Developing High Quality Interaction and Reflection

Teaching and Learning Research Project 2007-08

Developing High Quality Interaction and Reflection

through Online Forums

Dr Katya Toneva, ICTDepartment, EsherCollege

Executive Summary

The development of an adequate exam technique is one of the prerequisites for successful A-level ICT course completion. Our teaching experience shows that the students needa great deal ofpractice and support to develop relevant skills to answer exam questions.

It is suggested that online discussions could offer high quality interaction, reflection, and continuous feedback. Having the student motivation and relevant e-facilitation we could expect that online forums would help students to build up relevant skills to answer exam questions. In addition, the discussions in an online environment could help students to develop their written communication skills.

Since the beginning of this academic year two A2 ICT groups (twenty students in total) have been involved in interactive and reflective online activities based on past exam questions. Within our one year pilot project we ran thirty four forums (seventeenforums per group). All the forums, student contributions and teacher summaries are available on Portal.

Before the commencement of the online discussion, the students werebriefed, in a face to face environment, on the task they needed to do. The students were asked to sign a code of conduct for using on-line discussion groups.

The studentswere well motivated to learn and contribute to the forums (the online discussions objectives and content matched their A2 ICT exam needs and interests – developing of knowledge and skills to answer exam type questions). Some of the online questions were completed during the lessons, other online discussions were developed beyond lesson time.

At the commencement, the teacher acted as an e-facilitator and encouraged the students to contribute to the forums. The big advantage of asynchronicity was that studentswere able to explore and reflect on information at their own pace.

The teacher provided individual feedback for each of the students and they contributed again to the forum reaching the right answers in quick succession. The teacher provided summaries indentifying the strengths and common weaknesses in students’ answers. At the beginning, there was not a good dynamic of student-student dialogue. However, the interactions student-teacher and teacher-student became very effective. The students needed a great deal of encouragement and guidance before becoming active contributors.

Gradually, the students started to process information successfully and became more proactive in their learning. They showed good skills to share ideas, to provide constructive feedback and to consider the others’ feedback. At this stage the dialoguestudent-student showed a better dynamic together with student-teacher and teacher-student interactions.

The students also realised that the discussion boards would be a useful learning resource for exam revision - they were ableto reflect to what was published later, when they needed to summarise key terms, concepts and exam tips.

Giving students (in turn) the role of e-facilitation aimed to help them to develop critical skills of a high quality – ability to analyse key ICT concepts and evaluate their own progress during the discussions. Having the potential of “text-based asynchronous interaction”, students were able to reflect on their own and their peers’ theoretical knowledge and practices.

It is notable that students understood their responsibility as e-facilitators and they were prepared to act as experts on the forum topic and to advise their peers how to answer to an exam question in order to achieve the maximum mark. Acting in this way, the e-facilitators helped their peers to develop further their topic knowledge and exam technique, and at the same time they helped themselves to develop deeper understanding of ICT concepts.

The online forum interactions and reflections showed that the e-facilitation role appealed to both more able and weaker students – all the students liked the opportunity to establish their image of ICT subject knowledgeable people and to be treated with respect as topic advisers.

After a few online discussions, a high quality interaction student-student was achieved. The students were able to develop the forums themselves in the right direction and the e-facilitation role provoked strong reflective skills. The studentstook personal ownership of their learning experiences and assisted peers within their study groups. The teacher provided the final summary of the forums evaluating both the members and the e-facilitator contributions, confirming the correct answers and re-enforcing the relevant exam technique.

We have found that the e-facilitation role stimulates reflective thinking and prepares the students for the next stage - sharing problem-based situations or scenarios that require interpretation information, creativity and willingness to test assumptions. Within the final stage of the research project, as a part of the A2 ICT exam revision, online discussions on exam essay scenariostook place. The essay discussion forums helped the students to enforce and reflect on the higher order skills of analysis and evaluation:

• breaking down the material in a way that helps reveal the issues involved;
• using relevant ICT concepts to explore causes and effects;
• stating the most important supportive arguments;
• examining arguments critically.

We have found that the students took advantage of asynchronicity of the online forums. In their own time and remotely, they were able to reflect on the discussed issues which helped them to develop deeper understanding, to provide online support to the other participants and to consider their feedback – this has been confirmed by the student dialogues available on Portal.

