During the lecture Dr. Martha Cleveland-Innes talked about
quantitative methods and how she used them in her research of online and
distance learning. I found it quite interesting for me to know more about this
topic as education is about to change dramatically. It’s now possible to stream
video classes with sophisticated interactive elements, and researchers can
scoop up student data that could help them make teaching more effective. Dr.
Martha Cleveland-Innes believes that online education is much better than face
to face learning but it’s even more useful to study in a blended environment, which consists of face to face and online
activities. She explained us how she applied quantitative methods in her
analysis of human behavior and, especially, emotions and their impact on our perception
of learning process. Online environment entails a creation of a new form of
communication “student-teacher” because a student can easily become a teacher
while studying online.
I’ve learnt some fascinating facts that, according to
the surveys, gender doesn’t matter when we use mobile devices and women
interact with their devices more than men. Dr. Martha Cleveland-Innes stressed
that “sampling is everything” in the research and the best thing is when you
randomize data to increase an experimental noise. Professor shared her thoughts
that it wouldn’t be possible to collect such data and see these patterns
without using quantitative methods.
The main aim of the article about mixed methods and
emotional presence in online learning was to employ rigor in the research in the field of distance education. After several years of studying this subject scientists came to the conclusion that emotional presence exists
and it can form a strong educational environment. Mixed method is more demanding
and enables researchers to combine data from different sources and get more
accurate results but it’s not always an easy task to find a proper question and
to make hypothesis.
Dr. Martha Cleveland-Innes recommended to read "The Handbook of Emergent Technologies
in Social Research" by Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber (Ed.) in which it’s stated that nowadays
people changed their way of interaction with each other using Internet and
modern technologies. Therefore it has an impact on how we implement a research.
In the lab Ester Appelgren introduced
us SPSS (Statistical Package for the
Social Sciences), which is often used for survey analysis and other types of quantitative research methods. In
SPSS I built one multiple response variable and tried to analyse this variable in
the dataset and then run frequencies/percentages based on the variable. The
data for this assignment was taken from Mediebarometern 2009. As I’ve got SPSS
is widely applied in social sciences when researchers need to analyse data and to
make calculations.
>because a student can easily become a teacher while studying online.
ReplyDeleteMarina, I don't understand this bit, to say the truth :) On the contrary, I understand how a student can be a teacher during 'offline' learning - he/she can explain things to the students sitting nearby, but with online study it is always easier to google something you don't understand than ask other students... So I beleive this statement means something else!
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ReplyDeleteHello Marina, Professor “Vanessa Camilleri” in one of her seminar’s about 3D learning stated that face-to-face learning is a very passive form of learning. Moreover, she strongly believed that this is not the appropriate type of learning especially in higher education, as students do not have a strong enough motivation to “dig” deeper in different topics of knowledge. What is your opinion about that? Personally, I do not thing that I share her opinion as I like the idea of getting into a classroom every day, creating bonds with my constructor and classmates and having the source of knowledge right in the same room with me.
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