Murray, et al, I agree with you (and am thinking fondly back to the 1970s) that EIES was the best system, with the default being signed, but also allowing for pseudonyms and anonymity on demand -- providing anonymous posts could be tracked when libelous. Barry Wellman _______________________________________________________________________ S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology, FRSC NetLab Director Department of Sociology 725 Spadina Avenue, Room 388 University of Toronto Toronto Canada M5S 2J4 twitter:barrywellman http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman fax:+1-416-978-3963 Updating history: http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php _______________________________________________________________________
I've read much about how students claim to prefer F2F but sign up for online classes. However, I am not much about which instructional modalities are most effective. I'd appreciate some references regarding the comparative efficacy of F2F, Online, and hybrid instruction. I appreciate that many factors are involved and instructional efficacy is not a well defined construct. I also know that hybrid classes are in fashion. My particular interest is in comparisons of these methods for teaching computer programming but would appreciate anything that's a good read. I'm also interested in opinions based on experience. For what it is worth, I find teaching completely online has the best student learning outcomes. Thanks, Charles Balch PhD Charles.balch@azwestern.edu Professor of Computer Information Systems Arizona Western College
As a mere PhD student (our "credentials" discussion is fresh in my mind), I feel compelled to prominently proclaim that I am not speaking on behalf of my employer or colleagues but offering my own viewpoint and opinions. On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 7:30 PM, Charlie Balch<charlie@balch.org> wrote:
I'd appreciate some references regarding the comparative efficacy of F2F, Online, and hybrid instruction.
We've looked at this a few times in my shop, Indiana University's Center for Postsecondary Research. We annually administer several large scale surveys, most prominently the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), and occasionally we've focused on technology as it relates to our measures of engagement and other proxy measures of learning. We've been conducting the NSSE for 10 years now and I'm starting to compile all of our technology-related work. It seems that every time we look at this issue there is a significant positive correlation between technology use and nearly every thing we measure. Our most recent work, which I presented a few months ago at the meeting of the American Education Research Association, focused specifically on how the relative number of online courses relates to the things we measure. Even when we controlled for a bunch of things (age, gender, enrollment status, major, institution type, etc.) the same generally positive correlations remained: increased use of technology positively correlated with measures of engagement and learning. Our paper can be found at http://cpr.iub.edu/uploads/Engaging%20Online%20Learners.pdf if anyone is interested in digging into this more. But "technology is good!" isn't a very useful or nuanced finding, right? We're continuing to dig in to this more; we have another large set of data from this year's survey we're working to analyze. We asked more specific and different questions this time around so we should learn some new things. But we're also pretty limited by our methods and resources. We can make some really good generalizations with really impressive numbers of respondents but we can't ever answer the "why" and "how" questions.
I appreciate that many factors are involved and instructional efficacy is not a well defined construct.
The things in which we're all really interested are very subtle and hard to define much less measure. Many, many things are conflated and confused. And it's difficult and often irresponsible to generalize findings. Kevin
participants (3)
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Barry Wellman -
Charlie Balch -
Kevin Guidry