Virtual TAU

FIGURE 27.2. DISTRIBUTION OF PERCENTAGE OF CONTENT ITEMS

VIEWED BY STUDENTS.

all was significantly higher among undergraduate than graduate students. This rate was higher among Social Sciences and Humanities students compared with Exact Sciences students.

Different conclusions can be drawn from these data. First, it appears that in most courses, the effort invested by many lecturers to include large amounts of digital materials in their Web sites was not fully rewarded (by reasonable content-consumption levels). It appears that many instructors made their course devel­opment decisions focusing more on intrinsic or content-based considerations and less on actual implementation considerations (for example, students' capability to access and read all content items in the course or actual allocation of time for read­ing assignments along the instruction). However, a contrasting conclusion may be based on the concept that the content items component of the Web sites is an ever­growing repository of content resources, which can be reconfigured according to changing objectives and student needs in each teaching cycle. In such a model, there is not necessarily an exact correspondence between a given item and a specific class, but a more flexible perception of content base to be used by different

The Handbook of Blended Learning

students at different stages according to their needs and objectives; in other words, under this model, it is unrealistic to expect all items to be retrieved or all students to access each and every item.

When we consider the interplay between the lecturers' motivations and con­ceptions for developing content and the students' needs and goals for consuming it, an evolving process during which different models emerge and are tested in each teaching cycle of the blended course.

Implementation and Use of Asynchronous Forums

A fourth issue addressed in our studies relates to the extent to which instructors implement asynchronous forums in their blended courses and the associated level of student participation in such activities. To deal with these questions, all courses during the academic years 2000-2001 to 2003-2004 were examined (over fifty-nine hundred courses). Table 27.3 presents the data on forum implementation and use over these years. On the one hand, the data show a gradual increase in the number of courses in which asynchronous activities were implemented. It seems that progressively more lecturers become aware of the potential contribution of the communication tools for teaching. On the other hand, the actual proportion of courses implementing communication tools, such as discussion forums relative to the total number of blended courses, is still discouraging: about 4 to 6 percent in the last couple of years.

From the students' perspective, the data show a slight increase over time in the total number of messages posted in the course forums and in the average num­ber of messages per course as well. The average number of messages per student per course (about four to six) remained unexpectedly low over the years.

TABLE 27.3. ASYNCHRONOUS DISCUSSION FORUMS IMPLEMENTATION AND PARTICIPATION OVERTIME.

messages per student (S.D.)

Virtual TAU

A strong claim favoring the adoption of new ICT for educational purposes stresses the potential embedded in the communication tools for empowering teach­ing and learning processes (Hara, Bonk, & Angeli, 2000; Nachmias, Mioduser, Oren, & Ram, 2000; Oren, Mioduser, & Nachmias, 2002). Despite this claim, the slow pace of actual adoption of communication-based activities in the courses indicates that a reexamination of needs, goals, and procedures in the development of blended instruction is required. It appears that the lecturers are neither aware of the educational potential of these tools nor trained in their implementation for teaching. For both teachers and students, the integration of technology-mediated communi­cation into their teaching or learning implies first and foremost a change in the way they perceive the transactions involved in their shared academic experience. Such transactions might include those that are not tied to a predetermined space or time slot; that may be configured in formats other than the common one-to-many lecture-dominant structure; that may follow varied interaction models typical of different human transactional situations (a trial, a design group, a contest, or a distributed pro­duction team, for example); or that represent the distribution of functions and allo­cation of control and leadership roles other than that characterizing the classic teacher-student interrelationship. It appears that the required change in perception takes place gradually with the attempts to devise communication-based activities. It is by this process that more innovative and complex models progressively evolve and enrich the repertoire of learning opportunities.

Conclusion

This chapter briefly surveyed four aspects of a campuswide implementation pro­ject aimed at integrating the Internet into the academic instruction at Tel-Aviv University. This initiative is being accompanied by comprehensive research and evaluation, focusing on multiple aspects at the macro-, mezzo-, and microlevels.

From our continuous examination of the progress of the project, two main preliminary and apparently contrasting conclusions can be drawn. The first is re­lated to the impressive pace at which the implementation of the Internet in the academic instruction has grown at TAU. Beyond any expectation, many lecturers adopted the technology over a very short time, triggering the diffusion of blended learning all over the campus and at all academic levels.

The contrasting conclusion relates to the still limited pedagogical range of the implemented activities. From the pedagogical point of view, most instructors conceive the use of course Web sites in their most basic form: as content provider rather than communication facilitator (asynchronous forums were included as teach­ing mode only in about 4 to 10 percent of courses in the past three years). Only

The Handbook of Blended Learning

about 5 percent have developed novel pedagogies in which the Web has added value, such as hyperlinked information and Web-supported collaborative work. However, some instructors (5 to 10 percent) do experiment and add novel peda­gogical features to their Web sites in new cycles of their courses' implementation.

We can conclude that blended learning at TAU remains in a transitional phase characterized by the implementation of traditional pedagogical solutions by means of the new technologies. For greater transformation of teaching and learning to occur, most lecturers need appropriate support to make the conceptual shift toward the generation of more sound technology-based learning activities.

A salient feature of the majority of the courses developed over the years is that these were conceived as blended courses in varied degrees. Thus, an increasingly rich continuum of course models has evolved. On the one end, the Web site serves as a repository of varied content and administrative information resources. On the other, the Web site represents a complete pedagogical component complementing the cam­pus-based face-to-face activities in a virtual way. However, total flexibility (Collis & Moonen, 2001) in learning time and space was hardly achieved. Only one or two lec­turers created fuUy online courses, and very few gave up their actual meeting in the class. In the vast majority of the courses, all Web activities were additional to the classes, in some cases increasing the workload of the students and the instructors as well.

These issues were usually related to the implementation process of blended learn­ing at TAU. Our research agenda for the near future includes the study of issues in several areas, such as the cost-effectiveness of blended learning, evaluation of dif­ferent types and models of blended courses, development of appropriate method­ological tools for the analysis of large amounts of logged data, and consolidation of new pedagogical models fostering the mindful formation of the academic staff.

Aware that we are only at the first stages of a long and complex implemen­tation process, we do believe that blended learning has the potential to evolve into a paradigm shift in the organization and pedagogies of academic instruction.

References

American Federation of Teachers. (2000, May). Distance education: Guidelines for good practice.

Retrieved September 27, 2004, from www.aft.org/higher_ed/downloadable/distance.pdf. American Federation of Teachers. (2001, May). A virtual revolution: Trends in the expansion of

distance education. Retrieved September 27, 2004, fromwww.aft.org/higher_ed/

downloadable/VirtualRevolution.pdf. Bonk, C.J. (2001). Online teaching in an online world. Bloomington, IN: CourseShare.com.

Retrieved September 22, 2004, from https://PublicationShare.com. Bonk, С J., Cummings, J. A., Hara, N., Fischler, R., & Lee, S. M. (2000). A ten level Web

integration continuum for higher education. In B. Abbey (Ed.), Instructional and cognitive

impacts of Web-based education (pp. 56—77). Hershey, FA: Idea Group.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT