lesson 6-old

Lesson 6: Social Presence & Assessment (spring 2012)

Goals

  • Discuss and describe the research dealing with social presence in distance learning.

  • Identify factors important to online social presence.

  • Discuss the assessment of distance education.

  • Research and discuss the strategies of the assessments of research in distance education.

Instructor's Notes

Social Presence

In this lesson we will discuss online social presence, and assessment in distance education. We have covered some aspects in social presence previously. It is important for us to spend a little bit more time to research social presence because it has been overlooked by many practitioners and researchers.

Social presence is important in online learning. Social presence becomes critical because physical presence is lacking in the online learning environment, . Social presence is the degree of feeling of, perception of and reaction to being connected by CMC to another intellectual entity through a text-based encounter. Gunawardena and Zittle's and Tu and McIsaac's studies are important to the understanding of social presence.

The importance of examining social factors that impact communication and learning in telecommunications-based systems has been emphasized in recent studies. Virtual classrooms with multicultural students are pervasive. Studies have suggested that future research should explore the relationship between media and the socio-cultural construction of knowledge, and examine the cultural effects of technology and courseware transfer in distance education. Social presence is the degree of person-to-person awareness that occurs in the computer environment. Social presence, the most important concept in social context, is an important key to understanding person-to-person telecommunication. Recent studies have emphasized that social presence possesses potential for future study. Social presence is necessary to enhance and improve effective instruction in both traditional and technology-based classrooms. When the level of social presence is low, interaction is also low. The lack of social presence will lead to a high level of frustration, an attitude critical of the instructor's effectiveness, and a lower level of affective learning.

Social presence is a significant factor in improving instructional effectiveness; therefore, it is one of the most significant factors in distance education. Studies that have investigated the effects of conveyance system design and social presence, in the form of teacher immediacy behavior on perceived student learning and satisfaction in the televised classroom, concluded that system design and teacher immediacy behavior have a strong impact on student learning and satisfaction. Social presence is a strong predictor of satisfaction within a CMC environment. Also, it is considered to be an element of interpersonal communication in an online learning environment. In fact, an examination of the utilization of e-mail by college student concluded that students used CMC more when they felt that e-mail conveyed more interpersonal presence. The user judges the degree of social presence. Lack of non-verbal cues in CMC causes an impersonal feeling, doubted to be inherent to the system. Online users have perceived CMC as a high social presence medium. Social presence can be cultured by teleconference users and leaders or encouraged by initial learning sessions. It is suggested that by successfully inculturating themselves within CMC, learners promote their levels of social presence, and allow themselves an opportunity for greater participation. In spite of the characteristics of the medium, student perceptions of the social and human qualities of CMC will depend on the social presence created by the instructors/moderators and the online community. Therefore the instructor or the moderator must utilize their interaction skills and techniques, rather than that of the medium; this will enhance students' perceptions of social presence on CMC.

How can we assess learning in distance education? This is a tough question. Many different methods of assessing distance learning have been proposed. One question I was asked frequently, how do you know the actual enrolled students are participating the course activities? How do you students are not cheating in online classes? I would like to ask you the same questions. Because you may be asked the similar questions. The assessments and evaluations are very critical issues in distance education. How do we know our students are learning? Should we give exams to distance learners? How do we know the right students taking the exams, not others? When processing the readings, keep one thing in mind. Assessments and evaluations are related to the distance course designs and learning objectives.

Let's identify effective distance education assessments and justify why they are effective.

Readings (Powered by Del.icio.us. Consider to subscribe RSS to keep updated on reading resources.)

    • Required Readings (Finish the required readings before the lesson starts)

    • Optional Readings (More readings for you to enrich your learning, to prepare for discussions, assignments, projects etc.)

    • Resources (Resources from our classmates, ETC students, and ETC faculty.)

Activities

Lesson Discussions (4 points) Lesson Discussion Guidelines

  • ETC777 Lesson 6 Multi-dimensional Network Discussion Instructions Purposes

      • Integrate PLE to support open network discussions.

      • Reflect better human thinking

      • Dynamic social network linkage design: RSS Linkage & Social Tagging Linkages

      • Traditional online discussion board requires participants to visit the discussion board to know what have been discussed and to participate the discussions. Multi-dimensional network discussions allow participates use a central network tool (Google Reader) to monitor discussion postings on multiple discussion tools without visiting the actual discussion board. This is an example of PLE and ONLE for network discussions.

      • After you subscribe all four tool RSS. You should visit your Google Reader first before you participate the discussions when you would like to participate the Lesson 6 discussions. By visiting your Google Reader, you can moderate our discussions occurring on different tools.

