What does the research say about what students studying online? What do they like? What do they dislike? And do they know best?
‘The secret is the teacher’. The learner’s view of online learning represents the most comprehensive attempt to date to answer this question from the perspective of vocational education and training online learners. Commissioned by the NCVER, this study was carried out by Phoebe Palmieri and Joan Cashion to investigate what comprises high quality in online learning for VET students in Australia.
Both Phoebe and Joan are veterans of VET with over 30 years experience between them. Phoebe has worked in research, policy, professional development and training development for government, industry and other organisations. In recent years, she has focused particularly on research and evaluation related to flexible learning. Since 1996, she has been an independent consultant.
Joan is the Executive Director of Strategic and Business Development in the TAFE Division of Swinburne University of Technology. She has a passion for education and a long-standing interest in online learning.
Their complete report is available at www.ncver.edu.au/publications/906.html. The NCVER has also published a series of Online Learning Issues leaflets, one of which - What makes for good online learning? - summarises the research findings. Visit www.ncver.edu.au/online.htm for more information.
This month we sent our reporter, Alison Cutler, to ask Phoebe and Joan to reflect on their research and how it can inform our practice.
Alison: Much of your research has looked at what makes for quality online learning from the perspective of vocational education and training online learners.
Can you tell me something about what was behind that research? Where did you expect it to take you and what were the biggest surprises?
Phoebe: It’s lovely to remember the research because it was a couple of years ago now. We decided to investigate this topic because a lot of opinions had been expressed about what online learning should be like but nobody had really asked students what they thought about it.
Alison: So online learning was led by the educators more than the learners?
Joan: There was really very little real research on it. Most of what was out there was people’s opinions or giving examples of what they’d done. No actual objective study over a broad range of either courses or different organisations. It was really one place, one teacher’s opinion.
Phoebe: Or else if students had been asked, they were asked to evaluate a particular course and we wanted to know in a more general, universal way what students thought worked and what they thought didn’t work online.
Joan: To put it into context, 4 years ago when we got the grant from the NCVER online learning was really on the increase, it hadn’t reached a plateau – it was new, it was exciting, it was what everyone was grappling with and wondering how to do better.
We knew quite a lot about online education. Phoebe had written From Chalkface to Interface, which was one of the definitive works about what you might consider when setting up online learning.
Our intelligence on it was good; our surprises were the organisational difficulties getting in touch with students. Until we started the research, we hadn’t realised how many surveys and evaluations were taking place across the VET sector and it was really quite difficult to get students’ opinions as they were getting tired of being surveyed. When anyone wanted a student’s opinion they were using a survey instrument, so we had to work quite hard to get the input into our surveys.
Phoebe: We didn’t get big surprises in terms of the results because we didn’t know what we would find. One thing that certainly emerged was that there were distinct differences between VET students’ ways of learning and students from other sectors.
Joan: Some of the research that had been published was from the Open University in the UK. Gilly Salmon, one of the leading writers in her eModeration book, was talking about how to actually teach online. She was promoting a lot of student to student interaction, a lot of communities of practice and a method of learning where the teacher really took a back seat. Our findings were that the VET students were really much more teacher-centred learners.
This wasn’t much of a surprise to us. When you think about it, we all knew as VET educators what students were like, but we just hadn’t discussed the fact that they wouldn’t be very different when they went online. The only work out there at the time had said the online medium promoted communication, communities of practice. Online is a medium that facilitated this. The works that had been published at that time suggested that if you set it all up it would just happen but in the VET sector at any rate, it doesn’t just happen. The needs of our learners have to be the dominant thought when you’re developing online education and you have to find ways really of developing things around their learning needs
Alison: So what do you think the VET sector should be doing in the light of your findings?
Phoebe: Just to continue that point a little. What Joan’s saying is quite logical. Writers like Gilly Salmon don’t say students suddenly become autonomous learners. She actually goes through a process where you develop those learners. She talks about learning communities and the process by which students become more self-reliant and the teacher steps back. When you think about students in VET, most of them will have grown up with very teacher-centred learning, so I don’t think it’s realistic to suddenly say, well, ok, you’re now independent learners.
Independent learning was a bit of a buzzword when we did the research, though probably not so strongly now, and you can speculate why it might have been so at government and policy levels. But the point I’m making is that it’s not something you can just impose. You have to help students to develop the skills to become independent and some are going to be more so than others.
