RSS Feed (xml)
Interaction in Online Education
Recently, online education has been developed quickly in many parts of the world. For instance, there are 67 universities obtained licenses to provide online courses in China since 1998 (Niu and Xu, 26). In fact, online education is an alternative way of teaching and learning delivered by We-based and Internet-based technology. There are many terms for online education. Some of them are: virtual education, Internet-based education and Web-based education. Scholars classified online education into three types. One is synchronized online education including live-broadcast teaching, online course material, discussion and tutoring. Another one is for self-study which includes the features of synchronized online education except live-broadcasting teaching. (Huang and Luo, 39) The last one consists of online course material, Video on demand, discussion and tutoring (Su and Cheng 2002). Nevertheless, the purpose of the above teaching methods is the same. That is teachers and students communicating with each other through a computer network even though they are separated in different locations. Teachers can distribute their course materials and answer student’s questions in the network. On the other hand, students can view streaming auto, video class lecture as well as participate in discussion boards and chat rooms with other students. Both parties are impressed by the capability to interact and share information electronically. Interaction serves as the basis of learning. Liaw and Huang (2000) even claim that “the more interactions that occur between learners and instructors or among learner, the more learners are able to learn and develop knowledge through self-discovery and personal insight”. In this research paper, Open University of Hong Kong is taken as example for revealing the level of interaction in online education. It will further discuss the reason for such level of interaction and provide suggestion to improve the online education of Hong Kong.
It is essential to understand the situation of online education in Hong Kong before discussing the level of interaction. Companies and schools work together to provide e-meetings, e-courses and videos to the students in the foreign nations. However, students and teachers in Hong Kong lack the chance of experiencing this new teaching method. The tele-interaction is often limited to Windows Messenger, ICQ, 3G mobile and so on. Although Hong Kong has several educational reforms recently such as the 3-3-4 reform and changes in public examination, they are still exam-oriented and continue the traditional way of teaching, face to face method. Besides, the social foundation of online education in Hong Kong is weak. People still have doubts about the recognition of online degree and diploma in the working environment. The Hong Kong Education Web conducted the “Survey on Online Learning 2001” to study the local learning market. There were only one-tenth of the respondents participating in online courses. 9% of these online learners preferred pure Web-based education. 72% of them favored the combination of traditional education and online learning. As a result, Hong Kong educational institutions seldom operate synchronized online education. They prefer the combination of online learning and face-to-face teaching.
Open University of Hong Kong is taken as example to examine the online learning environment in Hong Kong. It is the first institution providing online learning programs. They establishes the WebCT system to provide an interactive online learning environment (OLE) rather than just in-class teaching. Students can find the learning materials such as printed study units, supplementary readings, cases studies and assignment questions in WebCT. Besides, there are interactive tools composed of chat room, discussion board, email and whiteboard for students and teachers to exchange idea. The Multi-media column includes videos and computer software. Students are free to decide the extent of using WebCT. In fact, Open University of Hong Kong operates online education for self-study. Apart from this Web-based system, students have to attend face-to-face tutorials in the evenings or at weekends. Both online education and traditional education enrich students’ knowledge and provide more opportunities for teachers and students to communicate with each other.
However, students do not participate in the online education actively. The main reason is time constraint (Fung, 143). Since majority of the students in Open University of Hong Kong is the working adults, they are busy at works. Even they have spare time, they would like to spend time on reading rather than participating in the OLE discussion board. This may be contributed to the perception that the messages in the discussion board are not useful for their studies. Besides, students are uncomfortable to raise questions in the OLE discussion board (Fung, 143). They are doubt about whether their messages are read or have any errors. They feel a lack of social support in the online world. Hence, there is a greater chance for them to withdraw from online discussion. In addition, most students are more anxious about the mark in the course than the participation in learning. Since teachers and tutors will not count the participation in OLE, some students will not excess to the WebCT so often. They will pay more attention to the assignments and examinations which the marks will be counted in the exam (Shin, 142). Students are in lack of enthusiasm for sharing their ideas and helping each other in online learning environment.
All of the above reasons result in low interaction in online learning. According to the report by Yvonne Y. H. Fung (2004), student’s level of participation in online discussion was low. He had chosen the course, E817 ‘Learning, curriculum and assessment’, for analyzing the interaction patterns of online learning in Open University of Hong Kong. The course coordinator and tutors did not require students to have online group work so as to encourage students to have collaborative learning self-consciously. Nonetheless, they posted open questions on the OLE discussion board. Among the 60 students in this course, only 30% of them posted messages concerned with academic, building relations, support, appreciation, administrative and technical issues. 43% of their messages either did not have response nor had only one student responded and then the conversation was ended. There was only 7% of the messages received multiple responses and students would read these messages again. Consequently, the interaction between the students and teachers as well as interaction among the students in the online learning environment was low.
There are several ways to increase the interaction and participation in online education. Collaboration is one of the methods. The course materials are mostly provided by the course instructors and sometimes uploaded by the students. The online courses will be more attractive by inviting special guests and experts to join the discussion boards and answering student’s questions. There are a lot of advantages in using this approach. In preparing these courses, the instructors contact the experts to see if they are interested in the topic. If they agree, both parties can arrange a time for a special discussion forum and exchange ideas about the course syllabus. Experts can also help to provide extra course materials to the students. This can further improve the online learning programs. After arranging the time, course instructors promote this special discussion forum to the students through e-mails and provide them the background of the guests. Not only the students can benefit in the online discussion by obtaining expertise advices and widening their horizons, but more importantly, the educational institutions can establish connection to other organizations. Collaboration can also be held with the same institution. Two or more faculties can develop a course. For example, faculties of Marketing and Culture Studies can work together to develop a course concerning the media culture. This new course can be opened to both business and culture studies students. It also should be credit-bearing. Hence, the business students or culture students will not only obtain information restricted to their major programs only. They can interact with other faculty’s students. Online education cannot be limited to providing the structured course materials to the students. It also needs to provide students with inspiration and stimulation from the experts and different faculty’s students.
