Abstract
Thirteen students in a graduate-level course on Historical and Policy Perspectives in Higher Education held face-to-face and online discussions on five controversial topics: Diversity, Academic Freedom, Political Tolerance, Affirmative Action, and Gender. Students read materials on each topic and generated questions for discussion that were categorized by Bloom’s taxonomy so that the level of questions in the two discussion settings would be closely parallel. Upon completion of each discussion, they answered questions that addressed depth and length of the discussion, ability to remember, and a self-assessment of how the student learned. Students’ assessments show a consistent preference for the face-to-face discussion but a small number of students preferred the online setting. However, what is perhaps more interesting is a minority of approximately one-third of the students who perceived no difference betweenthe settings, or that the two settings were perhaps complementary.
Highlights
Within the past year, there has been increased interest in defining and studying the phenomenon of blended learning
This research focuses on a narrow comparison of faceto-face and online discussions that have been designed to be closely similar in topic and level of “triggering questions” [7]
This research cannot be definitive, but it is suggestive of a number of interesting insights into how these students perceived face-to-face and online discussions in a blended learning context
Summary
There has been increased interest in defining and studying the phenomenon of blended learning. Sloan-C has created a web site on blended learning (http://www.blendedteaching.org/) and published a compilation of research studies [1] (which includes an intriguing theoretical approach [2] for future research), and there have been other books and articles [3, 4, 5] on how to blend online and traditional methods appropriately and what may be the advantages and disadvantages of the format [6] This interest is overdue, and indicates an interest on the part of faculty and researchers to identify what blended learning is and how to describe it, but more importantly, to determine how faculty can plan the face-to-face and online instructional components so that each works best for student learning. This was done to ensure that the study could be a more direct comparison of the two settings rather than inadvertently including too many variables that cannot be controlled or isolated such as when courses or programs are compared
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