I've been thinking about the research question to study for this class. I have a few different ideas, but the one that I woke up thinking about at 3 AM a couple of days ago concerned surveying faculty to members to determine their attitudes towards and uses of tools that would help them distribute some of their ideas at a distance. I found this literature review regarding faculty perceptions of distance education and read through it to see what I could find. One thing I noted was that the focus was on creating complete distance education courses. I am more interested in studying how faculty perceive and use Web 2.0 tools to share part of their teachings at a distance. For example how do faculty members view podcasting their lectures? What prevents them from doing so?
My initial thought is to interview 5-7 faculty members asking questions such as...
1. What tools (if any) do you use to share your course content with those at a distance?
2. If they do use tools, ask about the ways in which they use them and why the use them. Also, why do they not use other tools.
3. If they do not use tools, why not? Is there a technical barrier, a low perceived value?
4. I will also ask them if they know of faculty members that they feel are successful in using tools to promote distance learning. This will help me find a wider variety of users.
I would hope that I could turn this study into a paper by the end of the semester. Actually doing the research would be very helpful for me.
Comments/suggestions?
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5 comments:
A couple thoughts/questions:
It might be helpful to start by getting them thinking about the most useful/impactful/successful resources they have developed for their courses--do they have engaging, rich slide presentations? are their lectures/discussions fun and insightful? have they built great problems/projects for their courses?
Once they have those "gems" from their courses in mind, it might be easier to talk with them about how they have or might share them...
Then again, it could be really interesting to see if faculty "perceptions" of sharing and technology for sharing changes based on whether they have been primed with a feeling that they have something worthwhile to share. :)
Jeremy again...
Because a sample response can help you work out the kinks in your data collection, here are mine.
1. What tools (if any) do you use to share your course content with those at a distance?
*Institution's CMS (Angel).
*A WordPress blog, the students submit work on various blogging sites (blogger, liverjournal, etc.)
*RSS aggregators (bloglines, google reader, Rnews) for the students, too.
*MediaWiki to post articles the students write.
*Justin.tv (via QuickTime Broadcaster) to live webcast my course sessions.
[Comment: We're conducting a similar questionnaire/focus group with faculty here in NY, and we found you really have to define “tools.” Some teachers still think colored chalk is a multimedia technology (Wilkins, Peck, & Jordan, 1991), and, even though some would agree with that view (Seels & Richey, 1994; Driscol, 2001; Gibbons-yes-THAT-Gibbons, 2003), I don't think it's what you mean here.]
2. If they do use tools, ask about the ways in which they use them and why the use them. Also, why do they not use other tools.
I really only use the school's CMS for basic organization, posting information I don't want non-class members to see, and the gradebook. I think Mike Griffiths knows all about how campuses pay money for CMS software and the teachers only use a portion of the functionality. I find that there are more open and accessible ways to conduct most of my course business.
I use blogs and wikis like they've been used (off and on) at BYU since 2003. Charles has a special issue of Computers in the Schools with work by Rick West on that.
The live broadcast is something I've always wanted to do, but this semester I'm teaching a class with students driving as much as two hours to attend... and the class doesn't get over until 9pm. So being able to participate synchronously offsite was really important. Justin.tv also has an integrated text-chat function, though I'm still in the process of modifying my teaching approach to make use of it.
3. If they do not use tools, why not? Is there a technical barrier, a low perceived value?
My experience has been both. Angel (our CMS) is ten times more usable than Blackboard, but faculty still complain that it's hard to use. Also, what kept me from live broadcasting my course wasn't motivation or need, it was just last semester that I discovered Justin.tv. (Eg. I didn't know of a free tool that could meet my needs.)
4. I will also ask them if they know of faculty members that they feel are successful in using tools to promote distance learning. This will help me find a wider variety of users.
I'm kind of my college's geek when it comes to this, so I don't know anyone here who is doing more. The “success” issue may be debated though. We'll see how it turns out.
[Comment: You may want to define “successful,” or at least make sure to record the participant's definition.]
I'd be interested to hear how your study goes. I agree with Jeremy that it is important to define tools. I also think you need to get some context on what content is being taught. Do professors consider how tools match the content they are teaching?
@SaraJoy, Jeremy and Kimberly--thank you so much for your insightful thoughts. I appreciate this...please continue to contribute feedback--it is very helpful!
Ok - here are some disjointed thoughts for you. I don't have any answers;-)
Your first question is:
1. What tools (if any) do you use to share your course content with those at a distance?
You haven't established why they would even want to share their course content with those at a distance yet - after all they are teaching students here on campus - right? Or is it understood that one of their goals is to teach or make resources available at a distance? The way this question is framed makes it seem more like an "open learning" question. That is, you are teaching here on campus . . . but what are you doing to make your teaching available to others. Is this what you intended? Or were you intending to look at how they are using technology tools to impact access/flexibility etc for learners here on campus?
I guess I am struggling to understand the central thing that you would like to come away learning? It sounds like you are really interested in how and why they are using internet-based teaching tools? How will you make the connection between this and distance learning?
Let's sit down and talk - I think that I can help you to focus your purposes and questions.
What do teachers perceive as being their primary role?
- is it creation of instructional content?
- is it helping a specific group of learners that have been assigned to them?
- is it a combination or even something else.
Another important issue is teachers' perception of the re-usability of what they have created. We know that the more context laden a "learning object" is the more difficult it is to be reused.
The way that these two things relate is that if a teacher primarily views his/her role to be teaching a specific group of learners - much of what he/she does in the course may be heavily context laden for those particular learners.
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