The Use of Online Collaborative Tools and Student ... - LearnTechLib

Download PDF
3 downloads 64653 Views 103KB Size Report
Comment
because the tool could be used to create collaborative websites in a short ... wikis to build Do-It-Yourself (DIY) websites. ... While this is a good use of wiki.
The Use of Online Collaborative Tools and Student Perception of Social Presence David Wicks Instructional Technology Service Seattle Pacific University [email protected] Arthur Ellis School of Education Seattle Pacific University [email protected] Andrew Lumpe School of Education Seattle Pacific University [email protected] Abstract: The researchers explored the Community of Inquiry framework and how collaborative technologies, specifically wikis, can be used to impact student perception of social presence in online learning. The subjects were 78 graduate education students in three differently contrived sections of the same online course. Participants completed the Community of Inquiry (CoI) Survey at the end of the term measuring their perceived level of teaching, social, and cognitive presence during the course. The experimental setting utilized a single instructor teaching one course, and randomly assigned students. Each section had students collaborate using a different tool (synchronous wiki, asynchronous wiki, and discussion board). All subjects perceived high levels of the three presences when compared with previous studies. Students collaborating using an asynchronous wiki perceived significantly more social presence than those using only a discussion board. Specifically, students perceived greater levels of trust and group cohesion when the course design incorporated a wiki for small group collaboration.

Introduction The advent of the World Wide Web in the mid 1990s radically changed what was once known as distance education as we moved into the 21st Century. Distance education professors who at one time were expected to organize course materials that would be physically mailed out to students are now online learning professors and are expected to incorporate learner-centered practices, such as cooperative learning into an unfamiliar medium (Howell, Saba, Lindsay, & Williams, 2004). Moore and Shin (2001) stated that institutions need to understand both the science and the art of teaching at a distance before implementing online courses and programs. They warned that online programs need strong administrative and organizational structures in order to be successful. McLendon and Cronk (1999) list four models that demonstrate diverse distance education formats: the correspondence model, the multimedia model, the telelearning model, and the flexible learning model. The flexible learning model, more commonly known as online learning or e-learning, uses the Internet as a delivery medium and includes text, audio, and video teaching/learning resources. It includes both synchronous and asynchronous forms of computer-mediated communication. This format is both flexible and interactive and has experienced enormous growth since its introduction in the mid-1990s (Allen & Seaman, 2011). Early studies indicated that student perception of this format was mostly positive (Daugherty & Funke, 1998). Collaborative small group projects lend themselves well to the flexible learning model and can be

