Overall positive experiences
المؤلف:
Winnie Cheng & Martin Warren
المصدر:
Enhancing Teaching and Learning through Assessment
الجزء والصفحة:
P205-C18
2025-07-05
569
Overall positive experiences
The majority of the students were very positive about the overall OCLA experience; very few students preferred the traditional way of learning and teaching. They all felt that the subject objectives, both subject knowledge acquisition and application, had been achieved, and the students' generic qualities had been enhanced in that they had developed critical and creative thinking, team building, language and communication skills, etc. They found OCLA providing a better learning environment, compared to the two hours lectures where they experienced having a short attention span. In addition, doing OCLA had saved time, and the time saved was used for reading and further study, and they felt that they had learned more as a result. In general, the students appreciated involvement in the assessment process, and particularly the value of critical peer review of their forum postings.
Regarding their views on the forum discussions, all students thought that they had learned a lot from the online discussions with peers, and had followed the flow of the arguments in writing better and more clearly. They posted discussions, analyses and feedback regularly, and some agreed that they would have benefited much more from more regular participation in the forum. What they had achieved most included realizing different perspectives from group discussions, and learning through critiquing peers and reading the critiques by peers. They were aware of the dynamics involved in successful critical peer review of assignments, and were demanding of peer contributions. Most students remarked that within their own groups, when they came across problems in understanding the online instructional materials or the worked examples, they would try to solve the problems by themselves through, for example, reading the set textbook and other books on Pragmatics.
However, a few students thought they lacked self-discipline to have fully benefited from OCLA, and so they felt that they had learnt less. A small minority of students feared troubling peers too much if they posted critiques or disagreements too often, and others found it difficult to involve all group members actively in the forum discussion, and preferred group oral presentations.
One student said that she would not keep on asking questions on the WebCT because she feared that her classmates might become tired of having to type in their answers on the forum to defend their original data analysis after having done it a few times. This particular student said that she might have asked her classmates more questions if the discussion had been carried out in a face-to-face meeting. Another student said that he thought that traditional oral presentations done in class were better than the online group discussions. One of the problems of this online discussion, as he perceived it, was the difficulty of having all group members actively engage in it. He thought he had a hard time fulfilling the requirements of the assignment throughout the subject.
The pattern of use of the forum also varied from one student to another. A couple of students admitted that they did not have real online discussions with their members all the time for each unit, and quite often they had already had the discussion face-to-face or on the phone before they typed in the responses or data analyses. One student said that the discussions among the group members did not start until a few days before the assignment deadline. Sometimes, they would telephone other members reminding them that there were new postings on the WebCT, and that they needed to reply in order to speed up the data discussion and analysis process. Other than these instances, they would not visit the forum very often. However, these dissenting voices were very much in the minority; most students were very positive about the online discussions as a medium for deep learning. A student said that her group logged in to the discussion forums regularly and started posting up answers and giving feedback immediately after the first unit was covered. All the students, however, agreed that they would have benefited much more from more regular participation in the discussion forum.
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