The Study of a Campuswide Implementation of Blended Learning in Tel-Aviv University

Rafi Nachmias, Judith Ram, David Mioduser

he use of the Internet as an instructional tool in higher education is rapidly increasing. In the past decade, implementation of the new technologies in higher education has generated a rich variety of teaching configurations, from fully online courses to blended learning (American Federation of Teachers, 2001; Bonk, 2001; Bonk, Cummings, Hara, Fischler, & Lee, 2000; Collis & Moonen, 2001; Harasim, Hiltz, Teles, & Turoff, 1995; Mason, 2000; Mioduser & Nachmias, 2002). These developments challenge the 2, 500-year-old Socratic, face-to-face instructional mode, currently implemented in most college and uni­versities around the globe. However, alongside the enthusiasm and creativity typical to this process, essential questions regarding the learning quality and effectiveness of online courses emerge (American Federation of Teachers, 2000; Guri-Rosenblit, 2001; Phipps & Merisotis, 1999). In order to examine these issues, a comprehensive research study is currently being conducted to investi­gate the blended learning taking place in Tel-Aviv University's (TAU) academic courses. In this chapter, we briefly present the rationale of blended learning at TAU, along with excerpts of empirical data on some of the issues related to its implementation.

Virtual TAU

Background and Rationale of Virtual TAU

TAU is one of the largest research-oriented universities in Israel. Located in the center of the country, it serves some twenty-seven thousand students. These stu­dents are enrolled in about six thousand courses annually, which are taught by twenty-five hundred instructors in almost every academic discipline. The Virtual TAU project (http//: virtual. tau.ac.il) was launched in the 2000-2001 academic year in response to a government initiative to advance the implementation of learning technologies in the Israeli higher education system. The project aimed to initiate and stimulate a process by which more faculty members will gradually use the Internet to enrich pre­vailing learning processes and make instruction more efficient and flexible. The Web shell used by Virtual TAU is Highlearn, a multilingual (including Hebrew) Internet course management system developed by Britannica Knowledge Systems. Highlearn is similar to other Web-supported course systems (such as Blackboard and WebCT). It allows easy creation of an information base for course content and didactic activi­ties and supplies synchronous and asynchronous communication tools for the students and the instructor. In addition, it provides tools that assist the instructor in adminis­trating the course, such as course schedulers, test builders, and address books.

One of the fundamental principles of the project is that the instructors, most of them TAU faculty members, maintain full responsibility for their course Web sites. Their views of the objectives, syllabus, and instructional methods lead to the development and the implementation of the course. No predesigned pedagogical solution is imposed; rather, each instructor acts according to his or her own peda­gogical approach. Most of Virtual TAU's support center activities are aimed at em­powering the instructors, helping them in the realization of their pedagogical vision.

One major objective of the research project is to evaluate the learning poten­tial embedded in typical Web-supported courses and examine the conditions needed to realize this potential. The research framework of Virtual TAU (VT) consists of three levels of research and analysis. First is the macrolevel, which focuses on the assimilation process of the Internet into the campus instruction from the institutional point of view. Second is the mezzolevel, which focuses on the characteristics of teaching and learning processes emerging in Web-supported courses. Finally, there is the micmlevel, which is concerned with the characteristics and consequences of the actual use of Web features in the teaching and learning of specific courses. A detailed description of the research framework can be found in Nachmias (2002).

In this chapter, we address four major issues relating to the macro- and the mezzolevels derived from different studies over a period of four years (2000—2004): (1) the diffusion process of Web-supported instruction in TAU, (2) the pedagogi­cal configuration of course Web sites developed and used by instructors, (3) the use

The Handbook of Blended Learning

of course content by students, and (4) the use of asynchronous learning processes in blended learning courses.

Diffusion of Web-Supported Academic Instruction

The major question addressed in this section relates to how the diffusion process of Web-supported instruction in TAU developed over time. To examine this process for the academic years 2000-2004, we rely on the number of courses developed and used by faculty and students within VT.