The comments received from the students were very positive. Detailed feedback and analysis are included in the case study attached to this executive summary. Below are some results and illustrations of student feedback.

The students were given a multiple choice: I strongly agree/I agree/I disagree/I strongly disagree, to make references the following positive comments:

Comment 1:The online educational forums are useful learning resource for me.

Comment 2: The online educational forums help me to understand specific ICT terms and concepts.

Comment 3:The online educational forums help me to understand how to answer examination questions.

It was great to see that 85% of the students agreed with the firstand second comment, 90% agreed with the third comment. Ten percents students strongly agreed with the first comment and 5% strongly agreed with the second and third comment. Ten percents students disagreed with the second comment and 5% - disagreed with the first and third comment. However, these students confirmed that they had done a few contributions to the forums, read the other student contributions and found the exam tips useful, but they preferred to use mainly the ICT book which goes with the course.There was not any reference to “Strongly disagree” option.

The graphical illustration below(Figure 1) shows clearly that most of students agreed with the three comments. Small percentages answers are spread across “Strongly agree” and “Disagree”- answers and there is no answer “Strongly disagree”.

Figure 1

The next charts (Figures 2, 3 and 4) show the spread of the student references to each of the three comments. The green parts from the charts clearly present again, that the most popular answer related to each of the comments is “Agree”.

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

We believe that our research, experience, analysis, created models and guides would be useful for many subjects across the college. Developing an adequate exam technique including essay writing technique is one of the main objectives for a range of courses and our pilot project has shown that the online forums could facilitate this process. In addition, apart from past-exam questions forums, we could advise on other reflective online activities.

We produced and enclosed aguide “How to create an online discussion group on College Portal” which leads straight to the practical online forum environment. We have also included a case study, analysis, examples of student feedback andappendices which could be useful not only for teachers in Sixth form colleges, but also for a number of other educationalists. In addition, we developed a second version of our final report including a detailed theoretical background and analysis, which could be useful for similar research projects in future. The second version is available as a separate publication.

How to create an online discussion group on College Portal

Simple Step by Step Guide

14. Click OK.

15. Select New, then Add Users.

16.Type the code of the group, then select permission

(“Contribute” permission is recommended for students).

17. It is a good practice to send welcome message with a subject line completed.

18. If you wish, you could add a personal message to the group and then click OK.

You can see the group code and the given permission

in the Users/Groups list.

20. Type the name of the teacher who will manage the forum, then select permission. Full control is recommended as the teacher should be able to edit or delete not only her/his own comments, but also the student comments if necessary.

21. It is a good practice to send welcome message with a subject line completed.

22. Submit the completed options by clicking “OK”.

You can see in the Users/Groups list the permissions set up for the teacher.

23. Click on the discussion group you have created.

24. Select New, then Discussion in order to set up a discussion topic and to introduce the tasks or questions.

Please note that the novices always need encouragement in order to develop active online dialogues. You may need to make the first contribution to the discussion suggesting some answer tips.

25. Type the discussion topic.

26. In the message body, type the task(s) or question(s) for a discussion, then click OK.

27. Now, the relevant users can start discussions – they need to click on the topic.

All the users who were given permissions can find and use the created discussion group following the next simple steps:

College Portal

click on Subject areas

click on the relevant subject, i.e. ICT

click on Subject Collaboration

click on Discussions

click on the discussion group, i.e. 1ITAC1

click on the topic, i.e. Relational Databases – introduction, then click “Reply”.

Click “Reply”

Now, the user should type his/her contribution (answer) and then click OK to submit the reply to the forum.

Please note, that you can use the online forum software facilities in the same way as using MS Word, e.g.,text editing and text formatting.

In addition, if you wish, you can copy and paste images or you can use the “Attach File” –option to attach file to your forum message.

A2 ICT course Case study

Since the beginning of this academic year two groups A2 ICT students have been involved in interactive and reflective online activities based on past exam questions.

Within our one year pilot project we ranthirty four forums (seventeen forums per group). All the forums, student contributions and the teacher summaries are available on Portal. The screenshots below show the topic lists for each of the groups 2ITAA1 and 2ITAC1.

Before the commencement of the online discussion, the students have been first briefed, in a face to face environment, on the task they needed to do. Some of the online questions were completed during the lessons, other online discussions were developed beyond the lesson time.

