Involving Students in a Blended Course via Teacher's Initiation in Web-Enhanced Collaborative Learning

Abstract

Teachers of application software in Taiwan have traditionally applied disjointed and out-of-context examples in their teaching, which usually result in ineffective learning outcomes. A Web-enhanced, collaborative learning approach was therefore adopted to help students become involved in a course more positively. Additionally, the teacher provided initiation, establishing the essential knowledge and required skills for students at the beginning of the course in order to help students climb the learning curve. The results showed that students who received Web-enhanced collaborative learning with initiation were significantly more involved than those who did not receive the initiation. Moreover, findings also revealed that the initiation contributed to significant increases in students' involvement at the end of the course. The implications for teachers, schools, and scholars who plan to provide Web-based learning for their students are also discussed.

Introduction

The teaching of application software in Taiwan traditionally emphasizes memorization by applying inappropriate, disjointed, out-of-context examples.¹ Students who learn in this context may find becoming involved in their courses a challenge; moreover, they may lack the motivation to learn more in the future.² The results of such teaching and training can hardly be deemed effective.³ Collaborative learning describes situations in which two or more subjects synchronously and interactively build a joint solution to some problems.⁴ It is indicated that collaborative learning could improve students' learning and, at the same time, provide students with a multifaceted means of knowledge acquisition.⁵ In order to develop students' practical reflection skills and increase their involvement in learning, collaborative learning is considered an appropriate teaching method to achieve effective and satisfying learning.

Involvement includes responses to structured tasks, active engagement with material, student collaboration, student direction, flow, and motivation.⁶ Involvement is defined by Zaichkowsky⁷ as a person's perceived relevance of the object based on inherent needs, values, and interests. Involvement is regarded as a powerful means of improving almost all aspects of the undergraduate student's cognitive and affective development.^8,9 Involvement, especially academic involvement, seems to generate strengthened student effort, and leads to enhanced learning.¹⁰ In this regard, how students' involvement in learning was affected through the teacher's adoption of collaborative learning was measured and tested in this study.

Collaborative learning is an umbrella term that combines a variety of approaches in education involving joint intellectual effort by students or students and teachers.¹¹ It could facilitate education, research, social cohesion, and psychological stability, thus reducing anxiety, improving understanding of diversity, fostering relationships, stimulating critical thinking, increasing students' retention, and encouraging group learning.⁵ Collaborative learning involves the mutual engagement of participants in a coordinated effort to solve problems together.^12,13 Learning from peers can be a compelling experience, and is scalable.¹⁴

Advances in synchronous distance education and online collaborative technologies have contributed to the availability of collaborative learning. The potential for collaborative learning to break down the isolation of learners is realized in e-learning technologies.¹⁵ Many studies of Web-enhanced collaborative learning have shown higher levels of learner satisfaction, improvements in knowledge, increased understanding of concepts, greater achievement of course objectives, and changes in practice.^15–17 Thus Web-enhanced collaborative learning is adopted in a redesigned course to help students learn and increase their involvement in learning.

However, Taiwan's students are used to receiving teachers' lectures without higher-order thinking and reflection. Whilst learning, they usually just listen to teachers' lectures and take notes. Students have very few opportunities to practice or solve problems with what they have learned. Students growing up in the context of receiving a spoon-fed pedagogy usually lack the ability to seek essential information and solve by themselves the problems they face. In this regard, it is difficult for students to collaborate effectively without building their essential knowledge in the initial stage of the implementation of Web-enhanced collaborative learning; missing this may further limit and damage the effects of Web-enhanced collaborative learning. Teachers should provide assistance to their students and initiate their students into the field covered by the course. Furthermore, it is also indicated that students do not know how to collaborate effectively, and that they need to develop the requisite skills to help them collaborate.¹⁸ Understanding how to use the Internet to support collaborative learning and interaction presents a substantial challenge for the designers and users of this emerging technology.¹⁹ Thus a course entitled Applied Information Technology: Networking was redesigned and Web-enhanced collaborative learning with initiation was applied to improve students' involvement in this course.