  • Discussion Topic(s)

    • What important factors impact online social presence? (Be sure to read Gunawardena & Zittle's article. Additional information can be obtain from Tu and McIsaac's article.)

    • What are the important strategies to foster higher level of online social presence?

    • What is augmented reality? How and what it may support DE?

    • Identify and justify an effective distance education and online learning assessment strategy. See the discussion board for the question(s) posted by the weekly moderator(s)

Additional questions:

    • After reading Wood & Smith's chapter, do you think their values should be integrated into virtual reality (VR) for online learning?

    • Based on Vrasidas's and Savenya's chapters, do you think distance learning mode is appropriate high school students and younger learners (k-12 level)?

    • How does gender affect online learning? Are the issues of femininity and masculinity the same as the gender issues in online learning?

Integrated Tools

    • Google Reader: Google Reader is a Web-based aggregator, capable of reading Atom and RSS feeds online or offline. as a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) & as a discussion hub. Since all of you have GMail, you can obtain Google Reader by using your GMail.

    • Twitter: You should use the Twitter account that you use for our class.

    • Delicious: You should use the Delicious account that we created in the beginning of the class.

      • Delicious bookmark sharing isn't necessary a posting. It is more like network learning resource sharing. It is highly encouraged to provide some information in the note field to help other to understand the bookmark resources.

      • Your bookmark must use this require tag so your bookmarks can be linked to RSS feed: ETC777L6D

      • Subscribe RSS feed: http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/tag/ETC777L6D?count=15(You can click this link and add it to your Google Reader or iGoogle by following the instructions.)

Instructions

    • Key functions: Apply ETC777's community/instructional activity "tag" to link people, content, and multiple tools via RSS subscriptions on Google Reader.

    • Community/Instructional Activity Tag: ETC777L6D (which means ETC777's Lesson 6 Discussions)

    • Google Reader

      • Subscribe all FOUR tools' RSS to Google Reader

      • iGoogle

        • We can add Google Reader gadget to our iGoogle so we monitor our discussions from iGoogle gadget.

    • Nabble

      • Tag: ETC777L6D

    • Twitter

      • HashTag: #ETC777L6D

    • Delicious

      • Tags: ETC777L6D ETC777 (Two tags)

Requirements

    • At least one posting for each tool. Total four postings. More are encouraged.

    • Do your best to participate this discussion. We will discuss this new discussion format in Lesson 7.

    • Multi-dimensional discussion format could be very overwhelmed because it is completely different from our traditional discussion format. It requires us to have different mental model to participate in this discussions.

    • See the online discussion for more discussion questions posted by the moderators.

    • Moderators: Team 6: Moderation Guidelines

Nabble Widget (This is a live view on Nabble discussion board).

Twitter Search Widget ETC777L6D

Delicious Widget Live Feed

Delicious/tag/ETC777L6D

NOTES: Lesson 6 discussion is very different previous discussions. Be sure to read the discussion instructions.

Traditional online discussions do not afford digital identities and social identifies, particularly after the course ends because CMS does not allow us access our course discussions.

Differences between multi-dimensional network discussion and traditional discussion:

    • Multi-dimensional network discussions retain participants’ digital identifies and social identifies via discussion postings and resource sharing.

    • After the semester, participants can access their and others’ postings and shared resources.

    • Participants’ postings and shared resources on different network tools becomes their digital and social identifies.

    • Apply PLE concept and tools (Google Reader) to participate and manage network discussions.

    • Monitor course discussions on our own PLE (Google Reader) without actually visiting course discussion web pages/sites.

    • Engage in mobile learning, ubiquitous learning easier.

Tips:

    • When you are ready to participate and/or to check lesson discussion activities, visit your Google Reader first or your mobile device to monitor the lesson 6 discussion activities. Then you can determine whether you would like to participate in the discussions.

    • If you have mobile devices, you can subscribe RSS feeds on your mobile devices. EX: I have a smartphone and an iPad. I subscribe our four L6 discussion RSS feeds from different tools so I can manage our L6 discussion activities.

      • I can use computers and/or mobile device to submit my postings to Delicious, Twitter, Blogger etc.

      • I can tweet my flash thoughts to Twitter.

      • I can blog my reflections to Blogger.

      • I can share/tag online resources on Delicious.

      • I can post more formal/longer discussion postings to Nabble.

    • Example of Google Reader RSS subscription feeds.

ETC777 Discussion Statistical Analysis

Assignment

Prepare upcoming assignments

    • Assignment 3: Web 2.0 Learning Environments (Due Lesson 7)

    • Assignment 4: Final Paper Proposal (04/13)

    • Assignment 5: Final Paper (05/18)(See Lesson 7 for the instructions)