USING A BLENDED LEARNING APPROACH TO BRIDGE THE GAP
BETWEEN THE WORLD OF INDIVIDUALIZED EDUCATION AND
THAT OF COLLABORATIVE WORK
R. Fernández-Flores1, B. Hernández-Morales2
Dirección General de Cómputo y Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación de la
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Cd. Universitaria, México, D.F.04510 (MEXICO)
2
Depto. de Ingeniería Metalúrgica, Facultad de Química, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
México, Cd. Universitaria, México, D.F.04510 (MEXICO)
1
Abstract
The professional world is not a world of isolated individuals but it is constituted by people who
communicate and collaborate in solving problems. In fact, collaborative work is one of the skills
requested by employers and, therefore, one that the use of ICT in the classroom must develop.
This paper describes how using Moodle tools such as "forum" and "wiki", together with learning
objects, helps achieving collaborative learning. The methodology was applied in an Engineering
course that is taught based on a problem-solving strategy. A group of about 30 students was
subdivided into four teams. For each of the four teams, a forum and a wiki were created within
Moodle. Through the wiki, students built a web page with the steps they took to solve a given
problem, including sub-tasks distribution. That allowed them to navigate from one topic to another in a
nonlinear way, introduce graphic files, etc. On the other hand, forums were used to document the
information exchange that occurred while solving a problem. This is the same information that
normally flows clandestinely while solving traditional individual exams.
The final grade was obtained by weighting the work documented in the wiki and the forum with other
elements such as class participation and exams. The advantage with this approach is that the final
grade does not depend on the exams alone but also on the collaborative work done throughout the
course.
This paper shows the results obtained during a full term as well as an initial assessment of the
student’s opinion about this methodology.
Keywords: Collaborative work, LMS, Blended learning, ICT in the classroom.
1
INTRODUCTION
When a course starts, it seems that teachers and students have different purposes. Students attend
classes mainly to pass the course while the teacher aims at getting the students to learn material that,
to him/her, is very interesting. Thus, this work is inspired by the desire to make compatible both
purposes: that students pass the course and ... learn. To achieve both goals, one needs to rethink
how learning is acquired throughout the course and the way the student work it is graded.
The traditional teaching practice, impractical and focused on the individual and not on teamwork, is
also changing with the use of Information Technology and Communication (ICT) [[1] Stenseth (1999),
[2] Murchú D (2005)]. On the other hand, the most common procedure to assess learning has been
through the use of traditional tests that attempt to measure what the student has learned during a
course without considering collaborative work. This practice is obsolete because the students have
access, through their mobile devices, to a large amount of information on the network and there is no
reason to restrain them from using it even during exams.
Moreover, during a test, students can communicate with other students in the classroom as well as
through text messaging with other students outside it, which faces teachers with the dilemma of either
becoming a students' custodian during exams or allowing free exchange of information among them.
This second possibility, much closer to the conditions in which professional work develops, requires a
reformulation of how to assess and work in class.
In this paper we share an attempt to rethink the methodology of team work using ICT. In particular
Forum and Wiki tools from Moodle were used with the goal of encouraging and organizing
collaborative work while improving learning assessment, such that the final grade did not depend on
the exams alone but also on collaborative work the student did throughout the course.
2
METHODOLOGY
2.1
The course
The experience described below was conducted with a group of 19 students that enrolled in the Heat
Transfer course which is one of the courses required for the undergraduate degree on Metallurgical
Chemical Engineering at “Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México” (UNAM). The course, taught in
two sessions per week during 16 weeks, belongs to the second year of the curriculum. One of the
weekly sessions is devoted to teach the course’s theory and the other to apply the theory to solve
problems. Theoretical sessions were held in a conventional classroom, while practical work was
conducted in a computer laboratory. A similar experience, conducted with another group in previous
years, has been described elsewhere. [[3] Fernandez-Flores (2015)].
2.2
Students
Although the course is planned for students belonging to the same class, actually not all students have
the same background when the course starts. Some of the students who participated in the
experience described here enrolled in the course for the first time, others did it for the second time and
the remainder attended the sessions to prepare for a supplemental examination.
The students did not necessarily enroll in common courses apart of Heat Transfer, live in different
parts of the city and meet each other only in the classroom, on school days. Students had different
schedules and limited time to meet outside the classroom. All these elements make the formation of
teams difficult.
Another aspect to consider when rethinking the teaching methodology is that of the different technical
skills and ICT skills that students have. In the case of this experience, they already knew how to work
with word processors and spreadsheets, but not with languages such as HTML.