- 2371 -

completed using both synchronous and asynchronous technologies. The technologies used in the current study, including wikis, fall within this model. Wikis have become popular tools for educators in this Web 2.0 era (OReilly, 2007), allowing students not only to participate as consumers of Internet content but also to produce work on the Internet (Driscoll, 2007). The word “wiki” comes from the Hawaiian term “wiki-wiki” which can be translated as “to hurry.” Ward Cunningham (2005) is credited with developing the first wiki software application, naming it such because the tool could be used to create collaborative websites in a short amount of time. Teachers often use wikis to build Do-It-Yourself (DIY) websites. Using a wiki allows them to quickly create an entire website without having to know any Internet scripting code, such as HTML. While this is a good use of wiki technology, it does not take full advantage of the collaborative features of this Web 2.0 tool. Another popular educational use for wikis is to have students collaboratively create knowledge or content as part of a class project (Hazari, North, & Moreland, 2009). It is this type of use that is undertaken in this study. When used appropriately, wikis are powerful tools for supporting collaborative learning. Students can engage in inquiry-based activities, working with peers to construct knowledge. However, from an instructional perspective, structuring and supporting an activity where students work together in a wiki environment may be challenging. This is again where theory and research play an important role. Garrison (2011) defines a community of inquiry as “a group of individuals who collaboratively engage in purposeful critical discourse and reflection to construct personal meaning and confirm mutual understanding” (p. 15). Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2000) conducted a literature review and analyzed computerconferencing transcripts to develop a conceptual model called the Community of Inquiry framework. Their model includes three interrelated elements that describe processes hypothesized to be necessary elements for deep and meaningful learning to occur in an online course. These elements are teaching presence, social presence, and cognitive presence. Large cross-institutional studies on the Community of Inquiry theoretical framework led to a valid and reliable instrument that survey student perceptions of the three presences in online courses (Arbaugh et al., 2008; Garrison, 2011). The interdependent elements of the Community of Inquiry framework represent processes necessary to create deep and meaningful learning in an online course (Garrison, 2011). The first element is teaching presence, which is defined as “the design, facilitation, and direction of cognitive and social processes for the purpose of realizing personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes” (Anderson, Rourke, Garrison, & Archer, 2001, p 5.) An understanding of teaching presence can help faculty improve their pedagogy in this unfamiliar domain by raising student awareness of the value of meaningful instructor leadership in teaching and learning. Social presence is defined as “ the ability of participants to identify with the group or course of study, communicate purposefully in a trusting environment, and develop personal and affective relationships progressively by way of projecting their individual personalities” (Garrison, 2011, p. 34). Because students can feel isolated in an online course, much more research is needed to better understand how they can be empowered to make themselves known, and their ideas understood and valued by other learners. Cognitive presence is defined as “the extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse in a critical community of inquiry” (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2001, p 5.). Cognitive presence is a key to deep and meaningful learning. It is operationalized in the practical inquiry model, which is based on Dewey’s (1910) Five Distinct Steps in Reflection. Dewey’s elements include occurrence/awareness, specification/description, hypothesis, elaboration of possible consequences, and experimental test. The elements of the practical inquiry model include triggering event, exploration, integration, and resolution. Each of these elements is crucial to reflective practice, especially regarding the social/moral elements of collaboration tools that may benefit communities of learners. Garrison (2011) states “there are distinct advantages to creating a community of inquiry in an elearning environment. The permanence of text-based communication lends itself to reflection and the potential to challenge assumptions as well as edit text and rewrite positions” (p. 22). In this study, it was hypothesized that three different text-based communication technologies may alter student perceptions of teaching, social, and cognitive presence in an online course. This study is an attempt to address quality issues in online learning by exploring course design and facilitation practices through the lens of student perceptions of small group collaboration in an online course. Specifically, we explored perception differences among three randomly assigned groups of students who collaborated using asynchronous wikis, synchronous wikis and asynchronous discussion forums. The Community of Inquiry framework is utilized to analyze whether groups perceive different levels of teaching, social, and cognitive presence.

