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Research Paper 1617-005 Page 0

THE FUTURE OF BLENDED LEARNING:A REPORT FOR STUDENTS AND POLICY MAKERS

Written by the Standing Committee on Policy of the FCSS-FESC under the direction of Research Chair, Katherine Gotovsky and Associate Research Chair, Cindy Lee.

Written and Published by: Katherine Gotovsky, Cindy Lee, Jawad Bhimani, Kevin Ding, Marium Vahed, Rakeeb Hossain, Ryan Min, Ryan Yu, Sartaj Javed, and Tanya Nguyen.

© 2017 Federation of Canadian Secondary Students | La Federation des Eleves du Secondaire du Canada. All rights reserved. Do not reprint or reproduce without permission.

Running head: FUTURE OF BLENDED LEARNING IN EDUCATION FCSS-FESC !1

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 2 In Brief What is Blended Learning? Advantages of Blended Learning 3 For All Stakeholders For Students For Teachers Student Success and Engagement 6 In Brief Student Success Student Engagement Future of Blended Learning 8 Computing in Education References 11


INTRODUCTION IN BRIEF In the world of the twenty-first century in which many students devote their time to phones, laptops, and tablets, the education system often fails to keep the attention of students within their classes. More recently, however, many provinces across Canada have been implementing a new type of system: blended learning. Blended learning uses a provincial learning management system (LMS) to give students access to a variety of online assignments, calendars, and resources for their courses to combine traditional, in-class learning with independent development for students, each at their own pace. These tools are often facilitated by many widely used online tools such as TurnItIn, KhanAcademy (visited by 12 million people per month), Moodle, and Google Classroom (used by more than 10 million students worldwide). Blended learning creates convenience for students as well as for teachers, as course materials are available at all times online for students to access and teachers to modify. Additionally, majority of blended learning systems offer an e-mail service that allows students to contact their teachers at any time. For example, if a student has a question regarding an upcoming assignment, they can email the teacher through the online service and obtain a more immediate response, instead of having to wait until the following day. The Government of Ontario has especially been keen on implementing blended learning within its education systems, with its goal for the 2013-2014 academic year being to place all students from kindergarten to Grade 12 in an educational environment with some kind of blended learning opportunity. The main reason for this is to familiarise and teach children with responsible uses of technology from a young age, as use of these skills will prepare them for a globally growing technological industry.

WHAT IS BLENDED LEARNING? Blended learning is the usage of various programmes and applications in the provincial learning management system (LMS). It serves to supplement and teach learning in classes, equipping students with online tools to supplements face-to-face lessons and web-based coursework. In fact, Sloan Consortium, an organisation focused on post-secondary online learning, defines the term as “a course where 30%~70% of the instruction is delivered online” (The Blended Learning Toolkit). As a result, students are able to learn new content, review past material, stay organised, submit assignments, track achievements, and communicate with peers. Examples include blogs, calendars, checklists, drop-boxes, e-mails, ePortfolios, journals, news quizzes, surveys, and grades. However, the extrapolation of blended learning differs in each situation. For instance, in a computer lab, mostly online engagement would occur, while a classroom with limited technology would produce mostly face-to-face lessons. This makes the learning management system flexible; it is easy and open to interpretation and design.


ADVANTAGES OF BLENDED LEARNING ALL STAKEHOLDERS The real test of blended learning is the effective integration of the two main components (face-to-face and Internet technology) such that we are not just adding on to the existing dominant approach or method. This holds true whether it be a face-to-face or a fully Internet-based learning experience. A blended learning design represents a significant departure from either of these approaches. It represents a fundamental reconceptualisation and reorganisation of the teaching and learning dynamic, starting with various specific contextual needs and contingencies (e.g., discipline, developmental level, and resources). In this respect, no two blended learning designs are identical. This introduces the great complexity of blended learning.

The core issue and argument is such that, when we have solid understandings of the properties of the Internet, as well as knowledge of how to effectively integrate Internet technology with the most desirable and valued characteristics of face-to-face learning experiences, a quantum shift occurs in terms of the nature and quality of the educational experience. At the heart of this argument is the quality and quantity of the interaction and the sense of engagement in a community of inquiry and learning, achieved through the effective integration of Internet communication technology. Focusing for a moment on the properties of the Internet, we know that much of the satisfaction and success of blended learning experiences can be attributed to the interactive capabilities of Internet communication technology (Garrison & Clevel and Innes, 2003; Swan, 2001). A closer examination reveals the ability of asynchronous Internet communication technology to facilitate a simultaneous independent and collaborative learning experience. That is, learners can be independent of space and time—yet together. A concomitant property of learning with Internet communication technology is that it has a significant educational implication resulting from the emphasis on written communication. Under certain circumstances, writing can be a highly effective form of communication that encourages reflection and precision of expression. When thoughtfully integrated with the rich dynamic of fast-paced, spontaneous verbal communication in a face-to-face learning environment, the educational possibilities are multiplied.