Methods

Participants

The participants in this study were 127 sophomores from two classes taking a compulsory course entitled Applied Information Technology: Networking. Students in the first class came from the department of security management (G₁, n = 67), while those in the second class came from the department of counseling and industrial-organizational psychology (G₂, n = 60). The mean age of the students was around 20 years old, of which 92 were females and 35 were males.

Course setting

The course involved is a semester-long, 2 credit-hour course targeting second-year university students. This course focuses on the development of students' knowledge and skills for using networking technologies to seek information through Internet and bulletin board systems (BBS), build up a personal blog and online album, receive and send e-mail, and, most importantly, build up business-quality Web sites. During the course, students were divided into teams for discussion, interaction, collaboration, and learning from peers within and outside of their teams. Students had to design, complete, and present their Web sites by the end of the semester.

Experimental design and interventions

The experimental design was a collaborative learning with initiation versus without initiation pretest–posttest design. Students in the two classes received the same tasks. The author randomly chose one of the classes as the experimental group (G₁), which would receive the teacher's initiation, while the other group (G₂) served as the control. Students were divided into teams, each consisting of six or seven members, for discussion, interaction, collaboration, and learning from peers. The schedule of teaching and students' presentations is illustrated in Figure 1.

FIG. 1.

The schedule of the course and presentations during the semester.

Intervention regarding collaborative learning

In the implementation of collaborative learning in this study, each team was assigned a chapter or section of the textbook, and had to illustrate the functions and processes of installing and using a particular tool (e.g., the modules of a shopping cart or an electronic newsboard) to complete a business-quality Web site. Students had to discuss with their teammates, and prepare for the presentation. They presented their content with visual aids. When a team finished their presentation, their visual aids and the relative modules were uploaded to the course Web site for classmates to download as reference. If students faced problems in using the modules or software, they were encouraged to raise questions in the course-discussion section of the course Web site. They could also ask for assistance from their teacher or more capable peers in the face-to-face classes if necessary.

Intervention regarding initiation

In this study, the teacher initiated G₁ students in the field of Web-site architecture. This teacher established G₁ students' essential knowledge and developed the required skills in the initial stages of the course. For example, in the fifth week, the teacher illustrated the ways and processes of server installation and Web-site building. Then, G₁ students were asked to collaborate and learn from their peers and their teacher.

Measurement

Students' involvement in this course was measured twice in this study, given the pretest–posttest design. Students completed the first questionnaire as a pretest at the beginning (2nd week) of the course, just before the start of the experiment, and they completed the second one after the experiment concluded (the final week) as the posttest. Zaichkowsky's⁷ Personal Involvement Inventory (PII) was adopted in this study to measure students' involvement in learning. Ten 7-point bipolar semantic differential items were used.

In order to prevent the potential threat from students' initial differences that might cause bias of measurement, the first questionnaire was delivered in the course at the beginning of the experiment to check students' involvement and rule out this threat.²⁰ The difference between G₁ and G₂ students' involvement in learning at this initial stage is not statistically significant (see Table 1). Thus it is believed that the two groups of students had similar levels of involvement when they entered this course.

Table 1.

Independent Sample t test: Pretest of Students' Involvement in Learning

Groups	n	M	SD	F	t value	df	p
G₁	67	4.0164	1.2170	0.155	1.934	125	0.055
G₂	60	4.4133	1.0808

Results

In order to measure the differences in students' involvement in learning, an independent sample t test was used to compare the means of involvement between G₁ and G₂. As the data in Table 2 show, students' involvement in learning in the Web-enhanced collaborative learning with initiation group (G₁, M = 4.7582) was significantly higher than that in the without initiation group (G₂, M = 4.3400). That is, the effects of initiation on students' involvement in the Web-enhanced collaborative learning were more positive and higher than that without initiation.

Table 2.

Independent Sample t test: Posttest of Students' Involvement in Learning

Groups	n	M	SD	F	t value	df	p
G₁	67	4.7582	1.18835	2.782	−2.187	125	0.031^*
G₂	60	4.3400	0.93450

p < 0.05.