- 2372 -

The Study The context of this study was an online graduate education course on the topic of the foundations of education. Students were randomly assigned to three sections of a course taught in common by the same professor. Students in all sections were given the same lectures, readings, and tasks. Each section utilized a different communication technology for collaboration on a small group project. The Community of Inquiry framework informed the design of this online course as all content and assignments were designed to promote and reveal teaching, social and cognitive presence. Beyond the required readings, recorded lectures, and student posts, the small group project was the major assignment in the course. Students were randomly assigned to teams of three or four students and worked together to write three short essays that would lead to a PowerPoint presentation describing what a first year teacher needs to know about education foundations. Course readings, lectures, and discussions informed student work on this project. Besides the small group project, the course contained ten content modules with video lectures, readings, and ten asynchronous class discussions. The small group project consisted of five phases in which the first phase required teams to plan and agree how they would work together, the second through fourth phases required students to collaborate on essays, and the fifth phase requested students to construct a 20 minute PowerPoint presentation that synthesized major themes found in their three essays. The only known difference among the three sections was the type of communication technology tool students used to collaborate. The first section used an asynchronous wiki tool (Blackboard wiki), the second section used a synchronous wiki tool (typewith.me), and the third section used an asynchronous discussion forum (Blackboard Discussion Board). It was hypothesized that students using the asynchronous and synchronous wiki tools would perceive higher levels of the three presences from the Community of Inquiry because of the organization and tracking capabilities provided by these tools. Therefore, the aim of the study was to determine if student perception of a community of inquiry can be improved by using a specific tool for collaboration. Graduate students in a required foundations of education course were randomly assigned to one of three sections during the first term (synchronous wiki, asynchronous wiki, discussion board) using the random number function in Microsoft Excel. The second term had only enough students to create two sections, so students were randomly assigned to synchronous wiki and asynchronous wiki sections. A discussion board section was not included since it was considered the conventional method of collaboration for online courses at time of the study. By randomly assigning students, the sections are “probabilistically similar to each other on average” (Shadish, Cook, & Campbell, 2002), and if done properly, any outcome differences are likely to be due to the effects of the treatment. Students were given access to identical online sections of Blackboard course shells for this course with the exception of the type of collaboration technology. Modified directions were used in the collaborative script for the specific technology used in each section. All students participated in a tenweek long course using a synchronous wiki tool, an asynchronous wiki tool, or a discussion board for primary collaboration. A collaborative constructivist view of online teaching and learning places emphasis on learners as collaborative knowledge builders (Garrison, 2011). Online courses that employ collaborative technologies can be challenging to design and facilitate. The researchers attempted to determine whether different collaboration technologies can alter graduate education student perceptions of the community of inquiry presences in an online course by holding extraneous variables (e.g. instructor, course content) constant. Therefore, a posttestonly control group experimental design was employed using a three-step process of random assignment of participants to groups, administration of the treatment to groups, and administration of the posttest to all groups. (M. Gall, J. Gall, & Borg, 2007). A search of the literature found no other Community of Inquiry studies exclusively using an experimental design, which is common for online learning research (Phipps & Merisotis, 2000). Although nonexperimental designs are useful, they often lack means of controlling for factors affecting both internal and external validity. Ice, Curtis, Phillips, and Wells (2007) conducted a similar study that used a single group design where the impact of different facilitation technologies on student perceptions of teaching presence was evaluated. Interviews were used to triangulate the findings. Among other things, the findings revealed that students were significantly more satisfied with audio feedback than text feedback. There were three treatments in this study (synchronous wiki, asynchronous wiki, discussion board). Withholding treatment from the control or comparison group (discussion forum in this case) in this study would have been unfair since students would have been denied an opportunity to collaboratively construct knowledge while being left to their own devices to agree on collaboration tools such as email or telephone. Given that

- 2373 -

students may have limited email storage or live in different time zones, withholding treatment could well lead to resentful demoralization of the control group (M. Gall et al., 2007) resulting in the meaningless finding of determining if a non-recommended solution frustrates students. The Community of Inquiry Survey (CoI) (Arbaugh et al., 2008) was administered after the last day of the course to explore students’ perceived levels of teaching presence, social presence and cognitive presence in this graduate education course. This open source instrument can be downloaded from the Community of Inquiry Website, http://communityofinquiry.com. The CoI survey was empirically found to be a valid and reliable instrument for use with adult learners (Arbaugh et al., 2008; Garrison, 2011). The CoI Survey was developed and validated by a team of seven researchers at four institutions with students in graduate business and education courses (Arbaugh et al., 2008). Cronbach’s Alpha, a statistical procedure used to assess the reliability of scales, yielded internal consistencies of 0.94 for Teaching Presence, 0.91 for Social Presence, and 0.95 for Cognitive Presence. This is well above the recommended level of .7 for each accepted scale (DeVellis, 2003). A Principal Component Analysis of the data supported the construct validity of the three presences as measured by the survey (Arbaugh et al., 2008). The instrument can be used to investigate the CoI elements as “criterion variables in studies examining the extent to which course characteristics encourage or inhibit the development of social, teaching, and/or cognitive presence” (Arbaugh et al., 2008, p. 136). After human subjects approval was granted, students were asked to complete the CoI survey the day after the end of the term. It was listed on the course schedule but not tied to the grading of the course. The instructor told students in a Blackboard announcement that they would be emailed a link to a web-based survey after completing all work for the course. The email message asked students to click on a web link to complete a survey to evaluate collaborative activities in the course. It stated that anonymity would be protected. Students who agreed to take the survey clicked the link in the message to access the online survey. SurveyMonkey, a web-based survey tool, was used to capture the students’ anonymous responses to the CoI survey. Demographic data were gathered for gender, major, and section. Given ratios from previous quarters it was decided that analysis would not be run by gender or major as a clear majority of students in the course were female and most of the students were from a single major, Master’s of Curriculum and Instruction. These data were gathered to confirm the effectiveness of random assignment in a small sample. The survey was closed one week after the course ended and the data were exported and imported into SPSS for analysis. Descriptive statistics were calculated for each of the three groups’ self-measures on the CoI Survey. Statistics included mean, median, mode, standard deviation, standard error of the mean, frequencies, kurtosis, and skewness. Because of the small sample size, data were evaluated closely for violations of assumptions related to both a one-way MANOVA and a one-way ANOVA. A one-way between-subjects multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was conducted on the three dependent variables: teaching presence, social presence, and cognitive presence. The independent variable was type of collaborative tool (synchronous wiki, asynchronous wiki, discussion board). The Box’s M test was run to verify equivalent variance-covariance matrices. A significant Box’s M test would indicate that the dependent variable covariance matrices are unequal across the independent variable type of collaborative tool. This may be caused by unequal sample size and will determine how a multivariate effect is assessed. A significant Box’s M test required the use of Phillai’s trace multivariate test “because of its robustness in the presence of unequal dependent variate variance” (Meyers et al., 2006, p. 432). A significant F statistic on Phillai’s trace indicated that the independent variable accounted for part of the total variance of the three dependent variables. The partial eta-squared value indicated the amount of variance accounted for by the type of collaboration technology used. Since the multivariate test was significant, a one-way analysis of variance was conducted for each of the dependent variables. A risk of introducing a Type 1 error was minimized by running the MANOVA first (Meyers et al., 2006). A one-way ANOVA was conducted to determine whether significant differences existed among students’ perception of social, teaching, and cognitive presence in the three sections of this online course. Levene’s test was run to verify that homogeneity of variances was not violated. A significant Levene test on any significant F ratio would indicate a violation of normalcy assumptions and would suggest the use of the one-way ANOVA’s non-parametric equivalent, the Kruskal–Wallis H Test (Morgan, 2007). Post-hoc tests were performed on any statistically significant F ratios to determine which sections differed. Practical significance was determined by calculating the effect size, using partial eta squared.

