Week14 Blog reflection

What was the most difficult aspect of researching this topic?

I researched social presence in online learning. Social presence is the degree to which a person in perceived as "real" in mediated communication, so building social presence is vital for the learning, because when a learner construct social presence in online environment, he/she can participate in learning more actively, and it helps to increase the satisfaction about the learning and the instructor.

While I was researching this topic, the most difficult thing was defining social presence. I was confused with social presence and the interaction at first, but I found out that interaction is exchanging opinions each other through the discussion board or other media, and it can be an indicator of the social presence, but social presence is somewhat more deep perception of themselves in online environment, so those are totally different.

Also, I first tried to focus on K-12 level, especially elementary school level, because I think constructing social presence in online environment might be harder for young children than an adult learner. Thus, I tried to find out research exploring K-12 level, but I could only find 2-3 research, and those researches also focused on the other factors (i.e. emoticons and social presence) rather than social presence itself.

I had a couple of difficulties, but from this experience, I learned more about the relationship between social presence and online learning, and ways to enhance social presence in online environment from the interview.

Final presentation

Presentation- I included slide note, you can find it by clicking "Action-Show speaker notes"

Final presentation


References

Final reference list

Week11 Blog Reflection

Q. What did you learn this week that struck you as particularly important in learning about virtual schools? Has your thinking changed as a result of what you learned this week?

One notable advantage of asynchronous discussion is learning can be enhanced through "extended think time," which means providing time for learners to think about the answers before responding, according to the research by Haaavind(2006). Also, the online discussion is delivered solely by text, learners could focus on the content and the goal of the discussion better than face-to-face learners. The author found out that collaborative discussion, which is exchanging opinions with sufficient depth and levels of engagement so that learners could deepen their thought (such as higher-order critical thinking) and knowledge about the subject, is possible through online asynchronous discussion. Several findings of this research struck me.

1. The discussion is highly focused on stated learning goals.
2. Collaborative discussion is possible when the instructor provides frequent, private, constructive feedback, and avoids public praise or critique.
3. Collaborative dialogue is enhanced when the discussion is designed in detail.
4. Social community of the learners could be developed by ice breaking activities.
5. Posting responses to others promotes a consistent thread depth

Another thing that I agree with this study is the part that the author states about the advantage of the online learning research. Online learning data is conducted via computer, which means that the research has no impact on the class. Researchers could conduct data without intruding the class.

Week10 Blog Reflection

Q. What did you learn this week that struck you as particularly important in learning about virtual schools? Has your thinking changed as a result of what you learned this week?

I learned that researching virtual school is difficult because of too many variables. We could not conclude online learning is better than face to face learning in terms of achievement. According to Hughes et al (2007), "[they] consider [the] achievement data "suggestive" because it was impossible for [them] to get consistent, high-quality data" due to low response rate, small class size, and lack of data which can be used as a statistical control for a prior knowledge.

On the other hand, interestingly, most of the researches indicate that online learning can have the same (or better) effect on academic achievement when compared to traditional learning. In ED PACE final report (Rockman et al, 2007), they found out that students who were taking online class outperformed students who were in traditional class in terms of Spanish proficiency except speaking which was hard to practice online. Also, they report that virtual students are better prepared for the next level of the course than students who were taking same course in the traditional school. Online students are eager to participate, highly responsible, and they feel in control of their learning. Of course, this interview is conducted from the teacher, and need more research to be proven, I think these are interesting results of the online learning research.

Week9 Blog Reflection

Q. Now that you have seen what other people did in creating their units, is there anything that you might do differently if you were to redesign your own unit?


I think I would add two things in my own unit, if I were to redesign mine.

First one is synchronous discussion. My unit only has asynchronous discussion that students post their ideas and respond to others. However, since the model of my unit is virtual classroom and class-paced, I think it is possible that students discuss synchronously using Skype or some other tools, and it gives a chance to meet other classmates and it motivates students.

Another thing is pre-assessment for the unit. I think diagnose students’ readiness is quite important for the students who are taking online course because it is hard to catch up the lessons if they don’t have pre-knowledge of the unit in the online course, especially for the math or science. Therefore, I would add pre-assessment as a gate for taking the course, so that recommending students to take a lower level course which is more suitable for them, if students do not reach certain level.

Week7 Blog reflection

What are you most concerned about as you embark on creating a curriculum unit?

I'm concerning about how to incorporate interactive aspects in the unit. We've learned interactions between students-students/ students-teacher/ student-contents so far, and I think that the success of the virtual classroom depends on how well design interactive course.

In this interaction, frequency is important because increasing frequency also promotes student's engagement and retention of content. Thus, I have to consider the design of various kinds of interactions forms from simple questions-answers to collaborative problem solving or knowledge construction which promotes high-order thinking.

Also, quality of interaction is important as well, and this can be improved by diagnostic or remedial feedback. It promotes better outcomes and makes learners have responsibility for learning. Therefore, I need to think about how to improve interactions between various elements when I design the course, and that’s the most important key factor of online learning.

Week6 Blog reflection

Did you change anything in the Google spreadsheet? If so, what? Has your view of the schools you chose to research changed from the first week you looked at them? If so, how?

I was little skeptical about the possibilities of online discussion before this week, because I thought that online discussion had many downsides. For instance, I thought online learning could not have vigorous discussion because it is asynchronous and some student might not care about the discussion if they are not online.

However, after I read the article, and discussed with others, I find out that online discussion can be a powerful tool to make student learn deeply about the topic. Especially, from the asynchronous discussion, students can have enough time for organizing their thought, and developing their deep thinking.

Of course, to make discussion successful, the teacher need to offer clear guidance for students and the learning community should be built before the discussion.