This refers more to education in general, both face-to-face and online contexts and I must admit I got sidetracked while researching this topic but being a teacher myself and currently working in a sort of assessment-obsessed environment I couldn’t resist the temptation of writing more on assessment. So here you go:

ON WORKING TOGETHER (ONLINE)

There is no doubt that group work might be beneficial to learning - it is more student-centred, promotes more self-directed learning and social construction of knowledge. In more practical terms it helps students develop a range of important skills, including problem-solving, communication, leadership, collaboration and decision-making, all of them being important personal and professional assets sought by prospective employers. However, some groups prove to be dysfunctional, mostly due to the so-called ‘lone wolves’ or the phenomenon of social loafing.

Lone wolves are primarily interested in achieving their own goals while social loafing can be defined as little or lack of activity on the part of a group member who ‘shirks their obligations in the hope of benefitting from the work of others’ (Dommeyer, 2007:175). If the loafer or the free rider manages to slip unnoticed through the system they receive the same mark as the rest of their more industrious group members, which seems to be the most common reason for students’ concern, dissatisfaction and complaints (Aggarval & O’Brien, 2008; Kennedy, 2006).

Both these dysfunctionalities are likely to occur in face-to-face and online settings alike but perhaps they are more common in the latter due to lack of bodily presence and issues around community building? Besides Hron and Friedrich (2003) claim that due to its characteristics, online discussions (and I dare to speculate that by extension probably  any form of online communication) might pose a number of problems, among others difficulty maintaining topic coherence and understanding the context of a message, which could instigate a number of difficulties in group activities.

For instance, based on my own experience of setting up group discussions within a virtual learning environment (Moodle), students often contribute a single post and rest on their laurels, satisfied that they have completed the task. There is usually very little or no interactive value in the post, e.g. a question or a challenging comment. When I run the activity report I often find out there is one post per student – is that a discussion or rather a series of minipresentations – I ask myself.

Such eventualities should be borne in mind while creating the tasks and perhaps more guidance in ‘global learning methods for organising group work, behaviour rules for structuring dialogues, so-called co-operation scripts’ (Hron & Friedrich, 2003: 73) should be offered. Introducing peer evaluations during the process of group work or final peer assessment could also reduce the incidence of loafing (Aggarval & O’Brien, 2008; Pond et al, 2007).

ON PEER ASSESSMENT (ONLINE)

This  idea of peer assessment, as you remarked in your comment, Clara, is however both compelling and problematic.

To start with, there are obvious benefits to introducing peer assessment, such as increased motivation, engagement and accountability (Falchikov, 2005). To illustrate this, in a piece of research carried out by Bouchoucha & Woznak (2010) the engagement and interaction in an online group discussion increased upon introducing peer assessment from 1.4 to 3.6 posts per person in a single discussion. Other potential advantages include facilitation of deeper understanding of the subject matter and the student’s own achievement (Bloxham & Boyd, 2007).

Besides, in a situation where the group project entails other communication media, beyond the tutor’s control, let’s say emails, conversations on the phone or skype, chat or texts, the tutor is not really in the position to gain a good insight into the group dynamics and fabric and thus cannot make a fair judgement. The only people who are capable of assessing their own and others’ relative contributions are the students themselves (Race, 2001) but the question arises whether they are able to do so fairly and reliably.

ON PROBLEMS RELATED TO PEER ASSESSMENT

According to the reading I did on the subject, it seems there is some discrepancy in the views in that respect from quite favourable findings that students grade accurately and consistently (Marcoulides & Simkin, 1995), through stating that they mark with a slight bias to over-mark (Boud & Holmes, 1995) or under-mark (Hamer et al, 2009), to discovering that the correlation between the students’ and tutors’ marks tends to be restricted to a holistic judgement, based on well-understood criteria (Falchikov & Goldfinch, 2000). I guess these might be even more conflicting if a more thorough comparison is carried out across departments and faculties with their different grading scales, approaches and the nature of their typical assignments. If you think further of interdisciplinary degrees or post-grad degrees with students from different backgrounds, humanities and sciences, and you add online on top of that, the issue might get even more muddled (illustrated by your comment).