Besides collaboration, basic writing and communication skills are also important in online learning. As mentioned above, some students feel uncomfortable in posing messages in the OLE discussion board because of language ability. They usually have problems in expressing their words in proper verbs and grammars to write and respond to the email, messages in discussion boards and presentation. Course instructors can also upload some exercises of writing and communication skills online so students will have more confidence in the online environment. It will also increase the motivation of students in online participation. Another communication skill which the online learners need to obtain is “netiquette”. This skill helps learners to interact with the others more effectively. Some guidelines are suggested by Greg Kearsley. Since people do not like reading long messages in the discussion board, it is necessary to keep the messages short. Moreover, online messages in the discussion board do not carry the tone of voice and facial expression. Avoiding using capital letters extensively and sarcasm in messages together with formulating online messages carefully can prevent misunderstanding and online argument. The context of message will be clearer by summarizing what the students are responding to into the first sentence. It is also nice to give the URL to readers for reference when referring to a website. (Kearsley, 69). Good writing and communication skills can help students to expressing their ideas conveniently and getting their messages to be responded by the others.
The third way to improve the level of interaction in online education is formal assessment on online participation. Online discussion can be made compulsory in courses with online support. Teachers can record all the student responses and input these data into course delivery system. These responses include messages in discussion boards or e-mails. When teachers assess students’ performance, they can take students’ online participation into consideration. They are also required to disclose the percentage of online participation in the course outline. Consequently, the final grade of a course will be based on online contribution, assignments and examinations. In addition, teachers can organize online group works for the students. For instance, students are divided into groups and each group has to design a blog. They have to put the links of their blogs into the online learning system. They also need to look at the other works and give comments to each other. On the other hand, teachers give feedback and suggestion to their works. Then, each group has to modify their blogs according to the comments and suggestion by other groups and course instructors. Since online performance is taken into consideration for the final grade, students will participate more enthusiastically in collaborative online discussion which would then become an integral part of their learning.
The last way to improve the level of interaction is course design. It is essential to provide the most suitable means of teaching in online education programs so students can absorb the ideas easily. Douglas McCabe (2000) divides the nature of courses into two types: content-oriented (e.g. Physics, Medicine, and Engineering) and performance-oriented (e.g. performance arts and fashion design). For the content-orientated courses, students are required to remember facts, formulas, calculating and analyzing the data. Although there is a technical problem in mathematical symbols, course instructors can create graphic images to represent these symbols or use specialized web software to solve this problem. There are also right or wrong answers in the questions. Thus, these courses involve the fewest technical problems in using Web-based education. Teachers can reply more on the interactive tools to demonstrate the theories and design more online assignments. For performance-oriented subjects, Douglas McCabe (2000) regards these courses as expressive. Students perform their action, look and design in front of the audience. Hence, the assessment of theses courses should be based on personal performance in face-to-face tutorials. It is better for the lecturers to conduct these courses in small groups rather than using the online system to deliver the abstractive ideas. Effective course design paves the way for high interaction in online courses.
Online education is a new way of teaching and learning conducted in Hong Kong in recent years. Its social foundation is still weak. Consequently, Hong Kong students prefer to combine the traditional education together with online education. Open University of Hong Kong provides a good example to examine the online education situation in Hong Kong. Its online education is for self-study and supplemented by face-to-face tutorials. Nevertheless, their students participate in the online learning environment inactively mainly due to the time availably, perception in online learning as well as enquiries about the discussion boards. All these led to a low interaction among the students, course instructors and tutors. Collaboration, Improvement in writing and communication skills, formal assessment in online performance and effective course design can improve the level of interaction and participation in online classes.
Bibliography
Fung, Y H. “Collaborative online learning: interaction patterns and limiting factors.” Open Learning (June 2004): 135 – 149.
Huan, R K and Luo, X C. “Practice and thinking distance education in launch pilot.” Distance Education in China (Sept. 2001): 38 – 42.
Kearsley, Greg. Online education: Learning and Teaching in Cyberspce: Belmont, CA : Wadsworth Thomson Learning (2000)
Liaw, SS and Huang, H M. “Enhancing interactivity in Web-based instruction: a review of the literature.” Educational Technology. (2000): 41 – 45.
McCabe, Douglas. “Designing for Web Teaching.” Teaching Effectively in Higher Education in Hong Kong (2000), 12 Dec. 2007 <>
Niu, J and Xu,Y M. “Online learning and distance learners” in David Murphy, Namin Shin and Weiyuan Zhang (ed.). Advanced Online Learning in Asia. Hong Kong: Open University of Hong Kong Press, 2002. 26 – 38.
Shin Namin. “Online pedagogy: voices from students and teachers.” in David Murphy, Namin Shin and Weiyuan Zhang (ed.). Advanced Online Learning in Asia. Hong Kong: Open University of Hong Kong Press, 2002. 133 – 154.
Su, X B and Cheng, J. “Cyberculture and the development of online education” in David Murphy, Namin Shin and Weiyuan Zhang (ed.). Advanced Online Learning in Asia. Hong Kong: Open University of Hong Kong Press, 2002. 155 – 165.
“Survey Shows Infinite Rooms For Online Learning as Rising Consciousness of Hong Kong People in Life-long Learning.” Hong Kong Education Web (2001). 9 Dec.2007 < fclang="ENG">
