Book Report 3: Vignare, Literature Review of ALN Online/Blended Learning Research

Long time no post, I know... the conclusion of summer school, a training consultant gig and a few end-of-month personal commitments derailed things a bit, but now your faithful blended learning explorer is back in the game... presenting a summary of Chapter 3 from Picciano and Dziuban's edited volume Blended Learning: Research Perspectives.

Vignare, Karen. "Review of Literature Blended Learning: Using ALN to Change the Classroom -- Will It Work?" Blended Learning: Research Perspectives. Eds. Anthony G. Picciano and Charles D. Dziuban, eds. Needham, MA: Sloan-C, 2007. Print. 37-63

In this installment, I summarize Karen Vignare's literature review of studies that have examined the use of online asynchronous learning networks (ALN) in fully online and blended learning environments. This chapter is pretty darned helpful, not only in synthesizing a bunch of work done before the publication of this 2007 volume, but also in framing that discussion in terms of the Sloan-Consortium's Five Pillars of quality education. This framework seems promising in order to identify the key concerns of faculty and institutional constituencies, both in thinking strategically about adopting blended learning resources and in determining how to assess pilot efforts for continuing quality improvement. My wife, a one-time Certified Quality Engineer, would perhaps be pleased (or bemused) to hear me talking like this.

The emphasis on ALN as a mode of online blended learning (see the list of pedagogical strategies below from the chapter's able 1) also makes me wonder whether the approach I'm considering -- online mini-lectures and quizzes, followed up by more intensive in-class collaborative critical analysis and discussion exercises -- is the best way to go. Clearly, my approach emphasizes the face-to-face venue as the primary location for student/student and student/faculty engagement of the course knowledge, which might be more appropriate for our student population and college culture than the models put in place by larger institutions with a student population more in line with the averages Vignare describes. I must admit some surprise in the finding that 75% of all higher ed students are aged 25 and up (although this includes graduate and professional programs, as well as community colleges, etc.), and that surprise is reminding me that any of the stuff in this literature needs to be considered, in part, in terms of how we at Augustana (a small, residential liberal arts college) differ from the institutional cultures and needs described in this research literature.

In any event, enjoy the summary after the jump.

Book Report 2: Shea, "Toward a Conceptual Framework for Learning"

 As promised, loyal readers, a continuation of my summary of an informative anthology of blended learning research:

Shea, Peter. "Towards a Conceptual Framework for Learning in Blended Environments." Blended Learning: Research Perspectives. Eds. Anthony G. Picciano and Charles D. Dziuban, eds. Needham, MA: Sloan-C, 2007. Print. 19-35

Teaser for next time: Chapter 3 is a review of the blended learning literature (at least through 2005) -- should be useful!  Before we get there, though, Shea discusses a possible framework for how blended learning can be theorized, researched, designed and implemented, focusing on quality teaching and learning principles.

Book Report 1: Picciano and Dziuban, Introduction

OK, gang, part of what I want to do on this blog is to share what I'm learning in my reading of the relevant literature on blended/hybrid learning.  In the near future I will have a student research assistant reading and annotating a good bit of this literature; I may have her posting her research summaries to this blog.  For now, I want to do some of this myself.

Part of my work in the BLI right now involves reading what looks to be an important first step in grasping the current work-to-date on blended learning SoTL research:

Picciano, Anthony G., and Charles D. Dziuban, eds. Blended Learning: Research Perspectives. Needham, MA: Sloan-C, 2007.

It's nice to feel validated...

OK, so yesterday I joined the ACTL Blended Learning Initiative (BLI) in participating in a multimedia training presentation on "Organizing Blended Courses for Optimal Student Engagement," presented by Ivan  (Ike) Shibley of Penn State - Berks and sponsored by Magna Online Seminars. It was a recording of an online webinar, and the presentation style was PowerPoint, with a video talking-head window in the corner -- precisely the format I'm using for my podcasts (theirs is a more polished version, natch), so already I have a sense that developing this kind of online learning experience may not be as hard as I thought.

Moreover, the suggestions Shibley presented led me to conclude that there are many folks (myself included) who already use "blended learning" in the way experts conceptualize it. Thus, it seems that presenting this concept to campus will be that much easier, as there's a basis for identification with elements of the status quote.
As Inigo Montoya began, "Let me 'splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up."

1st prototype podcast!

OK, here we go -- my first attempt at a mini-lecture podcast composed with Camtasia and PowerPoint!

It's not pretty... for one thing, it's not scripted, so at times I sound like a blithering idiot. As well, the lighting on the webcam video is poor, and I didn't even bother to shave. But this gives you a sense of the sort of thing I'm driving at with these mini-lectures. It's a skosh over 17 minutes, so it could be tighter (I'd like these all to be 15 minutes or less), but it's close.

A note on uploading: I'm doing it at home tonight (wireless connection, cable modem), and (a) it's taking forever to upload, and (b) it's sucking the internet connection, so my wife's online work on her laptop with some course management software is really slow and sluggish. I'll need to see if things are faster or slower on campus, but usually my home network is a lot faster than the campus network. This might not bode well, at least under current campus network bandwidth conditions. How rough will this be when students are back on campus in full force?

Anyway, enjoy, and I'd be happy to receive any feedback you care to share.

Some clarification of purpose

OK, it makes sense at this point to flesh out the purpose of this pilot a bit more fully, at least from my perspective.  There are at least two sets of goals: institutional and personal. Both of these are outlined, more or less, in the grant application I've linked here, requesting a stipend for a summer research assistant to aid me in the preliminary preparation for this SoTL study.

Institutionally speaking, the group is guinea-pigging some possibilities for incorporating online content delievry and pedagogical options into the classroom learning experience for students.  Slow down -- no one's moving to a University of Phoenix model here.  But here's what we've noticed so far that has provided the impetus of this project.

Let's get this blog started!

Welcome to this inaugural blog post!  For those of you who don't know who I am (and are therefore reading this blog for reasons I cannot understand or anticipate at this time), I'm an Associate Professor of Communication Studies, and the Chair of the Fine and Performing Arts Division, at Augustana College in Rock Island, IL. As part of a group organized in the spring of 2010 by Augustana College's Center for Teaching and Learning (ACTL) and the Academic Affairs Office, I began exploring the possibilities for blended/hybrid learning in my political communication classroom. This blog will record that journey.