I will be presenting a self-paced online CPD program I recently developed in the MEDFAC E-Learning Showcase 2011. In my ten minute presentation, I will talk about:

• The background of the CCRE Anxiety Education Project
• The design methods, including how to work with a large SME team of 23 members to design peer-reviewed course content under the same framework
• The development process, using Articulate Studio, Text Aloud, Moodle, Adobe CS5, etc.
• The main features of the e-learning program including screenshots and a quick live pre-view of the actual program
• The future directions, including how to improve the process of CPD program development on a continuing basis

If you are interested in medical-related e-learning projects, you are welcome to attend this free event at New Law 026, University of Sydney, Camperdown Campus, at 12:30 on the 23rd of November 2011. This free event will be showcasing e-learning (broadly defined to include LMSs, multimedia, use of social media etc.) within Sydney Medical School – not just innovations but also work in progress, planned etc. The topics will include:

• Introducing LMS skills: a staged approach
• Using Adobe Connect for research consultations and troubleshooting
• Compass: Sydney Medical Program LMS
• Integrating e-portfolios, Blackboard and Compass
• E-learning modules for physiotherapists and junior clinicians for international (resource-poor) and local settings
• Internationalising your online course
• Using the i-pad to create dynamic lecture materials
• E-learning in Opthalmology using Ocean Browser
• Online OSCARS in Dentistry
• A self-paced program in psychiatry using Moodle and Articulate
• Using social media and webinars in student recruitment
• Computer‐based support for psychiatry
• Teaching/Learning Evidence Based Practice WITHOUT – PowerPoint, Quarbon, ‘Clickers’ and Blackboard
• E-learning strategic projects
• Mobile learning
• Researching e-learning in the Faculty

The full program can be downloaded here.

为学龄前儿童而设的网上教学？

——灵格风中国的家长参与方案

 何文超

发表于悉尼大学CoCo研究中心举办的Learning Technology Research Symposium 2008上的海报

海报PDF下载

家长参与的周末学前儿童外语（英语） 面授课程

网上学习解决方案： 灵格风中国案例研究

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Learning Science and Technology

by

Wenchao He

wenchao.he@sydney.edu.au

Centre for Research on Computer-Supported Learning and Cognition

Faculty of Education and Social Work

The University of Sydney , Australia

July 2008

学位论文全文

论文研究计划

参与者信息综述

家长参与者同意函

父母或监护人同意函

教师参与者信息综述

教师参与者同意函

Abstract

This case study was driven by the needs of Guangzhou Kids Centre, Linguaphone Group China Branch to explore the feasibility of developing an e-learning solution to promote parental involvement in order to enhance the learning outcomes of the preschooler-level students attending weekend face-to-face English classes. A pilot e-learning project was initiated in two classes (Level 1 and 2) to help the parents to organise weekly family-based English learning activities under the instruction of the teachers. During a five-week period, the parents were given access to an online learning management system where there were weekly instruction packages including the teachers’ summaries of what was taught in class, family-based English learning activity guide with relevant materials, and a feedback forum. The teachers checked and replied the parents’ feedback during the week to provide further assistance. To have a better understanding of parental involvement in the weekend English class and to avoid influences of any potential technical issues related to the e-learning project, an alternative method was taken at the same time in another two classes (Level 1 and 2), where the parents received the same instruction packages in print. The parents completed some questionnaires before and after the project, and were interviewed by the researcher. The four teachers were also interviewed at the end of the project. The results show that most of the parents of Level 2 students actively participated in the project while the participation by the parents of Level 1 students was limited. The E-Learning Group’s and Print Group’s parents participated in the program using different strategies. The teachers’ and parents’ observations seem to suggest that the students’ progress was associated with the degree of activeness of the parents’ participation. Suggestions for the subsequent development of the e-learning solution are made based on the analysis and discussion of the results.

Acknowledgements

Firstly, I am grateful to my supervisor Dr. Chun Hu for her support and help throughout my study. Her valuable suggestions and comments on my work gave me a strong direction to move further. Discussing with her usually triggered much new idea conducive to the subsequent research procedure. She cared not only my study but also my life in Australia, a foreign country for me. This has led to my confidence and enjoyableness during the study.

I thank Linguaphone China and Ask Idea Educational Studio for providing this study with funding, relevant materials and continual support.

I thank Mr. Yaowei Situ and Mr. Tim Ng for their promoting my proposed parental involvement program to be implemented in Guangzhou Kids Centre, Linguaphone China. Without their support, I could not conduct the case study with Linguaphone.

I thank the four teachers’ participation in this study. They have worked with me collaboratively within the parental involvement program. Without their support and effort, I could not implement the project and conduct the study internationally.

Finally, and certainly not least, my greatest thanks are due to my fiancée for cheerful encouragement and unfailing support during the study. And I thank my parents who are living in China but always encourage me to overcome difficulties via synchronous chat on the Internet.

Licensing

The author of this dissertation, Mr. Wenchao He, owns the copyright of this dissertation which is protected by Copyright Act 1968 and other applicable law in Australia . Without the copyright holder’s written permission, any use of this dissertation other than as authorised under this license is prohibited.

On 1 July 2008, this dissertation will be submitted to Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney for examination. The Faculty and University of Sydney Library and its agents will be permanently licensed to hold the hard and electronic copies of this dissertation which can be made available to the staff and the students of University of Sydney . Once this dissertation has been submitted, Linguaphone Group and Ask Idea Educational Studio will be respectively granted a permanent, irrevocable, free, world wide, non-exclusive license (including a right of sublicense) to use, reproduce, adapt and exploit the intellectual property rights in this dissertation for any commercial or noncommercial purpose.

From 1 July 2008 to 31 December 2008, the full text of this dissertation should be kept partially confidential and should not be copied, distributed, displayed or reproduced out of the scopes of University of Sydney, Linguaphone Group and Ask Idea Educational Studio. The author and any other staff and student in the three organisations who has received this dissertation should only use the dissertation for their work, study, or research within the three organisations and should not forward the full text of this dissertation to any other party or upload the full text of this dissertation to the Internet to make it available to the public.

From 1 January 2009, this dissertation will be made available to the public and become licensed unde Australian Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Work 2.5 License , which is:

You are free:

to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work

Under the following conditions:

Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.

Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author’s moral rights.

Any request for any use of this dissertation other than as authorised under the above licensing statement can be forwarded to the copyright holder, Wenchao He, who can be contacted at wenchao.he@sydney.edu.au.

List of Contents

1    Introduction. 1

1.1 Problem Statement. 1

1.2 Possible solution. 2

1.3 Purposes of the Study and Research Questions. 2

2    Literature Review. 4

2.1 Parental Involvement. 4

2.1.1 Parental Involvement’s Effectiveness. 4

2.1.2 Parent-school Partnership. 5

2.1.3 Communicative Issue of Parental Involvement Programs in Kindergartens. 6

2.1.4 Parental Involvement Possibility. 7

2.2 E-learning. 8

2.2.1 E-learning’s Representations. 8

2.2.2 Networked Learning. 9

2.2.3 E-learning in a Family Context 10

2.2.4 Using Technology to Promote Family-School Connection. 12

2.3 Second/Foreign Language Learning. 13

2.3.1 Family-based Linguistic Input and Interaction. 13

2.3.2 The Transitional Shift of CALL. 15

3    Methodology. 18

3.1 Research Method Selection. 18

3.2 Participants. 20

3.3 Instruments. 21

3.3.1 Questionnaires. 21

3.3.2 Telephone Interview. 25

3.4 Procedure. 27

3.4.1 Parental Involvement Program. 27

3.4.2 Data Collection. 28

3.4.3 Data Analysis. 28

4    Results. 30

4.1 Overview. 30

4.1.1 Overview of the Students and the Parents. 30

4.1.2 Response Rates. 33

4.1.3 Participation Rate. 34

4.2 Parental Involvement in Children’s English Learning. 35

4.2.1 Parental Modeling in Children’s English Learning. 35

4.2.2 Parental Involvement Preferences. 39

4.2.3 Summary. 43

4.3 E-learning Solution Supporting Parental Involvement. 43

4.3.1 Parent Involved Networked Learning Model 43

4.3.2 Promoting Connections. 44

4.3.3 Summary. 49

4.4 Enhancing the Outcomes of Children’s English Learning. 49

4.4.1 Enhancing English Input and Interaction by CALL. 50

4.4.2 Let the Students Know about their Parents’ Participation. 52

4.4.3 Multiple Language Representations. 53

4.4.4 Parent-Teacher Face-to-Face Communication. 54

4.4.5 Customised Instruction in Class. 54

4.4.6 Parents’ Learning English for Themselves. 55

4.4.7 Summary. 56

5    Discussion and Conclusion. 57

5.1 Summary of the findings. 57

5.2 Implications and Suggestions. 58

5.2.1 Multiple Solutions. 58

5.2.2 Instruction on Parental Involvement 58

5.2.3 Promoting Connections. 59

5.2.4 Promoting English Input and Interaction. 59

5.3 Limitations of the study. 60

5.4 Future research. 61

6     References. 62

Applying Learning Science Research to the
Design and Use of Educational Technology for
Promoting Learning about Complex Systems

He, Wenchao

CoCo Research Centre

Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney, Australia

25 May, 2008

Introduction

A complex system is a system composed of interconnected parts that as a whole exhibit one or more properties (behavior among the possible properties) not obvious from the properties of the individual parts (Weaver, 1948). Complex systems exist in various subjects (e.g. biology, physics and society) within education settings and they are believed to be difficult for learners to learn. Many learning scientists have been studying the difficulties involved in understanding concepts within complex systems as emergence and decentralized control and in helping learners grow their understandings of these difficult concepts (Kolodner, 2006). Journal of the Learning Sciences, one of the official journals of the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS), published a strand of articles on promoting learning about complex systems in the first volume in 2006. This paper will study the guidelines that three articles from the strand provide for the design and use of educational technology in relation to complex systems, and then identify, discuss, compare, and critically evaluate their methodological approaches, quality and applicability.

Guidelines from the Learning Sciences Community

Jacobson & Wilensky (2006) argue that the field of the learning sciences now has a major opportunity to help address the widening gap between current best understandings and analytical tools in the physical and social sciences and the working knowledge of professionals, policymakers, and citizens. They asserted that the learning sciences have been well positioned to contribute in this area and then they proposed five principles for creating environments and tools to help students learn scientific ideas about complex physical and social systems, which are (pp. 20-24):

(1) Experiencing complex systems phenomena

(2)    Making the complex systems conceptual framework explicit

(3)    Encouraging collaboration, discussion, and reflection

(4)    Constructing theories, models, and experiments

(5)    Learning trajectories for deep understandings and explorations

Different from Jacobson & Wilensky (2006), Lesh (2006) does not view current learning science theories as being sufficient to provide answers to most questions about the nature of the conceptual systems. In contrast, he believes that the most exciting point about learning science investigations of complex systems is precisely that such research is likely to require a variety of significant paradigm shifts beyond current ways of thinking. Furthermore, he believes that these paradigm shifts should have implications for learning and problem solving related to a wide range of constructs and situations where relationships to systemic understandings are far less obvious than in the case of complex systems. To support these claims, he suggests distinguishing among three kinds of complex systems (p. 46):

(1)    “Real life” systems (or simulations of such systems) that occur (or are created) in everyday situations

(2)    Conceptual systems that humans develop to design, model, or make sense of the preceding “real life” systems

(3)    Models that researchers develop to describe and explain students’ modeling abilities

In other words, layers of complexity of complex systems are different. Systems such as double pendulum can be referred to as being “simply complex” to contrast them with the kind of “deeply complex” systems that abound in “real life” systems where the “agents” within the system are often living organisms or ecosystems that are not characterized by simple, linearly combined, or concatenated hardware- or software-based rules. Therefore, to have adequate explanatory power, the design of models of complex systems should be based on at least three assumptions and principles (p. 49):

(1)    Useful models of complex systems’ most important properties cannot be derived from a list of simple functional rules.

(2)    Knowledge about useful models of complex systems tends to be both situated and distributed.

(3)    Useful models of complex systems meaningfully capture and illuminate some properties of the world.

Hmelo-Silver & Azevedo (2006) point out that one of the major issues affecting students’ ability to learn about complex systems is their cognitive, metacognitive, and self-regulatory processes. Understanding and reasoning about complex systems places a huge burden on working memory resources and is often counterintuitive. So they believe that studying the use of metacognitive processes in understanding complex systems is critical to understanding how we can facilitate learning about complex systems, as learners must engage in monitoring multiple activities during such learning—their emerging understanding, the aspects of their learning context and also their conceptual growth.

In addition, though agree with Jacobson and Wilensky’s (2006) claim about the importance of experience with complex systems, Hmelo-Silver & Azevedo (2006) argue that discovery alone is not sufficient and computer-based learning environment should provide students with embedded scaffolds to guide their exploration and experience, but should not provide all students with all students the same scaffolding from embedded scaffolds.

In terms of the use of educational technology, they notice that, although educators have become inundated with computer-based learning environments that may have the potential to facilitate students’ learning about complex systems, unfortunately teachers are not being trained how to support students’ learning with such technology-based environments. It is especially important for teachers to have the skills needed to support learning of complex systems from simulation and modeling software.

Methodological Approaches

Among the three articles, Jacobson & Wilensky (2006) and Hmelo-Silver & Azevedo (2006) discussed issues of methodological approaches regarding the research on the guidelines and principles that they proposed. Both the discussions aim to bridge the gap between the studies on complex systems in multiple disciplines and the learning sciences research through the use of data from complex systems in real world for educational purposes. However, they focused on different aspects of the use and the data.

Jacobson & Wilensky (2006) emphasize the way that we use the data and the validity of the data, and claim that the gap can be bridged by research on the use of conceptual and methodological disciplinary toolkit such as computational modeling of systems of learning and education where validated data from real world have been embedded. Such computational modeling approach allows dramatically enhanced capabilities to investigate complex and dynamical systems and has been widely implemented in scientific practice. Once researchers have demonstrated a valid model for a particular system compared to available data, it is then possible to run “computational experiments” in which what-if scenarios about the behavior of the system may be explored to understand a system under different conditions. And such model can be developed for educational purposes under the design guidelines and principles of educational technology.