ON POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

Ways of addressing the problem include involving students in the process of creating the peer assessment instrument. For example, they could select from a pre-prepared bank of questions or criteria using various scoring scales (Nicol & Milligan, 2006); alternatively they could even formulate the criteria themselves. Theoretically, in such a situation, they should be able to understand them inside out and allocate a fair mark. However, even this might be problematic as students might have varying notions as to what particular terms stand for or how achieving a given criterion translates into a particular grade. This might result in the students either over or under-marking. Clarity of the rubrics might be tested by means of a calibration process prior to launching the group project. In order to further reduce this stringency or leniency effect, each student could be assessed by all the other group members (multiple peer assessment) and the assessors could be encouraged to write more detailed comments to justify their scoring.

Hmm, it all sounds ideal but I guess in terms of preparation (creating criteria, running assessment trials) as well as implementation (students filling in the assessment forms and tutors reading them) might prove time-consuming and thus adding to the workload of everybody in question. It is also unclear to what extent the peers’ mark should influence the final grade and how the calculation should be performed.

I’d be quite interested in doing more about this as the issues of peer/self-review and assessment have been on my mind for some time now. Basically, I’d like to encourage more reflection on part of my students, deeper thinking on their performance, goals, abilities and skills. The issue of formative peer assessment springs to mind too (as suggested in the article by Aggorval and O’Brien (2009) it is multiple peer evaluations that best prevent social loafing). Something perhaps to ponder on the assessment module in the future?

 

Adult learning has been traditionally perceived as conceptual, rational and cognitive. Yet, adults undertaking studies do experience a range of emotions, both positive (enjoyment, pride, satisfaction) and negative (fear, anxiety, dread, shame). And these emotions are not necessarily a sign of insanity, as Kant would have diagnosed it (in his opinion, emotion being ‘an illness of the mind’) but essential ingredients of the learning process. Affective factors seem to play a crucial role when it comes to motivation or lack of it to pursue the subject matter of the course. Of course the view of learning and teaching now is much more holistic, trying to integrate cognition and emotion into the instructional design. However, isn’t that uncanny that expression of certain emotions might still be looked down on as a potential sign of weakness, hysteria, lack of balance?

This might be even further complicated in an online learning environment which on the surface appears to be emotionally impoverished – disembodied, devoid of non-verbal cues, blurring social and spatial boundaries, in other words ‘the ultimate disorienting dilemma (Campbell-Gibson, 2000 in O’Regan, 2003), too overwhelming and alienating to make subtle emotions explicit. And indeed students experience confusion and isolation when trying to navigate through the course site and establish contact with peers and tutors.

However, some of the rules regarding feelings must be renegotiated very soon and some users decide to disclose personal or even intimate details at some point of the course, often in the initial phase. For instance, I had one e-colleague divulging to me she'd lost a teenage son at the beginning of the second week of a 20-week course and I must say I was at a loss as to how I should react to that. The reasons for such sudden sincerity were obscure at the moment as well as the way she felt about the confession. I was in a bit of a shock and started wondering why such things happen.

Some researchers claim that what is regarded as an impoverishing aspect is actually very enriching. Lack of body language and visual cues introduces a greater degree of intimacy into online zones, often loosening users’ self-protection mechanisms and pushing them to disclose private details, including the greatest intimacies. Could that be likened to the anecdotal ‘stranger on the plane’ phenomenon? It is often considered that the body in fact exists in cyberspace – already in the late 90s Argyle and Shields (in Gilmore and Warren, 2007:593) stated that the technology mediates the body, making its expressive qualities apparent in different ways. After all, the term ‘virtuality’ comes from the Latin virtus, which stands for excellence, potency and efficacy (Online Etymology Dictionary). Although the computer-related usage dates back to the 1950s, perhaps the traces of the root meaning still resonate in this modern lexical expansion.

