Supporting Engagement in Learning by the Use of On-Line Collaborative Tools

BERA 2005

Supporting engagement in learning by the use of on-line collaborative tools.

John Grey, Alan Walker-Gleaves, Caroline Walker-Gleaves
School of Education and Lifelong Learning

University of Sunderland

Introduction

A common theme in the literature (Williams, 2002) on the use of collaborative tools in virtual learning environments is that, despite claims that these tools might make learning more effective, many students do not engage in on-line collaborative discussion-based activities except where these are required by assessment.

If the use of collaborative tools does make learning more effective, it is perhaps surprising that students do not generally appear to take advantage of this type of facility. There are a number of issues that might impact on students’ use, some pragmatic relating, for example, to their confidence and ability to use on-line systems for discussion. Issues might be more complex perhaps relating to the ways in which students conceptualise the tasks they undertake in the course of their studies and the ways in which these relate to the affordances offered by the ICT systems they use.

This paper provides some background to, and an interim report of the ways in which students have used two online collaborative databases to record, share and, to a limited extent, discuss academic literature.

Online discussion

The development of resources to allow teaching and learning to incorporate electronic computer mediated communication have been seen by many to provide opportunities to deliver constructivist models of learning (Duffy and Jonassen, 1992, Hughes and Daykin, 2002, Hiltz, 1997) in which the focus is on students engaging in authentic activity and collaborating with each other and with tutors to negotiate and develop shared understanding

Of particular interest here is the use of asynchronous systems. It has been argued (Im and Lee, 2003) that these have a particular value by allowing users to be more thoughtful and reflective in their communication compared to traditional seminar and tutorial situations where participants need to respond more or less immediately. Also, it has been suggested that some users might find online communication less threatening than face to face debate (Jetton, 2004), perhaps particularly where the online system provides some degree of anonymity (Chester and Gwynne, 1998b, Bell, 2001) .

Of course there may be other reasons for the development of on-line systems relating to economic priorities that encourage institutions to widen access to their market of potential students and perhaps to move to a more standardised curriculum (de Freitas and Oliver, 2005). Since discussion and collaboration can clearly happen in more traditional contexts there is perhaps a question about whether online systems genuinely provide new opportunities or whether it is more a case that the developers of online systems are in a position of trying to make the best of a more or less inevitable change.

Participation in discussions

A key theme in this area is the limited participation of learners in on-line systems that are voluntary and that aim to support other forms of teaching (Williams, 2002, Fung, 2004, Hughes and Daykin, 2002, Im and Lee, 2003, Molesworth, 2004, Richardson and Turner, 2000). In particular students' participation in on-line discussion forums that seek to encourage learners to share and reflect on their learning, as opposed to social discussion, has been seen as problematic.

Reasons that have been cited for this reluctance to contribute to online discussion have included an apprehension on the part of students about having their thoughts and ideas recorded and available for criticism. Clearly committing thoughts and ideas to an online discussion that might remain visible to a wide audience more or less permanently is a different undertaking to a verbal contribution in a face to face seminar. Related to this is that potential contributors might undervalue of their own ideas and opinions in comparison to those of others and might be afraid of appearing foolish. Discussion of ideas implies the critiquing of those of others, which again might be a daunting prospect for those with less confidence in their own ideas. A range of approaches have been suggested to encourage course participants to engage in online discussion.

Some approaches to encouraging participation have focused on the nature of the discussion, and the role of tutor intervention.

These have included encouragement of individuals through private messages (Graham et al., 1999), attention to the discursive interventions of tutors (Topper, 2005), setting the expectations for the course through a face to face meeting at the outset and the encouragement of social discussion at the outset of the process while participants gain familiarity with the systems and negotiate conventions for online communication.

Generally studies have suggested that, where students do engage in online communication, and when they are free to do so, social communication tends to dominate over reflective work oriented communication. Im and Lee (2003) for example, in a study in which students were encouraged but not required to make use of online communication to support their studies, make use of a three level scale to characterise student interaction; (a) introductory/social, (b) informative and (c) deeper analysis and reflection. They report that analysis of the communications demonstrated that the first two, and especially the first, dominated. Similarly (Murphy, 2004) describes a model of collaboration in which communications are characterised in a range, starting from the expression of individual social presence through the articulation of individual perspectives and on through stages of genuinely collaborative interaction, leading to the production of shared artefacts. In her study of pre-service teachers using a collaborative online system she reports that communications in the earlier stages of the model, tended to dominate.

