Internet Learning Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 2012 | Page 22

Assessing Virtual Students’ Quiz Performance in Web Mediated Synchronous Instruction 21
technically proficient instructor and students who place a high value on convenient access, a
crucial motivation for choosing distance education (for example, see Wyatt, 2005).
The single-course research design requires justification, since this design has been
deemphasized during the last 15 years of distance education studies in favor of multi-course
studies (Arbaugh et al., 2010, p. 46). The author’s public budgeting course had attributes,
addressed below, that lent itself to an emphasis on teaching presence. Expansion of the study to
include other instructors, however, would have contributed to more generalizable findings. The
primary reason for an exclusive focus on my course was that the software solution was
unavailable to others, because the specially licensed platform was external to the university’s
instructional technology plant and available initially through an individual instructor license.
The cost of this software and accompanying service was funded by a one-time grant.1
The stand-alone technology platform was integral to the research, as well as to the
hardware/software trial, which was the genesis for the research. The idea of evaluating a
modestly priced web-based broadcasting solution, which was viable for a small number of
instructors, even a single instructor, is consistent with the diffusion of innovation theory (Rogers,
2003), which suggests that early adopters usually lead general adoption of new technology by a
significant interval: the “S-shaped” pattern of adoption (p. 275). Relatively few universities
have the resources to provide universal web-conferencing infrastructure. Even for universities
where such an investment is possible, much of the infrastructure could be expected to be wasted
initially, given the necessity to build critical mass before the technology can achieve widespread
acceptance.
Another crucial reason for integrating web-based broadcasting into this traditional public
budgeting course was the dissemination of recorded lectures to students in an online section of
the same class. Although the resultant blending of face-to-face and online instruction is not the
main focus of this research, the goal of going beyond a text-based format for the online section
was an important rationale for experimenting with the webinar technology. Informal feedback
on the utility of recorded lectures is provided below, following the quantitative results.
Technical Solution
The core component of the technical solution was the proprietary software and service obtained
from Elluminate (currently Blackboard Collaborate) that provided “webinar” capability.
The other elements, which constituted a portable hardware solution (installed prior to
each class), did not add to the cost of the project: either being owned by the instructor or
furnished by the University’s Office of Technology Support. Even the most elaborate hardware
configuration used for this research could have been purchased for approximately $2,000.
Software consisted largely of Microsoft Office products, such as PowerPoint, used to populate
the “whiteboard” images—displayed for virtual and in-person attendees—around which lectures
were organized. Microsoft Excel underlay the computations and analysis for the applied financial
assignments, but seldom was employed in the salient portion of the lectures, which dealt with
contextual and political issues. Table 1 shows how the hardware used with Elluminate evolved.
The progression to successively more complex configurations over three semesters, before
reducing the hardware to a web camera and wireless keyboard/mouse for the last semester,
represented a largely unsuccessful attempt to capture class discussion in a manner audible to
virtual attendees.