Another facilitating factor at play, especially in regard to tightly-knit communities, might be an increased sense of community (which might build quickly on closed courses geared to a small group of like-minded professionals like in the above described case), common cause and purpose and trust that  builds up over the course of time. I would be curious to know which mechanisms are in place when people decide whether and when they can start trusting other online participants on the course and go further in disclosing personal information, beyond the point of stating the obvious 'I like reading 19-cent historical novels and listen to trip hop in my free time'.

Another interesting aspect is how online users go about their decision regarding who they are going to open up to. Based on anecdotal evidence and mostly on my own experience, I can state that even on asynchronous courses, where there is no real-time communication built in, you can create a sense of your personality through the way you express yourself. How do we pick up on the vibes from other people online, how do we come up with this expectation: ‘Hmm, I think I can easily relate to this person but not the other. She/He has got something about them. I think we’re on the same wavelength.’ Does that require an extra plug-in in our emotional intelligence to be able to read people online or is it by pure fluke that I managed to pick out friendly souls, including my current partner, in the chaos of the online? As I said this is a sheer speculation based on anecdotal evidence from my own and my friends' lives.  I am aware of the other darker side of the net where people meddle with their identity to harm others.

 

As mentioned in my comment to the previous post, online learners’ emotions are of paramount importance to their tutors, letting them have a better insight into what might engage or inhibit the student in achieving their learning goals. I have decided to take the previous and very informal attempt of visualising my emotions a bit further and analyse them in more detail, hoping I would be able to draw some conclusions and help myself overcome the interaction problems I am now experiencing. I am also trying to assess how such data would be useful to the teacher.

Description of the method

The inspiration was brought by the research paper written by Gilmore and Warren (2007) in which they were trying to research the emotions from the perspective of online tutors using the medium of an online chat for holding seminars and the potential influence these emotions exerted on the relationship with the learners. The framework they used was a combination of ethnography and grounded theory. The former means the tutors were participating in the seminar themselves, so becoming part of the researched community. The latter assumes collection and processing the data (marking, coding, grouping into similar concepts and then categories) prior to stating the research hypothesis.

This is how they justify their choice of their methodology and describe their data collection:

An ethnographic approach requires a sense of the ‘poetry of experience’ in that researchers often need to pay attention to data which are metaphorically indirect and atmospheric rather than literal and rational (Gilmore & Warren, 2002: 589)

During the analysis of our own and each other’s logs there was a strong sense of ‘reexperiencing’ our emotions and as such the logs were not ‘sterile’ records of past interaction to be picked apart and recombined as codes, but more akin to ‘material memories’ that evoked recollections and emotional remembrances of our feelings (Gilmore & Warren, 2002: 590)

I found this approach quite appealing and decided to replicate it in my context. While participating in the first skype chat I was trying to monitor my feelings and jot down any stronger occurrences of emotionality (a visual taster presented in my previous posting). Later I analysed the chatlog, trying to log my thoughts and feelings at the time alongside the actual chat contributions. After that, I analysed my comments and picked out any mention of emotions, either encircling them (if they were named explicitly) or extracting them from ‘in-between the lines’. I tried to restrict the set of emotions if possible so that it would be easier to count the occurrences of particular feelings. At the end, I counted all the mentions of any emotion, mentions of negative emotions, positive emotions and ambiguous emotions and mentions of particular emotions trying to establish which ones were the most frequent. See the attached PDF for more detail (this document is not public at the moment - email me for details).

Results

Any kind of emotion was noted on 34 occasions. Majority of them could be described as negative. The ones that occurred most frequently were: alienation/ annoyance, self-consciousness and embarrassment (PDF).