- 2374 -

Findings A multivariate analysis of variance was conducted to assess if there were differences of student perceptions among three types of collaboration technology used in an online course when measuring student perceptions of the three presences in the Community of Inquiry Framework. A MANOVA was used to help protect against a Type 1 error in the follow-up one-way ANOVAs (Morgan, 2007). Prior to conducting the MANOVA, a series of Pearson correlations were performed between the dependent variables to address the assumption that the dependent variables would be moderately correlated (.20 - .60) with each other (Meyers et al., 2006). A one-way multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was conducted to determine the effects of three types of collaboration technologies on the three dependent variables (social presence, teaching presence, and cognitive presence). Significant differences were found among the three types of communication technologies on the dependent measures, Wilks’s = .78, F(2, 71) = 3.04, p < .01. The multivariate 2 based on Wilks’s was .12. Analyses of variances (ANOVA) on the dependent variables were conducted as follow-up tests to the MANOVA. Each ANOVA was tested at the .05 level. The ANOVA on Social Presence was significant, F(2, 71) = 3.42, p < .04, 2 = .09. The strength of relationship between the type of collaboration technology used and students’ perceived level of social presence in the course was medium as assessed by 2. The type of collaboration technology used accounted for 9% of the variance of the dependent variable, social presence. The analyses of variances for Teaching Presence and Cognitive Presence were nonsignificant. Post hoc analyses were conducted for the univariate ANOVA for the Social Presence. This consisted of conducting pairwise comparisons to determine which collaboration technology affected student perception of social presence most strongly. Each pairwise comparison was tested at the .05 divided by 3 or .017 level. This was done to account for the comparisons of three types of collaboration technology. Dividing the common alpha level of .05 by three reduced the likelihood of a Type 1 error. The asynchronous wiki group perceived significantly higher social presence in comparison with the discussion board group. The synchronous wiki group did not differ significantly from the other two in their perception of social presence. The purpose of this study was to compare graduate students'perceptions of the Community of Inquiry framework in three differently contrived sections of the same online course. Specifically, this study compared student perceptions of teaching, social, and cognitive presence in three sections of the same course, who collaboratively constructed knowledge using different communication technologies. The goal was to determine to what extent access to different communication technologies alters student perceptions of collaborative constructivist processes that take place in a community of inquiry. The data collected through the CoI Survey were used to compare collaboration group differences. Overall, the group means are comparable to results from other studies (Arbaugh et al., 2008), indicating that community of inquiry was experienced in all three groups. The discussion board group experienced the highest level of teaching presence, and the asynchronous wiki group experienced the highest level of cognitive presence, although neither of these differences was statistically significant. Finally, the results of the investigation indicate that the asynchronous wiki group perceived a significantly higher level of social presence than the discussion board group.