We have observed a similar pattern when using online systems to allow discussion between students while on school placement. Students were invited to use the system to share, discuss and reflect on their experiences but in the main used it for social discourse and to share information and resources.

An alternative approach to encouraging students use of communication tools accepts the idea that students will prioritise and value activities that are directly assessed. Williams (2002), for example, points to a view that successful electronic courses have been characterised by online communication activities that are integral to the course and are directly associated with assessment rather than being perhaps seen as something extra, on top of the normal course.

This approach would however might seem to fit poorly with attempts to make students learning more authentic and genuinely meaningful and raises questions about the nature of the 'game' that students are playing; is it to engage in a collaborative effort to understand better their field of study or is it an exercise in scoring points and meeting whatever criteria are set for a high scoring communication activity. Biggs in this context, points to the need for students to “focus on the task, [and not to have to be] watching their backs” (Biggs, 1999). It is perhaps analogous the group discussion activities that are sometimes held in interview situations. The participants in these activities presumably know that they are engaged in a task in which they are likely to need to demonstrate an ability to present ideas and to respond to others appropriately; they are perhaps unlikely to be genuinely engaged in the discussion task beyond what is required to meet what they perceive the criteria of the interviewer. The question here is perhaps what is actually being rewarded and what impact might this have.

At first sight then it is perhaps surprising that students do not appear to value and make use of communication tools given the claimed benefits of the constructivist environments that they are supposed to support. In particular it might seem odd to suggest that it is necessary to force students to use online communication tools by including it in assessment when the claim is that these tools will make learning more effective. It might be expected that students would see it as in their interests to engage in this type of activity.

As indicated above much work on on-line discussion focuses on the volume and nature of contributions. Non-contributors, so called ‘lurkers’, might be seen as a problem, undermining the establishment of a community (Rovai, 2000) and therefore demanding strategies to elicit more active participation.

Christie and Azzam (2004) in a discussion of the use of an e-mail list server, set up as the official listserv of the American Evaluation Association, found that only 18% of subscribers were repeat posters of messages. They comment that “It is difficult to accurately deduce the reasons for ‘lurking’”. Presumably though, the decision to post reflects an individual’s weighing up of the balance of costs, for example the perceived the dangers of exposing your ideas to a wide audience against the perceived benefits of contributing.

However in their own terms lurkers might well be engaged and participating in learning activities by reading what other have written, reflecting on this and developing ideas in their own work.

Authenticity and deep learning

A motivation for the development of this work was the observation of how some students seem to make use of academic literature in the course of their studies. In some cases students seem to treat literature as an authoritative ‘given’ rather than a source of ideas and debate. When using literature in their own work students might include references to support points they made but with little discussion of the ideas and questions raised. In extreme cases students occasionally used an author to support a point they were making where the author in question had in fact been arguing for an opposing point of view and had paraphrased the opposing viewpoint. One reason for this apparently uncritical acceptance of literature that emerged was a sense that some students felt in some way presumptuous to be commenting on published work, perhaps betraying a lack of confidence in their own ideas.

The ways in which students use literature might be linked to ideas about deep and surface learning (Marton et al., 1997, Ramsden, 1992) with those adopting a surface approach to a task focussing on the need to collect an appropriate range of literature to support some writing, and perhaps reproducing arguments found in these. A deep learning approach would suggest engagement with the ideas and debates in the literature. Clearly this is unlikely to be a simple dichotomy, a number of authors for example Entwistle and Entwistle (2003) have pointed out that individual students might adopt different approaches in different contexts depending, for example, on teaching approaches or assessment requirements and that students adopting surface approached might still gain deep understanding.

Several writers (Reeves et al., 2004, Biggs, 1999) have suggested that a key element in encouraging deep learning is the provision of authentic activities in which the learner is engaged in a genuine task that is congruent with the aims of the teaching and learning. An aim of the work on which this study was based is to develop students’ reflection and scholarship and so the approach of trying to support this through on-line tools was of interest.

