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Anonymity in Blended Learning: Who Would You Like to Be?
Abstract
This paper examines the learning outcomes associated with implementing discussion forums and blog writings using pseudonyms in blended learning. Although anonymity or masking one's identity has been used as a teaching strategy designed to induce higher writing production and lowering anxiety in face-to-face writing instruction, little research has been reported investigating whether this strategy enhances learning outcomes in blended learning. This paper provides a research framework to clarify the position of anonymity in writing instruction. Through this, field-related research questions are identified. The study found that online writing assignments using pseudonyms can be an effective teaching strategy that induces higher online participation, especially among students who are hesitant to participate in a traditional classroom setting. In this anonymous context, students prefer gender-free pseudonyms, assuming no human identities online, in contrast to a previous research that considers pseudonyms as a form of expression of one's preferred identity. © International Forum of Educational Technology & Society (IFETS).
... On the basis of exploring the causes of foreign language learning anxiety, it has been an important theme for researchers to further explore the strategies to relieve it. Miyazoe and Anderson (2011) proved in an experimental study that the level of foreign language writing anxiety of students under the mode of anonymously publishing essays online was significantly lower than that under faceto-face guidance. Fong et al. (2022) examined speech anxiety among Malaysian Chinese college students at a private university, and found that rehearsing and practicing before giving a speech was an effective strategy for dealing with speech anxiety. ...
... In the past research, Miyazoe and Anderson (2011) put forward that anonymous speech can effectively relieve anxiety in online class, and Fong et al. (2022) pointed out that repeated practice can reduce speech anxiety in foreign language class, however, none of them discussed how to reduce students' own psychological anxiety from the perspective of cognitive psychology. Therefore, the last result summarized five strategies to relieve foreign language learning anxiety, including recognizing the existence of anxiety correctly, communicating the anxiety honestly with others, improving the psychological quality, being positive about life's setbacks, and setting up some realistic goals in English learning, which provides the reference for scholars to further explore ways to reduce foreign language anxiety from cognitive and psychological perspectives. ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought tremendous changes to the field of education, transferring traditional offline teaching to online teaching on a large scale globally. Junior high school students, as a special group, may experience foreign language learning anxiety different from anxiety experienced by college students in the process of online English learning. This research aims at investigating the level of, sources and strategies for English learning anxiety of Chinese rural junior high school students under online class mode. A total of 120 students from Dongshan Junior High School in Haikou participated in this study and asked to fill in the questionnaires, and 12 of them were randomly chosen to be interviewed. IBM SPSS Statistics 26 was used to analyze the data. This research found that Chinese rural junior high school students generally had a moderate level of English learning anxiety, and there is statistically no significant relation between the gender difference and anxiety in online foreign language classes. It was also found that factors influencing English learning anxiety of Chinese rural junior high school students included the students themselves, their home environments, the teacher and the school, and the social environment. Lastly, the research found five strategies to relieve foreign language learning anxiety, including recognizing the existence of anxiety correctly, communicating the anxiety honestly with others, improving the psychological quality, being positive about life’ s setbacks, and setting up some realistic goals in English learning.
... This finding aligned with the potential factor associated with students' focus on teaching online [46][47][48]. In addition, anonymity was important in the pedagogical implication that affects posting behavior factors, such as online privacy concern [46], self-consciousness [49], fear of negative evaluation [50], trust in the virtual community [51], and perceived psychological safety [49], and self-efficacy [49]. This finding implies that allowing for anonymous posts in online discussion boards could potentially enhance student engagement by creating a psychologically secure learning environment that mitigates the influence of self-consciousness and the fear of negative assessment on posting activities. ...
Background
The growing demands in integrating digital pedagogies in learning (e.g., social media) contribute to disrupting many fields, including the medical humanities education. However, the strengths and barriers behind social media and medical humanities context are blurred and contradictive. We examined the perceptions of integrating social media – Facebook – into a narrative medicine (NM) programme for 5th -year clerkship in Taiwan.