Conclusions The analysis of the CoI survey revealed that the discussion board group had a higher mean perception of teaching presence than either the synchronous or asynchronous wiki groups. Had there been a significant difference it might have been due to an instructor having a larger role of facilitation when all collaboration was done through discussion board posts. Given the results of their investigation, de la Varre, Keane and Irvin (2011) concluded that instructors perceived their primary role in an online course as a facilitator of discussion. A professor may be less likely to make a comment within a wiki content area, as that would be considered part of the student content and thus what was being assessed. In this study, the course design was held consistent except for the treatment (e.g. asynchronous wiki, synchronous wiki, discussion board). The professor kept his levels of facilitation consistent in each section. He posted the same announcements in all sections. The lack of a significant difference suggests evidence that his participation was similar with all groups. The CoI survey yielded a significant difference between the asynchronous wiki group and the discussion board group on students’ perception of social presence. The effect size was 0.09. Since this was an experimental design the difference may be attributed directly to the type of collaborative tool used. There is

- 2375 -

support in the literature for the role digital tools play in the levels of perceived and noted presence (Ice, 2008; Nippard & Murphy, 2007). Another way of saying this is that 9% of the variance in social presence can be attributed to the type of collaboration tool selected. 9% is considered a small effect. It emphasizes the level of importance that course design, and specifically the design of a collaborative assignment, can play in the level of perceived social presence (Rogers & Lea, 2005; Swan, 2005). For example, one student comment from the synchronous wiki group indicated frustration with needing a scheduled time to collaborate with team members to write an essay. A design that used the synchronous technology in another way may have altered how students perceived social presence. Synchronous technology may be best used for group activities that require quick decisions. In an attempt to gain a better understanding of where the differences within social presence actually lie, exploratory post hoc tests were run on the social presence subscales (affective expression, open communication, and group cohesion). This analysis was run to speculate on possible reasons for the significant difference. The use of three ANOVAs rather than the MANOVA during the analysis would have increased the possibility of introducing a Type 1 error. This is brought up speculatively here to determine what the statistically significant findings might mean. The post hoc tests revealed that both open content and group cohesion differed significantly between the wiki and discussion board groups. Affective expression was not significant. This is consistent with the literature as affective expression seems to be less important once students focus their efforts on completing an assigned task (Vaughan & Garrison, 2006). All groups began collaboration using a discussion forum. Affective expression may have run its course by the time the experimental groups began using other collaborative technologies. Open communication may be impacted by instructional design by assuring students feel at ease with the collaborative activities (Arbaugh et al., 2008). Students in the wiki group may have perceived a higher level of comfort because they had access to the work their peers had done at all times. They could examine the wiki history and see who was responsible for creating all content in the project. The conversation on the wiki discussion board could be more about the integration and resolution phases than triggering event and exploratory phases because the work being done was not located on another student’s computer. It was part of a web page in a wiki that all students had equal access to view. Group cohesion was also statistically significant between the wiki and discussion board group in this exploratory analysis. This significant finding may be a result of the differences between using a discussion board and a wiki for collaboration. As was just stated, a wiki allows all participants to have equal access to the web page where the content is being created. With the discussion-board, a student works on the content offline and only posts it when finished. In the meantime, other students may lack faith that the first person is actually working on the project, or be frustrated by an inability to participate in the process. Also, the asynchronous wiki group’s collaborative script asked each student to organize individual thoughts about the project on a single page in the wiki. These thoughts could quickly be reviewed by clicking on a hyperlink, which is a simple process for considering all students’ ideas when collaborating on a project. Using a discussion board for collaboration, students needed to search through all posts to find individual contributions as the ideas were arranged chronologically rather than by content area. Although the results were not statistically significant, students in the synchronous wiki section had a lower perceived level of social presence than did those in the asynchronous wiki section. This may have been because students in the synchronous wiki group were editing their essays in real-time which may be a less egalitarian process, especially for slow typists. Good keyboarders would have an advantage because students collaborated using text chat while they were editing their essay in real-time by keyboarding in Typewith.me. All three sections demonstrated high levels of perceived cognitive presence when compared to mean scores from other studies that use the CoI survey (Arbaugh et al., 2008). Although the results were not significantly different, the asynchronous wiki group had the highest level of perceived cognitive presence, followed by discussion board, and synchronous wiki. This is the only one of the three presences where all three groups had mean scores of 4.0 or greater on a 5-point scale. This may be a result of the how closely the collaborative script aligned with the practical inquiry model. The triggering event was integrated repeatedly throughout the course as students were asked to identify various items first year teachers should know at the beginning of a school year. The weekly discussions and the group project asked students to explore course and external resources, looking for answers to questions related to this prompt. All students integrated their finding on the discussion board and in their assigned collaboration tool. Resolution came at the end of the end of each week in the form of student reflective blog posts, as well as at the end of the course with completion of collaborative essays and a presentation for new teachers. Numerous researchers called for studies that compare design strategies and technologies, which may lead to practical benefits for online students and instructors (Allen & Seaman, 2011; Arbaugh et al., 2008;

