Design and Development of Blended Learning through LMS - CiteSeerX

Design and Development of Blended Learning through LMS K. P. Hewagamage, S.C. Premaratne, K.H.R.A. Peiris e-Learning Centre, University of Colombo School of Computing, Email: {kph, scp, rap @ucsc.cmb.ac.lk}

Abstract. Design and Development of Blended Learning is a challenging task than it is anticipated when we consider features and facilities in a Learning Management System (LMS). In this paper, we present what those challenges and how we have solved both technical as well as social problems in implementing a blended learning environment for the University of Colombo School of Computing (UCSC). It is very hard to achieve what we plan without all stakeholders participation with positive attitude. ICT awareness is very important for the success of blended learning but it is not everything for its success. More learning happens when students start engaging in activities which overlap both the classroom as well as the virtual learning environment (VLE). We also present our experience in activity mapping as a way to extend the classroom environment

Keywords: blended learning, VLE, LMS, activity mapping, learning activities

1. Introduction In a self-evaluation of undergraduate programs, UCSC (University of Colombo School of Computing) discovered several problems which are affecting negatively for the internal student courses. In the analysis of these problems, the faculty decided to use e-learning based methodology as a part of enhancing learning environment of internal students. The e-Learning Centre of UCSC was given the responsibility of carrying out this initiative of setting up the blended learning environment. However, this project faced so many challenges than anticipated in the very beginning. In this paper, we are presenting our experience in developing a blended learning environment for undergraduates’ courses conducted by the University of Colombo School of Computing (UCSC). The faculty and students are ICT literate community since their main discipline is computer science. Therefore, the background of faculty and students is enough to undertake the responsibility in participating e-learning based activities. Technical infrastructure of the UCSC and technical knowledge of users (staff and students) in the organization are not enough to achieve objectives of the e-learning framework. Those two factors are like front wheels of a vehicle and we need 4 wheels with good set of tires for a smooth and steady journey. Irrespective of power and capabilities, obstacles are unavoidable in this journey and we should be prepared to face these challenges. Joseph Fong, Fu Lee Wang (Eds): Blended Learning, pp. 279-291, Pearson, 2007. Workshop on Blended Learning 2007, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.

280

K. P. Hewagamage, S.C. Premaratne, K.H.R.A. Peiris

We first describe on our vision of improving the relevance and quality of undergraduate education, which we have quoted as IRQUE project of the organization. In this project, we have carried out several evaluations with respect to education process, initial capabilities of students including their soft skills, final outcome and output of the degree program, and staff capabilities and weaknesses. Before building a blended learning environment, such evaluation is very important to identify the background and foundation. e-Learning Centre (eLC) was established in order to assign the responsibility of carrying out e-learning integration of all the academic and professional services of UCSC. A specialized staff was recruited in planning and development of virtual learning environment (VLE) for all internal undergraduates. However, many of issues faced in this project didn’t have ready made solutions and we had to carry out research and development work in finding suitable solutions. In the section 3 of the paper, we will summarize initial research and development work related to the blended learning environment. We identified the VLE is the heart of a blended learning environment and its proper integration with the classroom teaching is the key to initiate the change. It is important to consider the VLE as an extension of classroom activities rather than the supplementary system to access learning resources. At the same time, VLE should provide facilities to implement collaborative learning activities among students in the classroom. Some of these activities will be initiated and carried out independent of the teacher/lecture of the classroom. In this paper, we describe challenging issues we have encountered in this endeavor together with our solutions so far in building blended learning environment in Section 5. Finally we conclude the paper by summarizing the work presented together with our future plan in enhancing our blended learning environment in the Section 7.

2. Improving Relevance and Quality (IRQUE) What is the quality and relevance in higher education study programs? There are different interpretations about them but simply they are some sort of indicators about the study programs and its applicability in the industry. The quality can be measured using student performance in the subject evaluation and their ability to apply subjective knowledge in problem solving. The relevance is usually measured with respect to their ability provide solutions at very beginning of first employment. Generally, there is a gap between employer’s requirement and graduates capabilities. If graduates have enough soft skills, then they can reduce the gap through a simple training program. However, if graduates cannot demonstrate their capabilities to reduce the gap, they will be unemployed or underemployed. At the same time, these two attributes are not completely independent ones and they are dependable on each other. The most important process which is required to enhance the education process in which teachers and students interact each other is the transformation of the knowledge. However, we identified under the IRQUE evaluation that teacher student ratio has adversely affected due to the increase of intake by 400% in recent batches of

