OUseful Info

Online Student Engagement

A couple of weeks ago, I was part of an interesting email exchange with a couple of colleagues (Chris Bird and John Martin) about engaging students with online activities. I didn't blog it at the time - though I should have. So what follows below is transcript of it woven together from a dozen or so email messages... (I've tried to credit all words that aren't mine....and apologies for inaccuracies, misquotes etc.). In a follow-on post, I'll comment about why I used this 'transcript' approach...

The thread began with me commenting on how I'm "struggling with the ongoing tension between being online, and consuming stuff in a browser. What is the expectation of students re: browser delivered material. Do they think of it as being an offline environment, or an online one?"

JM: I realise it is boring to say this to a techy audience, but surely the switch is when they move from modem to broadband - and a lot of T185 students do seem to be still on modems. 56K is slow and clogs up your home phone line (or is clogged up by your teenagers). Once you have switched to broadband, you phone is accessible again, and (a very big 'and') you have learned to manage the internet security nightmare, it is a different world. So 'students' are not a homogeneous category.

CB: I wholeheartedly agree with that observation, John. Not only I am still waiting for BB myself (hopefully it will arrive on 20/7!) but I'm also aware, as a moderator on various TT18x courses and TT280, that many students are still on narrowband, and may never have access to it for a variety of reasons.

CB: I am well aware, from comments students make on the short courses, and on T171 and M150 that I tutor, that competition for the 'phone, and computer, in a family can be intense. Many students like to rapidly save a number of pages to their own PC, then study them when time permits. Even on BB, students like to save pages to disk to free up the computer for other family members (eg teenagers 'insisting' they have to use a computer immediately). What they subsequently do is often to copy the info to a CD so they can access it later/elsewhere/on a laptop etc.

JM: In T205 T185 I've insisted that we issue a decent PDF version for very much that sort of reason, and students have always said they valued it. But the OU culture has tended to be rather resistant to the idea - and creating a decent PDF is non-trivial (though any student with the full version of Acrobat could make their own 'rough and ready' PDF in the length of time it takes to download).

So for the next year or two, should we be delivering all our e-courses on CD/USB drive, and just using the web to top the content up with downloaded updates?

CB: I'd certainly not totally disagree with that (well, not a USB drive as it would be possible to delete things).

Most of the courses I've seen delivered from the OU via a server to a student's browser don;t really need the server to deliver them - the pages can all work fine offline.

JM: While I have a lot of sympathy with that, the arguments against it are:

JM: 1. As an author who works directly in XML, the web has the ginormous advantage that I can at last control what the student get fairly directly. I don't mean that I'm a control freak - I'm happy for others to have access to it as well (provided we know how to handle the version control issues) but it means we can correct and update almost instantly and can ease many of the project control hassles and delays. I'm direclty on the critical path - not five wobbly sticks away from it.

JM: 2. Tony already know my concerns to offer a printable version, so I think that means PDF, not just a zipped up website.

JM: 3. I don't know how well combined CD/web sites work, but I do know that setting up the T185 web-DVD video is quite a techy hassle - fine for reasonably IT literate folk, but the naive IT novice would be scared off by it.

JM: 4. I know that even though T185 makes more use of the server than many OU courses, it is still very tame by Tony's standards. But unless we get academics like me really authoring live, hands on, on the web, we'll never learn. Even if the web is used non-interactively, it is still very different from print and CD - and I think we need to go through that steep learning curve of spending months at the screen fiddling round with stuff until it feels OK, with editors and studio working in parallel with the author, not in series - i.e. real team stuff.

CB: Largely, with most of the T18x courses, I see the web content as being static during each presentation (even between presentations) and the only real use made of web-disseminated info being news updates, corrections, and the CMA/ECA. Thus there would be no reason not to have the bulk of the material on CD.

CB: But, and I think it's a significant 'but', if the nature of the courses
change from being online to offline, with only a periodic need to connect to check for changes, what happens to the essential conference element? At the moment, with students needing to connect to study, they also access the conferences. Whilst I don't have any data that shows what percentage of students use conferences (guessing it's around 20-25%), those that do probably regard it as an essential part of their learning and make a lot of use of them (particularly T183). I suspect the use of conferencing would decline significantly in the course moved off-line.

CB: Out of interest, M150 is primarily offline with some online content - updates, news, CMA/ECA etc, and conferencing (both national and tutor group based). No matter how I endeavoured to encourage students to use the conferences, it was to no avail. Some never did, not even to use email. Conversely, T171, that is delivered online has enthusiastic use made of conferencing. OK, some of it is due to the 'enforced' online activities, but much of it exists purely because students need to go online to study and then use the conferences as a consequence of that (last year, my students posted 295 messages in a 4 week period!).