Differently, Hmelo-Silver & Azevedo (2006) emphasize the theoretical and empirical base synthesized by studying the data collected as well as the variety of the types and sources of data. They argue that we need to amalgamate diverging theoretical frameworks from multidisciplinary-approach-based research in complex systems and also need to collect multiple data source, such as those from laboratory and classroom experimentation, and use mixed methods to triangulate between qualitative data and quantitative data. They believe that the amalgamated framework and the different types of data are necessary for us to analyze and understand the complexities in learning about complex systems, which may be beneficial for corresponding design and use of educational technology.

It is evident that the two articles are promoting different directions for bridging the gap. While Jacobson & Wilensky (2006) base their exploration on complex systems perspectives and consider how to introduce computation modeling into learning sciences research, Hmelo-Silver & Azevedo (2006) start the research from the complexity of learning per se and promote educational-setting-based studies in relation to the field of complex systems. As Hmelo-Silver & Azevedo (2006) have noticed that the learning sciences is at an early stage of understanding how people think and learn about complex systems, Jacobson & Wilensky’s (2006) methodological approach—from complex systems perspectives to learning sciences—seems relatively more easy and efficient because computational modeling has been somewhat more mature in science practice and it can be immediately applied in educational settings once related guidelines from learning sciences research have been integrated into the process of its design and use.

Quality and Applicability

Though all of the three articles provide educational technology designers and users with the guidelines from different perspectives, they are still conveying the same information from the learning sciences community—it is not easy to design and use educational technology for promoting learning about complex systems, and they acknowledge that further research is needed as many current problems have not been solved. These problems can be sorted into three catalogues—cognition, computational tools, and teachers’ instruction.

For cognition, the three articles have addressed how difficult for students to change the way that they have been used to think, but only they have gone through the process of conceptual change can they better understand complex systems. Jacobson & Wilensky (2006) encourage further research about how to provide students with opportunities to experience complex systems and how to make complex systems conceptual framework explicit, which indicates that they intend to solve the problem out of the learners. Lesh (2006) criticizes the mechanistic information processing metaphors and claims that educational technology design should not reduce complex systems into a list of simple functional rules but does not claim what should be done to solve the problem. Hmelo-Silver & Azevedo (2006), focusing the cognitive challenge per se, suggest studying the use of metacognitive processes in understanding complex systems, which is critical to understand how to facilitate learning about complex systems.

As for computational tools, all of the three articles agree that we should use it to assist the learning about complex systems, but what the authors are worrying about is that computational tools may not provide students with the true representation of complex systems in real world and this may lead to misunderstanding and/or difficulty of understanding of real complex systems. Jacobson & Wilensky (2006), on the one hand, suggest introducing computational modeling approach from science practice domain to educational settings, and on the other hand turn the research focus to explore students’ learning during constructing and revising their own models. These two approaches can avoid the embarrassment in pursuing “real complex systems” in the educational technology context and are also much applicable. Lesh (2006) suggests that we differentiate three kinds of models of different degrees of complexity. Knowledge about the “simply complex” ones may be well distributed by computational tools while the “deeply complex” ones may not. However, the assumptions and principles that he proposes about useful models of complex systems tend to be hardly in relation to the solution of the “reality” issue of computational modeling. Hmelo-Silver & Azevedo’s (2006) solution is similar to Jacobson & Wilensky’s (2006) avoiding the embarrassment. But their focus is on the design of computational tools’ content and functions. They argue that computational tools should provide students with different kinds of embedded scaffolds to support their various learning needs. Nevertheless, they are still not sure how to realize the claim and then they argue that more research is necessary to understand when, how, and why to scaffold learning about complex systems in the context of computer-based learning environment.

As for teachers’ instruction, all of the three articles have discussed the challenge for teachers to teach about complex systems, especially to teach those “non-everyday” or impossible-to-directly-experience phenomena. Jacobson & Wilensky (2006) claim that teachers should organise collaboration, discussion and reflection in learning environments in which students come to experience and to construct their understandings about complex systems context. In addition, Jacobson & Wilensky (2006) also encourage investigating whether the complex-systems-knowledge-and-methodologies integrated curriculum fosters learning trajectories for deep understanding and explorations that students can apply not only in the domain of that curriculum but also other areas. But they have not provided implementation details though such claim may be still applicable but difficult for many teachers. Both Lesh (2006) and Hmelo-Silver & Azevedo (2006) focus on teachers’ preparation before class rather than the instructional activities in class and the investigation after class. While Hmelo-Silver & Azevedo (2006) still emphasize preparing teachers to be skillful of supporting learning about complex systems in class, Lesh (2006) identifies the importance for teachers to model students’ modeling abilities which may result in teachers’ deep understanding of how students’ learn about complex systems. And he also argues that researchers should help develop useful models to describe and explain students’ modeling abilities under three assumptions and principles that he proposed. Among the three articles, Lesh’s (2006) solution tends to be the most radical. Once the work of modeling students’ modeling abilities has been done by further research, it would be much easier for teachers to process their teaching about complex systems. Therefore, though three articles’ claims about the teachers’ instruction issue have not been followed by detailed guidelines for the application, those proposed by Lesh (2006) are relatively more reasonable comparing to the others.

There are strengths and weaknesses in the three articles regarding to solving the problems in relation to cognition, computational tools and teachers’ instruction. While Hmelo-Silver & Azevedo’s (2006) and Jacobson & Wilensky’s (2006) solutions are respectively the most applicable and of highest quality in terms of dealing with the issues about cognition and computational tools, the applicability of Lesh’s (2006) suggestion for teachers’ instruction issue still need to be examined in the future, but it is probably the best way to prepare teachers for the teaching about complex systems.

Conclusion

This paper has summarized the guidelines that three articles from the Complex Systems Strand of Journal of the Learning Sciences provide for the design and use of educational technologies for promoting learning about complex systems, and discuss, compare and evaluate their methodological issues, quality and applicability. All of three articles provide us with valuable discussion about technology-based learning about complex systems, but their emphases and scopes of the applicability are different. Therefore, we should apply the most appropriate guidelines for the corresponding issues—bridging the gap between complex systems research and learning sciences research, students’ cognition, computational tools and teachers’ instruction when we design and use educational technology for promoting learning about complex system.

References

Hmelo-Silver, C. E., & Azevedo, R. (2006). Understanding Complex Systems: Some Core Challenges. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 15(1), 53-61.

Jacobson, M. J., & Wilensky, U. (2006). Complex Systems in Education: Scientific and Educational Importance and Implications for the Learning Sciences. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 15(1), 11-34.

Kolodner, J. L. (2006). A Note From the Editor. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 15(1), 1-2.

Lesh, R. (2006). Modeling Students Modeling Abilities: The Teaching and Learning of Complex Systems in Education. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 15(1), 45-52.

Weaver, W. (1948). Science and Complexity. American Scientist, 36, 536.

Ernst & Young’s Practice of Designing

Global E-Learning Program:

a Review from the ISD Perspectives   

He, Wenchao

CoCo Research Centre

Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney, Australia

16 June 2008 

Introduction

Ernst & Young is a global leader in assurance, tax, transaction and advisory services, with about 130,000 staff helping clients retain confidence of investors, manage risk, strengthen controls and achieve potential in more than 130 countries in the world (Ernst & Young, n.d.-a, n.d.-b). To standardise or customise their services and make the staff members rely on explicit and tacit knowledge to solve problems, they have used the codification strategy since they frequently reuse their knowledge to achieve long-term advantage and economies of scale (Smith, 2004). To support this, they needed a flexible learning system to provide a global curriculum that all the staff from different offices in the world can participate in (Werner, 2002). On the other hand, using a blend of Web-based and classroom instruction, Ernst & Young reduced training costs by 35 percent while improving consistency and scalability (Bih, 2007). This paper, focusing on Ernst & Young’s Audit Methodology Learning Program, looks deep into the design process of their global e-learning program from the ISD perspectives, and provides suggestions for improvement of the e-learning solution.

Design Process

The Ernst & Young Assurance & Advisory Business Services (AABS) practice consists of financial statement audit, core assurance service, and six specialty assurance and advisory services. To support its AABS strategy, Ernst & Young created a global audit methodology that is organised in three layers: (1) overview of the methodology, (2) detailed guidance for applying the procedures and (3) examples and leading practices. The staff’s learning about this audit methodology would be critical to its successful deployment and application. So Ernst & Young used six months to design and develop the first 300 hours of the core curriculum of the global e-learning program to initiate and support such learning, which included six main stages (Werner, 2002):

(1)   Global Learning Committee Construction. The Committee Members were the learning leaders of Ernst & Young’s main geographic areas, who were responsible for defining the learning strategy and the development process, and approving all finished learning modules.

(2)   Content Creation. Ernst & Young used a modular approach to create the initial content which was divided into web-based and instructor-led learning modules based on the global audit methodology activities. Ernst & Young also assigned countries to develop the content for the modules related to a particular activity which would be bundled into logical groups later. All the modules were rated beginner, intermediate, advanced and expert.

(3)   Streamlined Development and Pilot Process. Once the relevant documents of the learning content had been ready, they used a streamlined development process to accelerate the actual learning module development and the build phase of the program. The Committee allocated the modules to different development teams and provided them with guidance including the detailed development process map, initial design documents, expanded design documents, leader guides, business English guide and roles description for team members (e.g. subject matter specialists, local project managers, etc.). A showcase was leveraged to test the content and gather feedback, in which approximately 80 hours of learning were delivered to the learning leaders and senior managers. The program manager and methodology team analyzed issues identified during showcase testing, and critical issues and suggestions for resolution were sent to the development teams.

(4)   Central Communication Point Creation. A central communication point was created to allow every developing team member from multiple countries to access the learning modules under development and make comments. Thus everyone could see what everyone else was developing.

(5)   Peer Review. When a learning module was developed in one country, it was systematically reviewed by a subject matter specialist from another country. Countries were asked to submit learning material related to all methodology activities, regardless of the activities their countries were assigned to develop.

(6)   Classroom-based Case Study Exercises Development. A separated case study team was created with a member from every country, which was responsible for creating all the information for a fictitious business. The case study was used in many of the classroom modules to create exercises to reinforce learning.

The six stages are more or less overlapped as there were different teams fulfilling responsibilities within each stage. However, the overlapped parts basically only appeared in the latter half of the whole project as the design process is actually a top-down approach (see Figure 1). The lower the levels of the teams were, the more overlapped the phases of their work were.

Figure 1:  The Organisation Structure of Ernst & Young’s AABS Global Learning Development Project (Werner, 2002)

Design Methodology

The method used for the instructional design of Ernst & Young’s e-learning program is a systems approach. This approach has been described in literature as instructional systems development (ISD) which provides a practical, step-by-step system for evaluating student needs, developing the program content and determining the effectiveness of the instructional design (Hannum & Hansen, 1989). The widely used models for ISD are ADDIE Model which includes analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation (Branson, 1975), and the Dick and Carey Model which describes nine phases of an iterative process that starts by identifying instructional goals and ends with summative evaluation (Dick & Carey, 1978). Though systems approaches for instructional design have been criticized by some as being too rigid, too cumbersome, too linear, too inflexible, too constraining, and even too time-consuming to implement (Clark, 2004; Kruse, 2006), Ernst & Young still had to develop their e-learning program in this way because they had become a complex system which has so many locations through out the world (O’Leary, 1998; Seng, Zannes, & Pace, 2002). Such context is much different from a single teacher or lecturer designing instruction for the classes. This section of the present paper adopts the latest edition of Dick & Carey Model (see Figure 2) to describe and discuss the design methodologies of Ernst & Young’s e-learning program development project.

Figure 2:   The Dick & Carey Model (6^th Edition) (Dick, Carey, & Carey, 2004)

The Dick and Carey model does not emphasize the first phase—analysis of ADDIE as Dick et al. (2004) believe that, before instruction is created, it is necessary to determine the need for that instruction in terms of what problem within the organization will be solved through the use of new skills, or what opportunity can be seized because of new skills in the organization. This step is critically important to the success of the design process. Ernst & Young’ e-learning program design decision was consistent with this assertion. In the very beginning, rather than analyzing the skills to be developed, the learners’ entry behaviour or the learning context, Ernst & Young clearly defined their instructional goal which was to promote their global audit methodologies that their staff was required to use consistently while providing clients with assurance and advisory business services. They valued and emphasised this goal to a considerable extent. To ensure the whole design process continually on the right track, they used a high-level committee to support and control the project, which has reinforced the importance of the project to all participants and made the project strongly goal-oriented.

However, Dick et al.’s (2004) not putting analysis phase as the first phase does not indicate that the analysis can be ignored. Rather, they recognise the constructivist points of view that learning is always a unique product "constructed" as each individual learner combines new information with existing knowledge and experiences, so the Dick and Carey Model’s second phase includes analysing the performance of the instructional goal as well as the learners’ entry behaviours, prior knowledge, learning and application context, etc., but this was much difficult for Ernst & Young to implement and actually they have not done much in this phase because the target learners and their contexts varied from places to place.

To make up the lack of analysis of learners and their contexts, Ernst & Young wrote the learning objectives according to the learners of different levels from beginners to experts and the learning content followed was designed based on these assumptions. The other compensation reported by Werner (2002) was to tie the learning content “to the learners’ previous experiences through open-ended questions (in the Web-based modules) and opportunities to share experiences through storytelling (in the instructor-led modules)” (p. 69). Anyhow, Ernst & Young tried their best to minimize the need for localization of the modules.

Without developing any assessment instrument, Ernst & Young directly proceeded to the fifth and six phases to develop instructional strategies (e.g. modular approach, blended approach, etc.) and materials (e.g. web pages, case study exercises, etc.). Once the pilot modules were completed, the formative evaluation was conducted by project managers and methodology team. Also, each completed module was sent to subject matter specialist from a different country for systematic review. However, the objective of this kind of reviews “was to use as much existing material developed by the different countries as possible” (Werner, 2002, p. 72). Therefore, the “real formative evaluation” only existed in the pilot process. And the feedback from the pilot process formed the basis for the revision of the instructional strategy and material. According to Dick et al. (2004), the data from a formative evaluation should not be simply used to revise the instruction itself, but should be used to reexamine the validity of the instructional analysis and the assumptions about the entry behaviors and characteristics of learners. However, because there were no actual learners participating in the formative evaluation, Ernst & Young could not identify the difficulties experienced by the learners in achieving the objectives and relate these difficulties to specific deficiencies in the instruction. Eventually, there were no data for the revision of the analysis phase. In addition, they even had no chance to validate the assumption for the four-level learners’ competencies.