Design and Development of Blended Learning through LMS

281

under progress. Teachers are delivering lectures to large number of students (around 120 – 160 students) at once and there is no dialog between teachers and students. Both parties find difficulties to involve in any sort of dialog in front of all these students. All lecture materials (usually power point slides) are given in advance of lectures. There is no feedback about lecture notes from students to teachers. Reading those lecture notes is not interactive and students are helpless in their learning process. In this evaluation, we observed the failure rate and drop out rate are also increasing. The lecturer and students ratio is not so bad but the interaction between two parties seems to be poor. Although students have enough computer lab access facilities together with Internet, electronic learning resources are not provided through this infrastructure. Library does not have enough copies of recommended reading materials and no digital versions of those recommended reading materials are provided to access through the local area network of the organization. It was also not possible to give attention to different levels of students when there are around 160 students in a lecture hall. These students cannot be grouped according to their skills and provide different lecturing due to administrative and resource constraints in the organization. Most of students have language difficulties and they need a special attention due to poor understanding contents/factors taught in the lectures.

3. Establishment of e-Learning Centre UCSC is a computing faculty of University of Colombo (UoC) and its faculty wanted to find out IT solutions to minimize bad effects in this process. The use of information and other technologies are not a proper integration of IT and education. Sometimes, it could diversely affect the education process. For example, the use of power point slides in the lecture halls reduces student active role in the process. Students are very keen and enthusiastic to have more and more notes and nice illustrations on visually projected screens but many students fell in sleep and may not properly absorb the required knowledge at the end of teaching sessions. When the UCSC is formed as an autonomous faculty of UoC, the importance of eLearning and its future role is identified [4,7] and a separate centre was established to provide the service of e-Learning to students and staff while promoting R&D work in this area. A coordinator was appointed among academic staff members who have experience of practical difficulties and challenges faced in the academic education process. A separate staff was recruited for the system administration as well as content development in e-learning centre. Initially the focus was towards the distance learning initiative of the UCSC. However, as mentioned above, after IRQUE evaluations, the importance of proper integration of technology with the education process is highlighted specially due to sudden increase in the intake of students (from 40 to 160 students).

282


4. Learning Management System (LMS) The importance of learning management system was identified as a significant requirement. Several systems both commercial and open source products were evaluated [2] considering various factors such as network resources and infrastructure, resource availability for sustainability (i.e. funds allocated from the institute budget), customization of the product for specific requirement of the organization, external acceptance of similar academic organization, etc. We first evaluated several commercial products WebCT, Blackboard and Theducation (a Swedish product localized to English), but they were not selected specially due to two reasons, the customization of the product and the cost of product which was based on the number of users of the system. However, when we evaluated Open Source Products, those two critical issues in the commercial products were not major issues. When we evaluated the community around these products, Moodle (Modular ObjectOriented Dynamic Learning Environment) seems to be acceptable FOSS product with a word wide user group. At the same time, the computing resources required for the deployment of product are something which is commonly used in a web server (i.e. Apachie, PHP, MySQL). After several testing, eLC obtained the approval from the academic board of study to use the Moodle LMS as the learning management system to implement the blended learning environment of UCSC.

5. Social Resistance for the Blended Learning When the term e-Learning was used among the academic community as a way to enhance education process, there was some resistance among some faculty members just like the way the computerization or ICT enable environment is introduced for any working environment. At the beginning, it was a surprise for us since UCSC is a computing faculty which advocates its theoretical & engineering development as well as integration of computing with other working environment. However, every human teacher will have the common fear of ICT, when he/she did not properly understand the potential of the ICT in education. Hence, the very first challenge of eLC in its blended learning initiative was a social constraint due to the various interpretation of e-Learning and its applicability of e-Learning. Negative Arguments against the Blended Learning Initiative: • Technology adversely affects students’ active status in the classroom [this argument was based on the use of power point slides in a classroom teaching. When students are not taking down notes, student attention may vary and some of them will start engaging other activities like chatting, sleeping etc.] • Accessibility of technology during classroom [all students do not possess laptop or any portable devices when lectures are delivered] • Imbalance of Number of Computers: Students ratio and its adverse affect in allocating enough time to access LMS or Internet. • Increase in the teachers’ workload


283

• Teachers’ unawareness of facilities and methodologies [Many of senior staff have highly academically qualified researchers but they do not have a special training about teaching methods] Positive argument for the Blended Learning Initiative; • Possible solution being tested [6,5] • Technology infrastructure has already been established • ICT-awareness is above the required level (UCSC is a computing faculty) Action taken to promote the blended learning: • Special demonstrations are held about LMS to senior staff. • Several workshops were carried out to educate the academic staff (Workshops are carried out with respect to small groups since it was difficult to get all staff committed to a single time slot). • A LMS Administrator was appointed to provide on demand help for academic staff • All research assistances at eLC are advised to work closely with respective teachers (senior academic) in setting up relevant courses in the LMS. These actions didn’t give 100% solution to social issues in implementing a blended learning environment. However, it was a satisfactory beginning. Student training and evaluation of the service: Documentation doesn’t solve all problems faced when a virtual learning environment is introduced for the blended learning. A demonstration followed by a proper training is very crucial even before the starting formal academic courses. Training is usually conducted as hands on workshops for small groups at a time. In this training, LMS features are introduced illustrating how students can participate in the blended learning activities.

