Mixed Mode Delivery: A Case to Study the Effect of Sequencing Mixed-Mode Delivery

05:02
December 2007

Taiyu Lin, Massey University, New Zealand
taiyu.lin@gmail.com

Kinshuk, Athabasca University, Canada
kinshuk@ieee.org

Lin, T. & Kinshuk (2007, Dec), Mixed Mode Delivery: A Case to Study the Effect of Sequencing Mixed-Mode Delivery. Bulletin of Applied Computing and Information Technology Vol. 5, Issue 2. ISSN 1176-4120. Retrieved from

ABSTRACT

Researchers have pointed out that online learning gives students a good opportunity to develop a robust understanding of conceptual knowledge, whereas classroom face-to-face interaction is valuable for strengthening understanding and/or correcting misconceptions about the subject matter. It is therefore the belief of the authors that curriculum sequencing could be used as a tool to leverage the benefits of online and face-to-face learning to optimise the learning outcomes. The current study proposes an approach where students learn the conceptual knowledge using an online learning system followed by face-to-face sessions for question-and-answer, hands-on demonstration, and real-life problem solving. By means of a survey, this study has found that the students were highly satisfied with the proposed approach.

Keywords

Mixed mode delivery, curriculum sequencing, learning system

1. INTRODUCTION

With the advancement and availability of the Internet and communication and information technologies (ICT) in general, the employment of technologies in education has become a widespread practice. Traditional face-to-face classroom teaching has been supplemented with various formats of instructional dissemination enabled by technologies (Ponzurick et al., 2000): web-based learning systems (e.g. Chen et al., 2005; Chang et al., 2003) allow any time and anywhere access to learning; research of intelligent tutoring systems (e.g. Hospers et al., 2003; Hegarty, 1996) and adaptive hypermedia (e.g. Zikouli et al., 2003; Satratzemi, 2003) offer individualized content and improved learning experiences. While the on-campus mode is still representative of mainstream education so far, the technologies are often employed in conjunction with, or integrated into, the on-campus curriculum.

Three modes of technology-mediated learning can be identified: adjunct mode, mixed mode and integrated mode (Harasim et al., 1997). In the adjunct mode, students often have the choice to go online for the optional/supplementary materials. In the integrated mode, learning and teaching are totally mediated by technologies. Virtual universities (Pöyry and Puustjärvi, 2003) synchronous learning management systems (Chen et al., 2005) are examples of the integrated mode. In mixed-mode learning, curriculum, including learning materials and activities, is often divided into online and face-to-face components according to the relevant strength of the available resources. For example, students can go online to engage conceptual learning at a pace that suit them and come to face-to-face classes to see demonstrations and problem solving by the instructor. It is in this mode that most combinations of delivery format are possible, and the advantages of face-to-face learning and technology-mediated learning can be leveraged to optimise the learning experience.

The current study investigates a mixed-mode approach in which the students were asked to prepare themselves for the face-to-face class by logging on and studying in a self-directed online learning system. Weekly schedules are given to students on what will be done in the class and what concepts in the learning system they are expected to read before the class. The face-to-face classes then follow up the concept learned in each week and emphasise question-and-answer and real-life problem solving. It is the authors' belief that such a combination represents an ideal instructional design that is suitable for students learning a computer programming language. There are two reasons for this belief.

The first reason is to have the students develop a mental representation of the conceptual knowledge which could then be either reinforced or corrected in the class. It has been documented that the development of a mental representation is most efficient when the representation style of the learning material matches the learning style of the student (Griffin, 1996), and techniques available in online learning can foster reflection which is essential to achieve deep learning (Miranda and Elizabeth, 2004). Deep learning has been proved to assist not only future recall but also aid the transfer of learning to a novel context (Bransford, 2000). This leads to our hypothesis that an online learning component is ideal for conceptual knowledge building.

It is common practice to have the curriculum scheduled in a way that the delivery of conceptual knowledge happens frequently without any chance for reflection and self-evaluation to take place. The number of posts in discussion forums could increase sharply and students form long queue outside the instructor's office just a few days before an examination. The second reason is that we think that the value of immediacy during face-to-face interaction lies in:

1) The opportunity for the student to ask questions,

2) The instructor to create and allow the opportunity for the student to find out questions to ask, and

3) The immediate addresses to those questions by the instructor.

The aim is to foster the atmosphere of active learning (Chen et al., 2005) and the student can actively engage in the instructor-student interaction which would be otherwise mostly uni-directional, i.e. the instructor lectures the students.