To sum up, Ernst & Young’s e-learning design process basically went through most phases of the Dick & Carey Model but some components and links of the model were “missing” as labeled in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Ernst & Young’s E-learning Design Process Model

Critical Analysis and Problem Solving

The main decisions within Ernst & Young’s e-learning program design process were basically made by high-level staff (e.g. learning leaders, project managers, subject matter specialists, etc.) without much consulting the target learners. The learners were considered in the design and develop phases, but not involved in the actual design process. As learners are the important factors in the analysis, assessment and evaluation phases (Dick et al., 2004) and Ernst & Young’s design process had no learners involved, these three phases tended to be missing and this would lead the design process to be a vicious circle because of lack of effective revision of instruction supported by the data from learners. Such situation would also lead to learner readiness issues, such as lack of time, low interest in subject matter, low motivation for learning, poor self-study skills, poor time management skills, disrupting life interruptions, lack of necessary e-skills, psychological resistance to losing face to face learning perks, etc. (Phillips, 2002; Romiszowski, 2004). Furthermore, because of such situation, the leaders in the organisation would have not enough understanding on the learners’ needs in terms of the learning context, which would lead to poor internal marketing of courses and events, lack of clear reward structure, failure to provide quality learning environment, failure to provide quality learning equipment, failure to provide managerial feedback and support of learning, failure to provide time on-the-job to train, corporate-wide lack of dedication to a learning culture, blanket mandate of e-learning as the new-new thing (ibid).

Ernst & Young’s current instructional design approach is exactly what Carr-Chellman & Savoy (2004) described about traditional instructional design—“the designer analyzes, creates, and negotiates, and the leaders initiate, approve and decide”, and “the users are left to accept or reject the innovation” (p. 702). If users are truly empowered to participating in designing products or processes, the products or processes will tend to create a significantly different adoption process. Therefore, a user-design approach, which indicates that actions such as initiation, approval, rejection, design, and decision making are negotiated among the users , designers and leaders, would be beneficial for Ernst & Young to avoid the disadvantages of the current design process and the potential risks on the organizational level (ibid).

Since user-design is very time-consuming and resource hungry (Carr-Chellman, Cuyar, & Breman, 1998), the suggestion about user-design approach may not be adopted if its disadvantages significantly constrain the e-learning solution to meet the business goal of Ernst & Young, and the possibility of this supposition tends to be large because saving learning and administrative time, training budgets and other resources is still one of the main reasons why corporations use e-learning (Oakes, 2003; Tai, 2008). An eclectic approach would be revising the traditional ISD models so that it can adapt to the context of e-learning that has special needs and constrains (e.g. lower cost, learners’ locations vary, etc.). Carliner (2002) revised the Dick and Carey Model and then proposed a four-phase model to describe the ISD process for e-learning (see Figure 4).

In the Carliner Model, there are no standalone instructional analysis (distinguishing from the analysis of goals and needs of organisations), assessment and evaluation phases and basically learners are not involved in the design process. Some of the components of each phase of the Carliner Model indicate the differences between designing e-learning and designing traditional classroom courses, and these components generally have existed in Ernst & Young’s e-learning design process. For example, in the Definition Phase, Carliner (2002) suggests collecting demographic data about the learners and preparing prose descriptions of them because within an organisation, learners with different backgrounds and of different levels have different appetites for content and use the content in different ways. Similarly, Ernst & Young prepared their e-learning content for four-different-level learners. We can notice that both the Carliner Model and Ernst & Young’s practice tend to construct the learning content that covers most of the learners and the term “learner” that they used actually refers to the abstract, assumptive or even imaginary concept of “learner”, rather than the learners known as actual people. Such situation is much different from traditional classroom where actual learners are known and reachable, and the learning content will be only prepared directly for them.

Figure 4:  ISD Process for e-learning (Carliner, 2002)

In the Design Phase, Carliner (2002) emphases using of style guides and templates to ensure the consistency of similar content (screens, text, number, language, formats of headings, etc.). And in Development Phase, effective communication, technical and editorial reviews, and running tests are also required in the context of designing e-learning. Ernst & Young’s design process included the provision of guidance for streamlined development and the review process. Such “additional” work should be done within the ISD for e-learning, which is not emphasised in traditional ISD because the most of the information from the course will be delivered through teachers’ speech which does not need the style guides, templates, review process, etc.

Assessment and evaluation are the two main missing phases for Ernst & Young’s design process as well as the Carliner Model. However, Carliner (2002) still mentioned assessment and evaluation in the Design Phase but disappointingly he only used limited words to address the importance of them and did not clarify whether the actual learners should be involved or not and whether the assessment and evaluation should be implemented in the Definition Phase to obtain the data for the definition of goals. So regarding to the assessment and evaluation phases in ISD, we probably can adopt some thoughts from Borich’s (1979) systematic evaluation model (see Figure 5) to the e-learning design context.

Figure 5: (a) Traditional view and (b) nontraditional view of the evaluator during planning, development, and evaluation (Borich, 1979)

Borich (1979) noticed that, traditionally, planners, designers, developers and evaluators each often begin their work in different phases in the instructional design process and then proposed a new approach involving evaluators to keep contributing through out the whole process. Here the evaluator, rather than entering the scenario late in the development process, plays an integral role in program planning and development alongside planners and developers. This model and Carr-Chellman & Savoy’s (2004) User-Design approach may meet a compromise and be integrated. While one representation of User-Design approach is design team members acting as users (Carr-Chellman & Savoy, 2004), this kind of “users” can keep contributing to the evaluation process within Borich’s (1979) framework. So if Ernst & Young used this systematic evaluation approach in the design process (e.g. using the special “users” to conduct a formative evaluation while senior leaders were reviewing the pilot modules), this would help make up the disadvantages caused by lacking actual learners involved.

To sum up, lack of actual learners involved in Ernst & Young’s e-learning program design process would lead to various problems and a user-design approach is recommended to the e-learning project. However, a user-design approach requires too much time and resources to support, so a revised ISD model was introduced specifically for e-learning design process. Finally, the evaluation issue was resolved by integrating a user-design approach and a systematic evaluation approach so that the drawbacks of lacking actual learner’s involvement would be overcome.

Reflection and Conclusion

Although there are places that could be further improved, Ernst & Young’s practice of global e-learning program development has given us a very good case to help us better understand Instructional Systems Development’s (ISD) application in the real world. ISD has been used for more than three decades. It experienced the change of contexts—from pure face to face instructional design to e-learning program development. In the middle of this change, there has been a need for us to study how bridge the gap between using it in traditional way and in nontraditional way. If new issues emerge, we need to identify opportunities to use other exist approach to resolve them, or to create new approaches to update ISD’s usage in the new context.

In this paper, we have summarised Ernst & Young’s e-learning design process, used a system approach (e.g. the Dick and Carey Model), and critically analyse the issues identified in this paper and finally provided the conceptual solutions for the issues.

References 

Bih, J. (2007). When it comes to e-learning. ACM Ubiquity, 8(43), 1-11.

Borich, G. D. (1979). A system approach to the evaluation of training. In J. H. F. O’Neil (Ed.), Procedures for instructional systems development (pp. 205-231). New York: Academic Press.

Branson, R. K. (1975). Interservice procedures for instructional systems development: Executive summary and model. Tallahassee, FL: Center for Educational Technology, Florida State University.

Carliner, S. (2002). Designing e-learning. Alexandria, VA: ASTD.

Carr-Chellman, A., Cuyar, C., & Breman, J. (1998). User-design: A case application in health care training. Educational Technology Research and Development, 46(4), 97-114.

Carr-Chellman, A., & Savoy, M. (2004). User-design research. In D. H. Jonassen (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Educational Communication and Technology (2nd ed., pp. 701-716). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Clark, D. (2004). The Dick and Carey Model – 1978.   Retrieved June 15, 2008, from http://www.nwlink.com/~Donclark/history_isd/carey.html

Dick, W., & Carey, L. (1978). The systematic design of instruction. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman.

Dick, W., Carey, L., & Carey, J. O. (2004). The systematic design of instruction (6th ed.). Boston & London: Pearson/Allyn & Bacon.

Ernst, & Young. (n.d.-a). Creating the right climate for your business success.   Retrieved June 15, 2008, from http://www.ey.com/global/content.nsf/International/Services

Ernst, & Young. (n.d.-b). How we make a difference.   Retrieved June 15, 2008, from http://www.ey.com/global/content.nsf/International/About_EY

Hannum, W. H., & Hansen, C. D. (1989). Instructional systems development in large organizations. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications.

Kruse, K. (2006). Introduction to Instructional Design and the ADDIE Model.   Retrieved June 15, 2008, from http://www.e-learningguru.com/articles/art2_1.htm

O’Leary, D. E. (1998). Using AI in knowledge management: knowledge bases and ontologies. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 13(3), 34-39.

Oakes, K. (2003). E-learning. Training & Development, 57(7), 17-20.

Phillips, V. (2002). Why does corporate e-learning fail? Virtual University Gazette   Retrieved June 15, 2008, from http://www.geteducated.com/vug/june02/vug0602c.htm

Romiszowski, A. J. (2004). How’s the e-learning baby? Factors leading to success or failure of an educational technology innovation. Educational Technology, 44(1), 5-27.

Seng, C. V., Zannes, E., & Pace, R. W. (2002). The contributions of knowledge management to workplace learning. Journal of Workplace Learning, 14(4), 138 – 147.

Smith, A. D. (2004). Knowledge management strategies: a multi-case study. Journal of knowledge management, 8(3), 6-16.

Tai, L. (2008). Corporate e-learning: an inside view of IBM’s solutions. New York: Oxford University Press.

Werner, T. (2002). Best practices for e-learning: top entries in the best practices category Sunnyvale, CA Brandon-Hall. 

Summary and Analysis of

User-design Research by Carr-Chellman & Savoy (2004)

He, Wenchao

CoCo Research Centre

Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney, Australia

23 April 2008

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to examine a research stream of user-design by summarizing the main points in Carr-Chellman and Savoy’s (2004) arguments on user-design research, and comparing the main methods and methodologies that the authors identify to do user-oriented design.

Definition

Traditionally, end users of a instructional system is consulted through needs assessment conducted in which the instructional designers find the problem and begins to create a solution to it. Seemingly, the end users play an important role in instructional design circle. However, Carr-Chellman and Savoy (2004) point out that while traditional instructional designers analyzes, creates, and negotiates, and the leaders initiate, approve and decide, users are left to accept or reject the innovation.

User design, in contrast, empowers the users to engage authentically in the decision-making process that is design. It is an approach to design that attempts to actively involve the end users in the design process to help ensure that the product designed meets their needs and is usable. This means releasing power from the administrators to the end users. In this case, on the other hand, rather than only being outside researchers ,consultants, or even facilitators, instructional designers must be users as well, which increase their stake in the effectiveness of the design process and final product.

Problems

Though user design has empowering potential, many users still need convincing. This is because users may not desire to be involved in the design process where their responsibility and pressure may be increased. So user-design researchers should try their best to make the users aware that their participation will make a difference, the result will be implemented, and the process of design will be an enjoyable experience (Ehn, 1993).

In terms of objective obstacles, a lack of common standardized language of user-design concepts has been hindering research. Also, the varying knowledge levels the end users possess, and the difficulties in generalizing user groups, impose a dilemma for effective user-design.

Currently in literature, user-design empirical research on instructional systems is almost nonexistent. There are fields that are similar to user-design, and research conducted in those particular fields may offer some hindsight regarding the efficiency and applicability of user-design. One of the authors of “User-design Research”, Carr-Chellman, with Cuya & Breman, used the new approach to conduct a pioneer study of home nursing agents (1998), in which they found that user design was very time-consuming and resource hungry. However, Carr-Chellman and Savoy (2004) later acknowledged that the study was both naïve in its attempt to apply user-design principles to an organizational setting and unskilled at the actualizing of appropriate research methods.

Based on these problems identified, Carr-Chellman and Savoy (2004) express the demand for extensive empirical research conducted in user-design and emphasize the importance of selecting the appropriate research methods.

Models

The discipline of user-design originates from two models, the Scandinavian user design and the stakeholder participation model.

Scandinavian researchers have a long history of user-centered, user-design, and emancipatory design literatures. This empowerment is possible due to the strong position labour unions hold in Scandinavian countries. However, the relationship between Scandinavian user-design research and the application of user design to instructional design is still quite limited. Although Scandinavian user designs’ primary emphasis is on human-computer interface, many of the ideas are useful for instructional design.

Stakeholder participation has been widely researched. Most studies agree that including stakeholders in the decision making process is beneficial to the end result as long as the administrators actually take the stakeholders input into consideration. Understanding the ways in which leaders can enable stakeholders to take a decision-making role in the design of their own systems of human learning is the next step toward effective implementation of technology and educational practices. However, most of the studies about stakeholder participation lack significant methodological attention and rigor, because they use strategies and techniques that mix and match in somewhat less intentional ways and rarely display the rigor associated with excellent qualitative or quantitative inquiry.

One method suitable in user-design research is the PAR model (Participatory Action Research) that focuses on involving the test subject in the research by providing them with all accessible information. It is collaborative research where the “community” is in control (Stoecker, 1999). Participatory action researchers do not define problems ahead of time but determine, in collaboration with the participants, the problems throughout the research process.

User-oriented Design Research

Though PAR is expected to suit user-design research, it still has little specific research conducted on either process or product (Carr-Chellman, Cuya, & Breman, 1998). So basing future user-design research on similar user-oriented design research will be beneficial. Even though research in user-design is rare, there is a relatively large amount of research conducted in user-oriented design fields. According to Carr-Chellman and Savoy (2004), there are three distinguished methods for user-oriented design: learner-centered design, user-centered design and emancipatory design. Learner-centered design aims at improving the control an individual learner has on their learning experience and its focus is mainly on providing the designer better understanding of the different learners’ needs. User-centered design aims at manipulating users’ adoption rates of tools such as human-computer interface and library media by considering and understanding their context in which the user works. Emancipatory design’s main goal is user empowerment and it aims at instigating change in organisations.

These three designs are evaluated focusing on users’ true partnership in the design process. Empirical research in the three areas for the most part showed positive findings for involvement of users in the creation of their own systems part. However, these studies were overly reliant on certain forms of research methods, such as case studies and surveys, and were not holistic in terms of understanding complete disciplines.

For research method, learner-centered design usually uses multiple research methods to process the research, while user-centered design is criticized for being superficial and merely using case studies and surveys as research methods, but most of emancipatory design researches are case based.

