Geraldine Jones's List: PGCAPP Unit 6 readings

University e-book
Are you an education professional seeking to design innovative courses that ‘blend’ different sorts of media learning activities across time and space? Do you find it challenging to decide what might be the best blend of activities and media for effective learning? In an age where innovations in social computing and the mainstreaming of e-tools are unlocking new opportunities for blending online with face-to-face interactions, this book will help you to design and implement effective blended e-learning.

With practical, accessible advice for teachers and support staff, Preparing for Blended e-Learning reviews practice and research in planning blends of e-learning and scopes the core skills and knowledge required by teachers. Drawing on the experiences of expert practitioners worldwide and citing examples across a range of institutions and countries, it offers a readable, non-technical and comprehensive introduction informed by practice and research. Issues discussed include:

• designing quality, appropriate, effective online learning;

• efficient and sustainable e-learning activity;

• providing appropriate feedback to learners;

• devising student activities and sourcing learning resources;

• managing online and offline interactions.

Edited by Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharpe

e-book in the University collection
In this book, learning technologists from the UK and further afield pool their ideas around one way of accelerating the exploitation of digital technology: bringing its creative use within the capability of the individual teaching professional. By setting out to explore the design of learning activities in educational contexts already rich in electronic and mobile technologies, the authors show us what a technology-aware future for education would be like.

The Theory and Practice of Online Learning
Online e-book - free to download chapter by chapter
Mainly with distance learning in mind but still relevant to blended approaches.

The purpose of the desk study was to describe what is understood by effective practice in relation to e-learning; to identify and describe the range of models that inform the design and implementation of e-learning activities and to specify a planning tool to aid practitioners in their implementation of e-learning. This review is designed to inform practitioners, policy developers and other stakeholders who want to reflect more deeply upon their practice or gain a greater understanding about how theory and practice can be mapped together.

A practical guide to evaluation methods for lecturers.

This paper reports the findings of a case study in which audio feedback replaced text-based feedback in asynchronous courses. Previous research has demonstrated that participants in online courses can build effective learning communities through text based communication alone. Similarly, it has been demonstrated that instructors for online courses can adequately project immediacy behaviors using textbased communication. However, we believed that the inclusion of an auditory element might strengthen both the sense of community and the instructor’s ability to affect more personalized communication with students. Over the course of one semester, students in this study received a mixture of asynchronous audio and text-based feedback. Our findings revealed extremely high student satisfaction with embedded asynchronous audio feedback as compared to asynchronous text only feedback. Four themes, which accounted for this preference, were culled out in an iterative, inductive analysis of interview data: 1. Audio feedback was perceived to be more effective than text-based feedback for conveying nuance; 2. Audio feedback was associated with feelings of increased involvement and enhanced learning community interactions; 3. Audio feedback was associated with increased retention of content; and 4. Audio feedback was associated with the perception that the instructor cared more about the student. Document analysis revealed that students were three times more likely to apply content for which audio commenting was provided in class projects than was the case for content for which text based commenting was provided. Audio commenting was also found to significantly increase the level at which students applied such content. Implications of this case study and directions for future research are addressed in the discussion and conclusions section of this paper.

"This paper reports the findings of a case study in which audio feedback replaced text-based feedback in asynchronous courses. Previous research has demonstrated that participants in online courses can build effective learning communities through text based communication alone. Similarly, it has been demonstrated that instructors for online courses can adequately project immediacy behaviors using textbased communication. However, we believed that the inclusion of an auditory element might strengthen both the sense of community and the instructor’s ability to affect more personalized communication with students. Over the course of one semester, students in this study received a mixture of asynchronous audio and text-based feedback. Our findings revealed extremely high student satisfaction with embedded asynchronous audio feedback as compared to asynchronous text only feedback. Four themes, which accounted for this preference, were culled out in an iterative, inductive analysis of interview data: 1. Audio feedback was perceived to be more effective than text-based feedback for conveying nuance; 2. Audio feedback was associated with feelings of increased involvement and enhanced learning community interactions; 3. Audio feedback was associated with increased retention of content; and 4. Audio feedback was associated with the perception that the instructor cared more about the student. Document analysis revealed that students were three times more likely to apply content for which audio commenting was provided in class projects than was the case for content for which text based commenting was provided. Audio commenting was also found to significantly increase the level at which students applied such content. Implications of this case study and directions for future research are addressed in the discussion and conclusions section of this paper. "