Characteristics of pedagogical change in integrating digital collaborative learning and their sustainability in a school culture: e-CSAMR framework

Collaborative learning is perceived as an important component of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) integration in schools. The purpose of this study was to examine an initiative of the Ministry of Education that promoted intra-school and inter-school digital collaborative learning projects. The participants were 159 district ICT leaders, who designed 37 digital collaborative projects containing 73 learning activities to promote inter-school student interactions. The study was conducted within the qualitative research paradigm through analysis of digital collaborative learning activities. Additionally, the participants were required to share their experiences regarding digital collaboration through an open-ended online questionnaire. The thematic analysis revealed all four levels of the SAMR model, rating pedagogical changes during technological integration; the most common were the model's two middle levels: Augmentation and Modification. Moreover, we explored the degree of teamwork (information sharing, cooperation, or collaboration), complexity of collaboration (intra-school vs. inter-school) and sustainability of collaborative learning within the school culture. Most of the activities reflected the cooperation level of teamwork, while in the highest level—collaboration was less common. Surprisingly, complexity of collaboration and its sustainability in school culture were negatively interconnected. Regarding the extent of collaboration, some activities were categorized as “Islands of innovation,” the majority were comprehensive and conducted on the organizational level, while only few involved the wider community-parents or other stakeholders. Based on the bottom-up analysis of pedagogical changes in digital collaboration activities, we suggested a comprehensive e-CSAMR framework. The implications for educational theory and practice are discussed.     

The role of local authorities in the integration of ICT in learning

Abstract How does ICT integration in learning processes depend on the support or lack of support from local authorities? Data from the SITES M2 case studies sheds light on how Danish schools attempted to meet the ‘Act on the Folkeskole’ regarding the integration of ICT in all subjects. This paper draws on the school's perspective based on interviews with the Principals, teachers and ICT coordinators, and the schools' ICT plans and strategies. The schools' perspective is then seen in relationship to the respective municipalities, ICT strategies and national ICT policy in a discussion of the implications of ICT integration on the decentralised Danish folkeskole system.     

The role of ICT coordinator. Priority and time dedicated to professional functions

This research analyses the ICT coordinator's role in primary schools in Andalusia, Spain. 101 coordinators filled in an online questionnaire that included a question regarding preferences about priority given and time dedicated to the eight professional functions assigned by the Educational Administration. The difference between the importance given and time dedicated to the different functions showed a high role adjustment of the ICT coordinators. Guiding teachers to work out and use digital contents in the classroom was the most prioritized function. On the contrary, school web management was considered the least important function. Managing digital tools was prioritized mostly by the youngest ICT coordinators females who were selected by the school board and did not hold any other school position. Multidimensional Scaling of a preferences question suggests that ICT coordinators prioritize their functions according to their complexity and the setting where they take place (classroom vs. school).The most relevant functions are the ones which favor ICT implementation in the classroom, and these functions result in being less complex since they adjust to the teacher's traditional role. These findings are discussed in order to fortify coordinators leadership in the change that ICT implementation in schools brings about.     

Bangladesh calling: farmers' technology use practices as a driver for development

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) usage in education falls into three board categories: ICTs as objects under study, ICTs as support tools, and ICTs as catalysts for transformation. The researcher's goal was to determine and evaluate the status of ICT resources in Metro Manila schools. Specifically, the researcher wanted to determine the goals that educators had for using ICTs, whether schools had the necessary ICT facilities to reach these goals, whether actual usage was consistent with these goals, and whether there were differences between public and private schools' responses. Using a mail-in questionnaire and follow-up interviews, the researcher determined that schools, a few primary schools and many secondary schools said they espoused emerging or transformative uses of ICTs. However, Metro Manila students' access to computers, peripherals, and the Internet was poor. Software selections were also generally limited to productivity tools. As such, ICTs were actually primarily used to teach computer literacy and programming. Private schools were better equipped than public schools, but ICT usage was similarly limited.     

Digital diversity among upper secondary students: A multilevel analysis of the relationship between cultural capital,self-efficacy,strategic use of information and digital competence

This paper addresses digital diversity among upper secondary students. Since 2006 digital skills and competence has been embedded as key competence in the Norwegian national curriculum. A sample of 593 Norwegian students from 43 upper secondary schools participated in a survey with a digital competence quiz and a self-report questionnaire. Analysis showed differences in students' digital competence and indication of digital diversity on both student and school level. A multilevel analysis reveals that cultural capital, language integration at home, self-efficacy, strategic use of information and average grades of the students predict 20% of the variation in students' digital competence score and 49% of the variation between schools' average digital competence score.     