Literature about mixed-mode delivery focuses only on the content and the technologies employed (e.g. Ponzurick et al., 2000; Howell et al., 2004; Porras-Hernandez, 2000). Pedagogical issues such as the curriculum sequencing have not been explored to any great extent. The aim of this study is to find out how students perceive the proposed instructional design. The content of this study is documented in the following manner. Firstly, the literature relating to mixed-mode delivery is reviewed. The empirical study including the self-directed online learning system, the methodology used in the survey, the results and analysis are then presented and discussed. At the end, a brief summary ends the paper.

2. MIXED MODE DELIVERY ISSUES

In a case study reported by Howell et al. (2004), a computer science program was delivered in mixed-mode by staff of RMIT University in Australia to students of African Virtual University (AVU) in four different sites in Africa. Two dimensions of mixed-mode delivery were involved in this case. The first dimension was related to the learning material. WebCT is employed as the Learning Management System (LMS) in which weekly tutorials, quizzes, and extra multimedia supplementary materials are available. On the other hand, live lectures were conducted using video-conferencing technologies between RMIT and AVU. The live lectures were indeed a novelty for AVU students and were regarded as a valuable for the students as 1) it could act as relationship building between students and lecturers, 2) the lecturers can pace the progress of the course, 3) the lecturers can highlight important or difficult concepts. The second dimension was location and proximity related. Local AVU academic staff, acting as facilitators and bridges between AVU students and RMIT staff, were present during live lectures; conducting classroom based activities and discussions; assisting the students in laboratory sessions; and available as students' first contact point and to provide general consultation. The evaluation at the end of the first semester showed a good pass rate. Facilitator support was identified as an important factor of success during student evaluation proving its necessity and usefulness to the students, and the live lectures were considered an effective means of conceptual learning (Howell et al., 2004). " Its [the live lecture's] similarity to traditional classroom interaction in both time and psychological dimension endows it with many benefits that asynchronous learning would have difficulty in achieving " (Chen et al., 2005, p. 184).

The availability of ICT not only exerts its impact on students, but teaching staff as well. The impact is visible in many aspects but psychological shift was the one that McShane (2004) examined in detail. Academic staff were analysed in order to study the changing teaching self-concept of university lecturers who integrated ICT into their teaching and found several points relevant to our discussion here (McShane, 2004). All five subjects (teaching academics) in the study adopted a mixed delivery mode in which students attend face-to-face lectures, tutorials, and/or seminars accompanied by other online components including lecture notes, exercises, quizzes, discussion, announcement, and/or email communication with the lecturers.

Three out of the five subjects in the study reported enhanced relationships with the students. "[The three subjects] each reflected with me on how they came to know their student better - as individuals, as colleagues or in a mentoring relationship" (McShane, 2004, p. 8). The age and generation barrier between the lecturers and the students is less obvious in ICT-mediated interaction than in the 'stand and deliver' mode of interaction. In other words, ICT, in a mixed delivery mode of teaching, could facilitate the interaction in a mode where the power-distance is reduced. The strengthening teacher-student relationship is not only desirable for the common association of increased student performance, it also leads to improvement of the self-concept of lecturers as teaching staff because the "lecturers' subjectivities are bound up in how they understand and negotiate their relationships with their students " (McShane, 2004, p. 8).

However, caution has to be exercised when ICT is employed as a communication means across different cultures as it may widen the gap even further. In a study documented by Thompson and Ku (2005), Chinese students who enrolled in an American online course in which all teacher-student and student-student interactions were completely via internet technologies, had reported stressful experiences partially due to cultural differences and partially their lesser English language ability. Limitations in ICT-mediated communication indeed can increase the communication barrier. In their perceptions of other peer students' performances in the online discussion forum, 43% of the Chinese students thought that the American students did not read the questions carefully or address the questions directly whereas the two lecturers interviewed were quite satisfied with answers posted by American students but Chinese students failed to address questions properly due to misunderstanding (Thompson and Ku, 2005). One lecturer in McShane's study perceived face-to-face communication as 'direct' and that he could learn, interact with and gather immediate feedback from the students, whereas another lecturer felt that he did not need to alter the language (jargon), as he did for his remote students, for his local students because " they see me " (McShane, 2004, p. 13).

3. EMPIRICAL STUDY

An empirical study using a survey was conducted on students who enrolled in a third-year undergraduate course in the Department of Information Systems, Massey University, Ne w Zealand. The course was design to teach PHP, a server-side script language, and web-based multimedia development. A total of seven students participated in the study. Participants in the study were either studying toward a Science or a Business degree. The study was conducted only on the PHP component of the course. All participants were male students.

3.1. Self-Learning System

An online self-directed learning system was developed for the course (Figure 1). The learning system contained both concepts and simple quizzes about PHP. Each student was given at the beginning of the semester a login account for the learning system. The students were not forced to login. They could choose how to login and how long to stay in the system. The learning system itself is written in PHP. A logging mechanism using PHP and Mysql kept a record of students' activities in the learning system.

