Well, one suspicious mind, at least. I've been reading a study from 2007 which claims to demonstrate that students view online tuition unfavourably, compared with face-to-face.
Price et al. reached their conclusions not by asking students who had experienced both forms of tutorial support to compare them, but by surveying & interviewing students (on the same module) who had chosen one form or the other, then comparing their ratings of tutoring quality.
That seems a reasonable enough approach to take. But it strikes me there are two major shortcomings in this study.
1. No account is taken of the students' reasons for choosing the online or the face-to-face option. In my experience, where students are offered this choice, the online option is taken by two main groups:
- those who are coping with less than ideal study situations - they may have a demanding carer role, long working hours, a disruptive health condition. This situation would be likely to impact negatively on their study experience regardless of the tutorial format.
- those who are reluctant to participate in tutorials at all & see the online version as easier to avoid ('This way, we don't have to go to classes - great!'). More of an opt-out than an opt-in situation.
Failure to take into account the possible distorting effect of factors that make students unable or unwilling to attend face-to-face tutorials weakens the study's conclusions.
2. No questions are raised about one rather startling statistic. Apparently large numbers of students surveyed agreed with the statement 'feedback on students' work is usually only provided in the form of marks or grades'. The average score for this statement (on a scale of 1 - 5) was 2.12 for those in 2002 face-to-face groups & 2.36 for the online groups. In 2003 the levels of agreement were 2.18 & 2.28 respectively.
I find this quite extraordinary. The major part of OU tutors' contracted hours are spent providing detailed, personalised teaching feedback to students in the form of annotations on their assignment documents & a discursive overall summary. So why were the agreement ratings not zero?
I wonder how much faith can be placed in the testimony of students who seem either not to have noticed this feedback (suggesting a lack of engagement with the learning process) or to have taken a casual approach to completing the survey questionnaire. The study does acknowledge that the online students' disappointment may have stemmed, in part, from unrealistic expectations. It's a pity it didn't also recognise that, on the evidence of this example, the entire findings may be deeply flawed.
I wonder what Elvis would have made of the internet?
Just emerging from a close encounter with a veritable alphabetti spaghetti of learning design tools. Each one would really need about a month of training to get my head round, so a dozen or so in a fortnight proved somewhat indigestible.
First up was an apéritif, the STARR template. Then we had a choice of starters: 4-Ts, 4SPPIces (a tasty mix of CSCBL scripts, within LdShake), ISIS, e-Design, CADMOS, web collage (with a side order of CLFPs, LMS & GluePS) or DPD. Then on, relentlessly, to the main courses, CompendiumLD & the pièce de résistance: the PPC, lovingly crafted by the chefs of TLRP-TEL, an ESRC-EPSRC funded LDSE project. Those of us who hadn't yet slipped under the table were treated to a cheeky little dessert of either a four-facet mapping matrix or a three-dimensional framework. It was all getting a bit blurred by this point, as the brandy had started to circulate...
Still, at least it straddled the Easter break, so we could stuff ourselves with chocolate when we needed a break from the fancy stuff :-)
Block 2 started with exploring Cloudworks, the OU/JISC-funded project: in its own words, 'a place to share, find and discuss learning and teaching ideas and experiences'. Immediately there was a new language to learn, with clouds, cloudscapes & cloudstreams.
As is often the case with such OU initiatives, Cloudworks seems to be rolling along nicely under its own steam, with a few enthusiasts left on board, but a bit wonky round the edges & largely ignored by the rest of the world. The About page's link to the Cloudworks blog, confidently promises to give 'current information on what we are working on and our plans for the site' but actually returns an error page. It turns out the blog is now somewhere else, but the last entry was in March 2012 & the one before that, in February 2011. Many of the cloudy worlds here are uninhabited, created by well-intentioned visitors who reneged on their divine responsibilities & never returned to carry out their seven days of follow-up work. Search attempts are frustrated by inconsistent tagging - I almost lost the will to live, ploughing through Mind-Maps, MindMap, Mindmap, Mindmapping, Mapping tools, etc., etc. to locate resources to complete an activity. An entirely innocuous comment I tried to post on an existing 'cloud' prompted a stern message informing me that my comment had been identified as possible spam & was awaiting moderation - not a very friendly reception.
My initial explorations concluded somewhat negatively. Invited to give the three words I would use to describe Cloudworks, I offered 'random, inconsistent, time-consuming', observing in my notes:
there's no guarantee a
searcher will find anything useful or a contributor will reach an
audience. I'm sure there are some treasures in there, but how many of
us have time to rummage? It has a kind of nosiness
value, to see who is following who, like checking out friends of
friends on Facebook, but I doubt that's why it's being funded!
Yet Cloudworks turned out to work really well as a platform for a clearly defined collaborative activity such as the one we were asked to carry out for H800 - posting a design narrative for a learning activity (as a cloud) linking it to fellow students' responses (in a cloudscape) engaging in dialogue around our postings & keeping track of that dialogue (via the cloudstream).
I could envisage Cloudworks being mainstreamed in the OU as a way for tutors to share, compare, discuss tutorial plans & resources for the modules they teach. It's so much more efficient & consistent than the current clunky hotch-potch of VLE-based facilities we use. Perhaps when H800 is over, & I have more time.............