As for research emphasis, learner-centered design focuses on learning outcome; user-centered design focuses on appropriate tools to be produced; emancipatory design focuses on the benefit of management for organisations. So the levels of their research subjects are therefore different: individuals, tools or organisations.

As for research hypothesis, although the three designs acknowledge the importance of users’ contribution for developing and improving education, products and management, their internal structures differ. Learner-centered design hypothesizes that the more the learning needs are clear to instructional designers, the better the learning out will be. User-centered design researchers consider that the more the users’ contexts are clear to product designers, the better the product using experience will be. Emancipatory design researchers hypothesize that the change of individuals will lead to the change of organization that they belong to.

As for users’ powers and role, both leaner-centered and user-centered designs treat users as those who may adopt the results and will not really empower users. Although users are interviewed, observed, surveyed and consulted, the final decisions are still made by designers and administrators. Emancipatory design, however, asks users to find ways to create systems for themselves that serve themselves primarily, which leads to users’ power and indigenous knowledge become more powerful and respected than those of the expert designer.

As for the scopes of involvement, learner-centered and user-centered designs limit users’ experience within a specific area such as a classroom or a specific behaviour such as using software. At the same time, the researchers also try to avoid other factors that may influence the experiment in the scopes. However, emancipatory design researchers consider individual users’ immediate daily life as part of the objects to be empowered. This means emancipatory design is to change entire structures that dominate and oppress.

As for data collection and analysis, learner-centered design mainly collects and analyzes information about learners’ needs, learning outcomes from different approaches, etc. User-centered design needs users’ report of experience of using a specific tools and suggestions for improvement. However, emancipatory design seldom collects data for research as most of them are case based, where analysis is processed qualitatively.

As for difficulty to success, learner-centered design researchers always report increased student motivation, fewer disciplinary problems in classrooms, higher student performance and improved student-teacher relations, which seems that the successful rates are very high, though there are factors that could have distorted these results out of the research context. In contrast, the results of user-centered and emancipatory design research are not so promising because they rely on either designers’ skills and experience or individuals’ success.

Conclusion

This paper has summarized the basic definition of user design, the problems existed, the three models for user design, and three similar user-oriented design models. The three user-oriented design models are elaborated by comparing their methodologies from different aspects, such as evaluation focus, research method, research emphasis, research hypothesis, users’ power and role, scopes of involvement, data collection and analysis, and difficulty to success.

References

Carr-Chellman, A., Cuya, C., & Breman, J. (1998). User-design: A case application in the health care training. Educational Technology Research and Development, 46(4), 97-114.

Carr-Chellman, A. & Savoy, M. (2004). User-design research. In D. H. Jonassen (Ed.), Handbook of Rsearch on Educational Communication and Technology (2ed., pp. 701-716). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Ehn, P. (1993). Scandinavian design: On participation and skill. In D. Schuler & A. Namioka (Eds.), Participatory design: Principles and practices. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Stoecker, R. (1999). Are academics irrelevant? Roles for scholars in participatory research. American Behavioral Scientist, 42(5) 840-854.

Can We Teach Thinking Skills and Transfer?

Richard Wenchao HE

Faculty of Education and Social Work

University of Sydney, Australia

November 3, 2007

Introduction

The level that thinking skills can be taught for and transferred to has been debated and examined for many years. However, there is still no consensus on this topic. In this essay, the author will review, analyze and evaluate the ideas, thoughts and experiments through out the last three decades on the teachability and transferability of thinking skills.

It seems that comparative experiments can not tell the truth since the different results showed both significant and insignificant improvement. Even repeating the same experiment within a program, the findings varied from region to region (e.g. Blagg, 1991; Savell, Twohig and Rachford, 1986). Hence, it is worthwhile for us to look deep into different aspects of teaching thinking skills before any further implementation of similar programs. On the one hand, the failure of teaching thinking skills does not imply that they would never succeed again. Instead, they were based on the lack of many essential conditions, most of which were from teachers, instruction and students. If such conditions were not satisfied, some scholars would keep objecting that we could teach thinking skills and transfer. On the other hand, more and more supports for this educational practice, such as further approach design and theoretical exploration, have been provided to eliminate the barriers.

Against

Inappropriate teaching styles

Sometimes the thinking-skills material is not transmitted in the first place, even if teachers think they are transmitting it (Sternberg & Martin, 1988). One major source of failure in transmission relates to teaching style (Spear & Sternberg, 1987). Some teachers prefer a didactic style and fact-based questioning style, while some teachers use a dialogical approach with many open-ended questions. Though different styles have their own instructional purposes, the fact is that the former two styles, which are good for presenting and reinforcing information, lead to less thinking, whereas dialogical approach seems to be the most efficient style for encouraging the students to engage in higher-order thinking.

From Sternberg and Martin’s (1988) observation, in most thinking-skills courses (or in other courses, for that matter), students kept listening to the didactic-style teacher if the material was presented in a way that was interesting, well organized, and at least somewhat entertaining. Students are used to this style, and are comfortable with it. Students would generally answer the questioning-style teacher’s questions, and were comfortable with “correct-incorrect” feedback. When teaching occurred in dialogical style, the response was almost always the same: Silence. Try it. Students were not familiar with or comfortable with this style of interaction, and were unprepared either to do the thinking it required or to take the risks it involved. For the most part, they sat there, waiting and hoping that someone else would respond. Someone else usually ended up being the instructor. The greatest proportion of teaching takes place in didactic style, and most of the remainder of the teaching is in questioning style. Relatively little of the teaching that goes on in most classes takes place in dialogical style. Hence, relatively little of the teaching that goes on in the classroom directly encourages higher order thinking.

Teachers’ preferences on teaching styles are not easy to change, and those teachers using dialogical approaches would still encounter embarrassment during the “silence” and next time they might turn to teach in the former two styles. This real situation leads to less and less opportunity for students to learn thinking skills.

Problematic instructional materials

Insularity, placement and fragmentation are the three main errors of thinking-skills materials that undermine the transmission to students. An examination of teachers’ manuals for the variety of textbooks reveals that most of the thinking-skills material is isolated from the rest of the material. Not only is the thinking-skills material separates from the body of the text, but it is almost always placed at the end, usually at the end of each chapter. Material that is supplementary and that comes at the end of the chapter is likely never to be reached at all. So even if thinking-skills materials were designed and supplied, they could also be ignored. In terms of fragmentation, the way in which the text writers relate the instruction to the taxonomies, such as those of Benjamin Bloom and Madeline Hunter, may do more harm than good. In particular, the writers present sets of exercises, each of which is linked to a particular taxonomically derived scale. For example, one problem might be an analysis problem, another a synthesis problem, and so on. This is a mistake, because virtually no problems we encounter in our everyday lives are soluble through the application of just a single thinking process or skill (Sternberg and Martin, 1988).

While those thinking-skills materials within the content areas seem to have some problems, teaching thinking-skills as a separate subject matter apart from content would go more far away. This is an ineffective but common approach with schools often importing various thinking skills programs from the commercial market, usually as self-contained adjunct courses (Bereiter, 1984; Jones, 1986).

Nonautomatic Transfer

Transfer across domains is not automatic (Costa, 1987; Heiman, 1987). Students are usually unable to use what has been taught about how to think. The knowledge they have about thinking skills is inert when they need to gain access to it. Even to the extent that they have them, they often do not use them when they need them (Sternberg and Martin, 1988). This is because problems we present to students in order to encourage them to think do not resemble everyday problems. For example, in the everyday world, the first and sometimes most difficult step in problem solving is the recognition that a problem exists. But in school, we give students problems and ask that they solve them. In everyday life, it almost never happens that someone gives us a problem and asks us to solve it. Another example is that most of the problems we present to students in class and in textbooks are well-defined problems, but few of life’s problems are well-structured (Sternberg, 1985).

Back to the school system, considering different subjects, those students involved in thinking-skills programs still feel that they would not be understood if they were to use what had been taught elsewhere and they are afraid that the teachers in other subjects do not know about it (de Bono, 1978).

All these mean that, in many circumstances, thinking skills can only be taught and used within a specific program. Without further effort, it can not be transferred (if ever).

For

Proven Effective Programs

Bruning, Schraw and Ronning (Bruning, Schraw and Ronning, 2004) assert that they have examined several stand-alone instructional programs to improve thinking skills, such as Productive Thinking Program, the IDEAL Problem Solver, the CoRT Thinking Materials and the Feuerstein Instrumental Enrichment Program. The research indicates that all of these programs enhance thinking skills, although each promotes a different set of skills. Besides these, Adey and Shayer’s (1994) two-year evaluation of Cognitive Development through Science Education (CASE) indicates that CASE pupils’ grades in GCSE Science were on average one grade above the control groups. Lipman et al. (1980) reports the results of an evaluation of Philosophy for Children Program that the experimental group has many improvements in intellectual performance, especially in reading and mathematics and also on creativity measures.

Moreover, evaluations of thinking skills embedded into subjects or across the curriculum are also documented. Schoenfield (1992) reports findings from his program for teaching mathematics to college students in which he models problem solving through analysis, exploration and verification. He claims that a ‘before and after’ comparison of the problem-solving skills of students who attended his own courses compared with those students attending other courses indicate a marked difference. His students performed better not only on problems which he had covered during his course but also on different problems. Peel (1967) suggests that pupils who had worked through the School’s Council’s History Project achieved higher levels of understanding of the nature of historical enquiry.

Though there is also evidence indicating some programs do not help experimental groups gain significant improvement (e.g. Blagg, 1991), the majority of research in this domain, at least prove the possibility of the teachability and transferability of thinking skills.

Improved Teacher Education

A widely accepted approach is the integration of thinking skills into the total curriculum and various content areas (French and Rhoder, 1992). This suggests the need for broad curriculum revisions as well as inservice and preservice teacher training programs to integrate thinking into the curriculum (Strahan, 1986). The Irvine Thinking Project (Tama, 1989) and the Inclusion Process (Worsham, 1988) are two examples of programs developed by school personnel who have identified what needs to be included, revised curriculum to include it, and then taught the program within the regular classrooms using academic materials. Talents Unlimited is designed to develop critical and creative thinking in elementary and secondary students. Over 20,000 teachers in 1,500 schools in 49 states of USA have been trained to use this program. Such large scale of staff development guaranteed the integration of the target talents into the regular academic areas (Barbieri, 1988; Schlichter, 1986; Schlichter, Hobbs and Crump, 1988). Hence, if teacher education had been improved to prepare teachers to effectively teach thinking skills, they would eliminate the problems mentioned above in the section of “Against”.

Something Ignored

The voices from the objection to the teachability and transferability of thinking skills are mostly based on the distinction between students’ good thinking, which is the goal, and thinking-skills instruction, which is the approach. However, according to Harpaz’s (2007) formula for teaching thinking (Good Thinking = Thinking Skills + Thinking Dispositions + Understanding of Knowledge), good thinking is based on not only thinking skills but also thinking disposition and understanding of knowledge. Since the other two important elements—“thinking disposition” and “understanding of knowledge” are ignored, only teaching thinking skills could hardly achieve the goal—good thinking. Though this, we can not ascribe the failure of achieving the goal to thinking skills if the other two elements are not taken into account. Hence, once we notice the goal is not achieved, we should review all the three approaches, but not only concentrate on thinking skills or even object to it.

Discussion

After looking through both sides from the objection and the support, we can articulate the limitations of the arguement.

The basic model of the objection is because some conditions and requirements are not satisfied and these conditions and requirements are essential for successful thinking-skills instruction. This is the goal that can not be achieved. But, what if those conditions and requirements were satisfied? Would thinking skills become teachable and transferable? It seems that the objection still does not focus on teaching thinking skills itself but turns to its result. However, the current and temporary result can not always indicate the characteristics of an approach. If we could not do something at the moment, it would not always mean that thing could never be done.

On the other hand, the supports for the teachability and transferability of teaching thinking skills seem to be demonstrating the possibility but not predetermination. If thinking skills were really teachable and transferable, they would be always teachable and transferable without any exception. However, it seems that this point could not be proven. The supports were trying to add more and more favorable conditions to contribute to the final goal, such as promoting improved teacher education and taking “thinking dispositions” and “understanding of knowledge” into account. But these new conditions have not been guaranteed controllable.

All in all, the significance of the debate is not to fight for a victory, but to explore how to improve our education. The two sides have shifted their original arguments (teachability and transferability) to the discussion of the goal and its conditions. Then we could follow their thoughts to continue the exploration and research these areas:

Teaching methods: how do teachers improve their teaching methods to convey better thinking-skills instruction? How do they treat the issue of teaching styles?

Instructional materials: one set of thinking-skills materials would never fit for every situation because students, teachers and their environment vary from school to school. How can we develop a scientific system for instructional design to meet different needs?

Comprehensive assistance: without enough cooperation of different aspects, after being taught thinking skills, students can not transfer them because they lack opportunity to practice. So how can we utilize different resources to create an environment with comprehensive assistance for thinking-skills instruction?

Modification of thinking-skills instruction programs: regardless the success and the failure of the programs, our task is to keep improving according to what we have discovered and what we need to modify.

Updating the content of teacher education: how teachers are skillful would determine how well they could perform during thinking-skills instruction. Keeping updating the content of teacher education by integrating latest outcomes of research and exploration would prepare them better.

Comprehensive exploration: we should not focus on a narrow scale while successfully teaching thinking would be influenced by many factors and variables. So we can try to explore a wider domain around thinking-skills instruction and try to integrate different domains’ productions.

Conclusion

Based on the debate and the discussion, we can conclude that there are different theories, practices and experiments to develop the arguments from both sides. The side of objection raised their points from the perspectives of teachers, instructional materials writers and students while the opposite emphasize the successful cases and the further improvement. However, the real significance of the debate is to help improve our thinking-skills instruction, rather than to fight for a victory. The points that both sides raised inspire us to think deeper into what should be further researched and explored. This could stimulate further debate. But our education could keep improving at the same time!

References

Adey, P., & Shayer, M. (1994). Really raising standards: Cognitive intervention and academic achievement. London: Routledge.

Barbieri, E. L. (1988). Talents unlimited: one school’s success story. Educational leadership, 45, 35.

Bereiter, C. (1984). How to keep thinking skills from going the way of all frills. Educational leadership, 42, 75-77.

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Englishtown.com’s Efekta^™ System : Could Be Further Improved

He, Wenchao

CoCo Research Centre

Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney, Australia 

October 30, 2007
 

1.  Introduction

This paper reports on aspects of the possibilities and potentials for Englishtown.com’s further improvement from the perspective of user experience. It could help online language teaching program developers, both from Englishtown.com or other institutes consider the ways that they could make progress.