Objectives:

 to develop student skills to share, explore and reflect on information and knowledge, to provide constructive feedback using text-based asynchronous interaction;

 to develop student reflective thinking by sharing problem-based situations or scenarios that require interpretation of information;

 to develop student written communication skills.

The research has been carried out through the following activities:

 Producing a Code of Conduct for using online forums and asking the students to sign it.

 Providing a range of reflective task-based activities and encouraging the students to contribute online remotely in their own time.

 Ensuring regular online feedback: student-teacher, student-student, teacher-student.

 Providing regular e-facilitation for the forum: setting up one discussion topic per week (in average), managing the discussion groups and publishing a summary at the end of any discussion.

It is acknowledged that the online discussions on past exam questions within A2 ICT groups could contribute to the overall understanding of e-learning and e-facilitating process.

At the beginning of the project, the teacher acted as an e-facilitator, encouraged the students to contribute to the forum, provided individual feedback to each of them and a summary at the end of each forum. One of the common weaknesses in student answers to exam questions has been the lack of providing specific examples in the given context. The students have needed guidance and support to meet this requirement for AQA examination.

Below is one of the “Organisational structure” scenarios. Due to respect to students confidentiality the names are not shown, but they can be seen on Portal from all the parties who have access to the forums.

ORGANISATIONAL STRUCTURE

Describe what is meant by the following terms, and give an example of each:

(a) a data processing system;

(3 marks)

b) a management information system.

(3 marks)

(AQA Jan 03 Q2)

The teacher provided individual feedback for each of the students and they contributed again to the forum reaching the right answers in quick succession. The teacher provided summaries during the session indentifying the strengths and common weaknesses in the students’ answers. At this stage, there was not a good dynamic of the student-student dialogue. However, the interactions student-teacher and teacher-student became very effective. The students needed a lot of encouragement and guidance before becoming active contributors. It has been hard e-facilitation work, but very rewarding. At the end of the forum, all the students were able to provide specific examples and started to realise that they could not achieve a high mark in their exam papers unless they learn to consider the context of the question and be able to provide examples in the given context.

Below are some samples of student-teacher and teacher-student interaction. The students considered the teacher feedback and they were able to provide the required specific examples.

Dialoguestudent R. – teacher KTT – student R.:

Posted: 03/10/2007 16:01


R.
/ Student- R.
(a) a data processing system;
a data processing system is a computer system that deals with day-to-day transactions of a firm or organisation. The transactions that will be done will be at operational level. An example is an online cinema booking system with a purpose of reserving seats and tickets.
(b) a management information system.
A management information system or MIS is a system that changes data from both external and internal sources into information formatted appropriately. This information is usually sent to managers at different levels of the organisation. An example of this is the total sales of cinematickets in the past week.
Edited: 03/10/2007 18:25


KTT
/ Teacher: KTT
R., thank you very much for your contribution to this question. Very good definition and example for "Data processing system"!
Can you please think about the key point of Management Information Systems - "MIS provides information for the managers to make decisions"?
Please take this point into consideration in order to adjust your example for Management Information System - you should consider some Sales Manager decision based on the analysis of the information "Total sales of cinema tickets". What kind of decision you could suggest?
I would like to see ideas from the other members ofthe group. Please contribute moreexamples for both a) and b) parts of this past exam question.
Trust me, you all can benefit a lot from the online discussions if you contribute to them.
I am looking forward to meet all of you at the forum (before the next lesson please).
Katya
Posted: 04/10/2007 15:16


R.
/ Student- R.
Hi Katya, the information from the MIS should tell the manager the amount of sales and money made in the past week. With this information sent from the MIS, the manager will know how thebusiness is doing and may gain some clue into how his stock levels are.
Is this the kind of thing you wanted?
Posted: 05/10/2007 09:14



KTT
/ Teacher: KTT
R.,
Yes, the Manager would know "how the business is doing and may gain some clue into how his stock levels are", but can you please provide an example what decision the manager could make on the basis of this information.
The rest of the students are also welcome to give examples for the manager decisions in this context (underlined above).
Katya
R. considered the teacher feedback again and he was able to justify his answer:
Posted: 05/10/2007 14:19


R.
/ Student: R.
Sorry Katya, the information that will be received will give the manager the decision whether to order more stock or to discontinue a product if it is not selling. This will be in the long term.

DialogueStudent C. – teacher KTT – student C and teacher’s summary