Figure 27.1 shows the increase in the number of courses and lecturers using VT during the four years. The number of courses has grown about eight times from its number in the first year, up to almost three thousand courses. This rep­resents nearly 50 percent of the courses offered at TAU. At the same time, the number of lecturers using VT increased rapidly to over a thousand, which rep­resents about 40 percent of the lecturers in Tel-Aviv University.

In the first year of the implementation, each lecturer taught one or two courses using VT (an average of 1.5 courses per lecturer). In the fourth year, this ratio almost doubled to an average of 2.71 courses per lecturer. Such data indicate that lecturers who began implementing VT in one of their courses adopted its use in other courses as well. Consequendy the number of students who use VT increased as well. In the year 2003—2004, about twenty thousand out of twenty-seven thou­sand students were registered in the system. During 2004, about 1.5 million user sessions were recorded and about 4 million content items were viewed.

FIGURE 27.1. INCREASE IN THE NUMBER OF COURSES AND LECTURERS INVOLVED IN VIRTUAL TAU, 2000-2004.

Virtual TAU

The data indicate that by all parameters (as defined by Rogers, 1995), the diffusion of the Internet use for instruction at TAU was extremely rapid and beyond any expectation. The original attempt to build an initial phase of imple­mentation based on the gradual creation of course Web sites, as well as the allo­cation of limited budget and technical and pedagogical support, proved to be highly naive. In a very short time, the demands by lecturers and academic units far surpassed the initial prospects.

Several factors might have contributed to the rapid development of VT. First and foremost, it seems that the very concept of blended learning and the tools for facilitating its implementation satisfied real instructional and pedagogical needs for both faculty and students. Being already aware of the role of information and communication technologies (ICT) for learning and working at the personal level, it took our faculty members little time to foresee the potential of these tools for the creation of sound pedagogical solutions aimed to enhance their instruction.

Institutional policy was another influential factor. VT was conceived as a cam-puswide project. All interested lecturers were given the opportunity to receive tech­nical and pedagogical training and support in the use of the online learning tools and associated integration into their courses.

Finally, the efforts of the efficient and knowledgeable support center staff, and the relative user-friendliness of the various components of the system, undoubtedly contributed to accelerate the adoption rate of VT among lecturers and students.

In summary, timely educational policy, pedagogical and technical solutions based on real needs, and proper infrastructure and support contributed to the impressive diffusion process of Virtual TAU.

Pedagogical Configuration of Course Web Sites

A main objective in our studies was to assess the course Web sites' pedagogical configuration as conceived and used by the instructors. For this purpose, a ran­dom sample of 109 course Web sites (from about 2000 courses in the academic year 2002-2003) was selected. The courses pertained to the faculties: Art, Humanities, Medicine, Engineering, Social Sciences, Life Sciences, Education, Exact Sciences, Law, and Management. These Web sites were analyzed using a course Web site characterization scheme comprising 116 variables in four main dimensions: (1) content, (2) educational activity, (3) learning management, and (4) instructional environment (a detailed description of this tool can be found in Shemla and Nachmias, 2004).

The analysis of the configuration of the 109 Web sites is described in Tables 27.1 and 27.2; 821 learning activities were found (an average of about

The Handbook of Blended Learning

TABLE 27.1. FREQUENCY OF LEARNING ACTIVITY TYPES IN 109 COURSE WEB SITES (Л/ = 821 ITEMS).

8 per Web site). Table 27.1 indicates that over 80 percent of the learning activities were assignments, exercises (including online), and simulations. Verv few group activities, and, in particular, asynchronous-tool-based activities, were implemented.

In the course Web sites examined, over thirty-three hundred content itenu were included. The average number of items presented in each site was 28, rang­ing from 2 to 118 items for each Web site. For most courses (88 courses, com­prising 75 percent of the courses in the study), up to 35 items were in existence. Only in one course were over 100 items presented. There were no differences in the number of content items presented in Web sites of Exact Sciences faculties and Social Sciences and Humanities faculties. Likewise, there were no signifi­cant differences between undergraduate and graduate courses. There was a

Virtual TAU

positive correlation between the number of students in a course and the number of content items presented in the Web site (R = 0.21; p < 0.05). A close look at the content items by type shows that the most frequent categories (about 60 per­cent of the items examined) refer simply to plain information (for example, read­ings, lecturers' presentations, and content). However, only about 25 percent of the items concerned task-related information (for example, assignments, lab prepa­ration, and tests). Unfortunately, even in this world of learner-centered instruc­tion and the power of the Web to exploit it, there were very few courses that took advantage of student-generated items.

