Yoder, M. (2003). Seven steps to successful online learning communities. Learning and Leading with Technology, 30 (6), 14–21.

Yoder (2003) in her article suggested seven steps toward creating successful online

learning communities. They are listed as the following:
1 Begin with Curriculum
2 Spend Time Planning
3 Encourage a Positive Social Climate
4 Understand the Unique Nature of Online Communication
5 Encourage Good Reading and Writing Skills
6 Deal with Inappropriate Behavior and Attitudes.
7 Use Effective Facilitation Skills.

The seven strategies help facilitators setting up high level online communication. These

seven strategies assist teachers’and learners’ smooth transition from a traditional f2f

learning to an online learning community.


Riel and Polin (2004) proposed three major types of online learning community, the task-

based learning community, the practice-based learning community and the knowledge-based

learning community. Because learning communities are diverse in its culture and goals,

besides the seven generalized strategies, online facilitators may need to consider

further. For instance, the role of an instructor of a task-based learning community may be

slightly different from the role of a practice-based learning community.



The seven strategies provide a foundation of building up a successful online learning

community in a generalized approach. Therefore in addition to them, online instructors may

need to look at the facilitation strategies to the learning community based on its

characteristics.

Goodyear, P., Salmon,G., Spector, J. M., Steeples, C., & Tickner, S. (2001). Competences for Online Teaching: A special report. Educational Technology Research and Development, v49(1), p65-72.


Goodyear,Salmon, Spector, Steeples and Tickner (2001) in the article “competence for online teaching” suggested that online teachers have the following roles: content facilitator, technologist, researcher, assessor, designer, adviser/counsellor, process facilitator and manager/administrator. This is very similar as Berge’s (1995) opinion. Berge noted that online instructors’ roles are fallen into pedagogical, social, managerial and technical areas. In fact, online teacher’s role in the “competence for online teaching can be categorised into Berge’s four roles as following:

• Pedagogical: Content Facilitator, assessor, researcher, designer, process facilitator

• Social: process facilitator

• Managerial: process facilitator, manager/administrator

• Technical: technologist

Online teachers’ roles were viewed in different ways in the two articles, but they all suggest that the major roles of a competent online teacher are facilitating, managing, supporting and assessing online learners; and these roles are not much different from the roles of f2f teachers.

Four types of interaction have been identified in the online learning by Chan (2002). They are learner-learner interaction, learner-content interaction, learner-interface interaction and learner-instructor interaction. The major roles of online teachers reflect what a competent online teacher should do to enhance interaction. Here are some examples based on Goodyear’s online teachers’ roles and Chan’s four type of interaction in distance education.

• Learner-learner interaction: process facilitator (creating community and managing communication).

• Learner-interface interaction: technologist (assists students with technical difficulties and makes choice of technology).

• Learner-instructor interaction: manager/administrator, assessing (validation learners’ work).

• Learner-content interaction: Content Facilitator (facilitating learner’s understanding of course content), designer (designing learning tasks).

Berge, Z.L. (1995). Facilitating Computer Conferencing: Recommendations From the Field. Educational Technology

Four roles of online instructor/facilitator were identified in this article and they are categorized into pedagogical, social, managerial, and technical area. Similarly, such roles can also be found in f2f learning environment. When we take a close look at the technical role of online instructor, a question is emerged.


Berge suggested that “the facilitator must make participants comfortable with the system and the software that the conference is using. The ultimate technical goal for the instructor is to make the technology transparent.” Many instructors have had experience of repeatedly answering questions like “I cannot install this software on my PC” or “how do you publish the PPT on the Google Docs”. Instructors may have extra workload on providing technical support than the actual teaching. Furthermore, some questions may be very technical and go beyond instructors’ IT knowledge and ability. This is an issue that an online instructor faces.

Institutes should not expect instructors to be the technical support to online learners. Very often, the decision of using certain software or system, WebCT and Moodle for instance, are not up to instructors. The role and responsibility of online instructors in terms of the technical support should be clarified when offering an online course. To achieve the ultimate goal (make the technology transparent), three parties, instructors, institutes and online learners need to work together.

Challis , D. (2005). Committing to quality learning through adaptive online. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education V30 (5), pp. 519–527.

Adaptation has become a hot topic in recent years. From e-business to e-education, the system was designed to have certain intelligence to customize its services to suit individual need. For instance, amazon.com provides features like recommended products; Google users are able to personalize their own Google home page. Adaptation has been widely employed in e-business systems. However when it comes to education, the concept is extremely different. A business can make profit by recommend one suitable product to customers out of ten inaccurate recommendations. But in education, it is dangerous to provide learners inaccurate instructions just because based on predefined rules, this instruction may be suitable for learners in his/her level.

Adaptive assessment, in the journal articles discussed, can be seen as part of the adaptive system (which provide adaptive instruction as well as adaptive assessment) or can be used separately from non-adaptable teaching instructions. The assessment may be used either formative assessment or summative assessment and such assessment has the following features:

- User level is constantly established via the assessment.
- Assessment becomes more difficult/complex or easier, depending on the demonstrated level of answer.
- Users can specify an entry level and the sequencing of the test items will adapt to it.
- Remediation can be provided through embedded feedback.
- Assistance can be offered without drawing on lecturers’ time.
- The score is derived from the level of difficulty of the questions answered correctly.

