3. PARTICIPATORY AND COLLABORATIVE LEARNING WITH TELD
Participatory and Collaborative Learning can be understood from a number of viewpoints. Firstly, the students must collaborate with the teacher(s) to establish their own learning objectives and plans of progress. The student is responsible for directing his or her own learning goals, methods and progress. Secondly, students must participate in the analysis of the case study. During this process, students generate questions that need to be investigated and synthesize their answers to the discussion questions. Thirdly, students must work together on issues that are given by the tutors or generated by the students themselves. Individual members must participate in such teamwork.
Collaborative and participatory learning are reinforced through various instruments. Firstly, formal lectures are often unavoidable because of limited resources. The class size is usually large. It is therefore not too efficient to conduct too many discussions in this type of class. Nevertheless, TELD does provide some discussion questions that the teacher may wish to discuss during the formal lecture. Secondly, workshops and seminars in small groups are organized for either tutorials or the mini-project. This is the time when students are expected to collaborate and participate intensively within the team or group. TELD provides a number of facilities to facilitate group activities, e.g. for planning the learning activities, for posting questions in the project bullet board, and for submitting project progress reports. Thirdly, participation from individual students is required through formative assessment (homework questions) after each formal lecture. Finally, presentation is often used to groups to discuss their achievements in the project. The presentation is given jointly by the group and individual members must prepare their own materials to be presented.
This section focuses on the following four categories of TELD facilities for supporting collaborative and participatory learning:
· Participate in formative assessments as homework assigned after each lecture. Tutors’ comments and marks can also be checked and observed.
· Carry out summative assessments as a mini-project and submit the progress and final project reports online.
· Prepare learning schedule of the mini-project and check the progress.
· Organize group meetings and prepare minutes of meetings.
Figure 3 Online facilities for students to submitting answers to discussion questions.
3.1 Use TELD to Answer Homework Questions
The purpose of formative assessment is mainly for the students to obtain timely feedbacks from the course tutors on specific topics / issues. Marks allocated to formative assessments are therefore nominal and minimum. TELD treats formative assessments as homework after formal lectures to force/encourage students to participate in the learning process. The assessment is individual in TELD. A set of questions is attached to a topic or an example. The tutors specify the deadlines and students must answer them before the deadlines. Students submit their answers online to the TELD database. The course tutors will mark them and make comments online. Both the students and tutors must login TELD before they can answer questions and mark the answers.
Figure 3 shows the sample screens of homework questions and online answering facilities. The entire process is straightforward. The following activities are involved:
· Student login and choose a theme/topic to get the list of associated homework questions.
· Choose a question by simply clicking on the question description. An answer book (page) is then provided.
· Type the answer in the corresponding text box and submit the answer to the TELD database.
· The student needs to indicate if the answer is completed. If completed, the answer will be available for tutors to mark. If not, the student may continue to answer the question at a later session.
· The tutor login TELD and marks the answers and makes comments. (See previous section about the marking process in TELD).
· The tutor also needs to indicate if the marking is final or to be continued. Once the marking is final, the mark and comment will be available to the student to reflect. If not, the tutor needs to complete the marking at a later session.
· The student reflects on the theme/topic by looking at the answers, marks and comments.
3.2 Use TELD to Upload Exercise Chapters for Mini-Project
As opposed to Formative Assessments which are usually individual, Summative Assessments are mainly for the “assessment” purpose. That is, marks allocated to these assessments constitute significant proportions of the overall mark. For some courses such as Mechanics of Solids, Summative Assessments consist of a series of independent exercises. For some courses such as Product Design and Development, a mini-project is usually used. A mini-project in turn consists of a number of work packages which are actually treated as exercises in TELD. In this sense, a mini-project is a series of logically related exercises. TELD treats both forms of Summative Assessments in the same way. Individual exercises are conducted and reports are submitted online separately as basic units. They are then put together to form a report based on which the tutors allocate marks.
In TELD, students/groups of students are able to submit their answers to exercises online using the facilities shown in Figure 4. As explained previously, an exercise has the exactly same structure in the backend TELD database as that of the teaching example. Therefore, the process of submitting an exercise is very similar to the process for the tutor to prepare lecture notes and specify exercises (Huang et al, 2000b). However, the front-end user interface is different between that used by the tutors and that used by the students.
At present, TELD does not support HTML format of exercise reports/chapters. Instead, students are able to prepare their reports in original MS Word or MS Powerpoint formats. These reports will be uploaded into the TELD database and become available for the tutors to mark.
TELD does not impose any structure for preparing exercise chapters/reports. Students are free to adopt their own ways of organizing the reports/chapters. If HTML format is to be allowed and supported in TELD, it is intended and perhaps necessary for TELD to provide a template report and chapter so that students can customize to suit their special needs while a reference structure is adopted. Such template would include some items in the following:
3.3 Use TELD to Prepare Mini-Project Plan
As mentioned in the preceding section, the mini-project consists of a series of exercises. When the tutor defines the mini-project, he or she prepares a master project plan for students’ (groups’) reference only. This plan generally defines the start and due dates of individual exercises in the mini-project, in addition to the brief job specification. The groups must produce a slightly more detailed plan for the mini-project by specifying who is responsible for which exercise(s), what is the start and due date for each exercise, etc. The group’s project plan may and should deviate from the tutor’s reference plan, as long as the final due date is met.
Figure 4 shows the sample screen of mini-project plan editor. As can be seen from the figure, the editor includes two main parts. The top part is a list of work packages (exercises) already included in the project. The lower part is a form for viewing, entering and modifying exercise definition information. The group is able to add new exercises or modifying an existing exercise. The process of both addition and modification is straightforward and almost self-explanatory by the user interface of the editor.
PARTICIPATORY AND COLLABORATIVE LEARNING WITH TELD C
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