ONLINE BLENDED LEARNING IN SECONDARY SCHOOL

online blended learning in secondary school, is it effectiveness?

Online Blended Learning In Secondary School, Is It Effectiveness?

Introduction

In most ways, modern universities are no different to profit-seeking corporations. Even public sector universities which might be regarded as not-for-profit organisations must achieve operating surpluses if they are to continue to serve the purpose which society sees them as fulfilling, whether from teaching and research operations or from investments. In the case of teaching operations, technology is seen as a means of achieving cost-effectiveness - a matter which is re-examined in the educational context in the present paper.

The paper commences with a review of distance education development in the next (second) section. In the third section, the use of tools and technologies and the resulting student evaluations of teaching (SET) employing secondary data is described. In the following (fourth) section, discussion of the findings of Australian case studies involving three undergraduate degree study subjects is presented. The paper closes with commentary on the ramifications of the findings of the case studies and sets out a suggested future research agenda to more fully answer the research propositions examined.

Background

Educators have long used various tools and technologies to enhance their communication with audiences, and have long sought to engage them interactively. These tools may be grouped in terms of their importance as Bates (2005:45) suggested, and as has been done in Table I, culminating in the use of digital tools and technologies enabled by the computer - particularly the networked microcomputer.

The use of the microcomputer has been particularly evident in what is termed distance education and synchronous digital communication of the type set out in Table II, and which is referred to herein as knowledge media. A view of the distance education development timeline is shown in Figure 1.

The main point to be made from the timeline presented in Figure 2 is that universities and their approach to teaching and learning have been transformed by telecommunications, multimedia (TMT) and transmission control protocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP) convergence. It is reiterated that the TMT acronym refers to convergence in TCP/IP (e.g. the World Wide Web and associated tools such as Wikis, Blogs, YouTube, Second Life and social networking generally, multimedia (e.g. all manner of packaged DVD and online tools such as the Sony Playstation 3, Home 3D) and telecommunications (e.g. wide area networks (WAN) and 3G mobile telephones). The advent of TCP/IP tools has led to use of such online course management systems as Blackboard which now embraces a product originally released as WebCT Vista. Additionally, products like eLive (synchronous communications), iLecture (lecture recording and streaming) and screen recording software (e.g. Camtasia, Breeze and CaptureCam pro) have entered the toolbox of most university educators whether teaching on- or off-campus students.

SET and learning outcomes

Global market coverage by Australian education institutions and the ensuing enrolment of international students has assisted many universities to gain cost-effectiveness (Back et al., 2006:74). This is particularly so with regard to postgraduate education concerning which Cunningham et ...