CB: Weighing up the 'do students study online or offline?' debate, maybe T171 has the balance right. It's an online course, with a strong online study element via activities, but the CT, in an acknowledgement that students do work offline for reasons I and John have previously denoted, distribute a zipped offline package for each module a few weeks after the online one is made available. Obviously, this kind of thing cannot be done with a 10 week course, but it is indicative of a recognition of how students do work rather than the way we'd perhaps like them to work.

JM: T205 did that also, and had that same 'delay' problem (until eventaully they 'froze' the PDF). But T185 overcomes it by making its PDF available as a downloadable file. OK, it is 12 MB, but even over a modem that is worth downloading as a one-off. Zero cost, zero delay - it is available from day 1.

So this zipped offline package is for who's benefit? Student's who've fallen behind, or to give students a legacy?

CB: Various reasons:

CB: Fallen behind? - Not necessary as the material is still online.

CB: A legacy? - Yes, I think that is one thing students like it for.

CB: Another reason? - So they can unpack the zipped module on to their computer and study offline. All the interpage links etc will work perfectly, and it's a more coherent solution than relying on students to save individual pages.

The use of online study to pull students into the confs is a well made one, i think. Although resource wasn;t there to let us do it, I originally argued that T184 should have interactivity/animations etc to keep the student at the screen, rather than printing stuff off.

I didn't see the materials being online as being essential, (because eg T396 has only student confs online and these are reasonably active) but I too have since come to see that some students won;t necessarily log on *just* to see the confs, (though they may go to confs if they are logged into an OU context for other reasons...)

CB: I think that is very definitely the case, Tony. 'Enforcing' an online study element means they may naturally migrate to conferences. Out of interest, for T183 there is a very distinct correlation between the quality of the ECA and participating in conferences.

The M150/T171 comparison is an interesting one...do you think that if online materials and conferences were even more closely integrated (eg with links to relevant threads appearing in the course web page (eg from a drop down list box in each chapter, with links to conference threads on that chapter/topic)) this would encourage students to converse even more? [can;t you just tell i love techie toys?!;-)]

CB: Possibly. By keeping them online (but not wholly and exclusively online!), it goes a long way to reducing student isolation and can enhance group relationships as a whole. Anything that keeps students working as a group tends to induce better work. In T183, we (mods) deliberately keep a low profile when students post webpages for review. Students, after an initial shyness, enthuastically embrace peer review and support as a consequence. Mods step in when real problems arise.

JM: Incidentally, T185 uses direct links to FC at various points, and this can work quite well - e.g. they do an exercise and report its results via a direct link to the correct conference. You barely know you are in FC at all, but 'participation rates' (if you can call it that) are high.

When T184 was being prototyped, we mocked up a 'have your say' link which allowed students to post a comment about a topic from a link embedded within a page to a simple database, and once they'd made a comment it would let them see others' comments. We never went with it in the end because i couldn't get anyone to give me access to a 24/7server with a database (long since resolved, now) but in the meantime i think that jamie has made a similar facility available (is this something you pushed for, john?)

JM: The original idea was from Peter Richardson (ex-ACS, now independant) who provided 'Chatlets' and 'Ideas banks' for T205. I asked Jamie to implement a similar system for RK/T185. It works well as a way of recording people's thoughts on the way past - but you don't get 'discussion' - usually just one very brief message per contributor - but many will contribute to those who don't contribute to FC. They can end up somwhat in competition - so a lot of 'Chatlet' activity may actually reduce FC. I've been talking to the VLE folk, and they are intersted in trying to create a sort of 'FC + Chatlet' system so that you can move seamlessly between website and FC-quality messaging system in any way you want without ever having to worry about whether you are in FC or not.

There is also an issue with changing content during the persentation of a course. However, I think we could find a work around for this. E.g. could we call them 'Livelinks' and use a modified style, the implication being that not every student may have been served with this link.

There is also the opportunity to build in personalisation - for example, in the suggested links on automation mentioned we could add a user links section. So for example, we give the header: My Links (automation) and a script pulls in a student's bookmarks that are tagged with a) t184, b) automation (we provide them with bookmarking bookmarklets for their browser, or on the toolbar in the course page). The script will also make use of the student's PI to get the right bookmark stash, and this can come either from the server as a result of logging in, or via a personalisation cookie.

CB: Time and again, in all the T18x courses I've moderated, the issue with a significant number of students is 'How can we save pages to read offline'. At one time, one might have thought it was a cost related issue, but few people use pay-as-you-go accounts now. Primarily, it is either to free up the phone line for other members of the family (if on a narrowband connection), or to free up a computer for the same reason; i.e. students save material to the computer, then copy it to, for example, a laptop for consumption elsewhere, or burn a CD and take it to work to read etc. Of course, I cannot possibly quantify numbers, only assert that it does arise with a number of students.

CB: We need to be careful about locking students into the necessity of being
online.

Thanks guys - I hope you're okay with me quoting you verbatim - hopefully I preserved the context...

Posted by ajh59 at July 29, 2005 04:35 PM