Figure 1. Online self-directed learning system for PHP scripting

The concepts included in the learning system and their relationships are shown in Figure2 where each small rectangle represents a single web page. The name written inside the rectangle is the title of the page and denotes the concept to be taught. The arrows in Figure 2 represent hypertext links from a page to the other and virtually outline the navigational path a student can take in the learning system. Next and Previous arrows, denoting a logical and recommended sequence of study, were also available to the students. The Next and Previous arrows are labeled as 'isBasisFor' links in Figure 2. Alternatively, students could return to the index page where all the other pages were listed and click on any of them to any particular page. This allowed more freedom of navigation to suit different individual needs.

Figure 2. Concepts and their relationship included in the learning system

3.2. Method

The survey consisted of the questions shown in Table 1. The students were informed about the survey during the class and were told that the survey was completely voluntary and the purpose of the survey was to evaluate the overall delivery sequence, the online learning system, and the performance of the instructor in the class. The questions were emailed to all students in the classes. Seven students completed and returned the survey.

Table 1.Questions used in the survey

3.3. Results

There were five possible answers (including very poor, poor, neutral, good, very good) for each question in the survey. For the sake of analysis, these five answers were replaced by numbers from: 1 (very poor) to 5 (very good). The results are shown in the Table 2

Table 2. Tabulated result of the survey

4. DISCUSSION

Table 2 shows that the participants were quite satisfied and were affirmative on the effectiveness of the approach taken. It is not surprising that the students gave high rating to the mixed-mode approach as it is quite popular for students in Massey University to take a mixture of internal (on-campus) and extramural (distant) courses to complete their degree. As the participants were all in their third year of study, it is quite likely that they already had experience with similar online learning system.  

The self-directed online learning system, though not yet optimised to include adaptivity, had also scored well in the survey. Having the online material available anytime and anywhere had allowed any student to tailor his/her own learning timetable to meet individual requirements. The simple quizzes after each learning unit were also a bonus feature of the learning system.

Although the learning materials included in the online learning system and the text book were enough for the students to meet the course requirements, students still gave a very high score (highest among the questions) to the face-to-face classroom interaction. One plausible explanation is the familiarity of and the numerous types of interaction available in the classroom. In addition, it is also likely that students, upon seeing hands-on demonstrations and real-life problem solving, strengthened their understanding of the subject matter that they already obtained from the online learning system. They could also see directly and remember the programming codes that could be readily used to solve future problems. One participant commented that "students are supposed to have more useful real-world project source code as a reference, which can be prepared by the system in many categories [as demonstrated in the class] rather than they spend a lot of their time on finding this code on the internet or from a book." The resulting learning was therefore goal-directed (student knew what they wanted to achieve)and problem-oriented (solving a real-life problem). The value of proximity and immediacy of face-to-face interaction was maximised. The instructor had indeed observed more questions from the students in this approach than otherwise.

The high rating of 3.71 for the order of curriculum schedule points out that the students see the proposed order of curriculum sequencing and design, even though different from other courses they were doing, as a helpful way to their learning.

Although the result could lend credence to the effectiveness of the proposed approach, it has to be noted that the small size and the singularity of gender in the survey population, could possibility bias the result. Recruiting female volunteer participants from a class where male students where dominant in number had been a difficulty. It will be attempted in the future to recruit at least a small number of female participants with whom analysis could then be carried out to find whether there is any gender difference in such a research setting.

5. CONCLUDING REMARKS

Technology-mediated mixed-mode education is not a new concept. However, most of the relevant literature focuses on the technical issues and the content (Ponzurick et al., 2000; Howell et al, 2004; Porras-Hernandez, 2000), curriculum sequencing and the resulting student perception is not widely researched. Research has pointed out that online learning gives students a good opportunity to develop a robust understanding of conceptual knowledge (Griffin, 1996; Miranda and Elizabeth, 2004; Bransford, 2000) whereas classroom face-to-face interaction is valuable for strengthening understanding and/or correcting misconceptions about the subject matter (Chen et al., 2005).

The current study proposes an approach where students learn the conceptual knowledge using an online learning system followed by face-to-face sessions for question-and-answer, hands-on demonstration, and real-life problem solving. By mean of a survey, this study has found that the student were highly satisfied with the proposed approach.

It has to be noted that another survey with a larger number of participants and a better gender balance may be required to give a statistically stronger conclusion. In the future, adaptivity can also be included in the learning system in order to provide individualised learning experiences in the learning system. 

6. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research was supported by Online Learning Systems Ltd in conjunction with New Zealand Foundation for Research, Science & Technology.

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Copyright © 2007 Taiyu Lin, Kinshuk
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