According to Wosnitza & Volet (2005),emotions can be analysed in regard to their direction, i.e. recipient and they have identified multiple sources emotions can be orientated towards: task, technology, performance, oneself, social environment and learning context. It’s curious that all of the emotions coded in my experiment appear to be socially oriented, mostly self-directed and occasionally other-directed (and here it seems ‘other’ stands for ‘fellow students’ rather than the tutor), so it seems the social aspect of the learning experience took over. Another odd thing is that the emotions I felt towards myself, the feelings of alienation, self-consciousness and embarrassment are closely related to the social environment. One could actually argue that for instance the prerequisite for feeling alienated is the presence of a group of which one does not feel part of. Feelings of self-consciousness and embarrassment might also have a tendency to arise in a social setting as they are linked to the issue of perception – how the person perceived themselves in relation to others, how they are perceived by others and how she/he feels about others perceiving her in a given/imagined way.

My rough conclusion in regard to my emotionality is that there seems to be a high degree of pre-occupation with that last issue, considerably higher than in face-to-face contexts.

Limitations

Of course, my ‘research’ is still very informal and its conclusions are far from being meaningful due to the following reasons:

• I have minimal experience in research
• Self-report tends to be subjective and therefore not very reliable
• The annotations were made with a few days’ delay, which might further decrease the reliability of the report
• The matter was treated in a cursory manner, without a deep analysis of how to decipher, code and group the emotions arising due to the interaction (I was just playing a researcher)
• Due to the above reasons, some important data might have got lost.

Nevertheless, the whole experiment was worthwhile and did bring some insight into my emotionality. It would be interesting to repeat this with greater care about detail and reliability as well as compare with what other chat participants felt at the time.

Now the question remains a teacher can do with such data (I am now distancing myself from it and trying to put myself in the tutor’s shoes). Could the course design be tweaked to include more social get-togethers in real time, more pairwork and groupwork to facilitate establishing closer working relationships between the students so that the comfort zone for a socially inept student is slowly extended?

Gilmore and Warren (2007) while summarising  the issues related to the virtual classroom point out that online interaction is often conceptualised in dichotomy terms of being either liberating or impoverishing, either enabling highly intimate relationships or ones that are impersonal and hostile. It puzzles me to see that I am experiencing both: the Skype experience and the blog experience. So after all, even if the student runs into difficulties in one online environment, it does not have to be blown out of proportion as long as they find their niche in another environment on the course where they can flourish and fulfil their potential.

 

... and elsewhere. I'm finding this blog platform restricting, especially in terms of embedding multimedia (or maybe I'm just too much of an immigrant to explore the possibilities?) To treat the subjects of the first few weeks of the course, namely the digital natives fallacy and the Dreyfusian concepts of distance learning, I have created a wiki (screenshot of the home page below).

Since I am slightly more familiar with this environment (I have used it before in projects with my learners and I am going to use it again hence my need to remain conversant with the environment ) the technology is more transparent for me, which allows me to delve deeper into the discussed issues. I can also experiment with multimedia more and thus give vent to my creativity. It all started with Dreyfus' text which stirred quite strong reactions in me, to an extent I decided to break down the text into different themes which I tackled in a series of postings. Due to its chronological nature, the blog was somehow imposing a linear/vertical way of presenting the thoughts whereas I was more interested in verticality,a web-like presentation that can grow unrestricted in all directions. A wiki lent itself more to this. It also gives more freedom to the reader as they can decide in what order they want to explore the topics. The wiki is also public (that was not planned as accidentally I chose the non-education version of the wiki where I cannot create guest accounts; to make access easier for tutor's feedback and later assessment I opted for the 'public' in the accessibility settings), which makes it an additionally interesting experiment in terms of online presence, identity and visibility.

When making a decision to switch to the wiki, I was aware that I was being slightly anarchic and thus might be overstepping the mark. I knew the reasons why we were asked to reflect on our learning using this particular blogging platform and the consequences it might have in terms of assessment (although I hope that creating links between the two platforms will let me bypass any potential problems). At the same time I believe that as an adult learner I am and can be more self-directed and autonomous in achieving my learning goals.