Moreover, it was also found that there were longitudinal effects of the teacher's initiation in Web-enhanced collaborative learning on involvement. The results from Table 3 show a significant increase in the mean of G₁ students' posttest involvement (4.7582) compared with that of their pretest involvement (4.0164).

Table 3.

Independent Sample t test: Involvement

		Pretest		Posttest		Change
Groups	n	M	SD	M	SD	t	p
G₁	67	4.0164	1.21700	4.7582	1.18835	−3.570	0.000^***

***

p < 0.001.

However, the results from Table 4 show insignificant decreases in the mean of G₂ students' posttest involvement (4.3400) compared with that of their pretest involvement (4.4133). Therefore, it is believed that the teacher's initiation may contribute to the development of students' involvement in learning in the implementation of Web-enhanced collaborative learning.

Table 4.

Independent Sample t test: Involvement

		Pretest		Posttest		Change
Groups	n	M	SD	M	SD	t	p
G₂	60	4.4133	1.08088	4.3400	0.93450	0.398	0.692

Discussion and Implications

Currently, learning not only comprises traditional brick-and-mortar classroom sessions, but also encompasses advanced computer-assisted or Web-enhanced collaborative learning and peer learning.⁵ Advanced technologies might overcome some of the barriers to learners' interaction, and support collaborative work to synthesize shared knowledge.²¹ In response to the problems in the education of computing in Taiwan and the needs for effective teaching methods mentioned earlier in this article, we applied educational technologies to support Web-enhanced collaborative learning with initiation, and help students to be more positively involved in their learning. We also explored the potential effects of the teacher's initiation in the implementation of Web-enhanced collaborative learning on enhancing students' involvement in the course. The results in this study were generally positive.

At the beginning stage of the course, it was found that G₂ students' involvement was higher that those in G₁, though insignificantly (p = 0.055, see Table 1). However, under the instruction through Web-enhanced collaborative learning with initiation, G₁ students learned from their peers and teacher via discussion, collaboration, and lectured as capable users and experts. They scheduled learning by themselves and built visual aids for their presentation and for their peers' reference. Students were well prepared for their presentations, and provided help to their classmates enthusiastically. The visual aids built by each team could serve as a primary reference for their classmates when building their Web sites.

Moreover, students in G₁ received the teacher's initiation, and established the essential knowledge and required skills in the initial stage of the course. They were initiated into the field of Web-site building with essential knowledge and skills. Then, as students climbed the learning curve and encountered bottlenecks, they had a better chance to benefit from the Web-enhanced collaborative learning. Thus this initiation in Web-enhanced collaborative learning may be the reason behind the statistically significant difference between G₁ and G₂ in students' involvement in learning (p = 0.031, see Table 2). Furthermore, this initiation also led to significant increases in G₁ students' involvement by the end of the course (p < 0.001, see Table 3).

However, G₂ students who learnt without the teacher's initiation in the initial stage did not perform as well as those in G₁ at the end of the semester. In the teacher's observation, G₂ students usually faced problems that they could not solve by themselves, and asked for the teacher's support. Some G₂ students could not finish their presentations completely, and were confounded by unexpected problems or unfamiliar manipulations. G₂ students' posttest involvement was lower that that in the pretest, though insignificantly (p = 0.692, see Table 4).

Learning is a social process, and the Internet and Web-based technologies have extraordinary potential to facilitate new kinds of learning relationships.¹⁴ Online educators need to find ways to promote collaborative learning through reflection and social negotiation.²¹ In this study, we established the teacher's initiation for Web-enhanced collaborative learning, and found that it had a positive effect on improving students' involvement in learning. It is also suggested that teachers and schools recognize the importance of initiation in Web-based learning environments, and provide this initiation to lead students into the professional field, so that they may further benefit from innovative teaching methods and technologies. This study may provide a reference for teachers in the societies that have typically delivered spoon-fed pedagogy for many years (e.g., Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Singapore) to adopt and modify innovative teaching methods when conducting online or blended courses.

Footnotes

Disclosure Statement

No competing financial interests exist.

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