Joan: I absolutely agree with what you’re saying. What I have is a different interpretation of the work of Gilly Salmon. I think the stages she refers to are about familiarity with the online medium and your ability to manage being online as against your ability to learn. I think they’re different and I think the VET student has a similar ability to the higher education student to manage the online medium. But where they’re very different is in their preferences about how they learn, and I suppose their confidence in their own learning. I think there were underpinning assumptions with higher education students – that they could research, and that they could analyse and synthesise.
Phoebe: And it’s made more complicated by the high degree of variation amongst groups of VET learners compared to those learners in the university sector.
Alison: Your research also drew attention to distinctions between the experiences of young students and their older counterparts. Can you tell me something about that?
Phoebe: I’d like to unpack that a bit in the light of subsequent experience. I think we were surprised that the younger students were more critical than the older students and we expected it to be the other way round. We assumed the younger students would be so competent and familiar with the technology that they would be technically tolerant whereas we thought it would really put off older people far more.
And there’s a parallel here between learners and teachers. You know there tends to be expectations that it’ll be older teachers who are more fearful of technology and less inclined to get to grips with teaching online but this is in fact not the case.
You’re going to have different levels of computer literacy that are not dependent on age and different levels of confidence about learning in general, as well as learning online. That again is more likely to be about educational background, previous educational experience and general life experiences than age per se. Confidence in using resources whether they’re online or otherwise and expectations about learning and learning processes, how they work and what you can expect from them are all part of determining students’ perspectives of online learning experiences.
Alison: Your research also pointed to the “just for me” element of flexibility as missing from online programs. Do you think that the level of customisation this implies is a sustainable model?
Joan: I think it’s really difficult in the present economic climate and the lack of funding that’s in education. I think generally teachers are too overworked to be able to do that “just for me” component. The cases where I think it can work are where you’ve got, if you like, mass-produced education – a commercial company who might use online learning to deliver in-house professional development and particularly if it’s a global company. And if you’re putting a lot of time into developing resources and the resources are going to be used entirely in a self-learning mode so really not in a teacher driven mode, really for independent learners, then you can develop resources that are customised to the needs of different types of learners. Then the learners can select which way they wanted to learn and use the resources accordingly. On the whole, the VET sector is too under funded for this to happen.
Phoebe: And another issue relating to sustainability is over the last ten years or so there’s been the implication that training organizations need to be infinitely flexible to meet the needs of learners. Realistically, nobody can be infinitely flexible. If you’ve got twenty or thirty thousand students, you’re not going to provide something different for every one of them. And this leads to the need to support teachers. There’s lots of great professional development and commitment in RTOs.
Joan: But the time is not there. To do online learning really well you need time to prepare well, to think and reflect on your practice and then engage in that continual improvement spiral and I think teachers are always rushed.
Alison: So what then does your original research and recent works suggest teachers need in order to deliver a quality online learning experience for students?
Phoebe: Well, I did another study last year which looked at the impact of flexible learning on HR practices. This is a NCVER publication under the Australian Flexible Learning Framework and it’s called The Agile Organisation at http://www.ncver.edu.au/publications/1426.html
It looks at a lot of aspects about how teaching work is managed. One of the subjects that was of great concern was the question of what comprises perceptions of work. Probably the most important way of supporting online teachers is to recognise and acknowledge the work they are doing. Teachers might be sitting in front of a computer, emailing their students or looking online for resources or moderating a web discussion. People who are not involved in online teaching might not see this as ‘real’ work; if you don’t teach online, you may not necessarily realise what is involved. When people are teaching in so many different ways, it can be hard to recognise what work actually consists; but teachers, almost universally, said that recognition from management of their hard work makes such a difference.
Alison: Your research also points to quality being achieved when there is a match between the learning experience and the learners’ expectations and the needs for standards to ensure this, including assessment and feedback. Is progress being made on this front?
Joan: A great deal is being done to make teachers aware of the importance of expectations and expectation management in the online medium. When you’re not seeing students all the time then being clear right up front and how this will manifest is essential to both learner and teacher sanity. I think we’re very good at making sure the course information is all there. The implementation of the AQTF has meant that every RTO has course outlines so students will have most critical information about assessments and so on.
