CMC in Business Courses: Are Students Today Digital Natives or Text Driven? Dr. Caroline Akhras Assistant Professor, Notre Dame University, Lebanon
[email protected] Abstract: Business students are digitally-driven yet the business courses in the Faculty of Business Administration and Economics are text-driven. Proactive educational institutions are taking major steps in terms of building the technology infrastructure to integrate its students, especially bright technology-versatile students. It is held that Course Management Communication (CMC), a learning software, integrates educational tools online motivating leading university students into the rich context of learning today that is dynamic, multidimensional, and social. The web-mediated technology practices bridge time, location, and distance. However, introducing Web 2.0 practices as learning activities may be challenging. The purpose of this study is to prove that through the teacher’s appropriate knowledge management on the CMC, it is easier to facilitate graduate and undergraduate business student’s performance success. Two critical components were addressed: (a) CMC course assignment, (b) student-teacher CMC interaction Case assessment was conducted. Implications and recommendations were made. Key Words: Higher Education; CMC; Digitally-driven students; Student-teacher virtualinteraction Improved performance.
It is held that the third millennium students are digital natives (Prensky 2010). As universities and schools are still text-driven (Education/Evolving 2005), a solution is in order. Youth are leading this transition to a fully wired and mobile nation. Leading educational organizations use knowledge processes and contribute to the institution’s success (Becerra-Fernandez & Sabherwal 2008) born from an awareness of the importance of information and knowledge and followed by a constant search for ways to create, store, integrate, tailor, share, and make available the right knowledge, to the right people, at the right time (Bennet & Bennet 2003). The birth of knowledge management (KM) grew from the recognition of the difficulty of dealing with the complexity and with ever-increasing competition spurred by technology and the ever-increasing demands of the market. At present, Higher Education has an opportunity to revamp the way education content is presented, extend the depth and scope of the academic programs, enrich the efficiency and effectiveness of course delivery and improve the content, variety, and administration of assessments (Aggarwal, & Legon 2008; Jackson & McDowell 2000). It has been shown that the structure of a Course Management Communication, a learning software system, has the potential to allow Higher Education to integrate the software and adapt it to the needs and learning styles of its student body (Morgan 2003). Today, a new teaching strategy integrating the Web is in order in higher education (O’Bannon & Puckett 2010; Corbitt, Holt, & Segrave 2008 ) though what precedes it is a good pedagogical design (Ziegenfuss 2005) and knowing how students learn and need to be assessed (Bryan & Clegg 2006). E-Learning may better facilitate the kind of learning outcomes needed in a knowledge-based society (Bates 2005) or it may be best facilitated by blended learning where the assumption is that there are inherent assets in face-to-face interaction as well as the understanding that there are benefits to using on-line methods (Clark & James 2005). Students realize that the nature of information and communication has changed carrying with it how students make sense of their world. Communication on the World Wide Web (WWW) is currently evolving from the one-to-many display of information on the homepage to the bottom-up many-with-many interaction of multiple participants in the construction of social-networks as Facebook (http://www.facebook.com), communities of practice, user-driven encyclopedias as Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org), and collaborativecontent-sharing systems as Connexions (www.http://cnx.rice.edu) (Dohn 2009). Such factors markedly influence what students learn. Research holds that today’s students insist that major transformations in the curriculum are in order in terms of technology integration (Brooks 2002), in how they are taught, but more importantly, in the teachers’ underlying concept (Bosch 2006). This is also the case with practitioner-researchers. Responding to the challenge of behaving more strategically, academic teachers are also alert to the enduring value of technologybased initiatives and may be “trans-classroom teachers”, fully or partially committed. Holt & Segrave (2003) argue in support of the changing role of the academic teacher in Higher Education. Such a move is potentially transformational. BlackBoard (BB) is a type of software tool used to manage the knowledge assets of the institution and make them available to its students (Graf 2008). These class portals empower students to interact with each