In a study published in 2000 aiming to characterize the pedagogical profile of educational Web sites, we defined the situation then as

one step ahead for the technology, two steps back for the pedagogy. One can depict that way the usual loops affecting educators' assimilation of new tech­nologies for the last decades.... As experienced educators we hold substantial models regarding the varied facets of our practice (e.g., how to build a lesson plan, to assess a learner's performance or behavior, to develop a learning unit). These models are usually tied to the (technological) resources at hand, and they affect each other mutually. It seems reasonable to assume that when facing the assimilation of a new technology we use these models as input to the process. The result is usually a transition period during which the known models are replicated by means of the new technology [Mioduser, Nachmias, Oren, & Lahav, 2000, pp. 73-74].

Academic instruction is by its very nature more conservative than instruction in other educational settings, such as school-level or informal education. Acade­mic instruction has long been based on lecturing and individual reading and the structuring of scientific content to be delivered according to the episte-mological model of the textbook. The fortunate (but perhaps not incidental) con­junction of new theories of learning and instruction, and new technologies facilitating the development of novel pedagogical solutions, implies a challenge for educators in general, and for academic instruction in particular. However, it appears that a transition time is unavoidable. Our observations of the evolving character of the blended courses at TAU show clearly that different lecturers adopt the innovation at different rates and that many configurations in the pedagogical continuum can and do coexist. This continuum of blended courses ranges from digital mirrors of the traditional courses at one end, to exciting examples of original pedagogical solutions at the other end. While many lecturers are still in the transition phase, the seeds of new models of blended learning are already there.

The Handbook of Blended Learning

Use of Content Included in the Course Web Sites

The third issue addressed in our studies is the extent to which content items in the course Web sites were actually viewed by the students. To examine this question, 117 courses in the academic year 2001-2002 were investigated using the auto­matically recorded computer logs (see Nachmias & Segev, 2003, for more details). This automatic recording includes textual and numerical identification of content items, date and time in which the item was viewed, and the ID of the student accessing it. A content item is defined as a unit of information uploaded into the course's Web site (for example, presentations, lesson summaries, and exercises). Content items may vary in their format (documents, pdf's, and presentations, for example) as well as in their size. In this system, students can access only the learning materials of the courses in which they are registered. " Viewing a content item" is referred to each time a student clicks on a link to a content item and opens it. Our analysis is based on the assumption that " viewing a content item" meant that the student read it. The information accumulated in the computer log com­prised the database used for the study.

Figure 27.2 presents the distribution of the percentage of content items viewed by students in 117 courses. In the 117 course Web sites examined, 3, 301 content items were presented. The average number of items presented in each site was 28, ranging between 2 to 118 items for each Web site.

Examining the individual differences in content use among students, one of the central findings of this study was that only 62 percent of the students viewed at least one content item, whereas 38 percent of the students listed in the courses did not view even a single item. However, there was a large variance among stu­dents with regard to the number of items viewed. Most students viewed only a small number of the available items, whereas few students viewed all of them. Fig­ure 27.2 presents the distribution of the percentage of content items viewed by students. About 50 percent of the students accessed no more than one-tenth of the items avaHable, using only a small part of the information presented in the courses' Web sites. Only 18 percent of the students accessed more than half of the content items, and less than 4 percent accessed all content items presented on the courses' Web sites. Students viewing at least one content item viewed on average 38 percent of the items available.

An examination of differences in use by discipline shows that students in the Social Sciences and Humanities faculties viewed a significantly larger number of items compared to students in the Exact Sciences faculties. In addition, gradu­ate students viewed a significantly larger number of items than undergraduates did. The study also revealed that the rate of students who did not use the items at