Effects of online presence on learning performance in a blog-based online course
Introduction
Driven by the rising need for cost-effective education offered to a broad audience, and enabled by the advancements in Internet and communication technologies applied to educational purposes, a growing portion of higher education is taking place in online contexts such as on the Web or in virtual learning communities (Dabbagh & Kitsantas, 2012). A prominent characteristic of online learning is a temporal and spatial separation among teachers and learners. While independence from a fixed schedule and physical location when attending online courses allows learners much convenience and flexibility (Bower, Dalgarno, Kennedy, Lee, & Kenney, 2015), the absence of a social context may present an important issue related to a sense of disconnectedness or isolation (Kruger-Ross and Waters, 2013, Wei et al., 2012), which is detrimental to the learners' cognitive development from a socio-cognitive perspective (Cunningham, 2015, Ellwardt et al., 2013).
To provide online learners with a sense of presence similar to that in face-to-face instruction, it is crucial to offer interpersonal communication opportunities for students to socially engage with the teacher and peers. In fact, the importance of online presence has been highlighted by numerous studies (Garrison & Cleveland-Innes, 2005), and pedagogical practices capitalizing on interactive communication technologies are well documented in the literature (Cunningham, 2015). Many online courses integrate social media into their delivery, while others incorporate a wide range of asynchronous facilities such as online discussion forums, wiki, and blog systems (Dabbagh and Kitsantas, 2012, Ke, 2010).
While social communication and interaction are essential for students to feel connected and to form interpersonal relationships, interaction alone does not guarantee student engagement in the process of cognitive inquiry, nor does it guarantee that cognitive presence is automatically in place (Garrison & Cleveland-Innes, 2005). Socio-cognitive approaches to online learning posit that online presence is a complex construct comprising a multitude of elements in different dimensions, including teaching presence and cognitive presence, in addition to social presence. Furthermore, these elements do not function independently, but rather, there is an interplay among them which forms many intersectional categories that function concurrently to form an integral whole to achieve the full potential of online learning outcomes (Akyol and Garrison, 2008, Garrison and Arbaugh, 2007, Garrison and Cleveland-Innes, 2005). The relationship of these intersectional categories is described by Garrison (2007) in a framework known as the model of Community of Inquiry (CoI). A CoI integrates social, cognitive, and teaching presence at the core of online learning experience. Based on this model, the success of blog-based online learning depends not on any single element of social interaction, but rather on the co-work of these elements interacting with one another. For a blog system to be cognitively effective, active dialog among peer participants must be fostered to articulate ideas and elaborate understanding. On the other hand, learners' reflective experiences should be stimulated to help them internalize the knowledge they have acquired so as to promote deep learning. With regard to teaching presence in learning courses, a considerable body of research agrees on a positive relationship between interaction with the teacher and perceived learning and satisfaction with the course (Swan, 2001). The role of the teacher goes beyond being a content provider and discussion moderator. Garrison and Akyol (2013) argued that participants in a learning community assume the role of both learners and teachers, in the sense that each participant not only constructs personal meaning but also facilitates and directs that process individually and collaboratively.
While online presence is widely accepted as one of the key factors determining learner experiences in online learning (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2003), empirical evidence of the impact of blog systems on students' learning experience remains inconclusive. Conversely, the effectiveness of online courses facilitated by blog systems is at times subject to skepticism on various grounds that online environments are unable to provide interaction equivalent to face-to-face instruction (Kohlmeyer, Seese, & Sincich, 2011). Furthermore, given the complexity of interaction emergent from the many intersectional categories of CoI, the role of each of the constituent elements remains under-explored, and requires further clarification on the basis of actual implementation of blog-based online courses. To this end, we specifically designed a blog system named the Learners' Digest Blog (LDB) as the chief source of learning for a graduate level course “Digital Learning,” in which the students were required to initiate discussion on specific topics relevant to the subject of inquiry, construct knowledge, respond to and rate others' posts, and interact with the instructor through Q&A. The design of the LDB strives to foster active group discussion, stimulate critical discourse, motivate participation, construct or co-construct knowledge, deepen understanding, and form a supportive learning atmosphere in the virtual environment. These learning activities on the LDB may enhance students' learning performance, which considered in this study in terms of the learners' subjective and objective learning outcomes. The former was assessed as the learners' perceptions of their learning performance and satisfaction while participating in the blog-based online course, whereas the latter was evaluated as the learners' blog-based course activities throughout the semester. We aimed to investigate both the cognitive and communicative aspects of students' learning through the use of the blog system over a semester of course participation. In attempting to better understand the role of various elements of online presence in students' learning performance attained from the blog-based learning environment through the lens of the CoI framework, we formulated the following research questions:
- 1.
How do learners' perceptions of online presences (i.e., teaching, social and cognitive presences) affect their learning performance in a blog-based online course?
- 2.
Which online presence among teaching, social and cognitive presences is the most important factor for learning performance?
- 3.
Are there any differences between learners' subjective and objective learning outcomes?
Section snippets
Literature review
Research on online learning can be traced back to earlier distance education and telecommunication endeavors (Moore & Anderson, 2003). Many of these efforts were however heavily technically oriented, concerning practical issues of the development and implementation of the online learning environments (Sunal, Sunal, Odell, & Sundberg, 2003).
In parallel to these studies are socio-cognitive approaches that focus more on cognitive development in social contexts. Research and practice along this
Design of online presence in a blog-based learning system
The LDB was used for a graduate level course “Digital Learning” in a renowned university in northern Taiwan. This course comprised six topics including game-based learning, social sites learning, computer-based learning, mobile learning, multimedia learning and synchronous learning. The content of this blog-based course followed most recent books related to those topics. The duration of this course was one semester. The blog integrated several learning features which may effectively facilitate
Methods
A questionnaire was employed to examine online presences (i.e., teaching, social and cognitive presences) and learning performance (i.e., subjective and objective learning outcomes). The questionnaire is divided into four sections to specifically address the research questions formulated in this study. Section one includes three questions for capturing the respondents' demographic information such as age, gender and education. Section two consists of three questions for capturing their adoption
The effect of online presence on the objective learning outcomes of the blog-based online course
A regression analysis was used, with the measure of online presence as the independent variable and that of objective learning outcomes as the dependent variable. The results of the regression analysis are presented in Table 4. Online presences (teaching, cognitive and social presences) are a significant predictor of the objective learning outcomes of the blog-based online course (F[1, 24] = 5.29, p < .05). It was found that online presence significantly predicted students' objective learning
Discussion and conclusions
This study explored the relationship between learners' online presences (i.e., teaching, social and cognitive presences) and learning performance in a blog-based learning environment. The results of this study indicate that online presence plays a significant role in predicting learners' learning performance. This study also further investigated the importance of online presence for learning performance, including both subjective and objective learning outcomes.
The present study found that
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank all the students who participated in the study. This study was partially supported by a grant (MOST 103-2511-S-008-008-MY2) from the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan.
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