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other by providing them with the suite of communication tools to form their own communities; these learning systems help in managing courses, delivering content to students, conducting learning activities, and evaluating learning outcomes (Goyal & Purohit 2010; Roqueta 2008). Many practitioner-researchers/teachers have invested their time into learning how to integrate these tools in their classroom as it may supplement face-toface instruction constructively. Even though collaborative learning tools are available in many universities, not all teachers use them (Gibson et al. 2003). As these teachers fall behind their students in both expertise and comfort with technology, they may not incorporate technology in their business courses though it may significantly increase disseminating information, communicating with the class, student involvement in the course, and deepening student learning (Akhras & Akhras 2010; Carmean & Haefner 2002; Stith 2002 ). Such teachers may hold that what is really important is knowledge sharing, building, and transference which occurs face-to-face (Borich 2007; Peddibhotla & Subramani 2006; Boud 2006). They may hold that students may want to interact in a place with people they can see and speak to (Goodwin and Goodwin 2004). Research holds that some students prefer face-to-face discussions with their teacher when they ask for assistance (Ginott, Ginott, & Goddard 2003) whereby verbal and nonverbal communication plays a role in understanding material not wellunderstood and in promoting constructive bonding. The purpose of this study is to prove that through the educator’s appropriate knowledge management on the CMC, BB it is easier to facilitate graduate and undergraduate business student’s success. • •
Hypothesis One: More business students perform significantly better on BB assignments than in traditional pencil & paper ones. Research Question One: Do business students visit their teacher during her office hours more on BB than on campus?
The 36 participants, senior and graduate-level students, belonged to two business course taken at the Faculty of Business Administration and Economics at a private university. These participants attended courses which the practitioner-researcher taught across one academic semester and as such were a convenience sample. The participants who were divided into an experimental group and a control group were informed that research work was being conducted. The procedure adopted in this study covered the path taken by the two groups of participants across one academic semester. •
The procedure adopted was to evaluate the online and offline course assignments written by participants who attended senior and graduate business courses. Those in the experimental group were informed that in order to know their course assignment, they had to go online to the BlackBoard Course Assignment and read it. The completed assignment had to be ‘digitally dropped-off’ on BlackBoard within a defined time. Those in the control group handled their course assignments in the traditional manner: the teacher wrote it on the board and the submission date was set.
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The procedure adopted to evaluate whether students would visit their teacher more on BB office-hours or campus office-hours belonged to a senior and a graduate level business course. The experimental group was told that they could only interact with their teacher on-line. As such, if they had questions related to the course these would be dealt with on BlackBoard where their teacher would be available to them at a predefined time on-line. On the other hand, the control group was told that they would interact with their university teacher in the traditional manner: they would discuss course-related factors in the predefined office-hours in her office.
The research was conducted as a case study in that it investigated a relatively few number of incidents, covering features of a naturally occurring event, with both qualitative and quantitative data in order to understand what was really happening (Gomm, Hammersley, & Foster 2000). Two research assessment instruments, office hours and performance on assignment, were used. Four main areas were probed with each instruments scored differently. Below is a list of instruments used to assess the two main areas probed. • • • •
On-line Course Assignment on BB: The first assessment instrument was reading the assignment, performing, and submitting the completed course assignment on BB during a defined time-interval. Traditional Paper Course Assignment: The second assessment instrument was reading, performing, and submitting the course assignment on paper during a defined time-interval. On-line Office-Hours on BB: The third assessment instrument was having the teacher available on-line during defined office-hours. Off-line Office-Hours: The fourth assessment instrument was having the teacher available in her office during defined office hours.
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Questionnaire: The fifth assessment instrument was a questionnaire participants filled out related to integrating BB in their course.
Based on the results, it was found that using BlackBoard as a class portal through which the practitionerresearcher appropriately manages knowledge graduate and undergraduate business students performed significantly better. The hypothesis was supported. Participants do better on assignments on BB than in traditional classroom assignments. It was found that the experimental group of participants who used BB to read their course assignment and to submit the completed work within a defined time interval significantly did better than those who did not (t-test=5.01; p