What makes blended learning particularly effective is its ability to facilitate a community of inquiry. Community provides the stabilising, cohesive influence that balances the open communication and limitless access to information on the Internet. Communities also provide the condition for free and open dialogue, critical debate, negotiation and agreement—the hallmark of higher education. Blended learning has the capabilities to facilitate these conditions and adds an important reflective element with multiple forms of communication to meet specific learning requirements. For example, at the beginning of a course, it may be


advantageous to have a face-to-face class to meet and build community. In contrast, discussing a complex issue that requires reflection may be better accomplished through an asynchronous Internet discussion forum. Whether face-to-face or online, communities of inquiry consist of three elements: cognitive, social, and teaching presence (see Fig. 2; Garrison & Anderson, 2003). The sense of community and belonging must be on a cognitive and social level if the goal of achieving higher levels of learning is to be sustained. This requires the consideration of the different Fig. 1. A continuum of e-learning. D.R. Garrison, H. Kanuka / Internet and Higher Education 7 (2004) 95–105 97 cognitive and social characteristics of each medium of communication. In this regard, blended learning presents a special challenge and, thus, highlights the importance of the third key element—teaching presence. Teaching presence manages the environment and focuses and facilitates learning experiences. With the combination of synchronous verbal and asynchronous written communication in the context of a cohesive community of inquiry, blended learning offers a distinct advantage in supporting higher levels of learning through critical discourse and reflective thinking.

FOR STUDENTS • Increase student interest: when technology is integrated into school lessons,

learners are more likely to be interested in, focused on, and excited about the subjects they are studying. Subjects that might be monotonous for some – like math and science, while also increasing information retention;

• Keep students focused for longer: The use of computers to look up information & data is a tremendous lifesaver, combined with access to resources such as the internet to conduct research. This engagement and interaction with the resources keeps students focused for longer periods then they would be with books or paper resources, this engagement also helps develop learning through exploration and research;

• Provides student autonomy: The use of eLearning materials increases a student’s ability to set appropriate learning goals and take charge of his or her own learning, which develops an ability that will be translatable across all subjects;

• Instil a disposition of self-advocacy: Students become self-driven and responsible, tracking their individual achievements, which helps develop the ability to find the resources or get the help they need, self-advocating so they can reach their goals;

• Promote student ownership: Blended learning instils a sense of ‘student ownership over learning’ which can be a powerful force propelling the learning, It’s this feeling of responsibility that helps the feeling of ownership;

• Allow instant diagnostic information and student feedback: The ability to rapidly analyse, review and give feedback to a students work, gives the teacher the ability to tailor his teaching methods and feedback for each student, while improving time efficiency;

• Enables students to learn at their own pace: Due to the flexibility of blended learning and the ability to access internet resources allows students to learn at


their own pace, meaning a teacher can help speed up the learning process or give more advanced resources if necessary; and

• Prepares students for the future: Blended learning offers a multitude of real-world skills, that directly translate into life skills, from: • Research skills; • Self-learning; • Self-engagement; • Helps to develop a ‘self-driving force’; • Better decision making; • Offers a larger sense of responsibility; • Computer literacy.

FOR TEACHERS • Teaching is less expensive to deliver, more affordable and saves time; • Blended learning offers flexibility in terms of availability – Anytime, anywhere. In

other words, eLearning enables the student to access the materials from anywhere at any time;

• Access to global resources and materials that meet the students’ level of knowledge and interest;

• Self-pacing for slow or quick learners reduces stress, increases satisfaction and information retention;

• E-learning allows more affective interactions between the learners and their instructors through the use of emails, discussion boards and chat room;

• Students have the ability to track their progress; • Students can also learn through a variety of activities that apply to many

different learning styles; • E-learning could improve the quality of teaching and learning as it supports the

face-to-face teaching approaches; and • Blended learning also improves other factors for the teacher including:

• More engaged students; • Better information and feedback on work; • Team teaching; • Extended time with students; • More leadership roles; • Focus on deeper learning; • Motivate hard to reach kids; • New options to teach at home; • More earning power; and • Individualised professional development plans.


