Hi All,
These are my comments about the article. Some notes I wrote down whilst reading:
Page 18: “Moreover, many students come to online tuition with inappropriate expectations that undermine their opportunity to exploit fully the advantages of working in an asynchronous and collaborative learning environment. The present findings suggest that students would benefit from prior supervised experience of an online tutoring environment.”
I think that participating in an online community evolves as well. Students behave differently nowadays then they have done before. Websites like Twitter, FaceBook, Hyves and other online community’s make people behave differently; being aware of online identities, sending short messages. Much research has been done in the new phenomena of social networking and it is interesting to see that participating in these online communities requires some newly adapted skills which, I think, can be transferred to educational online communities. OU Students who never or rarely participate in online communities will probably find online tutorials more difficult and compare participation with face to face tutorials. But comparing these two is maybe like comparing apples with pears.
Online communication is not new to me; I’m writing blogs, sending emails, I twitter, I participate in social networking and I contribute to various non educational forums. From my own experience I can say that my online behaviour has changed, my writing style adapts and my expectations towards participating online differ from before. The more I participated, the easier it got and the more confident I became. The feedback from other users created an open forum for all kinds of discussion .Online discussions were evolving and communicating got easier. I will take all of these experiences into my participation in the OU forums.
In the beginning I found participating in H800 forums difficult. I had to adapt my writing style and had to adapt to the academic level of writing and thinking. One comes across certain unwritten rules in this community and one can only reveal these by participating. It is hard to describe the exact process, but the more you participate, the easier it gets.
Do you agree with Price et al. that online tuition is a pastoral activity and not a purely academic activity?
“Most students made a clear distinction between tuition and tutoring. Tuition was the teaching of a syllabus of knowledge where instructional designers had the greatest influence on the nature of tutor-student interactions. It was conceived as a more objective, impersonal activity intended to meet the needs of a group, and involving interpretation and assessment of a subject. In contrast, tutoring was conceived as a more subjective and personal activity that was intended to meet the needs of individuals, where the students themselves had the greatest influence on the nature of tutor-student interactions. It was pastoral and interactive, involving supporting, counselling and mentoring students aimed at helping them grasp the big picture.”
Pastoral activity: I understand this to be an activity in which one looks at offering support to the student as a person as well: confidence, building up a relationship, comfortable communication between student and tutor. I do believe that every educator or tutor should not just focus on the activity itself but taking the differences between students into account as well. Therefore I think online tuition should have a bit of each; balance. This is of course easier said than done, but I do agree that students who tend to go to OU courses have either not studied in a long time or are not as confident as others. This should be taken into account.
I believe that feedback in this case is very important tool; it builds up students’ confidence. It doesn’t need to be much, but just enough to either make you go into the right direction or see if you’re already headed for the right direction.
Forum participation is a good pastoral tool too. Reading others’ messages can support learning processes as well, specifically when an online tutor participates additionally. Using blogs in week 10 was an effective tool as well. Students seem to have fewer boundaries in their blogs and tend to make more personal notes about the various courses. It is sometimes helpful to read that others struggle as well.
Do you agree that the absence of what the authors call ‘paralinguistic cues’ in an online environment can limit the effectiveness of online tuition?
I’m not sure. I understand the benefits of facial expressions, intonations and other non verbal language. It is very important in conversation. It helps to put things in perspective. However, I believe that when one participates in online tutorials, one can expect lack of paralinguistic cues. I am personally not concerned by the fact that there aren’t any paralinguistic cues; I participated on purpose in an online environment with all its consequences; I don’t feel limited by the lack of ‘paralinguistic cues’