An effective online teaching method: the combination of collaborative learning with initiation and self-regulation learning with feedback

In modern business environments, work and tasks have become more complex and require more interdisciplinary skills to complete, including collaborative and computing skills for website design. However, the computing education in Taiwan can hardly be recognised as effective in developing and transforming students into competitive employees. In this regard, the author adopted collaborative learning (CL) with initiation and self-regulated learning (SRL) with feedback to develop students' collaborative skills and regular learning habits and further contribute to practical computing skills for website design. This study comprised an experiment that included 279 second-year university students from five class sections, including four experimental groups (CISF group, n = 57; CIS group, n = 53; CI group, n = 68; C group, n = 68), and a control group (T group, n = 33). The results reveal that students who received the combined treatment of online CL with initiation and SRL with feedback attained the best grades for their computing skills for website design among the five groups. The author further discusses the implications for teachers, schools and educators who plan to design practical scenarios and online learning activities for their students.     

Leveraging a personalized system to improve self-directed learning in online educational environments

Many students who participate in online courses experience frustration and failure because they are not prepared for the demanding and isolated learning experience. A traditional learning theory known as self-directed learning (SDL) is a foundation that can help establish features of a personalized system that helps students improve their abilities to manage their overall learning activities and monitor their own performance. Additionally, the system enables collaboration, interaction, feedback, and the much-needed support from the instructor and students' peers. A Web 2.0 social-technology application, MediaWiki, was adopted as the platform from which incremental features were developed to utilize the fundamental concepts of SDL. Students were able to customize content by setting specific learning goals, reflecting on their learning experiences, self-monitoring activities and performances, and collaborating with others in the class. SDL skills exist to some degree in all learners, this study finds that students' SDL abilities can improve when a course adopts a personalized and collaborative learning system that enables the students to be more proactive in planning, organizing, and monitoring their course activities.     

How competition and heterogeneous collaboration interact in prevocational game-based mathematics education

The present study addresses the effectiveness of an educational mathematics game for improving proportional reasoning in students from prevocational education. Though in theory game-based learning is promising, research shows that results are ambiguous and that we should look into ways to support game-based learning. The current study explored two factors (i.e., collaboration and competition) that have been associated with motivational and cognitive effects, and have potential to optimize game-based learning. In a fully crossed design, four conditions were examined: collaboration and competition, collaboration control, competition control, and control. It was found that, over all, gameplay did improve students' proportional reasoning skills but that learning effects did not differ between conditions. However, when students’ ability levels were taken into account, an interaction between collaboration and competition was found. For below-average students, the effect of collaboration was modified by competition, showing a negative effect of competition on domain knowledge gains in a collaborative learning situation. In contrast, for above-average students, the data demonstrated a trend that suggests a positive effect of competition on domain knowledge gain in a collaborative learning situation.     

An online collaborative document creation exercise in an ODL research project module

Online technologies to support collaborative learning provide lecturers in distance higher education with ever more opportunities to extend their teaching in beneficial ways. Students are also increasingly familiar with the online environment via social networking sites. How well this familiarity with online environments translates into the online collaborative learning space in an open distance learning context was examined. We report here on one cycle of an action research project involving 11 fourth-year computing students producing shared survey questionnaires and interview questions collaboratively online. Feedback on the collaboration exercise was obtained by means of a questionnaire which was analysed using grounded theory techniques. The expectation was that collaborative text creation software would be used but somewhat surprisingly, given their academic background, the students used email as the tool of choice. The students' reflections on the collaborative process showed that they noted and appreciated the benefits of collaborative work but also confirmed some of the previously reported frustrations of online collaborative work – in particular differences in levels of commitment and effort, and the free rider effect. Overall, the results pointed to the need for lecturers to be involved in a collaborative process to critically question and guide choices being made.     