STUDENT SUCCESS AND ENGAGEMENT IN BRIEF Understanding the effect of blended learning on students in a classroom setting is absolutely vital for the development of blended learning as an educational tool. However, it currently stands that blended learning neither has significant clarity as to whether it positively impacts student success and student engagement, although most indications show that there is at least some effect; the question then becomes one of whether that effect is negligible comparatively to other potential items of focus, and whether then it is worthwhile to pursue blended learning as a means of improving education.

STUDENT SUCCESS In general, the effect of blended learning on the success of students in academic settings has been hotly debated within the scientific community, with evidence existing to support both sides. On the one hand, some studies claim that blended learning greatly positively impacts student success in learning. A study on learning at an information technology institute showed that the impact of implementing blended learning was substantial in raising the success of students with their academic endeavours, specifically with the measurement of arithmetic averages, which rose substantially with the implementation of blended learning techniques (Obiedat et al., 2014). Contrastingly, some reports show the exact opposite, that blended learning is of little (or even negative) impact in a student’s learning.

In learning new languages, a study on vocabulary learning showed that the impact of blended learning on student success was negligible, with only a 2% improvement over that of face-to-face teacher’s instruction (Tosun, 2015). This example could potentially speak to differences in effectiveness between subjects for blended learning, with the possibility that more humanities related subjects are less receptive. However, there was recently a review done on previous literature pertaining to the topic of blended learning, combined with an original investigation, showed that “there is not a significant difference in student performance between students taught with a blended model and students taught with a traditional delivery model.” This could indicate a wider lack of impact with the use of blended learning in education (Cracraft, 2015).

Nevertheless, even in consideration of both of these sides of the argument, factors such as individual student ability, demographics (e.g. age, class, gender), motivation of the student, quality of the instructor, and the school environment have been shown to play a much larger role comparatively in predicting student success then the teaching methodology (Red, 2012). This, of course, is also disputed, with arguments targeting the adaptation of use of blended learning technologies as a


more primary cause in teachers not knowing the logistics of blended learning well enough to confer a substantive benefit towards their students.

Overall, the specific area of student success in relation to blended learning is of great contention, and it is difficult to draw any definitive conclusions from the divided data available; there nonetheless does appear to be some consensus in the potentiality of blended learning techniques to confer advantages in teaching, especially in subject areas that lend themselves towards technology.

STUDENT ENGAGEMENT Similarly to the debate around blended learning and student success, the extent to which blended learning encourages student engagement is also a topic of great discussion in many circles around education policy around the world. The consensus view currently appears to be that there is not necessarily more engagement in the use of a digital medium; blended learning has been purported to be about as (if not less) effective as face-to-face learning in engagement, with students citing ease of distraction (“students see the Internet as a form of entertainment so we prefer spending time socialising on social media sites rather than studying vocabulary with web-based tools”), while also not disregarding some of the benefits in convenience that it confers.

This lends itself to a conclusion that blended learning could be effective in the case that students were first motivated and teachers received proper training on the matter (Tosun, 2015). There is some evidence, however, that blended learning can have a substantively larger impact than the impact represented in the current consensus viewpoint. It has been argued, for example, that student engagement can increase with blended learning, provided “careful implementation planning, professional development, and adequate resource planning (though note that there are potential biases here, as this study originates from an institution using blended learning) (Stirling, Bitter, & Skiera, 2015).

On the same token, compiled evidence shows that students are generally in favour of blended learning methods, but fairly small difference when comparing with traditional methods (Owston, 2015). Generally, this lends itself to the idea that blended learning has its benefits in facilitating active learning, which helps engage students more readily; blended learning also appears to only confer benefits when lecture-based teaching fails, meaning it is useful as a niche tool at least in certain situations (Delialioğlu, 2012).


FUTURE OF BLENDED LEARNING COMPUTING IN EDUCATION What is important to know? Who is prepared to teach? Who should be taught, and how?

Technology will fundamentally change how we answer these questions. As Andrew Ng, co-founder of Coursera, once said: “the economics of education are altered when one professor can teach 50,000 people” (Jasnani, 2013). This section of the report will explore future trends with regards to blended learning.

The first official MOOC was offered in 2008, and was taught by professors George Siemens and Stephen Downes at the University of Manitoba (Alman and Jumba, 2017). However, MOOCs exploded in popularity in 2011, when a MOOC on artificial intelligence offered by Stanford professors Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig drew 160,000 online registrants (Markoff, 2011). As of 2015, over 4200 MOOCs were offered by over 500 universities, and over 35 million students had registered for at least one course (Shah, 2015). Coursera and edX are currently the largest MOOC providers (Shah, 2015).