6. Technical Challenges to introduce LMS When a new system is installed, it is natural to face many technical problems which are not unforeseen during the testing stage. Especially when a system is being used more than 100 students at the same time. Therefore, it takes some period of time for the system to become stabilize. At the same time, we are using an open source product, it is very important to keep a good eye on possible bugs in the system and carry out regular update with the system. At the same time, it is not advisable to experiment with an online running system which has real users. Proper software engineering approach must be utilized in the maintenance of the system. Therefore we sat up an identical offline copy of the same system, for testing when system updates are posted. The LMS admin evaluates updates/patches of the system with the offline system, before updating them with an online real system. Taking the back up is a critical requirement since it is hard to justify when what will be happened. It could be a technical failure of hardware or software but eLC must have to accept the damage if something is happened. Taking the backup is not enough and it doesn’t give any validation or verification that the backups can be restored. We found the offline testing version is very useful to verify these backup taken.

284


Taking a backup once in a month was also not enough; we had to develop a policy for taking backups. Our policy was based on following factors: • Time between backups is fixed to one day [Incremental approach for the backup taking was implemented] • Backups are supposed to take when LMS activities are low. • Teachers were instructed to maintain their course backup [Many teachers were not happy with this request but we wanted to convince it is a responsibility of teacher] One of the big threats is Internal hacking of LMS by students. The direct hack through server as well as hacking through the LMS is another issue. Sometimes, friendly hacking is done by their friends. We usually ask students to update their profile with the personal email address but students are usually very careless. They also do not get any official email address and it also affected the official communication. Simply, LMS login and other system accesses must be linked through a central system of the organization in order to avoid some of technical failures. Network congestion A computer is multi-tasking equipment and students (as well as other users) usually use a computer for several activities at the same time. Many of these applications use network/Internet bandwidth in addition to the processor and memory of the machine. A typical example is that the user may open a web browser with several windows to access different web sites, a messenger application, streaming application for audio or video content or an online game. When a student logs into the LMS with all these active applications, accessibility is not quick as they want. Depending on the resources, the users must select relevant applications without disturbing to their own as well as others in the laboratory (for example, when a student starts downloading a big file, it affects everybody in his/her network). In addition to all these things, many student machines in computer labs are infected by viruses and it creates unnecessary traffic in the network system. Therefore, it is very important to establish a resource access policy when the blended learning environment is being introduced. This policy could be a guideline to reduce the problems that users face when they access the virtual learning environment. It is not very difficult to introduce a policy but people hardly follow these policies and keep complaining the system and the network.

7. Activity Design for Blended Learning: This is the hardest part when the virtual learning environment (VLE) is introduced to enhance the classroom environment. It is not possible to implement all classroom activities through the VLE but some activities can be enhanced by overcoming limitations in the classroom environment. At the same time, a new set of activities can be designed and developed using the features of VLE, and if properly used, the efficiency and effectiveness of the whole education process can be enhanced significantly. We discuss mapping of some selected classroom activities for the blended learning based on our experience in this section.