In this case the notion of authentic learning might be applied at more than one level. Thus in the work described below, which is concerned with online tools to assist students with the analysis of academic literature, we might look at the authenticity of the overall task that students are undertaking, that of developing, perhaps, a written analysis of some topic based on literature. Here we will be concerned that students are genuinely engaged in the issue they are investigating and that this has relevance and value to them in their current or future professional practice. Alternatively we might focus on the activity of scholarship and consider whether this is authentic in the sense that students are genuinely reflecting on and analysing ideas, rather than, for example, repeating and rearranging the ideas and arguments of others or treating the use of literature only in terms of collecting relevant citations but without engaging in the debates and questions raised in the academic literature.

On-line references tools

The work is concerned with students' use of, and perceptions of, online bibliographic databases which allow all users to add records of their reading and to comment on references added by others.

Two systems were used.

Structured database

The first system developed was based on a MySQL database accessed online through a forms based web interface. Thus users could enter bibliographic details of items of academic literature, could add comments and annotations to references, conduct searches of the database and tag individual items so that they appeared in personal folders. References added to the database would always be visible to other users however there was an option when adding annotations for those to be visible only to the individual who had made the contribution.

Wiki

The second system made use of a Wiki (Leuf and Cunningham, 2001). This is a collaborative web site where users are able to edit pages directly online. Unlike the structured database system this did not provide a fixed database structure. Instead users could edit or annotate a collection of web pages, one for each item of literature, or add additional pages for new references. Pages were accessed through alphabetic menu pages and through the built in searching facilities of the Wiki software.

Both databases were set up initially with collections of references relating to the use of ICT in education relevant to the modules students were studying at the time. Approximately 50 references were included initially in the Wiki and a wider collection of about 3000 references in the structured database. This was felt to be particularly important in the case of the Wiki in order to provide a model of pages format that students could follow.

Perhaps the key difference between the two systems is in terms of the degree of control users have over the system. The forms based database limited the ways in which users can interact with the system since all interaction was through preset forms. This provides a similar system, though with fewer features, to commercial bibliographic databases but with the added function of annotations on the references with other users. The Wiki provides a much less structured interface which relies more on users to provide organisation and structure.

There is perhaps a balance to consider here, the degree of control given to users would need to be appropriate to their abilities and expectations. Too little control might be limiting, whereas too much control can be self defeating if the interface becomes too complex for the user to be able to exercise effective control over the function of the software. This issue of control and the way in which it devolved from designer to users (and in some cases teachers) is discussed by Squires and McDougall (1995) in the context of educational software in general. In this case it is not only the control over the use of the software itself that is an issue, but also the control over the structure and development of the online database itself.

The research

These online systems have been made available to a number of groups of students at the University of Sunderland since September 2004. These have included Students following Primary Teacher Training Programmes (approximately 100 students), Secondary Trainees in ICT Education (50 students) and students following MA programmes (20 students) in the School of Education and Lifelong Learning. The use of the Wiki-based system was used mainly with the students following MA programmes.

The databases were introduced to students in the context of specialist ICT Education modules, reflecting the initial subject content of the databases and were provided as an additional resource for students, there was no requirement that they would be used although help and encouragement was given for them to do so.

The primary purpose of this research is to:

• investigate the extent to which students make use of this type of on-line discussion tool;
• to examine the ways in which it is used;
• to explore how this use relates to students orientation towards their studies.

At this interim stage in the work information about students actual use of the system is available as is data obtained from individual semi structured interviews and from small group discussions. To date approximately 15 users of each of the two systems have been interviewed.

Use of the systems

In the case of both systems definitive statistics are only available for the numbers of contributions to the database. Numbers of students accessing the system but not contributing were not recorded directly, though indications of the numbers accessing the system were gained from interview data.

Use of the structured database

Table 1 below indicates the numbers of users contributing different numbers of references to the databases, and numbers of users contributing comments to existing references. (over the period November 2004 to May 2005 out of a possible 150 users)

Table 1. Contributions to the Structured Database
Numbers of contributions / Numbers of users contributing references / Numbers of users contributing comments
1-5 / 29 / 31
6-10 / 6 / 2
11-15 / 3 / 4
16-20 / 4 / 3
21-25 / 5 / 1
26-30 / 1 / 0
30-35 / 1 / 0
Total contributors / 49 / 41
Total contributions / 391 / 222

Use of the Wiki

Table 2 below indicated the numbers of contributors to the Wiki system. (April 2005 to May 2005 out of a possible 20 users)