Partnerships: Mixing it up
Presentation by Bob Thurlow, SEO, Learning Technologies Unit, and Tim Smith, Teacher, IT, Western Sydney Institute, Richmond campus
Is it possible to have online and face-to-face students working together, using common resources and interacting online? This is the challenge the Richmond College IT section has been responding to. Their aim is both to increase engagement in learning for online students, and to reduce the workload for themselves.
The challenge
The Richmond IT section has been involved in workplace delivery for some years. Their approach was the fairly standard one of RPL interviews of students to establish what needed to be delivered, and then delivering one-to-one or in small groups, supplemented by students accessing ANTA toolboxes.
They soon found that there were various problems with this approach. For one thing, sending a teacher out to the workplace to support one student wasn’t cost effective. More fundamentally, they found that many students did not learn effectively with online resources. The teachers themselves, skilled at classroom delivery, were frustrated that they couldn’t transplant the TAFE classroom experience into the workplace.
Research on online learning backed up their own experience. The missing element was interaction among students and teachers:
“Interaction and community among students in the online setting is no less important to successful learning outcomes than in the face-to-face setting (Gunawardena, 1994; Wegerif, 1998) … But in the online setting, experiencing communal interaction or social networking is somewhat more challenging.”
Woods, R and Samuel, E. 2003
The challenge was to find ways to involve the online students with the face-to-face classroom delivery, to “blur the boundaries between online and face-to-face delivery”.
Blurring the boundaries
The first steps were in response to a challenging unit, “Operating Systems Concepts” where there were no resources to share with online students, but one of the teachers, Michael Reifenstein, was an expert on the subject. Their strategy was to make six short videos of interviews with the teacher, and upload them to a website, using MS Moviemaker.
While the online students responded well to this, it was not practical to do on a regular basis, because of the extra time and staff required.
Using Sharepoint
Instead of trying to make different resources for use in the classroom and online, they chose to use Microsoft SharePoint as a way of making the same resources available 
to both groups. In Sharepoint they set up a calendar, and a list of the courses available, and uploaded resources to the calendar on the day they were used for classroom delivery. Some of the resources published in this way were links to other sites (including the teacher’s own) and online movies as well as standard MS Office documents.
Some of the simplest, yet challenging, resources they made were MP3 recordings made while the teacher was talking to the face-to-face class. The teachers found it challenging to constantly remember the online audience – to turn the microphone off in periods of silence, and not to “waffle”.
Using wikis
Web-based wikis provided a way for students to collaborate in developing their own resources together. But just as importantly, wikis enabled face-to-face and online students to work together. They had found a practical way to combine the two groups into one.
The teacher set up the basic wiki, with headings but without content. The students collaborate to co-create the content. An important component is the “How to get marks” guide from the teacher, which explains the protocols for participation, and for enhancing what other students have previously contributed. The end result is a resource much more extensive than either the teacher or any student could have created alone, and what’s more, the classroom, workplace and online students have worked collaboratively together. See an example (Bob Thurlow’s wiki) here:
Teachers are now using another product, Adobe Connect, to deliver concurrently to face-to-face and online classes. With Adobe Connect, students can see and hear the teacher and view the teacher’s screen. No special software is required by the student.
Adobe Connect meetings can be recorded for later viewing by streaming video. See an example (John Garrett’s class) here.
Teachers reflect
The teachers, too, are going online to share their reflections and feelings about teaching face-to-face and online students at the same time, using a restricted access blog. Teachers have also participated in an online survey (using surveymonkey.com) to see how they felt about teaching both face-to-face and online at the same time.
Looking to the future
There is no doubt that teachers find it challenging to learn new skills to work with both classroom and online students. However, these teachers are convinced that face-to-face students will rely increasingly upon online resources, and an increasing number of external students will want to study online the courses we are currently teaching face-to-face. The technologies and strategies are there to enable us, as teachers, to meet these emerging learner needs.
References
Woods, R and Samuel, E. 2003
Social Networking in the Online Classroom: Foundations of Effective Online Learning
Volume 12/13 Number 1 March 2003, Viewed 7 August 2007