285

i. Classroom Activity: Power point based lectures Description: A lecturer usually conducts one or two hour lectures in a lecture room for 40 – 160 students at a time. (Depending on the classroom, some lectures use a microphone otherwise students find very difficulty to hear the lecturer’s narration). Lecturer may ask some questions but students hardly answer when there is a large number. Students can ask clarification from a teacher but it is not commonly practiced in the classroom environment. Students may get a printed note set in advance and he/she may take down some notes based on the explanation in the lecture session. If a student looses his attention, he may find difficult to understand what is presented. A teacher may find very boring exercise when he/she has to repeat basic details. Sometimes, the lecturer may late and he may not give the full description due to time constraints in the schedule of classrooms and/or the lecturer has to complete more content with respect to syllabus. Blended Design: Lectures are recorded based on the curriculum without any time constraints. Based on the topics and sub-topics in the syllabus, recorded videos (lecturer’s face and power point slides synchronized) are segmented for short durations. A segment size may be 15 – 30 minutes (It was recommended to keep segment size 15 minutes if possible). However, it was not possible to distribute these video materials through LMS due to their size and available bandwidth in the network. Instead of normal lecturer, these video presentations were used in the classrooms and after every 15 minutes, the lecturer or tutor, stops playing the video presentation for a discussion or questions. Effectiveness is high but time management became a problem to cover the syllabus. Therefore, these resources are made available from the library. ii. Classroom Activity: Question and Answer ( Q&A) Session Description: A lecturer usually spends last 5 -10 minutes in every lecture to discuss difficult things that students cannot understand and answer some of their questions related to the session. All students do not get this opportunity and many of them do not want to ask questions in front of others since they are not sure about the question. Blended Design: The course page, in the LMS, is structured with respect to syllabus and a discussion forum is added at the end of every section. In the classroom, when a lecturer completes a section, he/she reminds students to ask relevant questions under this discussion forum. If there are no questions in a section, the teacher will ask a random question to initiate the dialog. In the classroom environment, when a student asks a question, only a teacher/tutor answers this question. However, in the discussion forums, other students also started answer questions by promoting collaborative learning environment which was not easy to establish in a normal classroom.

286


Fig. 1. Course Page in the Moodle LMS - Based on the sections in the syllabus of the course, lessons and other resources are added

iii. Classroom Activity: Giving References for Topics Description: It is a common practice that a lecturer gives references during a session. This could be a reference of recommended reading materials, a web resource or a personal note. In reality, the students find various difficulties to follow up these references and there will be no dialog between teacher and students about these references. Blended Design: The teacher can add all these references as resources under the relevant topic in the course page of LMS. He/she can scan relevant pages of recommended reading pages and upload as resources in this course page. Students can download them for offline reading without waiting to access materials from the library. iv. Classroom Activity: Revision Exercises (MCQ practice questions) Description: During lecturers or after lecturers, students usually get exercises as practice questions. Sometimes they may get answers to verify themselves. However, there is no feedback


287

from lecturers or tutors directly. Question type also vary from the multiple choice questions (MCQ) to structured or essay type questions. Blended Design: At each section of course page, there is a practice question covering most important key questions. However, the question type is limited to MCQ and closed type questions. It was possible to provide essay type questions but the feedback was not possible to automate. v. Classroom Activity: Open Discussion of selected topics of interest Description: In reality, open matters related to a particular subject is rarely discussed during a lecture or after a lecture. Occasionally, some students meet a lecturer to discuss these types of issues outside the classroom. However, they are never heard by other students in the same class/group except the lecturer mentioned them in the next session when he meets all students.

Fig. 2. Open Discussion among Teachers and Students Blended design: If a student has an open issue or question, he/she can post it in a discussion forum of relevant section or news forum of the course. Posting to a news forum bring the attention of all students and teachers in the course. Teachers can also initiate interesting dialog by posting open issues of the subject (See Fig. 2).

288


vi. Classroom Activity: Formative Assessment Description: According to curriculum, all courses offer around 40% of marks from the formative assessment and the rest of marks from summative assessment at the end of semester. This formative assessment is usually based on the assignments given during the course period. Some of these assignments are individual ones and others are group work. In reality, there will be several administrative difficulties teachers as well as students faces when they are supposed to submit assignment work. For example, printers in the lab may be difficult resource to use near the deadlines, and some students later complain they submit on time but no administrative assistants to accept the submission just before the deadline. Blended Design: The distribution of assignments and submission of assignments were easy to manage or handle when those activities are channeled through the LMS. It saves lots of resources (when 160 students have to submit soft copies only) and makes it efficient since the teacher and assistants do not want to keep the manual record of submissions. Students can directly submit the report from the LMS. The deadline can be easily implemented without causing administrative problems. vii. Classroom Activity: Tutoring Description: When lecturers are difficult to understand, tutorial classes are conducted for small groups by tutors. More exercises are usually discussed in these classes and their success depends on the skills of tutors. Students have mix opinions on these classes and attendance is poor or irregular. Blended Design: Interactive e-learning lessons are designed as additional learning resources for all students. They are usually developed by instructional designers at the e-Learning Centre according to teachers’ (Subject Mater Experts) explanation of learning content. Instruction designer will use different presentation to simplify the learning content. Figure 3 shows a sample image of such interactive lesson. viii. Classroom Activity: Group Work Description: When a group work is given, it is important that all members discuss the given work and distribute among all members the work. In reality, all members are not active and sometimes some members complain that they do not get a good opportunity to participate in these activities. At the same time, there are passengers in groups, who get full marks without doing anything. Lecturers usually use lot of adhoc techniques to allocate marks among group members but they are not very successful.


