Online students : relationships between participation, demographics and academic performance

Using information technology to support teaching and learning is becoming ubiquitous in tertiary education. However, how students participate and perform when a major component of the learning experience is conducted via an online learning environment is still an open question. The objective of this study was to investigate whether any relationships existed between the participation, demographics and academic performance of students in an information technology course that was taught wholly online. Tracking data generated by the online learning environment was collected throughout the semester. Through a detailed analysis of this tracking data it was found that a relationship existed between students' participation in the online learning environment and their performance, as measured by final results in the course. Relationships also existed between gender, nationality, participation and performance. However, there was no relationship between age and performance and participation. These findings suggest that when designing online learning for a diverse population, student demographics should be taken into account to maximise the benefits of the learning experience. The results also suggest that the tracking data can be used as an early indicator of students who are likely to fail the course since lack of participation early in the semester is indicative of lower outcomes in the course. Being able to identify such students allows staff to take remedial action proactively rather than reactively in the latter part of the semester.

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.

Accommodating culture and cultural diversity in online teaching

The term 'culture' has been in common use for a long time. However there is no universally accepted definition and hence it is important to define clearly what culture means in a particular research context. The research reported here is part of a project undertaken at a large Australian university in late 2005. The overall aim of the project was to identify the characteristics of culture and cultural diversity, and to consider how these manifested themselves when teaching and learning in an online environment. The article reports on particular outcomes from the second stage of the project. This involved conducting focus groups with experienced academics and educational developers of online units. The aim was to gain an understanding of culture and cultural difference in the online environment and to consider what strategies were effective in teaching a culturally diverse cohort of online students. The findings from the focus group sessions were benchmarked with other external faculty. The cultural factors of ethnicity and language, attitudes to educational learning, education and prior learning, learning styles and socio-economic background were well supported by the external faculty. However the factors of religion and gender were not supported. Practices for accommodating such cultural differences amongst students within the online class are presented.

How online learning in an engineering-physics course helped us flip the classroom

Distance education has developed in the past 25 years or so as a way of supplying education to people who would not have access to local college education facilities. This includes students who live in remote regions, students who lack mobility, and students with full-time jobs. More recently this has been renamed to "online learning". Deakin University in Australia has been teaching freshman engineering physics simultaneously to on-campus and online students since the late1990's. The course is part of an online Bachelor of Engineering major that is accredited by the Institution of Engineers Australia.* In this way Deakin answers the call to provide engineering education "anywhere, anytime."**The course has developed and improved with the available educational technology. Starting with printed study guides, a textbook, CD-ROMS, and snail-mail, and telephone/email correspondence with students, the course has seen the rise of websites, online course notes, discussion boards, streamed video lectures, web-conferencing classes and lab sessions, and online submission of student work. Most recently the on-campus version of the course has shifted from a traditional lecture/tutorial/lab format to a flipped-classroom format. The use of lectures has been reduced while the use of tutorials and practical exercises has increased. Primary learning is now accomplished by watching videos prepared by the lecturer and studying the textbook.Offering this course for several years by distance education made this process considerably easier. Most of the educational "infrastructure" was already in place, and the course's delivery to a non-classroom cohort was already established. Thus many elements of the new structure did not have to be produced from scratch. Improvements to the course website and all the course material has benefited all students, both online and on-campus.The new course structure was delivered for the first time in 2014, has run for two semesters, and will continue in 2015. Student learning and performance is being measured by assignment and exam marks for both on-campus and off-campus students. Students are also surveyed to gauge how well they received the new innovations, especially the video presentations on the lab experiments. It was found that student performance in the new structure was no worse than that in the older structure (average on-campus grades increased 10%), and students in general welcomed the changes. Similar transitions are being implemented in other courses in Deakin's engineering degree program.This presentation will show how physics is taught to online students, outline the changes made to support flipping the on-campus classroom, and how that process benefited the off-campus cohort.

Freshman residential schools for undergraduate on-campus and on-line engineering students

By means of evidence-based practice, this paper describes the residential-school component of an accredited online (distance education) undergraduate engineering program in Australia, with a particular focus on how the residential school program is implemented at freshman year. During these residential schools, activities were organised around the respective engineering courses undertaken by students during the semester. Elements considered suitable and worthwhile for inclusion in residential-school programs included: • In-person engagement with academic lecturers, • Practical and laboratory learning activities, • Presentations and interaction with guest speakers from industry, • Industry-based site visits, • Engagement in sole and group-based learning and assessment activities on campus, and • Social interaction with other students. After running pilot residential schools for two years, it was found that a workable format consisted in a two-week residential experience in the first semester, linked to two key freshman courses, Fundamentals of Technology Management, and Engineering Physics. On-campus and online students’ academic grades were compared for both courses over the years 2005 to 2012. We found that for physics lab, on-campus students’ grades tended to be higher than those for online students, and vice versa for technology management. We also conclude that when carefully designed, residential schools for online students do enhance learning for both online students and their on-campus counterparts.

