Canadian Network for Innovation in Education

This presentation addresses the use of the Community of Inquiry framework (Garrison et al., 2000, 2001) employed as the structure for the design of a blended learning course on blended learning for faculty at a large technical university in Sweden. The overall aim of the course is to provide faculty with the opportunity to design and implement blended or online course components in their undergraduate and graduate level courses. The course covers both theory and the application of online and blended teaching strategies in higher education. The theoretical part of the course is founded in the Community of Inquiry framework for blended learning presented in Vaughan et al. (2013). The practical part of the course consists of participants designing modules for blended learning delivery implemented in their own courses.

This presentation will cover the faculty response to this PD course; provide opportunity to review, discuss and critique principles of blended teaching in higher education as expressed by the model used; examine teaching issues and identify intervention strategies using ICTs; and consider the impact of disciplinary differences as expressed by faculty in the course.

Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, K-12 educators, Instructional designers, Researchers, Educational technologists, Administrators

In previous research, we created a survey that examined the supports and obstacles related to Aboriginal university students completing face-to-face courses. We found that academic performance at university and student engagement (relationships with faculty and other students) were the strongest predictors of Aboriginal graduation (Walton et al., 2013). We expanded our face-to-face survey to include questions directly related to Aboriginal online course completion, and we are developing an online version.

Very early we learned that many Aboriginal students taking Adult Basic Education (ABE) online had very limited experience with the variety of online course options currently available. Some online ABE courses were based primarily on a textbook that students received by mail. To identify the online learning preferences of Aboriginal university students who have had limited experience with online learning options and access to the Internet and computer technology, we are developing an online survey that demonstrates a small number of online learning options, and then asks students to choose among these options. Our review of existing online course surveys did not find any online assessments that provided examples of online learning options in the areas of student-to-student engagement, student-to-faculty engagement and student-to-content engagement.

Our survey includes brief video segments of three options within each of the above forms of engagement, and then asks participants to rate each option based on three criteria:

1. Cognitive criteria – “to what extent would the example encourage me to be attentive to and expend mental effort in the learning tasks encountered” (e.g., to integrate new material with previous knowledge);
2. Behavioural criteria – “to what extent would I be encouraged to make active responses to the learning tasks presented” (e.g., asking questions, solving problems, participating in discussions); and
3. Affective criteria – “to what extent would the example increase my investment in or emotional reaction to the learning (e.g., high levels of interest or positive attitudes towards the learning).

Our survey also includes questions related to family and financial factors that were found to be important by previous research with Aboriginal online students in Canada (Fahy, 2009).

The two intended audiences are educators who seek to improve the completion rate of Aboriginal students taking online courses, and researchers looking at assessing learning preferences of online students who have limited experience with a variety of online learning experiences.

Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, K-12 educators, Instructional designers, Researchers, Educational technologists, Administrators

This presentation reports the results of a recently completed applied meta-analysis of Community of Inquiry (Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 2000) empirical research as well as the evolution of the website to support Community of Inquiry researchers, practitioners and community. Since publication of the keystone CoI framework, hundreds of research studies applying and extending the original Community of Inquiry framework have resulted in the development of theory, method and instruments for studying learning communities across multiple disciplines and in varied educational settings.

A research alliance reviewed more than 350 quantitative and mixed-methods empirical studies citing the keystone Garrison et al. (2000) publication, then completed a quantitative statistical meta-analysis of 50 studies. The short-listed studies were categorized by article focus (theoretical review, empirical test, practical application), and then analyzed for research methodology, original data or secondary data to determine which, if any, patterns are emerging in quantitative research being done on the COI Framework.

A Community of Inquiry website and online community have been established in conjunction with ongoing COI research to facilitate sharing of empirical evidence, practice implications and use of the COI framework in faculty development and course (re)design. The rationale underpinning the COI website and online community will also form part of this presentation.

Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, K-12 educators, Instructional designers, Researchers, Educational technologists, Administrators

International field schools provide rich, intensive opportunities for students to apply theory from previous courses in a completely different context. It is commonly understood that seminar is a place for students to discuss, question, explore and debate theory related to the discipline of study. Personal experience has underscored the importance of seminars to assist students to make sense and create understanding of what they are experiencing during an international field school.

This presentation will provide an overview of the opportunities and challenges that faculty and students face while participating in an international field school. Seminar takes on a dual purpose; it remains the environment to engage with theory and practice, but it also becomes the place where students can safely explore how cultural context, physical environment and changes in normal routines impact overall learning experiences.

Participants will explore the elements that influence seminar when the context for student learning is an international placement. Small group work will highlight some of the approaches and methods faculty can use to facilitate a higher level of understanding and meaning of course concepts when the international experience challenges the students both academically and personally.

Of Interest to: Post-secondary education, K-12 educators, Instructional designers, Researchers, Educational technologists

Students aren’t seeking out help from the library the way that most teachers and professors are traditionally familiar with. This declining trend in use is an internationally documented phenomenon, but we know that students still struggle in conducting library research, evaluating quality resources and using materials ethically. So how does a library help students who aren’t coming into the library?