289

Blended Design: When the group work is given, students are categorized as groups within the course of LMS. All students are supposed to participate in the discussion only through group forums which are not visible to other students. When they have classroom meetings, the group leader has to write minutes of meeting in the group wiki where others can make comments. Teachers use this information when they allocate marks among group members.

Fig. 3. Interactive Learning to support tutoring in the blended learning

ix. Classroom Activity: Collaborative Construction of Artifact Description: Many assignments are group work and each group must submit the group report on or before the given deadline. Sometimes these reports are copied from past reports in the library. The collaboration of group work is not visible among participants. Teachers find some practical difficulties when they correct these reports and allocate marks among group members. Blended Design: Group reports are required in a form of a wiki. Teacher can see its development progress and can also find out their collaboration. Interestingly, teacher can give his comments before the final deadline which is not an option in the normal classroom environment.

290


x. Classroom Activity: Sharing personal notes Description: Some talented students prepare their own notes based on the lectures and syllabus. They are not shared and sometimes not visible for teachers. If teacher can identify these talented role players, it is very easy to promote collaborative learning model in a classroom environment. Blended Design: All students in the course are allowed to maintain their own blog or journal as their personal notes. Teacher may examine such blogs if they get more attention from other students (based on the LMS statistics). When a teacher wants to give a recommendation or additional marks, he/she will consider these notes.

8. Summary and Future work In this paper, we have descried our experience in developing a blended learning environment for internal undergraduates of University of Colombo School of Computing. The requirement of blended learning was clear when the batch size of student intake was increased by 400%. When e-learning is introduced to enhance the classroom learning, it is possible to get several resistances from both teachers and students. Some of resistances are due to lack of knowledge about potential capabilities and others are due to visibility of activities. These social resistances from the environment can be controlled by assisting and training teachers and students. The virtual learning environment (VLE) given through the learning management system (LMS) is the backbone in introducing blended learning environment. Open source LMSes are feasible products to develop VLE and our experience given in this paper is based on the Moodle LMS. There are several technical challenges which must be carefully and properly handle when any LMS is introduced for the blended learning. Some of challenges are due to other factors such as network congestion as stated in this paper. In order for the success of blended learning, it is very important to use VLE to extend classroom activities rather than supplementary solutions. Therefore, classroom activities must be properly mapped to a blended design. In this paper, we have listed 10 such selected activities to describe our experience. However, those mapping could be further improved to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency in the blended learning environment. According to feedback from teachers and students, we are planning to enhance the activity mapping from classroom environment to VLE. Our immediate plan is to develop a catalog of activities which can be mapped from the real classroom environment to a blended learning environment. The activity mapping will be developed like design patterns [3] for teachers and their assistants when they develop want to develop blended learning environment. We hope this mechanism will be useful in extending classroom activities to integrate the virtual learning environment.


291

References: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

K. P. Hewagamage, V. K. Samaranayake, A. R. Weerasinghe, and G. I. Gamage, “Facing Challenges of an External Degree Program using ICT” A Case study of University of Colombo School of Computing”, in the proceedings of Digital Learning 2005 (DL2005), K. P. Hewagamage, K.H.R.A Peiris, W.A.U.C. Weerakoon, “Evaluation and Adaptation of Learning Management System (LMS) for Higher Education”, in the proceedings of Digital Learning 2006 (DL2006), Bangkok, Thailand, May 2006 “Web services for blended learning patterns” Derntl, M.; Mangler, J., Advanced Learning Technologies, 2004. Proceedings. IEEE International Conference 30 Aug.-1 Sept. 2004, “Software Engineering Education Applying a Blended Learning Strategy”, Bunse, C.; Grutzner, I.; Ochs, M.; Peper, C.; Steinbach-Nordmann, S. Software Engineering Education and Training, 2005. CSEE&T 2005. Proceedings. 18th Conference on, Vol., Iss., 18-20 April 2005, “Designing for the changing role of the instructor in blended learning” Danchak, M.M.; Huguet, M.-P. Professional Communication, IEEE Transactions on, Vol.47, Iss.3, Sept. 2004, “The instructional effects of on-line tests on the large-scale IT courses” Nakano, H. etc. Information Technology Based Higher Education and Training, 2005. ITHET 2005. July 2005. “Enhancing the student project team experience with blended learning techniques”, Reichlmayr, T. Frontiers in Education, 2005. FIE '05. Proceedings 35th Annual Conference, Oct. 2005.