Tools for enhancing oral proficiency and cultural understanding in teaching Arabic online to non-native speakers

One of the main challenges learners of Arabic as a foreign language face in Australia is the lack of opportunities to practice the language with native speakers of Arabic outside the classroom boundaries to enhance their language skills in general and their oral proficiency in particular. Learners have so little exposure to Arabic outside the classroom. This restriction in L2 exposure in the formal academic framework is due to the limited face-to-face learning time and, more significantly, is compounded by lack of exposure to the language’s authentic use settings. Students are often isolated from the target language’s authentic discourse communities and native speakers. This situation is exacerbated for Cloud (online) students studying in relative isolation. All of these factors make developing communicative oral fluency in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) more difficult and challenging for many learners, particularly for Cloud learners. Deakin University is the only university in Australia that offers Arabic in both Campus and Cloud modes of delivery. This paper discusses an innovative approach used at Deakin University to enable online learners of Arabic to practice their developing skills by listening, practicing, and experiencing directly how the language is used outside the classroom boundaries. In addition to providing Cloud learners with an Arabic online environment rich with interactive opportunities to practice the language, it was also necessary to provide the learners with tools such as the virtual classrooms, chat rooms, discussion forums and social media language partner programs, to practice their oral fluency and enrich their learning experience.

The effects of facilitation on punctuated equilibrium in e-collaboration projects

Information technology has transformed the “heartland” of education around the world. Classrooms are global, students international, but traditional methods and their adjacent challenges persist or are exacerbated in online schoolhouses. There is reason to believe that team performance of online students completing team projects can be significantly improved by the active participation of a facilitator. What could explain such improvement? Given the communication barriers that learners can experience using e-learning technologies, the skill of a teacher at facilitating an understanding of e-collaboration and the prescient need to facilitate collaborative skills at all times is essential to a successful educational result. There may also be generational learning style issues to consider. One practical, proven tool is progress reporting. This paper reviews the literature and reflects on author experiences in the online education of Management students at universities in the United States and Australia to draw theoretical connections with communication, leadership, and punctuated equilibrium relevant to contemporary educational practice. The implications of effective facilitation of student teams for Management education and management of student performance are explored.

Innovation in language education: enriching Arabic language learner experiences and proficiency in 2D and 3D environments.

Abstract:-Global language and cultural communicative competency is an ever increasing requirement in our connected world. Learners of Arabic at the only five Australian universities where Arabic is taught have access to predominantly on-campus delivery modes. One of the main challenges learners face when learning another language (L2) in an academic setting in countries where that language is not actively used – so little L2 exposure – is that it is harder to provide meaningful contexts for learning. This restriction in L2 exposure in the formal academic framework is due to the limited face-to-face learning time and, more significantly, is compounded by lack of exposure to the language‟s authentic use settings. Students are often isolated from the target language‟s authentic discourse communities and native speakers. This situation is exacerbated for Cloud (online) students, studying in relative isolation. All of these factors make developing communicative oral fluency in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) moredifficult and challenging for many learners. This paper will discuss two innovative approaches used at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia to enable learners of Arabic at Deakin University to practice their developing skills by listening, practising, and experiencing directly how the language is used outside the classroom boundaries as well as allow learners to develop their oral and cultural communicative competency by engaging them in simulating and evolving authentic language scenarios with native Arabic speakers through the Virtual World (VW).

Can an online tutorial pass the test for library instruction? An evaluation and comparison of library skills instruction methods for first year students at Deakin University

An online, interactive tutorial, Smart Searcher, was introduced at Deakin University as part of the Iibrary's information skills program in late 2000. As liaison librarians responsible for library skills training we wanted to compare and evaluate this mode of instruction with our normal face-to-face delivery of library instruction. This study found that students with face-to-face instruction did, in fact, gain higher posttest mean scores than students completing the online tutorial. Also, students attending these library sessions felt more confident about their library skills than those in the online tutorial only session.

Learning how to engage students online in hard times

In a context of financial restraint and enterprising university managers, teacher-researchers have reason to be sceptical about the trend towards online teaching and away from learning for its own sake. This article departs from both economic and technological determinism and turns instead to ideas about technology embedded in social and political institutions. Activity theory offers a useful means of analysing such embeddedness. Its Marxian assumptions about human nature specify a non-deterministic approach to technology. Its dynamic model of the subjects, tools, and objects of activity within a context of rules, a community, and a division of labour helps to specify aspects of the authors process of learning how to use electronic conferencing effectively. A full deployment of activity theory would also analyse the activity of students. Here the evidence comes mainly from the activity of researcher-teachers engaging greater activity among students. The numbers of students involved precludes reliable quantitative analysis but qualitative evidence from students does support conclusions about researcher-teachers learning how to make best use of electronic conferencing.

Students' perspective of online learning

When a student commences a course of study that includes an online component the initial feedback academics receive can reflect their fear of the online concept, their bias against the use of technology, as well as difficulties they may have encountered with using the supporting technologies rather than with online learning per se. In second semester 2002, an evaluation of an online unit in the B. Computing was conducted at the end of the semester to gain a better understanding of students’ perceptions of online learning as well as the effectiveness of the technologies that support these activities. We report some preliminary results from the evaluation. Initial indications are that poor first impressions are reflected in students’ perceptions of the overall online learning experience. We highlight some areas, normally considered outside the immediate domain of eLearning, that must be attended to in order to minimise the potential negative impact on students, maximise the benefits of learning online and improve the learning experience for students.

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.

Renegotiating the pedagogical peace : a case study in online discussions for undergraduate on campus students

This paper reports an investigation into the ways in which undergraduate students, who are studying on campus, learn in online discussions. The study focuses on student strategies, and the role of text, time and place independence, peer interaction and the influence of the curriculum. It also examines the relationships between online discussions and face to face classes. The study found deep approaches to learning were widely used and were associated with constructivist learning activity, thinking and interacting online in groups in a way that adds value to the classroom, close integration with face to face activity and a positive perception of online discussions and the course as a whole. This case study confirms the relational nature of student learning in a blended learning environment.