Englishtown.com is an online English learning website operated by Englishtown Inc, a division of Education First Group (EF) which is said to be the world’s largest private educational organization, with 26,000 staff, 300 schools, and 75 offices in 50 countries. Englishtown asserts that they have combined EF’s 40 years experience in language training with over $40 million in research and development to their Efekta™ System  for learning English (Englishtown, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c).

There are four main components in Efekta™ System (Englishtown, 2007b):

l        Teachers:  live, online teaching, 24 hours a day 

l        iLab:  interactive tutorials and study tools 

l        Coaching:  constant feedback and guidance 

l        Community:  classmates from 120 countries 

Teachers in Englishtown.com give 45-minute-long conversation classes every hour for the different levels of students based on different topics. Averagely, eight students of the same level will participate in one class. Students can make their own plans for conversation class and self-study in iLab but it is not compulsory for them to keep strict with the plans. In iLab, students will take their lessons by participating in different interactive activities. The lessons are divided into 15 levels and every level has 8 units. Based one topic, every unit has 13 parts: Introduction, Movie, Simulation, Map, Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing, Review, Conversation Class, Writing Class, Net Tour and Test. While studying the lessons, students will use study tools if needed, such as translator, pronunciation lab, grammar lab, podcast, etc. In Writing Class, students will be requested to write an article with a given topic in relation to what is taught in the previous parts. A writing teacher will review the writing assignment, compose the coaching note and send a feedback email to the student. Besides learning the lessons, students can also make friends in a virtual community and have voice chat with their classmate. Generally, Englishtown can meet most of the needs of English learning from the students with different language and social backgrounds.

Though Englishtown has achieved some success and been recognized by many personal and corporate clients, it still need to be improved. As the rapid development of  learning technologies and theories has increased the affordance for online learning (Conole & Dyke, 2004), only those education providers keep adapting themselves to emerging technologies and to the dynamic needs of students and clients, can maintain and increase their predominance in the more and more competitive global education market.

Hence, this paper will focus on the shortcomings and outdated components of Englishtown.com and provide suggestions for its further development. The developers of Englishtown could consider this paper as a reference for their future work, while other distance education providers, including Englishtown’s competitors, would consider surpassing Englishtown or doing better in their own fields by employing some idea from this paper.

2.  Placement Test and Study Plan

Before enrolling in any course of Englishtown, users will be asked to take a placement test to determine which level of course they are advised to take. Placement is “a process of matching students and courses to achieve the best fit between what students know and what they need to know…[It helps make] the best possible match between a student’s current achievement status and the prerequisites of various alternate course sequences” (Frisbie, 1982). Englishtown’s placement test is significant for their realizing the slogan of “customized for each student” and they say they will “evaluate your [users’] weaknesses, interests, schedule and personality”. Based on that data, they create a customized study plan for users (Englishtown, 2007c).

Englishtown does provide a placement test concerning grammar, listening and reading to determine a user’s level according to the score he or she gets. However, they do not really “evaluate” users’ interest, schedule and personality and create a plan really based on that result. In stead, the only thing that the users will experience concerning the “evaluation” is being asked to answer the following multiple choice questions:

l        What is your main reason for wanting to learn English? Professional? Academic? Social? Travel? Other?

l        Which area of English would you like to focus on? Speaking? Pronunciation? Listening? Reading? Writing? Grammar? Vocabulary?

l        How many hours per week do you intend to study? Light – 1 to 2 hours a week?  Normal – 3 to 4 hours a week? Intensive – 5 or more hours a week?

l        How many conversation classes do you plan to attend each week? One per week?  Two per week? Three or more per week?

l        For how long do you want to keep your study plan active? 3 months? 6 months? 12 months? 18 months?

l        When do you prefer to study? Morning? Daytime? Evening? Weekend? Weekdays?

It seems that the developers for this part misunderstood the word “evaluation”. Actually, rather than directly asking for the result, “evaluation is an applied inquiry process for collecting and synthesizing evidence that culminates in conclusions about the state of affairs, value, merit, worth, significance…” (Mabry, 2005). If Englishtown was really evaluating users’ interest, schedule and personality, the users should be asked to provide some personal information to let the system make conclusions and suggestions for their own study plans. However, by asking the questions above, Englishtown virtually let users directly make the final conclusions. Even though the users do submit their answers, the significance of the data deserves suspicion. Since the user have not known much about what exactly is in the system, it is difficult for them to imagine the teaching style and the most useful component in the system, the outcomes of the courses and the time they should spend on it. When is asked “what is your main reason for wanting to learn English”, the users would be confused with the meaning of “English” in the question—the English courses in Englishtown or the English spoken by native English speakers? When is asked “which area of English would you like to focus on”, the users would consider whether they are being asked the weakness and whether this information determines the structure of their courses…

When the “customized study plan” is created, the users will receive a changeable calendar with random located course names according to the answers to the third, fourth and sixth questions in the “evaluation” (See Figure 1). Then the system will provide some pieces of study advice based on the answers to the first two questions. The disappointing content of the advice is basically the repeat of the introduction of some components of the system. For example, if users answered “writing” to the second question, the advice would be “The Englishtown Writing class is a great way to develop your Writing skills. Submit your essay to a teacher and get detailed feedback within 48 hours.”

Englishtown tries to let the potential users imagine how they could convey learner-centred curriculum, especially when the users are asked to process the study planning with the “evaluation”. However, no curriculum can claim to be truly learner-centred unless the learner’s subjective needs relating to the process of learning are taken into account (Nunan, 1988). Englishtown has not linked users’ subjective needs, such as their will to overcome the personal weakness in English, to the content, structure, procedure, objectives, learning style and assessment method of the courses. Every user actually does receive a personalized suggestion for the appropriate level and weekly study plan. Virtually they are still provided the same courses because there is not any change of the courses according to the result of the pre-evaluation.

Figure 1  Weekly Study Plan Calendar

Back to the placement test, without a timer, different users spend different time on the test, which could lead to the fallibility of the result of grammar and reading test. Furthermore, in the listening test, the audio clips can be played unlimitedly and some of the questions even use the same audio clips.

One of Englishtown’s Competitors—GlobalEnglish.com, has a better placement test with a timer in every session and a limitation of times (twice) for listening to the same audio clips in listening test, which is worthwhile for Englishtown to refer.

The fatal objection to Englishtown’s goal—“customized for each student” is not only the suspect placement test and the poor designed questionnaire, but the lack of a cyclical needs assessment and summative evaluation plans during the whole period of the courses. (Smith & Ragan) (1999) created a figure (see Figure 2) to interpret that the conclusions of a needs assessment should provide the reasons for developing or providing the appropriate instruction (p. 32).  So the really customized study plan is not a calendar or some advice, but specific instruction that meets the users’ exact needs. Different from traditional face-to-face learning environment, e-learning system can prepare different solutions for predicted result from needs assessment and provide the most suitable one to the right user. A further evaluation for the study plan after implementation would provide the basis for modification of the solutions.

Figure 2  Relationship Between Needs Assessment and Evaluation

According to “discrepancy” model of needs assessment (Kaufman & English, 1979; Rossett, 1988), the placement test and the questionnaire should help find out the gap between “what is” (what learners are currently able to do) and “what ought to be” (what learners should able to do) and determine which of these gaps should be addressed within the instruction—the customized solution. Without a pedagogical context, new users with different social backgrounds usually don’t know much about these two statuses and the gaps between them. So in order to create a customized study plan and provide the most appropriate solution, it would be better for Englishtown to analyze other more concrete information from users and make up the determination, rather than to let the users input their preference based on speculation. And the instruction, including the suggested study plan, should be scientifically in relation to the analysis of the data collected.

3.  Conversation Class

The benefits of conversational interaction between native and nonnative speakers or between nonnative speakers in their acquisition of second language have been investigated, claimed and proven (Gass, 1997; Long, 1996; Mackey, Perdue, & McDonough, 2000; Pica, 1994). Englishtown highlights its conversation class in many occasions and does give great effort to maintain and promote it by employing lots of certified, native-speaking English teachers to teach online 24 hours a days and encouraging users to participate more in it. However, conversation class in Englishtown still has two main weaknesses, detailed in the following subsections:

3.1  Lack of Preparative Materials

Englishtown’s conversation classes are separated from the topic within a study unit. There are different conversation class topics for every day and students can choose their favorite topics by taking the conversation classes on specific days during the week. Before entering the virtual classroom, students are encouraged to do some preparation by listening to a dialog and studying the new vocabulary. We do know that it is impracticable to arrange teachers to give the conversation class based on a specific unit because there are too many units and there may be not enough students available for the class at the same time and in the same unit, which leads to extreme increase of the cost. As a result, the preparation session for conversation class becomes important. However, currently this session is quite simple and doesn’t have much pedagogical significance. For the one hand, only if the class has been started can the students know the structure of the lesson. While looking through the content presented on slides, they are asked to answer questions. This leads to students’ high cognitive load and a higher cognitive load should result in more errors (Ayres & Sweller, 1990). Since our working memory is limited (Miller, 1956), if we read, listened and spoke at the same time, our brain would be overloaded. According to Sweller (2007), conversation class teachers’ PowerPoint-based instruction “can backfire if the information on the screen is the same as that which is verbalized, because the audience’s attention will be split between the two.” Furthermore, language classrooms which require oral communication are more anxiety-provoking (Horwitz, 2001; Kim, 1998). This emotional factor further increases students’ cognitive load. To overcome this problem, the conversation class teachers could utilize students’ schemas^* by providing more preparative materials to them, such as the details of the subtopics, activities and tasks in class. Teachers could even ask students to do some preparation for specific questions and provide some websites for them to find useful information. These activities before class would help activate students’ schemas which help them answer questions and solve problems “automatically” without much consideration in working memory while they are in class. So they could focus on improving their spoken English skills, rather than the content of the topics. To realize this, Englishtown should create a path for conversation class teachers to provide preparative materials to students.

3.2  Cursory Feedback from Teachers

Conversation class teachers will grade and feedback on students’ performance in class. The problem is that there is insufficient quantitative standard to support the grading and feedback. As a result, students don’t know their progress and exact weakness. See some samples below:

Sample 1: I hoped you enjoyed talking about France in today’s lesson and learnt some interesting information about the country as well as some English vocabulary. You participated well throughout the class and used appropriate intonation in the reading. Good work! Grade: 90%

Sample 2: You have developed some really good skills. You simply need to fine tune these to improve your English; practice makes perfect! See you again soon in class. Grade: 83%

Sample 3: Your vocabulary is very good! Thank you for your enthusiastic participation in class today. Keep practising the vocabulary you have learnt in class today so that you continue improving. Keep reading books and listening to television so that you improve your grammar. Hope to see you soon. Grade: 80%

Sample 4: You did a great job! Thanks for your excellent contributions to today’s lesson. I enjoyed hearing your ideas and opinions about parties. You demonstrated a solid understanding of the topic and showed that your skills in English are strong. Keep up the good work and see you in class again soon! Grade: 88%

Sample 5: Excellent! You are speaking very well in class. You have great skills and you have a sound understanding of the topic areas. I hope that my corrections during class have helped. Keep up the good work! See you again soon in class. Grade: 86%

        In the feedback samples, those words underlined and in red have focused on specific points in relation to language learning, such as intonation, tune, vocabulary and understanding. It helps students recall what they said and heard during the class and be aware of their zones of proximal development (ZPD) ^† by thinking of what has been actually developed and what could be developed potentially. Though after class the teacher could not provide further help, the students could know their updated goals and then give more effort on them. But it seems that the teachers focused more on what students had achieved while seldom described the potential development levels for students.

        The comment in blue in the samples seem either too simple or irrelevant to the students’ personal situation known from class. In Sample 2, 4 and 5, teachers gave much positive feedback without details. Students will want to know what exact aspects they have done well. Though general positive feedback may motivate the students at first, they would ignore it if they received too much without satisfying reasons. On the other hand, the first sentence in Sample 1 and the fourth sentence in Sample 3 are just repeating what have been said in class and the audiences are the whole class.

Because different students have different preference for feedback in second language learning (Brandl, 1995), it would be better for Englishtown to let the students choose the  kind of feedback they would receive before class and let teachers know their options. If the teachers even could see the portfolio of every student, they would provide more relevant and useful feedback. Furthermore, though the system provides flexible learning environment, students should be still encouraged to take the conversation class given by the same teacher according to the teacher’s personal time table, rather then encouraged to try classes from different teachers through out the whole learning duration to demonstrate how “flexible” the system is. The more the teachers know about their students, the more effective and relevant the feedback could be.

To raise the quality of feedback, Englishtown could also create a criteria system to assist teachers’ evaluation work and let students know how the grading comes out. Hyland (Hyland, 2001) pointed out that over a half of online second language learners wanted to know about their strengths and weaknesses, which, from their perspectives, was considered to be the main purpose of teachers’ written feedback (p. 241). While most teachers prefer not to interrupt the communication by correcting students’ errors in class (Engwall & Bälter, 2007) and students’ performance is more likely to improve if they are encouraged to correct errors by themselves (Hendrickson, 1978; Lyster, 1997), it would be better to assign students some small oral practice tasks in relation to their personal errors and weaknesses perceived by the teachers in class when giving feedback according to the criteria system. Thanks to the student-only voice chat room in Englishtown, students have the opportunity to do the tasks with their peers after the conversation class.

4.  Online Community

Englishtown builds an online community for English learners by promoting their friendship. Actually it is like a SNS (Social Networking Service) website, where users are asked to create a profile that includes personal information such as gender, age, nationality, introduction, interest, etc, and can upload their photos and write articles and comment. Based on that the profiles, users can search for their pen pals according to some conditions they input, and then use English to communicate with each other by sending text message. There are also some chat rooms with different topics, where users can practice English instantly, but only subscription members are allowed to use voice chat rooms. The voice chat rooms are labeled with levels of English—Beginner, Elementary, Intermediate and Advanced.

        While the era of Web 2.0 has arrived, many SNS websites become popular and have much influence on people’s life on line. The educational potentials of SNS websites are worthwhile for us to explore and realize. Online learning website can also integrate the functions of typical SNS website to analyze learners, to help instruction and to enrich users’ learning experience (He, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c). Englishtown’s SNS product—Englishtown Friends, is still in its Beta. It has not been integrated into the main instruction system.