We’ve responded by utilizing new technologies, new philosophies and new approaches in order to adapt to the changing dynamics of our learners. These include synchronous reference services, roving reference, embedded librarians in online courses and partnerships with unique campus learning communities. The need for strategic agility and ongoing review and analysis is one that is shared by educators in both virtual and face-to-face spaces.

Participants in this session, intended for post-secondary and high school educators, will find out what modern and responsive academic libraries are doing to support learners in a variety of environments. Participants will reflect on their own teaching space or classroom and how they can collaborate with librarians to bring innovative information literacy opportunities beyond the library’s traditional walls.

Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, K-12 educators

It is widely agreed that “Quality Matters” when it comes to online course development. While many excellent rubrics and models have emerged in recent years to support quality in online learning, implementing these models is not always as straightforward as it seems. With the growing practice of Universal Design for Learning and, in certain jurisdictions, the roll out of accessibility compliance requirements, additional elements of review have become critical. How can quality assurance be carried out effectively in contexts where multiple players such as faculty/instructors, instructional designers, multimedia developers and more are involved in the creation and delivery of online courses?

This presentation will offer insights into how the Digital Education Strategies team at The G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education, Ryerson University, has risen to the challenge of quality assurance in a dynamic team environment that produces up to 30 courses per semester. The team’s Quality Assurance/Quality Control process will be shared, including roles and responsibilities and strategies for ensuring as effective practice as possible. By the end of the session, participants will be able to identify possible strategies for supporting quality assurance in their own institutions’ online courses and how to assist all team members in optimal fulfillment of their roles.

 

Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, Instructional designers, Educational technologists, Administrators

In 2011, a course design pilot project was started for Athabasca University courses in the School of Computing and Information Systems (SCIS), building on a development pilot initiated after a program review. The goal was to share an understanding of theory and effective practice for online learning and to develop guidelines to facilitate creative design and solution finding. At that time all SCIS courses were developed using one HTML design template. Initial changes were made to give each course its own visual identity and add course-specific resources. The next level of the design pilot looked for more effective ways to present content in the form of learning activities. 

In 2013, a formative evaluation was undertaken of the content and presentation of courses and of the design process, with the goal of informing improvements in both courses and process. Each faculty member who participated in the pilot provided his perspective on design choices made to engage students in an online learning environment. The coordinator and course author, Terry Taylor, who was interviewed for this study, used some particularly innovative ways to convey content, and the evaluation team wished to know more about his approach to motivating learners. He was interviewed about his design strategies for online courses to support learner motivation. The results presented here shed light on his successful design process. The intended audience is learning designers and faculty designing online courses.

 

Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, Instructional designers, Researchers

The Faculty of Kinesiology at the University of Regina offered two blended courses as a pilot. Up to 50 per cent of the course was done face-to-face in the classroom and the remaining time was done online in an LMS. There were two reasons for the pilot: 1) to test the notion that blended learning equals improved learning as compared to face-to-face alone; and 2) more efficient use of classroom space where the face-to-face component of both classes was taught using only one classroom, essentially halving the classroom usage. This process is being repeated for two more courses in Winter 2014. If this works, it could be scaled up to help alleviate classroom pressures on campus.

Since all four blended courses were also developed and delivered fully online, ongoing research has compared the effectiveness of each delivery mode. Some factors that will be considered in the research include but are not limited to: 1) student academic performance—assignment and final grades, assignment completion rates and retention; 2) student and instructor satisfaction or perception; 3) level of student support for each delivery mode (instructor and other support); 4) student profiles in each mode of delivery which could factor into this; 5) costs and time spent on designing and delivering/teaching each delivery mode; 6) and a detailed description of what constitutes each mode of delivery (how each course is designed and taught). The presentation will provide some preliminary research results.

 

Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, Instructional designers, Researchers, Administrators

The training of healthcare professionals has traditionally been based on substantial direct student–patient contact. Effective practitioners need to be able to apply reasoning skills gained from exposure to a variety of cases in order to develop diagnostic and therapeutic accuracy.

Virtual patients can provide students with a reliable, safe and replicable environment to practice diagnostic skills and develop clinical reasoning. In particular, virtual patients have demonstrated their use in healthcare teaching, learning and assessment and throughout a wide range of designs for learning.

While virtual patients are a useful component of healthcare education, they are seldom affordable. The range of virtual patients being produced is limited, with many essentially automated versions of problem-based learning (PBL) cases. These cases only proceed in a single direction, which prevents users from tracking down ‘wrong paths’ by immediate correction. This inflexibility limits the development of clinical reasoning, and is both unrealistic and unengaging. In real life there are often several ways to tackle a problem, but such multiple route scenarios can be very time consuming to model.

This presentation will demonstrate how UNBC is employing open source platform OpenLabyrinth https://github.com/olab/Open-Labyrinth/wiki to build online virtual patients. The development methods employ visual thinking and concept mapping techniques that are accessible, yet flexible enough to simulate real clinical decisions through non-linear pathways.