2.3
Teams
To integrate the teams, the professor initially asked all students who wanted to volunteer as a team
leader. Since only one student volunteered, the leaders of the three remaining teams were selected by
the teacher. The teams then then formed around those leaders depending only on how close they sat
that day with respect to each leader.
The initial team integration had as main goal that teams could start working right away; the teams
were not forced to maintain their initial structure. That was particularly true because the students had,
at first, little clarity about the roles each one would play within the team as they were not used to do
team work.
Once students knew each other through the work they were doing, the teams were reorganized
among themselves; in one case a team changed its leader.
2.4
Blended Learning
The course was taught with a blended learning methodology. A Learning Management System
(LMS), Moodle, was used to manage the exchange of learning materials with the students as well as
the reports they generated. The Heat Transfer course created in the LMS was divided into 16 weeks.
For each one of them, learning materials were uploaded so the students could work with them.
Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, used to teach theoretical sessions, were uploaded in the
corresponding week so that students had access to them at all times after class.
Learning activities were prepared for each of the application sessions. Access to those activities
through the LMS was allowed for each student only if he/she had previously answered a quiz. The
purpose of this requirement was to standardize the level of theoretical knowledge of each of the team
members before they started working together, given that attendance to the class in which theoretical
foundations were explained was not mandatory.
For each of the four teams a Forum and a Wiki were created in the LMS, using native tools in Moodle.
Access to wikis and forums was allowed only during the time when students were in the computer
laboratory. This requisite was set to encourage students to finish the work in the time planned for the
activity.
2.5
Application sessions
The work during the application sessions was based on answering a learning activities guide.
To do so, a series of simulators, built with Mathematica, which we have already described
elsewhere [[4] Hernández-Morales et al. (2015)] were available for the students. The day of
the application session, students worked in the computer laboratory, where they accessed the
guide through the LMS.
The team leader created a new page in the wiki for that day's session and started a new
discussion in the team's forum to organize the work. Typically, what happened was that some
time passed, during which students read the activities they had to perform, and then began to
organize themselves, distributing the workload. The degree of the leader’s involvement
regarding this step varied from team to team.
2.5.1 Forums
Communication among students from a given team almost always occurred through the
forum, but it was difficult to avoid oral communication among themselves.
Fig. 1 shows an example of the exchanges among team members in one of the forums (Team
3). In each of the 10 lines shown there are: 1) the topic, 2) the name of the person that
initiated the discussion (usually the team leader), 3) the number of replies for the particular
topic, and 4) the time and date of the last reply. In this case one can see that besides the team's
leader also the teacher (“Rafael Fernandez”, topic No. 5) and other student of the same team
started discussion topics at the forum.
Figure 1. Example of the work developed in the forum by Team 3.
The following is an example (translated from the original in Spanish) of the exchange held between
students in the forums. It is taken from the discussion in the topic “Radiation” during an application
session:
Student One: “Hey I have a little trouble understanding the problem, as I understand it I get the
temperature of the sun from its peak wavelength with Wien's Displacement Law and then I have to
input that data in the simulator to see how does the graph behave, is it not?
Team Leader: “Yes, compare with the graph of the slide 30 of the presentation. The information we
need is included in slides 7 and 8. I think the last paragraph is only about making the calculation as he
did it in class, it does NOT come to the distribution function between two limits of the electromagnetic
spectrum”.
2. 5. 2 Wikis.
Once the problems in the guide had been solved by the team, they had to publish the solution on a
website created collectively (wiki). It is a single website for each team, with different sections, one for
each week. Fig.2 shows as an example, a portion of the page created by one of the teams to work on
the topic “heat transfer under un-steady state conditions”.
Figure 2. Screenshot of Team 2’s wiki, showing the results obtained when using a simulator to solve
the activity assigned.
2.6
Grading
The student grade was obtained considering their collaborative and individual participation in the course
activities as well as the grade obtained in exams during the term. The percentage of the final grade
given to each element of the course and the split between collaborative and individual work is presented
in Table 1. It can be appreciated that the exams account for only 24 % of the final grade and that
collaborative work represents 50 % of the final grade.
Table 1. Weight of different course elements for the final grade.
Item
Collaborative work
Individual work
Total
Class participation
6
6
Quiz
10
10
Application sessions
20
20
Exams
24
24
Wiki (Individual)
10
10
Wiki (Collaborative)
30
Total
50
30
50
100
The grade for student participation in the wiki includes both collaborative and individual work. The grade
for the collaborative work done on the wiki was determined by the teacher after analyzing the data in
the wiki and was the same for all members of a given team. The grade for the individual work within
each team was assigned by the team leader; he/she not only reported the grade but also had to explain
why did he/she assigned that grade. To help them assigning this grade, a guide was developed and
handed to team leaders.