Englishtown could begin to promote this integration in “Student writing”. It is a place in the system for users to post their own writing. Users can also comment on other’s articles. Actually this is like a discussion board. Users can post whatever they like. Some users post their written assignments finished in a unit’s learning but most of the messages are like casual writing. The so-called 9 million users seem seldom participate in such a section shown in the column of “Student Center”. Since 2003, there have been only 13,018 messages in it, which is quite a small number. This may be because:

        (a) the users are not required to participate in it while they are learning in the system;

        (b) teachers don’t give feedback for the writing in it;

        (c) since the writings are not linked to the authors’ profile, it is difficult to develop and maintain a friendship in it.

        To encourage learners to participate more and to realize the instructional functions, Englishtown could integrate three things: (a) written assignments from every unit, (b) teachers’ coaching notes for written assignments and (c) Englishtown Friends (users’ profiles). This means that the section of “Student writing” could directly display every user’s written assignments submitted from Writing Class in unit study and teachers review them and write coaching note there. Every user could read and comment on others’ assignment and relative coaching note. Teachers could answer users’ further questions referring to a specific assignment. When an author’s name is clicked, the page could turn to his or her profile page in Englishtown Friend. Users’ profile pages could also display all the written assignments. Considering users’ privacy, the system could let the users decide whether the system publishes their writing and relative coaching note.

        This integration could not only promote peer learning but also enlarge the significance of teachers’ coaching—it becomes open to everyone! Furthermore, from peers’ writings, users could find more favorable friends because they know more about a user’s background, interest, goals and other information. Typical friend finder will not help find the right person like this.

Besides written assignment, users would have more to discuss about what they have learned in a unit. The discussion board could also build separated folders for each unit’s topic. While learning in a unit, users could click a link to turn to the relative folder in discussion board and post a message. They could reflect what they think about the topic, ask or answer questions and provide further materials such as some pictures and video clips. As usual, they could find their favorable friends during the discussion. Besides text version, voice chat room could be another good place to discuss and share something about a unit’s topic. Then every unit could have its own voice chat room.

        Furthermore, during conversation class, participants more or less disclose some personal information such as their interests, goals, locations, occupation, etc, some of which may become the base for further communication and even friendship. Hence, a tracking record of classmates with links to their profiles would be benefit for those who would like to process further interaction.

        Last but important, assessment for users’ participation in the activities above should be taken into account. The system could report how much the user has participated in the community during a unit’s learning through commenting on others’ written assignments, posting message or chatting in voice chat room about the topic, making new friends, and maintaining friendship by sending private message or chatting in text or voice chat room.

5.  Some Bugs

While evaluating different aspects of Englishtown.com, the author experienced some bugs:

l   Inappropriate Suggested Learning Time—the suggested time for every session is not like the real situation. If you finished a task much quicker than expected, it would indicate that you haven’t completed the session and you are not allowed to continue to next session, especially for the Writing Class—you could actually finish the written assignment within 30 minutes while the system expect you to spend 120 minute. To avoid this error, the suggested time could be designed to be displayed dynamically according to learners’ previous completion time for a specific session. That is, the current "predicted time" for completing a session is based on previous average time spent on the same kind of session.

l   Unchangeable Input—it seems that once writing class teachers submit their grading and comments on students’ writing assignments, they can not make any change by themselves until an administrator with higher privilege help. The author has experienced that a teacher provide much positive feedback for the writing assignment but gave a very low grade—9%. The author received three same feedback emails from the teacher. It seems that the teacher wanted to change the grade by further submitting or something, but failed. Then the author requested the administrator to help let the teacher reexamine the assignment. Several days later, the author received an email indicating that the grade has been changed to 90%. Hence, it would better to develop an error avoidance mechanism for teachers.

l   Inconsistent Statistic Data—it is said that Englishtown.com has millions of users all over the world. But in terms of the exact number, they have different versions in different web pages. From the “about us” page, they have 2 million users; from the message sent by the moderator of “Englishtown Friends”, they have 7 million users; and from most other pages, such as the register page, they have 9 million users. The numbers of active users, former users and total users may be changing every moment. So the places that show the numbers could be replaced as some variables defined and controlled by administrators. Then once a variable is changed, all pages including the variable will be changed automatically.

6.  Conclusion

There are always a gap between advertisement and real situation, a gap between clients’ expectation based on advertisement and the real experience and a gap between technologies’ potentials and the current status of a product. Englishtown.com has successfully set up a good example for e-learning by providing proven English courses. However, since learning science and technologies keeps developing, previous success of Englishtown does not guarantee forever success unless it also keep being improved based on updated technologies, feedbacks and researches.

        In this paper, we have discussed the weaknesses of Englishtown mainly from the aspects of placement test and study plan, conversation class and online community, and provided solutions. We can conclude that currently Englishtown provides poor placement test and study planning tools and does not really customize students’ learning; Conversation class provides insufficient preparative materials and cursory feedback; online community’s instructional potentials have not been fulfilled; and there are some bugs influence users’ experience. However, these weaknesses could be eliminated by better design, such as creating a better learner analysis system, a path for conversation class teachers provide preparative materials, a better feedback system with more explicit criteria, an SNS-integrated learning system, etc. All in all, Englishtown should keep being improved if they want to keep the dominant status in online English learning industry.

7. References

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Teaching and Learning Languages in the Virtual Community of Second Life

He, Wenchao

CoCo Research Centre
Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney, Australia

25 September 2007

1. Introduction

Second Life is an Internet-based virtual world launched in 2003, developed by Linden Lab, which came to international attention via mainstream news media in late 2006 (Sege, 2006; Harkin, 2006). Its users, called “Residents”, interact with each other through motional avatars in a downloadable client program called the Second Life Viewer, provided an advanced level of a social network service combined with general aspects of a metaverse. Residents can explore, meet other Residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, create and trade items (virtual property) and services from one another. All of the content (buildings, scenery and people) in Second Life is constructed by the residents and so it has become a place where our imagination is given freedom to create and explore. The Second Life Grid provides a unique and flexible platform for educators interested in distance learning, computer supported cooperative work, simulation, new media studies, and corporate training.

The educational potentials of Second Life are being explored around many educators and using it to teach and to learn languages has become a pretty popular topic recently. (see www.avatarlanguages.com and www.languagelab.com ) This paper tries to report and analyze this topic using notions of “Affordance” and its taxonomy and “Conventions” (Gibson, 1977; Norman, 1999; Conole & Dyke, 2004).

2. Affordance

The word affordance was coined by the perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson (1977) to refer to the actionable properties between the world and an actor (a person or animal). To Gibson, affordances are relationships. They exist naturally: they do not have to be visible, known, or desirable. Conole and Dyke (2004, p.p.115-120) develop this concept by clarifying a taxonomy, which can help us infer the educational potential and possibilities of Second Life. And now we focus on the affordance for teaching and learning languages:

(1) Accessibility

As introduced by Second Life’s website, students and educators can work together on the Second Life Grid from anywhere in the world as part of a globally networked virtual classroom environment. They don’t have any additional hardware or equipment to get access to Second Life. The students and educators can easily download the program and install it to their computers and then use its basic functions for free. So far Second Life provides four editions of languages — English, German, Japanese and Korean, which satisfy those who using the system of these language and those who know at least one of these languages.

Furthermore, there are more and more traditional classroom environments integrate the activities in Second Life Grid to provide new opportunities for enriching an existing curriculum, in the situation of which the accessibility can be guaranteed by the education providers.

(2) Speed of change

The introduction of voice into Second Life has led teachers to offer a different sort of language class – one that is both centered on the student carrying out tasks to produce a piece of work and that involves the student talking with real people in the language they are learning to gain specific information and, of course, practice their language skills. This, to a large extent, avoids outdated instruction and enables students to navigate their way through the myriad of changing information and to benefit from the change of the real world concerning the language that they are learning.

(3) Diversity

Virtual language schools in Second Life offer access to a vast range of diverse and different experiences that can inform learning to replicate complex behavior by the approach termed as SurReal Quests (Avatar Languages, 2007), since the quests combine the realism of communication with real people, the very real information available on the net and the virtual encounters within Second Life. SurReal Quests are intended specifically for language education and therefore combine the social and communicative aspects of Second Life with the wealth of information available on the web.

(4) Communication and collaboration

Second Life’s voice capabilities have enhanced the communication and collaboration in languages being learnd by allowing residents to chat with each other in a way similar to talking with a group of people in a room. The students can communicate with other people (whether complete strangers, acquaintances, friends or colleagues) in a 3D setting regardless of where they are physically located in real life. For language teaching the addition of voice to Second Life must offer one of the most significant advances in technology in recent years – language students can socialize in their target language at anytime of the day without leaving home. Furthermore, communities and groups can be formed and developed around shared interests and students can work together in pairs or teams to develop the quests of the teachers such as producing podcast, blog and other materials. The completed materials could also be used as a basis for future activities with other students; perhaps a student carries out an activity based upon the information given in a previous student’s podcast, such as finding places, following directions or taking part in mini treasure hunts.

(5) Reflection

It can not be denied that the speed and pace of information change militates against reflection. It leaves no space for contemplation and considered judgment, and promotes a more pragmatic, reflexive immediate response to new information, as it is pixilated across our screens (Conole and Dyke, 2004, p.118). To avoid this situation, when processing the instruction, language schools in Second Life can assign the students to different locations on the island to discuss their topics in smaller groups and they can teleport from one location to the other and saved the text of their discussions which later they may be assigned to analyze for the best statements on those topics (Bump, 2007). So this can help balance the need of experiencing the rapid information change as well as the reflection.

(6) Multimodal and non-linear

Within Second Life, an approach with as varied tasks involving a wide range of language skills being practiced can be processed. This non-linear process forms a multimodal environment in which the students can adopt more individualized strategies and pathways aiming at different emphases, such as reading and listening (both for gist and for specific information), interviewing (both with peer students and other strangers), writing (appropriate use of vocabulary and style for the target audience), speaking (including pronunciation, intonation for maintaining interest). The role of the teacher is to ensure that practice leads to the actual development of the various language skills.

(7) Risk, fragility and uncertainty

This aspect of Second Life mainly focuses on the language educators. Different from setting up the own teaching and learning platform, the educators experience low risk as all the properties are in a huge and safe system—Second Life, rather than in a small office or something like that. The familiarity with Second Life of the learners before learning also provides them scaffolding which help them make sure more factors within the learning environment and avoid uncertainty. In this case, the students need not to learn and practice every new language learning platform that they are interested in. They can transfer among different language schools within the same system.

(8) Immediacy

Second Life, as instant virtual world, of course guarantees the immediacy. Every student responses directly and immediately since they have any request from both the teachers and the peers.

3. Conventions

When designing a graphical screen layout, designers greatly rely on conventional interpretations of the symbols and placement including three kinds of constraints (Norman, 1999). Designing language learning instruction in Second Life also experiences them:

(1) Physical constraints

The system requirements for Second Life are high, especially for the graphic card. It is well known that Second Life usually crash fairly often, which makes the educator embarrassed on resuming class after an unexpected downtime of the system. The cost of teaching in Second Life is pretty high due to the pricing of the lands…These are all the physical constraints, which may be the obstacles for promoting the learning products in Second Life.

(2) Logical constraints

As the students are from all over the world, logically it is known that they are in different time zone. So it also will be the challenge for language educators to assign synchronous tasks because some students won’t be available at some specific time.

(3) Cultural constraints

There are also other virtual worlds such as IMVU and There, the functions of which are different from that of Second Life to some extent. Those users coming from other virtual world or having been using other relevant software such as IM, would experience the logical constraints because they feel that something, such as voice, are not available in Second Life based on their experience and the culture in other software environments.

These conventions prohibit something while encourage others, which should be taken into account when designing online language courses in Second Life.

4. Discussion

Based on the deductive work on the potential and possibilities of teaching and learning languages in Second Life, some questions may appear:

(1) Will teaching and learning languages in virtual world such as Second Life be the trend?

I don’t think so. This is because (a) the affordance is for behavior of teaching and learning itself but not for every potential students and teachers who may prefer not to use it, (b) the advantages of the limitlessness in virtual worlds will be evident only when the participants have some limitations in real world, such as time and space and (c) some constrains being the roles of drawbacks can not disappear in a short time or never disappear.

(2) What should traditional language schools do?

The affordance of virtual world for language teaching and learning does have great thread on traditional language schools. Yet the predominance of traditional models is difficult for the emerging ones to replicate or imitate. Conversely, the affordance of virtual world can be integrated to the traditional instruction by providing extra exciting experience to students. In such a process of integration, it would be essential to analyze and identify the different aspects of the affordance of virtual world and what exactly they are, but not to do what have been done in virtual world directly.

(3) How can the virtual world be improved to satisfy teaching and learning languages to a larger extent?

This is the predominance of the application of the taxonomy of affordance and convention. The common procedure is (1) to identify and analyze every aspect of the taxonomy, (2) to find out the weak points (such as Second Life’s incapability with many graphic cards), (3) to clarify the target situation (such as aiding the teaching and learning to what extent on what specific points and levels), (4) to find out the gap between (2) and (3), and (5) to deal with the gap.

5. References

Avatar Languages. (2007). SurReal Language Quests. Retrieved September 20, 2007, from http://avatarlanguages.com/blog/?p=14

Bump, J. (2007). Teaching English in Second Life. Retrieved September 20, 2007, from http://currents.cwrl.utexas.edu/spring07/bump

Harkin, J. (2006). Get a (second) life. Financial Times, 17 November.

Norman, D. A. (1999). Affordance, Conventions and Design. Interactions, May and June, 38-42.

Conole, G. & Dyke, M. (2004). What are the affordances of information and communication technologies?. ALT-J: Research in Learning Technology, 12(2), 113-124.

Sege, I. (2006). Leading a double life. The Boston Globe, 25 October.

A Critique of Mayer, R. E.’s Should There Be

 a Three-Strikes Rule Against Pure Discovery Learning?:

The Case for Guided Methods of Instruction

He, Wenchao

CoCo Research Centre
Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney, Australia
27 October 2007

Introduction

This paper begins with articulating the main arguments that Mayer, R. E. raised in his published paper—Should There Be a Three-Strikes Rule Against Pure Discovery Learning?: The Case for Guided Methods of Instruction, and then points out that there are many aspects worthwhile for us to reexamine and to critically review, including different concepts such as “pure discovery”, “guided discovery” and “unguided” in relation to an external concept “goal-free”. This paper ends with conclusions focusing on Mayer’s misleading concept and the further effort that he is supposed to give.