Exploring students' learning effectiveness and attitude in Group Scribbles‐supported collaborative reading activities: a study in the primary classroom

Improving students' reading comprehension is of significance. In this study, collaborative learning supported by Group Scribbles (GS), a networked technology, was integrated into a primary reading class. Forty‐seven 10‐year‐old students from two 4th grade classes participated in the study. Experimental and control groups were established to investigate the effectiveness of GS‐supported collaborative learning in enhancing students' reading comprehension. The results affirmed the effectiveness of the intervention designed. In the experiment group, students' learning attitudes, motivation and interest were enhanced as well. Further analyses were done to probe students' interaction processes in the networked collaborative classroom and different collaboration patterns and behaviours were identified. Based on the findings obtained, implications for future learning design to empower L1 learning were elaborated.     

The equivalence of Internet versus paper-based surveys in IT/IS adoption research in collectivistic cultures: the impact of satisficing

An increasing proportion of information technology (IT)/information system adoption research collects data using online surveys. However, a paucity of research assesses the equivalence of paper-based versus Internet-based surveys in collectivistic cultures. Furthermore, no theoretical or empirical research investigates how cultural differences between collectivistic and individualistic cultures influence the measurement equivalence (ME) of these survey modes. To explore these issues, online and paper-based surveys with comparable samples were carried out in both an individualistic (the USA) and a collectivistic culture (China). Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to examine the ME across both survey modes in these different cultures. Results indicate that the relatively larger satisficing discrepancy between paper and online surveys causes respondents in collectivistic cultures to have an increased likelihood of providing responses that vary as compared to respondents in individualistic cultures. The disparate responses, in turn, result in increased measurement variance between the two survey modes. The findings of this study bridge a gap in the literature and address the question of how culture influences online satisficing behaviour and how that behaviour causes measurement invariance across survey modes. This study also explains the possible underlying mechanisms by which different national cultures exert their influence on survey results. The findings provide important implications for IT researchers, especially those in collectivistic cultures or those who need to collect data in collectivistic cultures using online surveys or mixed-mode surveys that include an online survey mode.     

Patterns of students' collaborations by variations in their learning orientations in blended course designs: How is it associated with academic achievement?

Background

While a number of learner factors have been identified to impact students' collaborative learning, there has been little systematic research into how patterns of students' collaborative learning may differ by their learning orientations.

Objectives

This study aimed to investigate: (1) variations in students' learning orientations by their conceptions, approaches, and perceptions; (2) the patterns of students' collaborations by variations in their learning orientations and (3) the contribution of patterns of collaborations to academic achievement.

Methods

A cohort of 174 Chinese undergraduates in a blended engineering course were surveyed for their conceptions of learning, approaches to learning and to using online learning technologies, and perceptions of e-learning, to identify variations in their learning orientations. Students' collaborations and mode of collaborations were collected through an open-ended social network analysis (SNA) questionnaire.

Results and Conclusions

A hierarchical cluster analysis identified an ‘understanding’ and ‘reproducing’ learning orientations. Based on students' learning orientations and their choices to collaborate, students were categorized into three mutually exclusive collaborative group, namely Understanding Collaborative group, Reproducing Collaborative group and Mixed Collaborative group. SNA centrality measures demonstrated that students in the Understanding Collaborative group had more collaborations and stayed in a better position in terms of capacity to gather information. Both students' approaches to learning and students' average collaborations significantly contributed to their academic achievement, explaining 3% and 4% of variance in their academic achievement respectively. The results suggest that fostering a desirable learning orientation may help improve students' collaborative learning.     

Assessing online collaborative learning: process and product

The assessment of online collaborative study presents new opportunities and challenges, both in terms of separating the process and product of collaboration, and in the support of skills development. The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of assessment with respect to the processes and products of online collaborative study. It describes a qualitative case study of staff and students perspectives on two UK Open University courses which have used a variety of models of online collaborative assessment. The findings underline the importance of assessment in ensuring online participation, and in supporting the practice and development of online collaborative learning. They have led to a number of recommendations for the assessment of online collaborative learning.     

High school students' perceptions of affect and collaboration during virtual science inquiry learning

This study examined affect during high school students' face‐to‐face collaborative inquiry learning in science, supported by the web‐based software Virtual Baltic Sea Explorer. Self‐reported affective states during the inquiry process in peer groups were related to evaluations of a group's collaboration and performance in three phases of interdisciplinary science inquiry (biology and chemistry). Results indicate that despite high cognitive demands, positive affect prevailed whereas negative affect was infrequent. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse the significance of affect on collaboration and group performance. The relationship between affect, collaboration, and the groups' productive outcome revealed that self‐assurance had a significant effect on collaboration and support, intertwined with scientific understanding and group performance. Furthermore, a cross‐lagged analysis showed a reciprocal relation between positive affect, scientific understanding, collaboration, and support. These outcomes contribute to the scarce literature on the nature and importance of affect in the process of face‐to‐face computer‐supported collaborative inquiry and learning in science.     