Most online assessments are multiple choice questions because they are easy to be developed and grated. With current technology, short answers or essay type questions are almost impossible to be marked without involving instructors. The issues here is that without human involvement, simply based on pre-defined rules and difficulty level of questions, how system can accurately determine users’ level. For instance, when a student answered a math question (multiple choice questions) incorrectly, there are many possible explanations. The student may do the wrong calculation; the student may not know the formula at all or the student may apply the incorrect formula. Different assistance should be provided to the student in the above three situations. It is a challenge for system to diagnosis learner’s error based on correct or incorrect user feedback in the first place; and then the following adaptation process may be inappropriate if the first step is already inaccurate.

Both adaptive instruction and adaptive assessment are good concept but there is a long way to go to make such adaptation useful in education area.

Wang, T., H. (2008) Web-based quiz-game-like formative assessment:Development and evaluation. Computers and Education V51(3), 1247-1263.

This study explored alternative approaches to the traditional automatic assessment (web based multiple choice test). Features such as “repeat the test”, “all pass and then reward”, “monitor answering history”, “call-in strategy”, “prune strategy” and “ask-hint strategy ” are employed into the test to make the test more “game like”. This game-like automatic assessment tries to motivate students to engage into the assessment more actively. Similar approaches can be seen in TV shows like “Are You Smarter Than A Ten Year Old”.

This game-like assessment approach is powered by ICT which offered online assessment more to just simply converting a paper-and-pencil test to an electronic form. It does link an individual mind to what others think via call-in strategy. On the other hand, teachers are able to trace students’ decision making process individually by monitoring answering history. Instead of having students’ final answer, the process of making a conclusion can be recorded, for instance, if a student used a hint or if a student hesitated between two answers before making a final decision.

When this type of assessment is used as formative assessment, it has potential to offer teachers some valuable and additional data of students in assessment process. Hence as this study suggested, game-like assessment should be used as formative assessment rather than summative assessment. Furthermore, a challenge emerged in the game-like assessment. In the design of the assessment, for each questions, a hint design need to be carried out. Questions are how much hint should be given and how to design hint for a question that with different levels.

This game-like automatic assessment offers us opportunities to mine extra data from formative assessments. Further works, both from design and analysis, need to be done to make use of the extra data that are collected by this assessment system; they will be just raw data sitting in the system.

Game and Learning

Gros, B. (2003). The impact of digital games in education. First Monday, v8, n7.

Game based learning is a concept which has been drawn attention by educators and IT professionals for many years. Calvo (1997) explained the function of games in four areas, motor development, intellectual development, affective development and social development. From my point of view, when games are used in educational purpose, they should promote such development.


Here are some ways educational game promoting motor development, intellectual development, affective development and social development.

1 Motor Development
Educational games can stimulate players' visual and auditory sensation.

2 Intellectual Development
Educational games involve decision making, judgment and problem solving.

3 Affective Development
Player has opportunity to experience competition, achievement, winning and losing in educational games.

4 Social Development
Educational game involves socialization and collaboration.

Educational game, regardless of their types should promote above four type of development. Furthermore, learning is more effective when learning context blended into the game rather than working as separated module. "Kick & Score" (see reference 1) is a good example of so-called educational game, which uses the term of game based learning, does not integrate learning content with game itself and it does not promote full development. For instance, such game has little level of motor development as visual and auditory sensation from ball kicking has little to do with learning (answering questions). In terms of intellectual development, players' decision making and problem solving only has impact on repetitive scoring; hence players are not able to experience adequate level of competition, achievement ad satisfaction. Last but not least, socialization and collaboration are missing in this type of game.

Currently, digital games are on the hot topic and educators are seeking approaches of using computer and online games to benefit learning. Regardless game type or format, educational game and game based learning need to integrate game with learning and it is not simply one plus one. It is an art to select and create an appropriate game to serve educational purpose.



References
Kick & Score from dynamic power trainer
http://www.dynamicpowertrainer.com/english/01_ueberblick/add_ons/gamebased_learning_soccer.php

Authentic Learning for the 21st Century: An Overview.
By Marilyn M. Lombardi; Edited by Diana G. Oblinger
ELI Paper 1: 2007


In the previous post, I mentioned that due to the design of the authentic learning activity in the paper I was tutoring last year, students tend to concentrate on the actually tasks rather than the process of finding solutions. This article outline some important factors in authentic learning which some of them were missing in the last year’s learning activity.

Authentic learning activities should involve judgment, synthesis, research, practice and negotiation. Authentic learning activities should be close to real-world tasks of professionals; they are ill-defined problems with sustained investigation by learners from multiple sources and perspectives. Self learning as well as collaboration is needed for learners to make their own choice and reflect on their learning (Lombardi, 2007).

We had two authentic learning activities last year. The first one was to design a database to replace all the paper work of a pet clinic. The second activity was to design a website for a pet clinic. Compare both activities, the second learning activity was more successful; and in general learners were more motivated when working on it. In fact, both activities were based on real world scenario but they had different outcome.

Here are some possible explanations based on the suggestion of good authentic learning activity from Lombardi’s paper. First of all, even though both learning activities were based on real world scenarios, the first activity was not ill-defined. Instead, it provided an outline of what to do in order to complete all the tasks; hence students’ judgment and research were restricted by this outline. Secondly, learning tasks should require sustained investigation, however because of the outline of the learning tasks, students had little chance to carry out their investigation via the whole learning task. In other words, the first learning task provided little improvement space for students. This also reflected on the final product students handed in, for the first task, most of the assignment were with similar content and quality, on the other hand, most of the second assignments were very creative and extremely diverse.

Hence, when few parts were missing in authentic learning activity, learning outcome may be affected its design. Instead of trying to figure out the reason students did not meet the expectation; the first thing is possibly reviewing out learning activity. Really, learning how to help students to learn is just as hard as training one to be an expert.