 

Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, K-12 educators, Instructional designers, Educational technologists

For many years, JIBC has been guided by an applied learning model that has resulted in a healthy use of simulations, exercises and role-plays in the design and delivery of its programs. However, when learning technology is thrown into mix it presents certain challenges to maintaining an experiential learning environment since many mainstream technologies (e.g., LMSes) are better suited to delivering content-driven courses characteristic of more traditional university programs. At JIBC, this challenge is compounded by a highly focused institutional mandate, coupled with a less traditional student body whose learning experiences transverse institutional, workplace and simulated places. This presentation will discuss findings from a JIBC student use of technology study that looked at formal and informal uses of technology, and how this informs (and doesn’t inform) learning technologies and innovation at our institution.

 

Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, Researchers, Educational technologists, Administrators

Educational culture develops within a framework of learning. This is created through agreed-upon rules between teacher, learner and content. In this workshop, participants will examine both the framework and the experiences that inform the rules through a Learning Circle—a method of cooperative, oral reflection. Learning Circles are a way of sharing history, knowledge and decision making. The Learning Circle process changes the emphasis from teaching and coaching to encouraging flexible learning and finding answers from within one’s own lived experience. A Learning Circle is central to the notion of scholarly practice as it is based on inquiry and reflection. Through the experiential nature of a Learning Circle, there is an opportunity to allow patterns, themes and deep questions to surface about the practice of teaching and learning. It is within this space that innovation and creativity lies. Participants will be invited to consider the basis of their opinions and discover insights about their own practice. Christina and Dian have used Learning Circles extensively as a means of inquiry and exploration. The workshop will be limited to 25 participants.

 

Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, K-12 educators, Instructional designers, Researchers, Educational technologists, Administrators

With a growing need for lifelong learning and the accessibility of the internet to the most remote corners of Canada and the world, it is important to acquire successful ways to support students to complete their education There is sufficient research to document how educators effectively facilitate online learning, but little is known about other sources of support students perceive as useful.

The purpose of this presentation is to present the findings of a study undertaken to explore and describe the support systems nursing students utilized in their online learning. It came to our attention that students found other sources to facilitate their learning in the form of emotional, informational, instrumental and affirmational support from both online and offline sources.

Students’ identified their online peers as providing informational support when they helped to solve technical issues and shared resources for writing assignments. Families, nursing colleagues and employers were identified as providing offline support. These finding could be introduced to students in all disciplines as strategies to support their learning online.

Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, Researchers, Educational technologists

Amidst all the chaos of day-to-day life within your education career, what CNIE activities can (or could) we do for you?

We will examine a survey done to determine numerous demographic details to describe your type of employment, language preference, geographic region, etc. We hope to learn whether your professional interest is in K-12 or post secondary; if post secondary, would that be University, College, Cégep, other? Is your educational modality distance, face-to-face, online or a blend of these?

We hope to have the results of a membership survey that captures: (1) your interests in response to a broad range of questions, (2) input from Board members, and (3) a survey of other organizations similar to CNIE.

The session will close with some discussion on recent website activities and seek your input on future web focus.

Driving this kind of investigation is our commitment to maintaining a growing and active membership.

 

Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, K-12 educators, Instructional designers, Researchers, Educational technologists, Administrators

The Math Coach program provides help with mathematics using online coaching. In the program, communication using text-based CMC with additional whiteboard capacity is used. Students range from sixth to ninth year of compulsory school, and upper secondary school (aged 12–19). Coaches are enrolled from students at teacher training colleges. Stenbom et al. (2012) introduced a framework for analyzing online coaching, the Relationship of Inquiry. That framework is a modification of the well-researched and verified theoretical framework the online Community of Inquiry (Garrison et al., 2000, 2001). Survey data and transcript analysis indicates that emotional presence is a natural part of a four-element framework for analysis of one-to-one online coaching. Abbreviations, special words and symbols, such as emoticons, are used regularly as an instrument to enhance the visibility between the coach and coachee. It serves as a replacement for face-to-face non-verbal communication. Also, sharing of emotions and moods between two individuals as people and about the coaching activity are common.

This presentation will review the proposed framework for online coaching consisting of cognitive, social, teaching and emotional presence. A special focus will be on the role emotion may play in such environments. Beyond discussion of theory, implications for practice and training of online coaches will be discussed in an interactive session with guided dialogue.  

 

Of Interest to: Online and distance education, Post-secondary education, K-12 educators, Instructional designers, Researchers, Educational technologists

The article reports progress concerning the design of a computer-assisted simulation training (CAST) platform for developing decision making skills in police students. The overarching aim is to outline a theoretical framework for the design of computer-assisted simulation training to facilitate police students’ development of search techniques in complex interactions within the built environment, learning to apply and perform the five “quick peek” techniques for information gathering and subsequent risk evaluation. The article draws on Luckin’s Ecology of Resources model of learner context informed with perspectives on reflective thinking from Dewey and Schön. The article discusses design issues within the Ecology of Resources model applied on CAST for complex police situations.

 

Of Interest to: Instructional designers, Researchers, Educational technologists