- 2376 -

Sener, 2006). The findings in this study can be used to help online instructors serving similar populations make decisions on appropriate tools and strategies for designing and facilitating their online courses. In this section, suggestions will be made for how the findings in this study may help instructors improve the design, facilitation, and direct instruction of their online courses. Online learning and computer-supported collaborative learning are in need of collaboration techniques that efficiently and effectively help students co-construct knowledge with their peers and instructors. In the present study, students and the professor made positive comments about the use of a collaborative script. All groups perceived high cognitive presence indicating they were able to construct individual meaning through sustained collaboration. The professor stated that the quality of work across all sections was strong and consistent in quality. Therefore, if using a specific communication technology (asynchronous wiki) provides an advantage that helps students collaborate effectively in a trusting environment then that technology should be used. The growing number of students taking online courses in higher education requires more instructors to become knowledgeable about online pedagogy practices. Teaching and learning online is different from face-toface learning and therefore requires new learning theories (Garrison, 2011), those that value online community and synchronous and asynchronous collaborative learning. This is not the distance learning of the past, where a few transactions were exchanged between a teacher and an individual student. Theories such as the Community of Inquiry Framework provide a vision for how meaningful interactions can take place between students as they collaboratively construct knowledge using both synchronous and asynchronous communication tools. This study contributes to the current knowledge base in four ways. First, it adds a quantitative study to the Community of Inquiry literature, addressing a call for greater use of quantitative or mixed methods in future CoI research (Arbaugh et al., 2008). Secondly, the design of this study was experimental, meaning that a cause and effect situation was created. Given that groups were randomly assigned in this study, the significant differences in perceived social presence between the asynchronous wiki group and the discussion board group can be attributed to this treatment. Students perceive a higher level of social presence when using a wiki for collaboration than when collaborating using a discussion board alone. Third, this study examined all three presences concurrently as called for in the literature (Arbaugh, 2008). Examining these three dependent variables together allows for the use of a MANOVA, which is able to remove overlapping variance and improve the likelihood that differences between groups are true differences and not the result of a Type 1 error. Finally, this study answered the call to compares design strategies and technologies that can lead to practical benefits for online students and instructors (Allen & Seaman, 2011; Arbaugh et al., 2008; Sener, 2006), by finding that the use of asynchronous wikis in online courses can lead to higher perceived social presence. The use of wikis may increase trust among group members, improving group cohesion, which may ultimately lead to higher cognitive presence (Shea & Bidjerano, 2009). This finding may help an online instructor decide to use a wiki instead of a discussion board for group collaboration when designing and facilitating an online course, which hopefully leads to better teaching and learning, the ultimate goal of this study.