E-tutorial support for collaborative online learning: An explorative study on experienced and inexperienced e-tutors

The e-tutor plays a major role in supporting virtual collaborative learning, as he/she supervises learners in collaboratively solving tasks, acquiring new skills, and applying new knowledge. This study is aimed at gaining further insights into the daily support practices of e-tutors. Seventy-six e-tutors from 17 different European countries were invited to fill in an online questionnaire to evaluate collaborative activities, and to answer yes/no-questions regarding their intervention to support these collaborative activities. A cluster analysis identified two profiles of e-tutors according to the importance ascribed to collaborative activities, and to the number of times they intervened to foster such activities. The cluster validation revealed a difference between experienced and inexperienced European e-tutors in their support of online collaboration: e-tutors with experience considered specific cognitive activities to be more important for effective online collaboration, and they seemed to be more familiar in detecting and adequately intervening to avoid dysfunctional social phenomena. Thus, experience in supporting online collaboration seems to be a useful precondition for successfully intervening to stimulate necessary learning activities and to avoid dysfunctional collaborative activities.     

STEM learning attitude predicts computational thinking skills among primary school students

Computational thinking (CT) plays a vital role in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). However, whether students' learning attitude towards STEM is related to their CT skills remains unknown. Two studies were conducted to address this knowledge gap. In Study 1, we validated a newly developed STEM learning attitude scale among a sample of Chinese primary school students (N = 489). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis results revealed that the scale which consisted of three factors (mathematics, science and information technology) could sufficiently measure primary school students' STEM learning attitude in the current sample. In Study 2, we explored the association between students' STEM learning attitude and their CT skills. Evidence revealed that learning attitude towards STEM significantly predicted CT skills. We also found that girls had a more positive learning attitude towards STEM than boys, and the fourth grade might be the key period for the development of CT skills. Implications for promoting primary school students' STEM learning and CT skills were also discussed.     

The effect of a graph‐oriented computer‐assisted project‐based learning environment on argumentation skills

The purpose of this quasi‐experimental study was to explore how seventh graders in a suburban school in the United States developed argumentation skills and science knowledge in a project‐based learning environment that incorporated a graph‐oriented, computer‐assisted application. A total of 54 students (three classes) comprised this treatment condition and were engaged in a project‐based learning environment that incorporated a graph‐oriented, computer‐assisted application, whereas a total of 57 students (three classes) comprised the control condition and were engaged in a project‐based learning environment without this graph‐oriented, computer‐assisted application. Verbal collaborative argumentation was recorded and the students' post essays were collected. A random effects analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted and a significant difference in science knowledge about alternative energies between conditions was observed. A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was conducted and there was a significant difference in counterargument and rebuttal skills between conditions. A qualitative analysis was conducted to examine how the graph‐oriented, computer‐assisted application supported students' development of argumentation skills and affected the quality of collaborative argumentation. The difference in argumentation structure and quality of argumentation between conditions might explain a difference in science knowledge as well counterargument and rebuttal skills (argumentation) between both conditions. This study concluded that a project‐based learning environment incorporating a graph‐oriented, computer‐assisted application was effective in improving students' science knowledge and developing their scientific argumentation skills.     

Augmented reality and competition in robotics education: Effects on 21st century competencies,group collaboration and learning motivation

Robotics education has received an increasing attention in recent years as a means to build students' motivation, team collaboration skills, and other valuable 21st century competencies. Yet there is a lack of experimental studies to investigate and identify strategies to facilitate robotics education. This study adopted a 2 × 2 quasi-experimental design to investigate two strategies: the incorporation of augmented reality (AR) and the introduction of competition in robotics activities. Students' robotics task performance, team collaboration processes, 21st century learning competencies and learning motivation were measured as dependent variables. The results indicated that AR significantly improved students' motivation, team processes, and 21st century competencies. Moreover, the effects of AR were more pronounced with the competition groups. Implications are drawn to provide guidelines on the use of AR and competition in robotics education.