Solving problems collaboratively online : experiences of Australian and Chinese heritage university students

The research reported in this paper is part of a larger project designed to compare the online collaborative learning behaviours of Chinese Heritage Culture (CHC) university students, for whom a Chinese dialect is a first language, with Australian university students of European descent, and for whom English is a first language. The collaborative learning discussion focussed on in the research involved fellow students, rather than tutorial staff, facilitating those discussions.

The first component of the research was quantitative, comprising a questionnaire on readiness for online learning, and a quantitative analysis of student postings to a student-led collaborative problem solving task conducted online. The first component of the research (reported in Smith et at, 2005) showed no differences between the two groups in their willingness to self-manage their own learning, but did show that the CHC students were significantly less comfortable than the Australian students with online learning. Student postings to the online discussions were classified into organisational postings, social postings, and intellectual. There were substantial differences between the two groups in their patterns of online postings among those classifications, as well as differences in the length of postings made.

This paper will explore these findings in more detail through qualitative data generated through interviews with a subset of students from each group. Interview data provided further insight into the lesser comfort with e-learning among CHC students. Students from both groups felt there were inefficiencies in the online discussion, but CHC students also felt rather marginalised by the process. Australian students were more likely to evaluate the experience in terms of its capacity to achieve required learning outcomes in a time efficient way, while CHC students expressed more concern about how the process had impacted upon them personally. The interview data also indicated that a tutor sensitive to cultural difference is important for comfort among the CHC students in particular, since there is need for encouragement to those students to make reflective inputs to the discussion.

Virtual experts : who's online?

There will be between 30 and 80 million online students in the world by 2025. Globally, school systems are investing huge resources in the development of online education programs in order to meet this demand. Related implications for online teaching have been largely ignored despite evidence of the greatly increased workload for online teachers and widespread student dissatisfaction with online leaming experiences. Opportunities for improving the online experience for both leamers and teachers revolve around minimizing procedural inefficiencies in dealing with large numbers of individual students, as opposed to a single class, and of enhancing students' social and cognitive engagement with leaming. Intelligent software agents that can automate many routine online tasks and some aspects of leamer interaction have enormous potential to facilitate this. These agents that can act as a personal online coach, mentor or tutor to increase the individualisation of learning. The development of evidence-based agent personas is essential if agents are to fulfil specific educational roles. CUITently there is little progress being made in this area because of the lack of an agentrole model that can be used to implement specific educational personas in agents. In this paper we discuss key foundational elements of the nature and basis for implementing elements of educational expertise in software and how this could be used in developing agent persona models for specific educational roles and a model for implementing pedagogical constructs in intelligent educational software.

The role of the online teacher in supporting student learning: A case study

As teaching and learning environments for many tertiary courses move to online delivery, it is important to ensure effective student learning is still taking place. This paper presents a review of the current literature on the roles of the teacher and e-tutor in e-learning environments. The research presented here is a case study of a wholly online course in which the role of the etutors was examined. This was achieved through analysis of their online interactions with students from two separate offerings of the course. The study found that in this environment the main role undertaken by all e-tutors was a managerial one. Differences were also noted between the roles undertaken by casual e-tutors and faculty staff.

Tutor and teacher timescapes : lessons from a home-school partnership

A partnership project was developed in which parents volunteered to support teachers
in training years 1-3 children in computer skills at a primary school in a small, low
socio-economic community. This article identifies the ways teachers and the ‘tutors’
(as the volunteers were called) understood the value of the project. ‘Being a teacher’
and ‘being a volunteer’ were structured by different forms of social engagement,
which in turn influenced the ways individuals were able to work with each other in
collaborative processes. We argue that the discursive practices encoded in homeschool-
community partnership rhetoric represent ruling-class ways of organising and
networking that may be incompatible with those of people from low socio-economic
backgrounds. When such volunteers work in schools their attendance may be sporadic
and short-term whereas teachers would like ‘reliable’ ongoing commitment. This
mismatch wrought of teachers’ and volunteers’ differing everyday realities needs to be
understood before useful models for partnerships in disadvantaged communities may
be realised.

An examination of the role of the e-tutor

As online learning environments continue to evolve, both teachers and students need to adapt to make the most of opportunities afforded by these environments for teaching and learning. The focus of this paper is on the changing role undertaken by tutors in online learning environments. We present a brief review of the current perspectives on the roles and responsibilities suggested for the e-tutor for effective teaching, and then report on a study where roles of e-tutors in a large wholly online unit were examined. The study supports the view that although the role of the e-tutor is similar to that of the face to face tutor in some respects, there are sufficient differences to make e-tutoring challenging to those who have not undertaken such online activities previously. Ongoing professional development is required to meet the changing demands of the technological environment, as well as the changing needs of
students.