demand - the extent to which challenges and communicative role modelling is provided by tutors; •Affective Support - the extent to which sensitive and encouraging support is provided by tutors; and •Interpretation of Meaning - the extent to which students and tutor co-construct meaning in a congruent and connected manner. The COLLES can be used on-line by university teachers, teacher-researchers, researchers and evaluators who are interested in the educational role of the Web for promoting much-needed epistemological reform of university distance teaching and learning. In this presentation we shall demonstrate how to gain access to the COLLES web-site and complete the questionnaire, and how to access the results which are generated automatically and displayed in tabular and graphical formats. Participants will be invited to make use of the COLLES in their own on-line teaching