Mayer’s Arguments and Approaches

Mayer’s main argument in the paper is that guided discovery was more effective than pure discovery in helping students learn and transfer. To support this point of view, Mayer selects some research conclusions from 1960s to 1980s that are concerning discovery learning and report the comparative outcomes of guided and unguided learning.

To begin with, Mayer states that the one of the significant goal for the paper is clarifying the relationship between the constructivist views of learning and teaching. He objects to the “fallacy” that equates active learning with active teaching. He tries to move educational researchers’ attentions from hands-on activity or group discussion to appropriate instructional methods processing in learners, which is guided discovery as he explains and argues in the following sections.

Mayer then selects the study of Bruner (1961), Craig (1956), Kittel (1957), Gagne and Brown (1961) and Shulman and Keisler (1966) to conclude that students need enough freedom and guidance so that they can become cognitively active in the process of sense making and their cognitive activity can result in the construction of useful knowledge. Continually, Mayer integrated the examples and evidences from the research of Piaget (1970), Gelman (1969), May and Tisshaw (1975), Wallach and Sprott (1964), Beilin (1965) and Inhelder, Sinclair, and Bovet (1974) to promote the idea that children learn better when they are active and given productive directions. Furthermore, he uses the arguments and outcomes from several scholarly papers published after 1980 in terms of LOGO environment, including those of Papert (1980), Kurland and Pea (1985), Dalbey and Linn (1985), Fay and Mayer (1994), Lee and Thompson (1997), to demonstrate that more and more evidences go against pure discovery as a method of instruction.

Based on this, Mayer summarizes the shortcomings of pure discovery and emphasizes guided discovery is the best method for promoting constructivist learning since pure discovery so far has not been proved by good evidence to work.

Last but not least, Mayer analyzes the significance of the role of Psychology in educational reform and points out that the foregoing review interprets constructivism naively and is based on old evidence. He concludes that “the contribution of psychology is to help move educational reform efforts from the fuzzy and unproductive world of educational ideology—which sometimes hides under the banner of various versions of constructivism—to the sharp and productive world of theory-based research on how people learn”. (p. 18)

Could Be a Straw Man Argument?

The significant indication for Mayer’s view to be a straw man argument is the term of “pure discovery” and its interpretation in his paper.

There is strong evidence to suggest that “pure discovery” was seldom used around educational and psychological communities before Mayer’s paper, which is cited by those researching on discovery learning afterwards (e.g. Lavine, 2005, and Kirschner, Sweller and Clark, 2006).

Mayer tends to use “pure discovery” to define some phenomenon from previous researches. For example, in Craig’s (1956) research, the phrase of “pure discovery” doesn’t exist any where. Mayer has set up a “straw man”—using “pure discovery” instead of “independent discovery”—for easier further refutation. In Kittel’s (1957) experiment, there are three groups of students given different amount of direction—minimum, intermediate and maximum. However, instead of “minimum-directed discovery”, Mayer uses “pure discovery” again to report the outcomes.

It cannot be denied that using a set phrase may be more understood and easier to remember. However, “pure discovery” not only conveys a strong subjective preference but also misleads the readers on the previous researches from other authors. Differences still exist among the phrases “pure discovery”, “independent discovery” and “minimum-directed discovery”. If “pure discovery” replaces all other terms in previous researches, readers would probably consider that the previous researchers had have the position. Further more, if “minimum-directed discovery” equals “pure discovery”, then what about “guided discovery” used by Mayer? Does “guided discovery” equal the discovery with intermediate or maximum direction? It is hard to tell since the straw man has been set up and the readers have less opportunity to know about the facts.

Regardless whether the argument about pure discovery right or wrong, probably best if Mayor could give us a definition for this new term, which may help us to exam whether the scale of the concept include, overlap or exclude the examples used.

Can Guided = Goal-based? (Or Can Unguided = Goal-free?)

Evidence shows that Mayer, known as a Psychologist also researching on Cognitive Load Theory cooperated with other experts in this domain such as John Sweller, Paul L. Ayres and Wayne Leahy, prefers using more psychological testable theories and experiments to promote educational reform. In different occasions, he explained his ideas on Cognitive Load Theory (e.g. How to Reduce Cognitive Load for Multimedia Messages in American Educational Research Association 2004 Annual Meeting) and Guided Discovery (e.g. in the paper we are now reviewing).

However, these two domains may have something incompatible. Since it was predicted that a higher cognitive load should result in more errors (Ayres and Sweller, 1990) and it has been proved to be right later (Ayres, 1993), evidence shows that the presentation of goal-free problems, which automatically reduces the use of means-ends analysis that costs much cognitive load, can facilitate learning while helping learners find the correct solution path through the problem space (ibid). And, to large extent, teachers’ guiding is setting implied and exposed goals for students. Hence, according to Cognitive Load Theory, in order to reduce cognitive load, teachers should give more problems space to the students by reducing goals or even setting no goal (goal-free). To reduce the goals, teachers actually limit their guidance. As a result, less guidance leads to less cognitive load and more efficient learning for students.

If the above inference is right, it basically means that guided equals goal-based and unguided equals goal-free, which indicates that unguided discovery learning leads to more productive outcomes because it tends to be goal-free.

As a result, it would probably better for Mayer to explain such a paradox in ONE paper consisting both of Cognitive Load Theory and guided discovery learning, or we will not be convinced by his arguments.

Conclusion

It cannot be denied that Mayer has significantly reminded us that educational reforms should be based on convincing evidence rather than personal speculation like some teachers “applying” constructivism by promoting “pure discovery learning”. However, the concept and scale of the term of “pure discovery learning” could be clearer and the similar but not same terms should not be ignored. Further more, since Mayer is also an expert on Cognitive Load Theory, it would improve his work to be more convinced if he could utilize the theory to interpret on guided discovery in the future.

References

Ayres, P. (1993). Why goal-free problems can facilitate learning. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 18, 376-381.

Ayres, P. and Swleller, J. (1990). Locus of difficulty in multi-stage mathematics problems. The American Journal of Psychology, 103, 167-193.

Craig, R. C. (1956). Directed versus independent discovery of established relations. Journal of Educational Psychology, 47, 223-234.

Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., and Clark, R. E. (2006). Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching. Educational Psychologist, 41(2), 75-86.

Kittel, J. E. (1957). An experimental study of the effect of external direction during learning on transfer and retention of principles. Journal of Educational Psychology, 48, 391-405.

Lavine, R. A. (2005). Guided Discovery Learning with Videotaped Case Presentation in Neurobiology. IAMSE, 15, 4-7.

Mayer, R. E. (2004). Should there be a three-strikes rule against pure discovery learning?: the case for guided methods of instruction. American Psychologist, 59(1), 14-19.

教育理论的应用：actual与virtual之争
 
 
何文超 

      今天我在“EDPC5003 Teaching, Learning and the Interne”这门课的专题讨论板上与Christopher Waterman讨论关于在网络教学中对文化差异现象的处理。Chris是悉尼本地一所中学的老师，也是我的硕士同学。他说他在全球多个地方当过老师，他 的感受是，虽然理论上我们讨论了很多文化差异的论题，但是在实践中，没有哪个老师真的会认真地去考虑这个问题。他的原话是： 

Good ideas, but I’ve never met any one who would have the capcity to do this. I have taught all over the world, covering much of Asia and I have found very few people who are good at their topic who also have capacity to consider cultural differences on the fly.

I think the idea is good, but I’d happilly debate with you the validity and efficacy of this.

       他的这番话是回应我发表的关于网络教师的观点：

In terms of those two elements that I mentioned in Task 1, the following treatments are supposed to be provided:     

        * Create opportunity for all students from different cutural background to know each other so that they would have the psychological preparation for anything confusing caused by their difference in the following period during the course.

        * Discover and define the opportunity and challenge from the diversity of the learners’ cultural background.

        * Then ultilize the opportunity for peer collaborative learning, discussion, knowledge share, etc. and find some strategies to deal with the challenge such as misunderstanding, conflict, lack of required prior knowledge, etc..

        * Classify the students according to their expectation of cultural adaptation and assimilation indicated from their personal introduction, discussion, profile, etc.

        * Then design the activities to meet their expectations appropriately.

       实际上我并不同意他的观点，我用了英文中我觉得很好用的一个表达——actual和virtual的区别。在中文的解释中，virtual既有“虚拟的” 的意思，又有“本质上”的意思，关键看上下文来判断。而actual也是“事实上”的意思，从中文上看差别不大。但是如果如果给大家看一句话大家可能就明 白了——“男人实际上（actually）控制了世界，但女人控制了男人，所以女人本质上（virtually）控制了世界。”我的主要观点是，也许事实 上教师在做出一种教育行为的时候，并没有特意地去思考他们以前学过或者了解过的各种各样的教育理论的应用，但是，随着教师教学经验的不断丰富，他们本质上 是在遵循哪些理论来教学的，很多时候这种“遵循”和“应用”是在不经意中发生的。有些人可能觉得理论不重要，觉得实践中用不上，但是真正的应用，应该是自 然而然的。有丰富经验的教师会应用得更好，没有经验的教师如果能够吸取更多的间接经验，也会在潜移默化的应用到实践中。

       于是我回复他说：

Actually many teachers don’t think they have considered cultural differences, but since they have had enough experience of teaching students from different cultures, virtually they deal with this issue more and more skillfully, which sometimes they even don’t recoginize.    

In all these situations above, the experienced instructor may not consider any cross cultural differences seriously. However their experiences drive them to deal with these issues more and more approriately. This indicates the difference between actual and virtual situation.

      我在上面举了几个例子，一些向全球开放的网络课程会有来自不同国家和地区的学生。有些中国的学生会让其他人叫他们的英文名，而不是中文名。那么新手有可能 对这种现象感到很奇怪，但是有经验的网络教师，可能会主动问学生喜欢别人怎么称呼他们。在分组协作学习的时候，由于一些历史上的原因，有一些中国的学生也 许不太喜欢跟日本学生一组，阿富汗和伊拉克的学生也许不喜欢跟美国学生一组，但这个猜想也不一定完全成立。那么，有经验的教师，可以从每个学生的言谈中洞 察他们的态度，从而做出恰当的处理。由于一些政治上的原因，如果同时有来自中国大陆和台湾的学生，那么有经验的教师让学生作自我介绍的时候，就会让学生讲 讲他们来自哪个地区和以往的经历，而不是让学生讲讲他们来自哪个国家，这样可以避免出现尴尬以及引起与课程学习无关的争论。从以上的这些例子来看，国际网 络课程教师也许事实上(actually）没有非常认真地考虑跨文化的问题，但是他们的经验（包括直接经验和间接经验）会促使他们本质上 （virtually）越来越恰当地处理那些问题。

       因此，当我们面对一种教学理论和观点的时候，先不要过早地去否定其在实践中的意义。因为，也许实践中在不经意间，已经用上了！只是我们没有及时地发现与总结罢了！

A Case Study on the Change of an IT Company in China

From the Perspective of Ideal Types of Process of Organizational Change

He, Wenchao

CoCo Research Centre, University of Sydney, Australia

1. Case

I used to work at Longxing Information Technology Company in China as an educational project designer, an innovative position in the company. The main product of the company is School Messenger, a system helps communicate between school teachers and parents via mobile phone and internet. This kind of product, including its business mode (see Figure 1), is so successful in China that more and more IT companies have started to get involved in this domain and tried to take up as more market share as possible.

Figure 1: the Basic Business Mode for School Messenger

With School Messenger, teachers can send SMS to parents on line easily and parents can make feedback to a specific teacher immediately. The content of the message are mainly about the performance of the kids, homework, school notice, guidance for family education, etc. The system also records all the information of students that their teachers and parents write. Furthermore, new teachers of a class can get aware of the situation about their students by looking through the records easily. So long as having enough computers in teachers?offices, most schools including kindergartens would like to accept this free service and let parents pay for it through their mobile service providers, China Mobile and China Unicom, which are the two monopolizers of mobile service in China. Parents reserve the right to accept or refuse the service but they have one semester’s trial before making decision.

As Longxing was the first few companies exploited this service in China several years ago, so it has developed a large number of contracted schools and parents users and got stead monthly cash income. At the same time, Longxing kept outspreading its branches in other cities to develop its business.

Based on this, the CEO of the company was thinking two problems:

 

(1) How to persuade more parents to subscribe for the service? Although many schools leaders had tried their best help promote this service and let Longxing arrange client service representatives to hold lectures in schools and even at parents meetings, some parents (35% averagely) still refused to pay for this service and some of them even had no interest in the free trial.

 

(2) How to utilize the current good marketing channels to produce more profit? Since the company had developed some many fluent marketing channels in educational domain, it would be a great waste if Longxing only sell the service of School Messenger in the marketing process.

In order to solve these two problems, the boss decided to create new positions for those who were good at both education and information technology. Then I became one of the team of three educational project designers and our direct boss was the CEO. At that time, we tried to change our company’s mission from providing good tools for communication to providing good educational value. To achieve this, we mainly promoted the change process of the company by the following approaches:

 

(1) Products: exclude the system of School Messenger, we try to develop other educational projects such as training courses, summer camp, reading festival, lecture, family education counseling conference, etc.

 

(2) Client Service: our client service representatives should not only provide technical support and promote the sales in schools but also guide teachers for appropriate usage of the system for educational purposes. At the same time, they offered more help for parents when they got trouble with communications with the schools.

 

(3) Management: a. to create more positions for the change and to clarify the descriptions of the jobs; b. to provide more training courses on education and psychological for our client service representatives in summer and winter holidays; c. adjust the criteria of evaluation, especially for client service representatives.

More details about the change will be included in the section of Analysis.

2. Analysis

Poole et al introduced four different types of process theories that explained the change behaviors in organizations: life cycle, teleological, dialectical and evolutionary. They suggested that these four basic types of theories were adequate alone or combined to explain all specific theories of organizational change and development. (Poole et al, 2000)

Changes in an organization concerning educational industry and informational industry usually have a complex process which can be observed and analyzed based on different aspects. So in this section, I would like to use Poole et al’s theories to seek for deeper insight into the case.

(1) Life Cycle Theory

The life cycle theory assumes that changes are imminent. The outside events and processes may affect the development, but they are still filtered thorough immanent logic. There exists in advance path that depicts the trajectory until the end state. In a life cycle, the change experiences 4 stages which are Startup, Grow, Harvest and Terminate. (See Figure 2)

Figure 2: Life Cycle Model (Poole et al, 2000, p. 66)

In the case of Longxing, macroscopically the company was in Stage 2. Since it has developed enough amount of contracted schools and effectively prevented potential competitors’s inbreak in Stage 1 ?Startup, then it was time for it to make full use of these contracted schools and to improve their products and services. Microscopically, the old mode of operating the service of School Messenger, mainly providing just a tool for teachers and parents, had come to Stage 4 ?nbsp;Terminate while an updated mode of services was to start in a new life cycle.