References Allen, I., & Seaman, J. (2011). Going the distance: Online education in the United States, 2011. Babson Park, MA: Babson Survey Research Group. Anderson, T., Rourke, L., Garrison, D. R., & Archer, W. (2001). Assessing teaching presence in a computer conferencing context. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 5(2), 2–17. Arbaugh, J. B., Cleveland-Innes, M., Díaz, S. R., Garrison, D. R., Ice, P., Richardson, J. C., & Swan, K. (2008). Developing a community of inquiry instrument: Testing a measure of the Community of Inquiry framework using a multi-institutional sample. The Internet and Higher Education, 11(3–4), 133–136. Cunningham, W. (2005). Wiki history. Retrieved from http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiHistory Daugherty, M., & Funke, B. L. (1998). University faculty and student perceptions of web-based instruction. Journal of Distance Education, 13(1), 21–39. de la Varre, C., Keane, J., & Irvin, M. J. (2011). Dual perspectives on the contribution of on-site facilitators to teaching presence in a blended learning environment. The Journal of Distance Education, (25)3.

- 2377 -

DeVellis, R. F. (2003). Scale Development Theory and Applications Second Edition. Applied Social Research Methods Series, (26). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Dewey, J. (1910). How we think. Boston, MA: D.C. Heath & Co. Driscoll, K. (2007). Collaboration in today' s classrooms: New web tools change the game. MultiMedia & Internet@Schools, 14(3), 9–12. Gall, M. D., Gall, J. P., & Borg, W. R. (2007). Educational Research: An Introduction. Boston, MA: Pearson/Allyn & Bacon. Garrison, D. R. (2011). E-Learning in the 21st Century: A Framework for Research and Practice (2nd ed.). Florence, KY: Routledge. Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87–105. Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2001). Critical thinking, cognitive presence, and computer conferencing in distance education. American Journal of Distance Education, 15(1), 7–23. Hazari, S., North, A., & Moreland, D. (2009). Investigating pedagogical value of wiki technology. Journal of Information Systems Education, 20(2), 187-198. Howell, S. L., Saba, F., Lindsay, N. K., & Williams, P. B. (2004). Seven strategies for enabling faculty success in distance education. The Internet and Higher Education, 7(1), 33–49. Ice, P. (2008). Using online collaborative document editors to enhance student satisfaction and cognitive presence outcomes. Sloan Consortium Effective Practices. Retrieved from http://sloanconsortium.org/effective_practices/using-online-collaborative-document-editors-enhance-studentsatisfaction-and-cog. Ice, P., Curtis, R., Phillips, P., & Wells, J. (2007). Using asynchronous audio feedback to enhance teaching presence and students’ sense of community. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 11(2), 3–25. McLendon, E., & Cronk, P. (1999). Rethinking academic management practices: A case of meeting new challenges in online delivery. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, 2(1). Meyers, L. S., Gamst, G., & Guarino, A. J. (2006). Applied multivariate research: Design and interpretation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Morgan, G. A. (2007). SPSS for introductory statistics: Use and interpretation. Mahwah, NJ L. Erlbaum. Nippard, E., & Murphy, E. (2007). Social presence in the web-based synchronous secondary classroom. Canadian Journal Of Learning And Technology / La Revue Canadienne De L’Apprentissage Et De La Technologie, 33(1). Retrieved from http://www.cjlt.ca/index.php/cjlt/article/view/24/22 Moore, M. G., & Shin, N. (2001). Speaking personally about distance education: Foundations of contemporary practice. Open Learning Harlow, 16, 302-306. OReilly, T. (2007). What is Web 2.0: design patterns and business models for the next generation of software. Communications & Strategies, (1), 17. Phipps, R., & Merisotis, J. (2000). Quality on the Line: Benchmarks for Success in Internet-Based Distance Education. Washington, DC: The Institute for Higher Education Policy.

- 2378 -

Rogers, P., & Lea, M. (2005). Social Presence in Distributed Group Environments: The Role of Social Identity. Behaviour & Information Technology, (24)2, 151–158. Sener, J. (2006). Quality Matters: Inter-institutional quality improvement for online courses. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 10(1), 69–80. Shea, P., & Bidjerano, T. (2009). Community of inquiry as a theoretical framework to foster ‘‘epistemic engagement” and ‘‘cognitive presence” in online education. Computers & Education, (52), 543–553. Swan, K. (2005). On the nature and development of social presence in online course discussions. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 115-136. Vaughan, N. D., & Garrison, D. R. (2006). How blended learning can support a faculty development community of inquiry. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 10(4), 139–152.

- 2379 -