Introduction

A Pan-Canadian Perspective on Blended and Online Learning

Michael Power, Gale Parchoma, and Jennifer Lock

Universities are unique as one of the few millennial institutions known to human societies. These institutions have grown from humble beginnings to encompass a worldwide system of knowledge building and knowledge sharing. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the development and implementation of technology-enhanced learning, today a universal phenomenon. Key examples are online learning and blended learning, undisputedly major trends in virtually every university in Canada in 2020. The Finest Blend deals with research on blended and online learning across the country with contributions from 22 researchers from eight Canadian universities. Both French- and English-language institutions are represented.

The genesis of this edited volume was a series of panels initiated by eastern and western Canadian researchers who attended three national conferences over two years. All panel members were involved in research on various aspects of design, development, and implementation of educational technology at “dual mode” universities, those offering courses both on campus and online. An initial conversation arose in the preparation of separate but jointly planned eastern and western Canadian panel discussions on the roles of voice and text in online graduate programs for the Collaboration for Online Higher Education and Research (COHERE) 2015 conference. Several panel members, along with delegates with shared interests in the topic, worked to prepare a second joint eastern-western panel on voice and text in online graduate programs for the conference stream of the Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education at Congress in May 2016 at the University of Calgary. There panel members and interested delegates discussed future directions for collaborative work and decided to prepare a proposal for a third panel at COHERE 2016. Additional requests for new contributors were distributed, and panel membership was again renewed. The result is a pan-Canadian collection of current perspectives on the roles of text and voice in theory, design, delivery, facilitation, administration, and evaluation of blended and online graduate education programs.

The opening chapter of this volume provides a critical overview of technology-enhanced strategies implemented by universities to increase access to their programs. Subsequent chapters examine varied conceptualizations of research-based practices in online and blended learning in Canadian graduate education. Across chapters, authors focus on the role of instructional design in course development processes, current issues associated with open educational resources, varied institutional and programmatic supports for learners, departmental supports for faculty development of blended approaches to teaching and learning for adults, program evaluation, and institutional supports for engagement in the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Where on-campus, graduate-level programs have a long history of privileging voice–as in the spoken word–in the learning process through a seminar approach to course design (Jaques, 2000), over the past three decades distance graduate programs have relied heavily on technologically mediated text-based discussions (Garrison, 2011; Moore & Kearsley, 2011). The contrasting foci on differing modes of communication have led to debates on the efficacies of voice and text in the process of supporting graduate students in the development of critical, reflective, and reflexive thinking capabilities (Bell, 2015; Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 2001; Rourke & Kanuka, 2007; Simmons, Parchoma, Jacobsen, Nelson, & Bhola, 2016). Although practical considerations, such as the evolution of the capacities of digital technologies to support inclusively and reliably text- and voice-based communications over time and across diverse contexts have played a central and necessary role in this debate, a lingering concern about the learner’s experience has remained. Nearly two decades ago, Sgouropoulou, Koutoumanos, Goodyear, and Skordalakis (2000) argued that, when graduate learners are also practitioners developing research expertise to address practice-based problems, a reliance on text-based communications alone can be insufficient for both students and faculty-based teachers. Similarly, Strijbos, Martens, and Jochems (2004) posited that verbal interaction can be an important dimension of collaborative processes that lead to the attainment of shared learning goals.

The contributing authors in this volume revisit literature-based propositions and current practices in the ongoing debate on how to balance use of voice and text in various blends to support diverse graduate learners. The chapters contribute to contemporary understandings of blended and online learning through research-based analyses of current practices across Canadian dual-mode universities. Across the chapters, historical, socio-economic, cultural, and theoretical perspectives contribute to initiating an inclusive and critical discourse on current praxis in graduate programs in French- and English-language institutions.

In Chapter 1, Michael Power begins the conversation with a global historical overview of how voice and text have alternated and crisscrossed as the main means of communication in place-based, distance, online, and blended approaches to the media- and technologically assisted delivery of graduate programs. Traditional, campus-delivered, graduate-level education has a long history during which voice was prioritized as a medium of communication through the seminar method, whereas distance education, evolving through several generations, mainly targeted undergraduate studies and was largely text based. When online learning became viable in mainstream higher education in the mid-1990s, asynchronous, text-based communications remained the primary means of communication between learners and teachers. The primacy of text in online learning was a logical continuation of the distance education tradition as established by the open university movement. As Internet applications mature and broadband is fully extended across Canada, synchronous-based technologies are being implemented by mainstream universities as a compensatory mechanism for both a lack of instantaneous interaction and feedback among students and faculty members (prevalent in asynchronous, text-based, online learning) and a lack of institutional capacity to design and deliver quality, graduate-level, asynchronous-based courses (often called online courses, e-learning, or even forum courses). Responsive to students’ needs, universities have made a variety of outreach attempts, over the past two decades, to find workable solutions that allow graduate students to enroll in online courses in order to develop high-end competencies. These attempts are portrayed metaphorically by Power as swings of a pendulum that is gradually defining best practices in graduate-level online and blended learning amid technological breakthroughs as well as shortfalls.

In Chapter 2, Jay Wilson discusses the outcomes of an auto-ethnographical study of department chair mentorship and evaluation practices for supporting faculty members who teach in an online graduate education program. In sharing and reflecting on his personal experience, Wilson identifies recommendations for mentoring faculty members. He argues that, rather than simply directing professors to put courses online or “use more technology,” there needs to be a systematic means of supporting them in the process of course development. Furthermore, Wilson insists, it is not sufficient just to make the frameworks or taxonomies available; equally important, faculty members need to be shown how to apply them. Therefore, as a mentor, it is important to learn from deep reflection on design practice. There is an underlying appreciation that various strategies and approaches will be used in responding to the individual needs of faculty members.

