Assessing Teaching Presence in Instructional CMC

Susan LuleeJan., 2009

Introduction

• A growing number of courses offered online and degrees offered through the Internet.

• New online technologies have provided a broad spectrum of supportive features for online teaching.

• How will learning outcomes be ensured and improved? How will effective communication be established through online discussion? How new knowledge and understandings construct through instructional scaffolding?

Research Questions

• Have the measurement tools (categories & indicators) for assessing teaching presence developed by previous researches sufficient and appropriate?

• Are there patterns of teaching presence

existed, or not existed, in current practices?

Literature Review

• Transactional distance, Michael Moore (1980)• Teaching Presence. Three areas in Community

of Inquiry, Garrison, Anderson, & Archer (2000)

Literature Review (cont’d.)

• Content Analysis– Theoretical Framework

• Henri’s five dimensions model (1992)

• Gunwardena, Lowe and Anderson’s five-phase interaction analysis model (1998)

• Biggs’ SOLO taxonomy (1999)

• Garrison, Anderson, and Archer ‘s critical thinking and practical inquiry model (2000)

• Sometimes, Flanders interaction analysis model (1967) for classroom observation

– Indicators: Flander, Saba, Henri, Anderson

– Unit of Analysis: sentence units, proposition units, paragraph units, thematic units; and message units

Methodology

• Content analysis– tests that need to be performed – interpretation of those tests

• Instruments– Revised tool developed by Anderson

• Data collection– 273 instructors’ messages (out of 1735 posts) in 15

sessions of five online courses from 2 institutions

• Data Analysis – Measures of central tendency– Frequency distributions– Cross tabulations

Analysis & Findings

• Criteria for assessing teaching presence– Some modifications made to the tool developed by

Anderson

• Patterns of teaching presence– Initial session:

• encourage, acknowledge, or reinforce student contributions;

• create an open, warm, and trust climate for learning

– Intermediate sessions:• clarify and diagnose students’ misconceptions

• presenting content and questions

– Ending session• acknowledging students contribution

• assessment and explanatory feedback

Conclusions

• Role of online instructor is transforming from instructor to facilitator.

• Learning control is passing on to students as constructivism suggested; however, students are not ready to take the responsibility of learning

• Future study:– What combination of teaching presence tends to spur

larger amount of higher level thinking from student? – How to inspire student-student discussion? – How to assess cognitive skill level in order to

measure learning results of a particular set of teaching presence?