As seen in Table 1, the grade given by the teacher represents 30% of the final grade, while the grade
given by the team leader accounts for another 10%; thus, the work done on the wiki represents 40% of
the total score for each student.
The difference between the application sessions done each week and partial tests is their coverage.
The partial tests covers not only a single subject, studied the previous class, but all the subjects of the
syllabus unit being evaluated. Each partial exam has a weight of 8% of the final grade and, therefore,
collectively contribute 24% of the total score.
In addition to the 10% that the leader´s evaluation of wiki contributes to the final grade of each student,
other factors contribute to the grade of individual activity, such as student participation in the classroom
during the theoretical sessions, the answer to the quiz they ought to complete to be allowed to participate
in the application session, and their participation with their teams in answering the guide.
3
RESULTS
3.1
Leadership
The first result of the collaborative work, was the change of leadership. Three of the initial four leaders
held their position but one of the leaders, who had been selected by the professor, was "replaced". The
change did not happen formally, but it did occur during the team’s work. The organization and distribution
of tasks were done by another team member. The initial leaderships were kept or modified based on
the commitment shown by the leader.
3.2
Collaborative work?
Most of the "collaborative" work done the firsts weeks was organized at first, in a scheme in which each
student in a team was in charge of some of the tasks and then included the result into a work signed by
all the members. Collaborative work was rather a fragmented one.
The teacher's insistence, that the results uploaded to the wiki must be previously analyzed in group
discussions within the forums, slowly made the work more and more truly collaborative.
3.3
Wikis and Forums
In analyzing the forums and wikis from different teams, it appears that students felt more comfortable
working with the former than with the latter.
Students used the forums to distribute tasks, discuss ideas for solving problems and analyze solutions,
while wikis were basically used as a destination in which to publish the results of the work, but not as a
tool for collective work.
Wiki’s advantages, such as the easy with which one can include comments, compare versions, upload
images and multimedia files, and facilitate navigation, were underused.
3.4
Application sessions and exams
The weekly application sessions and the three exams were essentially the same type of activities;
however, interest in the exams was greater, as measured by the number of interactions in the forums.
3.5
Students opinion
During each week of the course a survey on educational materials and their relevance to the course
objectives were included in the LMS. In each survey, besides multiple choice questions, an open
response question was also included. In Fig. 3, an histogram showing the relevance of the learning
materials towards achieving a particular objective (in this example, related to “heat conduction under
unsteady-state conditions”) is shown. More than 66 % of the students thought that the materials
accounted for 71 % or more of their success in achieving the particular objective. Similar results were
obtained for other topics.
Figure 3. Example of student responses to a typical weekly survey.
Some examples of the student’s response to the open question in the survey are given in Fig.4. Given
that it is an open question, the responses varied:





“Thank you !!!”
Mentioning that one student had difficulties understanding the problem statement
“The problems helped understanding concepts”
Technical comments drawn from solving a problem
Stating that the videos helped understanding the system’s response.
Figure 4. Example of student responses to a typical open question.
4
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
While early results are encouraging, it is obvious that there are many areas of opportunity to improve
the learning experience. Clearly, there is a need to better exploit the potential of the wiki tool. The
teacher, from the beginning of the course, must explain clearly how a website is built with the
methodology of a wiki and all its advantages.
The main reason why the "collaborative" work became fragmented work was the need for students to
complete the activity under a time constraint. The problems used in the application sessions were -with
little adaptation- the same we have had used for individual work, in the past. It is necessary to develop
ad hoc exercises designed to encourage collaborative work.
REFERENCES
[1]
Stenseth B. (1999) Pedagogy and technology
http://www.ia.hiof.no/~borres/pedtech/article/teacher.html Last retrieved on May 9, 2016
[2]
Murchú D (2005) New Teacher and Student Roles in the Technology-Supported, Language
Classroom. http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Feb_05/article01.htm. Last retrieved on May 9, 2016
[3]
Fernandez-Flores, R Hernández-Morales (2015) Uso de las TIC en el Salón de Clase: la
Experiencia del Desarrollo y Uso de Materiales Educativos en un Curso de Transporte de
Energía. Memorias del Encuentro Universitario de mejores prácticas de uso de TIC en la
educación #educatic2015: Ciencias Físico-Matemáticas y de las Ingenierías
[4]
Hernández-Morales B, Fernández-Flores R & Beltrán-Fragoso B. ( 2015) USING
COMPUTATIONAL SIMULATIONS TO CLARIFY BASIC CONCEPTS IN HEAT AND MASS
TRANSFER AT THE UNDERGRADUATE LEVEL.