A MOOC is a course designed for large numbers of participants, that can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection. Currently, most MOOCs are open to everyone without entry qualifications, and are free of cost. To accomplish these aims, MOOCs traditionally use presentational media, such as video lectures, to teach subject material. Quizzes, online assignments, and interactive forums are used to evaluate the student’s performance and collect data. MOOCs are sometimes used in collaboration with traditional classrooms: in flipped classrooms, students learn the material through a MOOC at home before coming class to problem solve; in blended classrooms, teacher instruction is combined with technology to create a multi-sensory learning experience. Broadly, these trends capitalise upon three major themes in education today: active learning, self-pacing, and instant feedback.

What are some future trends that will affect MOOCs? Woolf et al. (2013) proposes two: intelligent tutoring systems and immersive learning.

In the future, MOOCs will serve as virtual mentors for every learner, and provide omnipresent support that integrates user modelling, social simulation, and knowledge representation. This will allow them to function as personalised “tutors”. Computer software is already able to provide customised lessons to learners. Intelligent Tutoring Systems, or ITSs, can provide guidance, feedback, and explanations, and can prescribe learning activities at the level of difficulty and with the content most appropriate for the learner (VanLehn, 2011). ITSs are already as effective as expert tutors (VanLehn, 2011), and have been shown to lead to higher test scores (Ma et al., 2014).


Research into this subject on an academic level is currently ongoing at Georgia Tech University, where an artificially intelligent ‘teaching assistant’ was created in 2016 (Maderer, 2016). Nicknamed “Jill Watson”, the computer was able to answer student questions on an online discussion forum with a 97% accuracy, convincing the majority of the class that she was human (Maderer, 2016). Other new forms of intelligent computer-based tutoring that are being actively investigated include, among others: support for collaborative learning (e.g., Isotami and Misogici 2008); emotionally intelligent tutors that take into account both student learning and emotions when deciding how to act (e.g., Conati and Maclaren 2009, D’Mello et al., 2008); teachable agents that can help students learn by acting as peers that students can tutor (e.g., Leelawong and Biswas 2008); and intelligent support for learning from educational games (e.g., Manske and Conati 2005, Johnson 2007).

On a corporate level, research is being done into how to optimize learning. So far, the programs that have been designed include Algebra Tutor, Mathematics Tutor, eTeacher, ZOSMAT, REALP, CIRCSIM-Tutor, Why2-Atlas, SmartTutor, AutoTutor, ActiveMath, and ESC101-ITS.

MOOCs will also foster an online immersive learning environment. For example, remote labs allow students to conduct experiments with real equipment placed online. Students already experience remote labs as being as effective as hands-on labs (Corter et al., 2004).

At Stanford University, professor Lambertus Hesselink and two other researchers performed an optics diffraction experiment in tandem with a digital camera, taking pictures of experiments (Zurier, 2014). The images were annotated and stored on a file server and a database. Online students will be able to replicate the experiment and using a visualizer to access the footage from the database. Hesselink says the Automator will eventually be available for free to anyone with an Internet connection (Zurier, 2014) .

Virtual reality, or VR, is also being explored as a tool to increase immersive learning. According to Erica Orange, member of Devry University’s Career Advisory Board, “The next generation of MOOCs will be sensorily immersive, leveraging virtual reality to put students in the world they’re studying.” (Levit, 2015). There are many examples of corporate research being done into this subject. The World of Comenius project employed a Leap Motion controller and specially adapted Oculus Rift DK2 headsets to teach biology at a school in the Czech Republic in 2016 (Sharma, 2016). Google launched Pioneer Expeditions in September 2015, where classrooms can access a library of hundreds of virtual “trips” (Moynihan, 2016). Virtual reality platforms such as Altspace VR and LectureVR allow students to make avatars in order to collaborate with other players (Reede, 2016). In fall 2015, Harvard began streaming its most popular class, CS50, in virtual reality on edX (Fahs, 2016).


As David Vogt, professor at University of Columbia, once said: “technology is going to enable a bigger transformation in learning than any invention ever, from clay tablets onwards” (Millar, 2012). With the demand for affordable, accessible education steadily increasing, universities will have to employ new technology to stay competitive. The development of intelligent tutor systems, remote laboratories, and virtual reality will change the way we deliver post-secondary education for the rest of human history.


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THE FUTURE OF BLENDED LEARNING: A REPORT FOR …of+Blended+Learning.pdf · the future of blended learning: a report for students and policy makers ... future of blended learning in