Research

A. The real-world problem or concern to be addressed in the dissertation study

With the enthusiastic (perhaps overly enthusiastic) acceptance of online learning, those charged with providing learning experiences for students in graduate school are often ill-equipped. The result is that many if not most online experiences for students are mere replications of a classroom-oriented, teacher-student model.

During my years at GMU as a student and instructor, I have been heavily involved in the creation of online courses. Most of these courses have been designed using a mentor-protégé model. While content delivery and activity outlines are published on the web, this model makes use of email as the primary means of interaction between protégé and mentor. Email communication, like the telephone, does not easily afford the opportunity for others to participate in discussions. While it is possible, to interact with a larger number, email is historically a person-to-person tool. This tends to reduce interaction opportunities to private communications between teacher/student, mentor/protégé.

In my courses and in my teaching, with Dr. Norton in the ITS program. I have discovered the real-world application of the types of learning written of by Vygotsky and others. Namely, that knowledge construction happens best in a social context. That is to say that students working together with their peers are able to share and negotiate meaning with and from their environment. This knowledge and meaning can then be communicated to the teacher/mentor for evaluation and assessment. To be sure, communication between mentor and protégé is a form of social interaction but I fear that we lose the benefits gained from peer-to-peer interactions in a group setting.

My experiences in learning and using problem-centered constructivist, techniques has led me to want to discover whether those types of designs for learning (group work, social construction of knowledge) can be replicated in an online environment. In other words, can the types of learning environments we seek to create in the face-to-face classroom be created when the learners are not present in a classroom in the traditional sense.

There are a number of communication tools available that could provide the opportunity for students to interact with each other (and their mentor) while participating in online courses. Discussion boards and chats afford students and teachers the means to conduct group discussions while in distant locations, thus approximating the information sharing and negotiation experiences in the classroom. In many ways, discussion boards afford a greater flexibility to students and provide a more robust discussion in that they are asynchronous. Thus, over a span of time, students can post thoughts, questions, and ideas and then have the ability to read and reflect on others’ thoughts before responding. Something that a reticent student in a classroom might appreciate.

I think that my proposed study will focus on the perceived quality of learning during a leadership course. Through the use of a number of instruments, Stages of Concern Questionnaire (SoCQ), Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI), Web-Based Learning Environment Inventory (Web-LEI), I hope to gain insight into students’ attitudes and beliefs concerning their learning and experiences during an online course. Through surveying students involved in a Leadership course conducted using the mentor/protégé model and students involved in the same course delivered through the Blackboard system, I hope to be able to compare learning experiences in the two environments.

B. The kinds of research questions that might be targeted in conducting a study in this area of inquiry

Overall question: How do students perceive their learning experiences in mentor/protégé learning environment compared with those who participated in the same course using discussion boards and interacting with peers?

The study I have chosen to undertake will seek to compare students' attitudes, beliefs, and learning in Leadership course modeled on the COPLS (Community of Practice Learning System) designed by Dr. Norton and those of students taking the same course using Blackboard Course management system.

The content of both the COPLS-based and Blackboard-based Leadership course is exactly the same. The differences between the two models will be the opportunity students will have to interact with one another. In the COPLS-based course the student will work on course activities alone and then interact with the mentor. In the Blackboard course, the students will interact with each other while completing the course activities and collaborate on a product.

Obviously, the philosophies and research done by Dr. Norton are a great influence on the study. The work of Vygotsky and others on social-constructivism are also influential in the design.

The design of online learning environments has been getting more and more attention lately. There have been research studies done by a number of people on online learning environments. I found an article by Chang in Australia particularly interesting. In fact, I would like to use an instrument she developed to assess students' perceptions of online learning environments in my study. This instrument assesses the learning environment in a number of different dimensions.

My planned study will assess various online learning environments and the effect of each on students' learning as well as their attitudes and beliefs towards learning in and using various environments. I think that such a study would necessitate a design which incorporated both quantitative and qualitative methodologies.

I would like to utilize the ITS program's Leadership course which is entirely online for my study. By dividing the participants up into two groups and having each group receive a different treatment (the mode of delivery of the Leadership course) I will be able to gather data to answer my research questions.

Below is a link to a list of research papers that I have obtained in order to begin developing a literature review.