Just finalising a paper for Moodle Moot this year and looking at what an academic does in their site, adding features adopted over time, then adding use of those features by staff and students to see if this creates involvement/engagement. While the paper is only looking at the old LMS, as CQUniversity has only (Term 1 2010) finalised its move to Moodle, the research is guiding my thinking in the move. It will be interesting, for instance, to replicate the study using Moodle, doing a comparison to Blackboard to see if there are any glaring differences in the data. From the synopsis – Learning Management Systems (LMS) are important tools in the university context. LMS data, whatever LMS a specific university uses, can potentially be used to inform aspects of academic practice to engage students by utilising some common features of the LMS in a way that supports student engagement. Educational research in this study focussed on how an academic interacts with the LMS, how the LMS is used by students, and how these interactions create involvement. Staff interaction with students seems to be one of the key factors in student engagement. This study uses an academic’s approach to teaching + feature adoption + use as an indicator of involvement.
I think this is interesting as it will start to fill in some of the gaps between what an academic states that they do in the LMS, their conception of teaching, and what they actually do, their approach to teaching. While there may be dissonance between what they say they do, and what they actually do, this has to be linked to involvement and engagement. Feature adoption changes over time and some academics have a discussion forum, but they do not use it to contact students then the forum is not an engaged space. Col in this blog post stated, “The participation rate is higher and failure rate is 5% lower for courses where the teaching staff participated in course discussion forums.” This is an important point, if the academic does not approach teaching, adopt features, and get both staff and students using those features then engagement will not happen.
Look at the following figure (Figure 1) detailing academic postings to forums. Why would/should students get engaged?
Figure 1: Course Coordinators posting to forums
Filed under: Indicators Project, self-reflection
