This section considers implementing applications of Online Learning in specific circumstances. Cognitive Flexibility Hypertexts enable learners to view information from different perspectives and to trace themes through a range of authentic situations.Collis discusses how Project-Based Collaborative Learning may be supported on the Web, while Teles and Collings describe the use of Virtual Experiments on a Web-based Electronics course.
In their important chapter, Jonassen et al (1997) address the issue of how hypertext can be used to help the learner integrate new information into their existing conceptual framework by interacting with it. They base their approach on Cognitive Flexibility Theory as an instructional model well equipped to develop higher level skills in interpreting complex, interlinked situations which need to be viewed from multiple perspectives, illustrating this with a series of authentic learning scenarios.
Cognitive Flexibility Theory sseks to overcome the overimplification of complex problems, leading to a failure to transfer learning to different contexts. Instesd, Cognitive Flexibility Hypertexts use linking to view complex problems from different perspectives and identify themes underlying a series of situations. In viewing the same situation from multiple perspectives, learners are obliged to construct their own interpretations, relating the different perspectives to each other and their own conceptual frameworks.
The authors illustrate this approach with examples drawn from their own materials on an instructional design course, an environmental science course and a unit on 'Understanding Sexual Harassment'. The environmental science example is a Web site examining the issues arising from the question of whether wolves should be reintroduced into the American Southwest. The site contains interviews in the form of transcripts and audio clips which can be sorted according to themes such as consumption vs. conservation and local vs. national control of the land. Each page provides links to related pages involving the same theme, encouraging the learner to navigate through the content viewing the material from different and conflicting perspectives.After viewing this information, learners are invited to vote on the reintroduction issue, requiring them to form their own synthesis of the information provided in different contexts.
The use of Cognitive Flexibility Hypertexts could be a powerful strategy for delivering transferable understanding of complex issues.
Implementing collaborative, project-based learning presents technical as well as educational problems. In her chapter Supporting Project-Based Collaborative Learning Via a World Wide Web Environment (Collis 1997), Betty Collis explains how full integration of course delivery on the Web can reduce some of the technical difficulties while providing a supportive educational environment for this kind of learning. She illustrates these ideas with her own Online Learning course, offered to senior students at the University of Twente.
Project-based collaborative learning involves cognitive and social goals as well as learning goals specific to the project. Its effective delivery depends on creation of an environment facilitating group work and development of a supportive culture, discussed elsewhere in this Guide. Collise describes the environment she created for her Online Learning course, designed to support collaborative work by students working together, but at different times and places. The environment featured tools for communication, access to information including the group's 'memory', and management of group processes. The project on which students were collaborating in her 1966 example was creating an HTML 'kiosk' of Web-based lesson resources for teachers, grouped into 14 curriculum topics.
The course site featured a shared workspace environment tool, BSCW, which provided access to a store of various types of document, the capacity to annotate and update them, and tracked events in the workspace. Groups had password-protected access to their own workspaces, within which they could organise file storage by creating a directory structure, improving access to the large volume of information by students and teachers. Integration of the workspaces with the rest of the couse site was eased by linking with standard navigation bars.
Collis's design recognised the special requirements of collaborative project work and met these challenging demands educationally and technically.
Delivering courses in science and engineering by distance learning is hampered by the difficulty of providing authentic experience of carrying out experiments, the basis of scientific knowledge. The Web offers a solution to this problem in the form of simulations run from a remote computer which may be interfaced with real laboratory equipment and instrumentation. In their chapter Virtual Experiments and Group Tasks in a Web-Based Collaborative Course in Introductory Electronics, Teles and Collings (1997) describe how they achieved this in a Virtual-U environment.
A key concept underlying the course is that of 'situated learning', the view that activity and perception preceed conceptualisation in learning, so should be the focus of attention in educational design. Students completed electronics experiments in a 'virtual lab', using MathCAD software for circuit analysis, Electronics Workbench for circuit simulation and LabLink for circuit prototyping. With LabLink, the students can construct circuits and test them using 'virtual instrumentation' running on the host computer, which is connected to the real circuit. Students are encouraged to build their own real circuits and test them with real instruments, but this is not a course requirement.
Although in this case students needed to install the specialist MathCAD and Workbench software on their own computers, increases in the power and speed of both home computers and internet communications might enable this type of approach to become less dependent on the local machine, opening up new opportunities for learners unable to access 'real' laboratories or wishing to conduct experiments beyond the resources available in an undergraduate lab.
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