In Chapter 3, Jennifer Lock and her collaborators report the results of an inquiry into an institutional orientation for new students on textual and audio practices in the online components of a blended graduate program. Students entering online higher education programs might not have the explicit technological knowledge and skills to be successful online learners. A short-term, online orientation program might help students to gain needed online learning skills. Using design-based research, these collaborators explored the instructional design of a new student online orientation and its impact on students’ preparation for learning online. They share implications for practice and address micro-, meso-, and macro-levels of inquiry: they identify the importance of instructors’ ability to incorporate differentiated instruction, the need for orientation programs to reflect the academic online environment, and administrative support for including online orientation programs for their new students.

Jane Costello and her collaborators provide, in Chapter 4, complementary institutional perspectives on the roles that instructional designers can play in supporting the teaching practices of faculty members in online and blended learning environments. In this self-study, four senior instructional designers share their experiences and reflections in terms of instructional design approaches and considerations for the integration of text, visuals, and audio in graduate online learning. This chapter highlights the critical role of instructional designers and their relationship with content authors who work together in designing rich learning environments that purposefully and effectively integrate media and technologies.

In Chapter 5, Wendy Kraglund-Gauthier reports on her participatory action research that involved instructional designers and faculty practice in support of pedagogical processes in the online environment. The study, conducted in a Faculty of Education, was designed to increase understanding of the changes in teaching practices and pedagogical thinking of faculty members as they transitioned from face-to-face classrooms to an online environment integrating synchronous and asynchronous communication tools. From this research, three institutional factors were identified in support of such a transition: the need for champions of online teaching and learning, changes in organizational culture, and an environment for a community of practice.

Sawsen Lakhal, in Chapter 6, reports on the outcomes of a scholarship of teaching inquiry into one university’s blended synchronous design for learning across graduate programs in the Faculty of Education. Transferring from a face-to-face mode to a blended synchronous delivery mode (BSDM) presents universities with many advantages yet also serious challenges (Bower, Dalgarno, Kennedy, Lee, & Kenney, 2015; Lakhal, Bateman, & Bédard, 2017). BSDM has been used in their graduate programs since 2006 because of the particularities of the context in which face-to-face students mix with online students. The programs are designed for teachers currently deployed in anglophone community colleges in Québec. Students who live in the Montréal area are required to attend face-to-face classes, whereas students who live outside the Montréal region attend classes using a web conferencing app. This chapter reports on a scholarship of teaching inquiry into current practices using this mixed course delivery mode as well as the benefits and challenges experienced by faculty members and students while focusing on the use of video/voice and text.

In Chapter 7, Kathy Snow surveys socio-economic influences on incrementally including voice- and text-based open educational resources in the design and delivery of contemporary blended online graduate programs ahead of reporting the results of three case studies of one university’s use of open learning resources. Snow argues that in public postsecondary institutions, where the rationale for “opening” focuses on an intent to increase access to education and still maintain quality learning resources and experiences, rather than focusing solely on increasing profitability, the funding model for “opening” can be daunting because associated costs can be prohibitive. These costs affect both faculty members and designers in that garnering institutional support for open access is especially challenging in a fiscal environment in which public funding for universities is decreasing and dependence on student tuition is increasing (OECD, 2012; Tilak, 2015). Snow examines the concept of “open” in the context of one eastern Canadian, publicly funded university’s initiatives that situate learning as a social process and in the context of supporting the development of an ecology of learning that extends beyond the confines of time and space of traditional university instruction.

Maurice Taylor and his collaborators explore, in Chapter 8, the current practices of students and professors in one Faculty of Education graduate program that adopted blended learning. Using a qualitative case study research design and the constant comparative technique on three data sources, they identified several themes. Key practices for graduate students included acquiring critical thinking skills, establishing a community of practice, developing trust with colleagues, and realizing the challenges of blended learning. Key practices for professors included discerning factors to motivate change, observing the impacts of blended learning, understanding the meaning of a blended learning pedagogy, and developing a supportive faculty culture. In addition, these themes were analyzed for types and variations of voice and text used by the key informants. One of the main arguments highlighted in the discussion proposes a pair of self-evaluation tools for professors to use for quality improvement of blended learning course design.

In Chapter 9, Gale Parchoma and her collaborators report the results of a two-year virtual ethnographic inquiry into links among designed voice- and text-based tasks in an online graduate research course, traces of students’ aspirations for embodiment, and evidence of engagement. The research team used van Manen’s (1997) four-dimensional framework (corporeality, spatiality, temporality, and relationality) to examine evidence of aspirations for embodiment in an online learning context. Across these dimensions, student-participants reported desires to be perceived as competent members of a learning community. Stolz’s (2015) tri-dimensional (cognitive, emotional, and practical) perspective on engagement informed the data analysis. The findings indicated that, where the course designers had intended purposes for sequenced cycles of formal asynchronous text-based interactions, learner-participants had varied levels of awareness of differences among those purposes. Individual preferences for and ways of engaging in communications via voice and/or text strongly influenced when, where, and how learner-participants engaged in the course. Although awareness of how the course design was intended to support engagement varied, it did not appear to detract from student engagement.

Jennifer Lock and Michael Power’s concluding chapter provides an overview of the major ideas, concerns, and issues arising from the previous chapters. Lock and Power highlight the implications for practice and set out pathways for future research.

This volume of perspectives on blended and online teaching and learning practices in both French- and English-language Canadian dual-mode universities provides openings for future national and international conversations, critiques, and collaborations among researchers, students, and administrators who will forge tomorrow’s technology-enhanced learning environments.

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