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

Abstract

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