I think Figure 3, which is a business life cycle mode, may integrate these two perspectives?characteristics rather than using two cycles to describe.

Figure 3: How Businesses Grow (Resource: http://www.empowersolutions.com.au/Business_Growth.shtml)

Longxing was then in the state of Growing pains in which the company had to look for new approaches for further development that might determine whether Longxing went continually to Maturity and Decay or met its 2nd Youth.

Hence, it is obvious that the CEO was pretty wise to lead the significant change when Longxing met the two main problems described above.

(2) Teleological Theory

Teleological Theory indicates that the development of an organizational entity proceeds towards a goal or an end state. Purposeful cooperation is the grounding idea behind the teleological theory where the goal formulation, implementation, evaluation and modification of goals based on what was learned repeat in a sequence. Also the developing entity is purposeful and adaptive, by itself or in interaction with others. This theory allows the participants to be more innovative and free to choose their goal as well as their means to achieve it.

Figure 4: Teleological Model (Poole et al, 2000, p. 66)

Analyzing based on Figure 4 ?Teleological Model, we can find that the subsequent changes on products, services and management in Longxing were led from the goals that the CEO set. The new team of stuff reified the thoughts about dissatisfaction and set the goals for solutions in detail.

However, actually we found out that there would be many problems in the process from Set/Envision Goals to Implement Goals where we might have not enough privilege to utilize every resource that we needed, e.g. we could not ask client service section for too much previous users?data, could not do what human resources managers should have done (e.g. composing descriptions for new positions and adjusting the evaluation criteria), etc. This is the risk for Teleological Model, as the company may fail to control the processes in an envisioned manner. In most situations, those processes leading to significant changes need more authoritative leaders involved in. As designers, sometimes we could only stand aside and saw what was happening when the boss was too busy to manage everything.

So for the case of Longxing and similar situations, the emphases are not noticing the dissatisfactions but making sure those who concerned keep going in the right ways to achieve the goals under the supervision of their bosses, especially for significant and fatal changes.

(3) Dialectical Theory

Dialectical Theory explains stability and change by reference to the relative balance of power between opposing entities. Stability is produced through struggles and accommodations that maintain the status quo between oppositions. Change occurs when these opposing values, forces, or events gain sufficient power to confront and engage the status quo. The relative power or legitimacy of an antithesis may mobilize to a sufficient degree to challenge the current thesis or state of affairs and set the stage for producing a synthesis.

The thesis and antithesis which made Longxing come to an internal conflict, were two different believes: instrumental rationality and value rationality. If we considered we were providing tools for teachers and parents to communicate, we should give great effort on improving the technical functions of the system and try our to produce tools to help teachers?and parents?controlling the children. If we turned to consider that we were to create and convey educational value for students, we should invest in training our client service representatives to be educational exports who could provide professional guidance for teachers and parents to utilize the tools in appropriate ways.

We noticed that many teachers just send all the information about the children to their parents directly without further instructions, e.g. telling the parents that their kid was late for school or did not finish homework but not making any suggestion indicating what parents should do at home based on the situations. As a result, more and more children hated this service and parents then felt that the service always made them in trouble or embarrassed. All these things led to a synthesis after the conflict in which we still reserved the main functions of the system but create additional features helping teachers and parents achieving their educational goals.

(4) Evolutionary Theory

Evolutionary Theory explains change as a recurrent, cumulative, and probabilistic progression of variation, selection, and retention of organizational entities. This motor is prescribed in the sense that one can specify the actuarial probabilities of parameters in differential equations to explain reproduction processes or the changing demographic characteristics of the population of entities inhabiting a niche. While one cannot predict which individual entity survives or fails, the aggregate population persists and evolves through time according to the specified population dynamics.

In terms of evolution, I think many rules in business are similar to the nature. Those companies?turnover cannot bear the cost may go bankrupt soon. Furthermore, companies should also pursue potential extra profit and avoid possible risks. If Longxing insisted on the old mode of service, it might be abandoned by the customers later. In order to "be selected" by the world of business, Longxing always try its best to adjust the way of development.

Evolutionary theory not only explains the change of an organization, but also reminds us to be stronger! Or we might become history!

(5) Composite theories

It may be not enough for one theory mentioned above to describe and explain most phenomena of the case. Now I try to compose these two or three theories to demonstrate some specific arguments of the case.

a. Interaction of Life Cycle and Teleological Motors. As seen in Figure 3, while the whole company was in a specific stage of the business cycle, there should be relative goals for it to achieve. For example, when it was in the stage of Start-up, one of the important goals was to snatch the market share as soon as possible by making contracts with schools. When it had come to stage of Growing Pains, its goals were to solve emerging problems and to prepare for its 2nd Youth.

b. Interaction of Life Cycle, Teleological and Evolutionary Motors. We may ignore the cycles for Longxing’s product modes themselves when we discuss their development on the assumption that this kind of product is reasonable from the initial state. However, there had been a difficult time for Longxing when this product was still not accepted by the government. The precondition of its development is its validity by law. The disputes about whether School Messenger could infringe children’s privacy and whether it might lead schools leaders to accept rake-off, were the barriers for Longxing at the beginning. In order to continue their business, it should be "selected" by the environment, e.g. getting support from the government. The process of changing the infaust situation could be accelerated by evolutionary motors. Since this be clear, then we can easily get aware of it later development from the perspectives of Life Cycle and Teleological Theory mentioned above.

3. Discussion

I have thought that the change in Longxing could have been more successful if its organizational learning mode could be more reasonable. Though history does not allow any "if", I still try to discuss it here with the theories of Single- and Double Loop Learning (Argyris, C., & Schon, D. A., 1996, pp. 20-25).

By single-loop Learning, we mean instrumental learning that changes strategies of action or assumptions underlying strategies in ways that leave the values of theory of action unchanged. By double-loop learning, we mean learning that results in a change in the values of theory-in-use, as well as in its strategies and assumptions.

Having decided to adjust the business strategies, as an agent of Longxing, the CEO started up the organizational learning within the whole parent company. Selectively referencing the suggestion from we educational project designers, he asked every stuff concerned to discuss and explore his new ideas on the changes of products, services and management. Then they made up new decisions together at the end of every weekly meeting that period. Their learning model was like Figure 5.

Figure 5: Learning Model in Longxing

The CEO did know that the previous values and norms of the company needed to be adjusted. However, he failed to redefine the problems which helped create new appropriate plans for next actions. This means he did not lead the organization to complete the whole double-loop learning.

Our team has done this for him but he did not accept it and refused to admit the redefined problems. What we suggested was that it would be benefit for the company to set up a isolated department for educational project which could be developed to a isolated educational company becoming a member of Longxing Group. Then the goal for Longxing should be Longxing Education? This might help to promote its new educational belief and brand. Nobody would trust an IT company’s own educational belief but the society may accept an educational organization’s technological product and other additional services.

However, our boss did not think the original framework of an information technology company and its branches might be the original causes for potential failure of educational projects held in the future.

Therefore, the changes of values and norms were still kept in the staff”s mind. What they did still obey to the framework of a typical IT company. So the speed of the reform remained low?

4. Conclusion

When we apply the Poole et al’s theories to analyze a case, we may find out its reasonableness. However, when the theories can explain the episodes satisfactorily and even perfectly, does it mean what the dramatis personae in the case has achieved the optimal status based on the given situation? Sometimes, it would be better than we could imagine.

On the other hand, though we know the optimal status and the approaches to achieve, we still don’t do that. Why? This is because sometimes a change of a bad habit may be worse than the bad habit itself! Who could bear the responsibilities for the devastating consequences if the organizational change was too innovative? Hence, though insist that Longxing could be much better now if it set up completive double-loop learning rather than single-loop learning, I can also accept the middle course and I don’t think the CEO did any wrong.

5. References

Argyris, C., & Schon, D. A. (1996). Organizational learning II: Theory, method and practice. Reading: Addison-Wesley. 
Fullan, M. (2001). The new meaning of educational change (3rd ed.). New York: Teachers College Press.
Maani, K., & Cavana, R. Y. (2000). Systems thinking and modelling: Understanding change and complexity. Auckland, NZ: Prentice Hall.
Poole, M. S., van de Ven, A., Dooley, K., & Holmes, M. E. (2000). Organizational change and innovation processes. Theories and methods for research. New York: Oxford University Press.
Empower Business Solusion. Business Growth: Where is Your Business?. http://www.empowersolutions.com.au/Business_Growth.shtml

SNS: from an Educational Perspective

He, Wenchao

CoCo Research Centre
Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney, Australia

4 September, 2007

1. Introduction

This paper will focus on the development of Social Networking Service (SNS) from an educational perspective, where different aspects of SNS, such as its time line information, current applications and potential development, will be articulated.

2. What is SNS

SNS is short for Social Networking Service (or Social Networking Sites), which is a part of the system of Web 2.0 and is based on Six Degree of Separation stated by Stanley Milgram (1969). It helps people to extend their social networks mainly based on their current friendship by building online communities where they can share interests, thoughts, photos, activities, etc., using various interaction tools that the websites provide, such as chat, messaging, email, video, voice chat, file sharing, blogging, discussion groups, etc. Basically, there are two kinds of SNS websites: (1) large and comprehensive ones, such as MySpace.com, providing general social networking service; (2) specialized ones, such as Student.com, aimed at teens, college students, and young adults.

3. History of SNS

The first SNS website is Classmates.com, established in 1995, focusing on ties with former school mates using the Old School Tie social networking method. Yet Boyd and Ellison (2007) argued that SixDegrees.com should be the first recognizable social network site launched in 1997. This is because SixDegrees.com allowed users to create profiles, list their Friends, and surf the network, which later become a mainstream phenomenon in SNS websites.

Besides these two early websites, two different models of social networking that came about in 1999 were the Circle of Trust developed by Epinions.com and the Circle of Friends developed by Jonathan Bishop, the later of which was utilized on a number of regional UK sites between 1999 and 2001 before being adopted by Friendster in 2002 according to NWT (2007), perhaps because it gives the user more control over content and connectivity than the earlier Web of Contacts model. By 2005, one social networking service using the Circle of Friends, MySpace, was reportedly getting more page views than Google, with Facebook, a competitor rapidly growing in size also using the Circle of Friends (Rosenbush, 2005). In 2007, Facebook began allowing externally-developed add-on applications, and some applications enabled the graphing of a user’s own social network — thus linking social networks and social networking.

4. Typical Features of a SNS website

4.1 Profile

In general, social networking services, such as MySpace and Facebook, allow users to create a profile for themselves, actually a personal homepage, which often contains demographic details (age, gender, location, etc.), tastes (interests, favorite music, etc.), a photograph, and an open-ended description of who the person would like to meet. Many SNS websites allow users to change the background of their profile page and to add additional picture, audio and video files so that the page would be more personal and attractive.

4.2 Friends

After creating a profile, users are usually asked to invite their friends to the site by supplying their email addresses. Alternatively, they can look at others’ profiles and add those people to their list of Friends. In most social networking services, both users must confirm that they are friends before they are linked.

4.3 Privacy

Most SNS websites have a privacy control that allows the user to choose who can view their profile or contact them, etc.

4.4 Interaction

Within SNS websites, users can upload their photos and videos, write their blogs, send message to their friends, etc. Once a user has any action, his or her linked friends will be noticed and recommended to see the new content and to leave comment on it. Then they continually discussed on a specific topic based on the initial action.

5. The application of SNS in educational domain

There are three different levels of application of SNS in educational domain, based on different types of SNS websites and their features.

5.1 Educational Application in General SNS

There are more and more teens use SNS these years, more than half (55%) of all online American youths ages 12-17 use online social networking sites like MySpace.com and Facebook.com, according to the latest survey. (Lenhart, A. Madden, M., 2007). As a result, more and more educators start to research on this phenomenon in order to avoid threats from SNS for education and to utilize it for help teens get socialized or benefit from other aspects.

Students are tremendously interested in social networking sites because of the community, the content, and the activities they can do there. They can share information about themselves, find out what their peers think about topics of interest to them, share music and playlists, and exchange messages with their friends. Social networking services like RateMyProfessors—which allows young people to find out about professors from a student’s perspective before they take a class—attract students by giving them a place to share their opinions and see what others have to say (The New Media Consortium, 2007). Hence, teachers may guide their students to communicate via SNS and learn collaboratively.

It is also recommended that students can join a community in the language that they are learning, where they will be exposed to conversational and colloquial reading and writing, learn about daily life, and establish friendships with native speakers. (ibid)

Besides such positive application, SNS is also used to seek for under-aged drinkers. The photos that the offenders uploaded may be the evidence.

5.2 Inter-campus SNS

Some SNS websites’ target group is students from different places attending different schools and colleges, such as student.com and xiaonei.com (Chinese largest campus SNS website), where some specific features only designed for students, such as they can add their high schools’ names, colleges’ names, majors, courses enrolled, favorite teachers, favorite courses, the clubs they have joined, the dorms they live in, etc. to their profiles.

Based on such information, the system can help college students to maintain the friendship both with their previous high school classmates and the current college friends, help them know about the situations about courses and teachers from their peers, help them identify those who take the same courses, live in the same buildings, come from the same cities, join the same clubs, etc.

5.3 Internal SNS on Campus

SNS on Campus means those social networking services are provided to the students from the same schools. Those who are not the students of the school are not allowed to register or log in.

Elgg.org, an open-source system, can also be downloaded and installed on campus, providing a secure internal community site, which is a good example.

Pennster.com is established by University of Pennsylvania, providing incoming first-year students with the opportunity to meet each other and begin forming friendships before and during the enrollment.

6. SNS’s Potential Development for Educational Purpose

There is still a large blank in internal application for SNS. Since learning management system has become more and more popular, it’s time to integrate SNS into LMS so that the students can receive better service and the stuff on campus can work effectively.

University of Wisconsin–Madison has been thinking about this innovation and they have been using the fervor surrounding social networking technologies as a way to build better relationships with the students and with personnel from disparate parts of the campus. The matrix that follows is intended to help stimulate thinking about how, and with whom, to best network ideas for improving campus services. (Berg, Berquam, and Christoph, 2007):