Internet Learning Volume 3, Number 2, Fall 2014 | Page 109

Internet Learning
We have described above some major
themes and opportunities to guide our—
and others’—future research. In summary,
we believe the ability to answer these questions
may have a transformational impact
on institutions’ fundamental approaches to
teaching and learning. For example:
• Learning to measure and value individual
patterns of behavior in the
context of discussion and collaborative
activities in online courses allows
for more holistic assessment of
student performance and potentially
more proactive and actionable interventions
to identify and assist at-risk
students.
• Learning to identify, measure, and
value conversation patterns in the
context of discussion and collaborative
activities in online courses, will
assist in the development of new
pedagogies, course and activity management
strategies, and technologies
aimed at increasing the productivity
and positive impact of these activities
in online courses.
• Learning to visualize topic spread
and conversation swell around particular
topic areas, and to evaluate
them against structured concept
graphs, will assist in the development
of program, course, and activity design,
adaptively matching students
with helpful content, promoting lifelong
learning behaviors, and more.
At the same time, we must be conscious
of the ramifications of this work, and
remain engaged with concerns and constraints
around the use and stewardship of
this kind of data:
• Concerns that models and typologies
may originate in this kind of research
and spur action on measures of student
performance that are not yet
well understood and that may change
across contexts and across time.
• Concerns over reporting (to students,
faculty, administrators, and systems)
and the creation of records of finegrained
student performance that
persist over time, as well as a multitude
of other ethics and data privacy
issues.
• Recognition that findings will precede
mechanisms for implementation, and
a commitment to supporting teacher
educators, faculty and instructional
designers in effectively and responsibly
adopting new methods.
• Considering to what extent, when
students become co-creators of
course content, there should be oversight/monitoring/policing
of the flow
of information to assure that it is
helping students rather than confusing
or overwhelming them.
We hope this report will contribute
to a responsible evolution of online and
blended teaching and learning, through an
increased awareness and understanding of
the social spaces in which these increasingly
occur.
References
Huff, D. and Geis, I. (1954) How To Lie With
Statistics. London: Penguin Group.
The New Media Consortium (2014). NMC
horizon report: 2014 higher education edition.
Austin, TX: Johnson, L., Adams Becker,
S., Estrada, V., and A. Freeman.
Page, Lawrence and Brin, Sergey and Motwani,
Rajeev and Winograd, Terry (1999).
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