Important questions for online students though tend to be along the lines of, “if I send you an email, when can I expect a reply? And if you haven’t told me it will be 2 days, then I’m going to expect it in the next half hour!” And this kind of expectation will be irrespective of whether the student sends the email at 3pm or 3am! And that’s challenging when students are expecting that kind of turnaround. There’s pressure then on both sides – the student gets disgruntled and the teacher’s workload becomes unmanageable. Much of our professional development at Swinburne University of Technology emphasises this aspect of using technology in learning. You must make it clear what’s expected. If you are going to take a week to turn around assignments for students then say so and stick to it. Recognise the need to build yourself some sanity too.
Alison: Can you talk about the key areas of difference and agreement between the perspective of the educator and that of the student when it comes to online learning?
Joan: There weren’t huge differences. The most notable one was where students were most concerned about their own motivation, time management and IT skills whereas the educators were more concerned about online learning communities. Another difference was that teachers believed that there should be inductions for students and students didn’t think they really needed them. But then the sorts of things they said they should be learning or that could have been better could have been covered in an induction. So in some ways, you can see it quite easily – the teacher coming from that knowledge of many people learning knows this is what the students will inevitably need. The students come in and say, “Oh no! I don’t need any of that stuff…” and as they get on with the process they find they could have benefited from it.
Phoebe: And it’s partly what students know about too. I’m just thinking about online learning communities. If you ask students what’s going to be beneficial for them, there would be very few who have actually thought about the existence of online learning communities.
Alison: I suppose the received wisdom was that online chat and discussion would be very central to a mobile phone savvy generation. Did your research show that students did in fact welcome these features online?
Joan: Well, we found very little to suggest this. While there are a few instances held up as some fantastic learning practice, ways you could do holistic learning and role play through these communities, we found very little in the way of actual examples and it was very difficult to find out which students had actually participated and which hadn’t. In the end, we discarded a lot of data on how students had actually used the online medium because one of the groups we were looking at, we knew exactly what they’d done and their answers were all over the place. We realised if they were all over the place and we knew what was going on, we were unlikely to be able to make any sense of what other students said with that kind of error rate.
Alison: What were some of the features of online learning that students identified as a turn-off to quality online learning? Do you think these turn-offs are as prevalent today?
Phoebe: The research clearly demonstrated that technology could be the key turn-off; if the technology didn’t work, then you might as well forget it. Some things are of course beyond the scope of the VET sector to improve, like bandwidth, particularly in rural and remote areas. Also access to computers, which is often a questions of affordability. For many students that’s a very real consideration although it may be that students are using computers more in public libraries… Also technical help was critical.
Teachers not responding were a big turn-off, too.
Joan: And that connects to what we were talking about before. About making expectations clear-cut at the outset and then managing those expectations.
Phoebe: Also if resources did not work or were out of date was a huge turn-off. And since we carried out our research standards here have definitely improved. And in that time, blended learning has come to the fore. Perhaps, as a response to both student and teacher need and as an expression of what learning theory says about the desirability of multiple modes and channels.
Joan: I think when we began this research, there were expectations that online learning would save money. There were expectations that we would be converting from a lot of face-to-face to more distance online and I think in the last few years there was acknowledgement that online education was not going to save money.
The only people who save money as online educators are, for example, multinationals and they do this via online professional development, which can save the various costs of bringing staff together from many locations. The actual educational process is not cheaper online. And there’s quite a lot of evidence that online education takes more time. That even once you’ve developed the resources, the actual classroom management takes more time because it’s individualised and organisations are finding the best way of doing this is to blend or deliver mixed mode. You might make it more flexible by having an online component, some face-to-face. And certainly at Swinburne last year when I was gathering data, there were classes conducted at a set time when all the materials were online and the students could choose whether they came or not. A lot of students were choosing to come because of the social interaction. They didn’t actually want to do it off campus.
Alison: Which brings me to my last question. Where else can our community members access information about our students and online learning?
Phoebe: Well, I know you’ve given the links to the original research in the preamble and another NCVER commissioned paper your readers might like, The Agile Organisation can be found at http://www.ncver.edu.au/publications/1426.html
Joan: We also very much like http://www.flexiblelearning.net.au
Alison: I think I might have a conflict of interest if I agree too wholeheartedly but I will anyway! Thank you so much, Phoebe and Joan, for your time and talent.
Joan and Phoebe (in unison): It’s a pleasure.