Methods
We used purposive sampling to recruit participants. Sixteen medical students (Female/Male: 7/9) participated in four group interviews. Semi-structured focus group interviews were conducted to explore students’ perceptions and experiences of the social media integrated into the NM programme. We analysed the data using a descriptive thematic analysis with a team-based approach. Data were managed and coded using ATLAS.ti version 9.0.
Results
We identified six main themes: (1) Positive experiences of social media integration; (2) Negative experiences of social media integration; (3) Barriers on writing and sharing NM stories in social media; (4) Barriers on reading NM stories in social media; (5) Barriers on reacting contents in social media; (6) Suggestions for future improvement.
Conclusions
The study revealed the strengths and barriers from medical students’ perceptions, when integrating social media into a NM programme. It is important to match students’ experiences, barriers, and perceptions towards learning. Understanding participants’ suggestions for future improvement are also crucial. With this knowledge, we might better develop the social media integration systems that achieve our desired outcomes based on the medical humanities education curricula.
This article provides an account of using reflexive participatory methods including study advisory group membership to evaluate a perinatal wellbeing service in an economically deprived area of Scotland. There is little qualitative research that explores the experiences of women accessing perinatal mental health services. This article draws on feminist values and narrative theory to explore the practice, process and ethics of using par-ticipatory methods with women in the perinatal period. We explore the blurring of intervention and research group boundaries to consider the service and study advisory group as a space which provided the conditions for collective care and re-storying the self. We explore the study advisory group as an extension of the intervention itself, highlighting the role of community in research practices and in interventions, for women who experience perinatal mental health difficulties. We reflect on the 'sticky' practice of navigating epistemic and decision-making power in participatory research, including the dual positionalities of being two academic researchers who come to research with therapeutic training in counselling, psychotherapy and social work. We call for reflexive, community-oriented and flexible approaches when using participatory methods with populations that might be considered vulnerable, marginalised or stigmatised.
Background:
Near-peer teaching (NPT) is becoming an increasingly popular pedagogical tool in health professions education. Despite the shift in formal medical education from face-to-face teaching toward encompassing web-based learning activities, NPT has not experienced a similar transition. Apart from the few reports on NPT programs hastily converted to web-based learning in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, no studies to date have explored web-based learning in the specific context of NPT.
Objective:
This qualitative study examined the nature of interactions among peer learners (PLs), peer teachers (PTs), and the learning content in a student-led, web-based NPT program for medical students.
Methods:
A 5-month-long voluntary NPT program to support first- and second-year medical students' biomedical science learning in the undergraduate medical curriculum was designed by 2 senior-year medical students and delivered by 25 PTs with 84 PLs participating. In total, 9 PLs and 3 PTs underwent individual semistructured interviews at the end of the program to explore general NPT experience, reasons for joining NPT, the effectiveness of NPT, the demand and importance of NPT, and the feasibility of incorporating NPT in the formal curriculum. Interview transcripts were analyzed using a thematic analysis approach.
Results:
The first general theme focused on the nature of student-student, student-teacher, and student-content interactions. Although PLs were engaged in web-based NPT, there was minimal interaction between students, as most PLs preferred to learn passively and remain anonymous. PLs believed the web-based NPT learning process to be a unidirectional transmission of knowledge from teacher to learner, with the teacher responsible for driving the interactions. This was in sharp contrast to PTs' expectation that both parties shared responsibility for learning in a collaborative effort. The second general theme identified the advantages and disadvantages of delivering NPT on a web platform, which were mainly convenience and teaching skills development and poor interactivity, respectively.
Conclusions:
Student-led, web-based NPT offers a flexible and comfortable means of delivering academic and nonacademic guidance to medical students. However, the web-based mode of delivery presents unique challenges in facilitating meaningful interactions among PLs, PTs, and subject content. A blended learning approach may be best suited for this form of student-led NPT program to optimize its efficacy.
In the recent, and ongoing, Covid-19 pandemic, remote or online K-12 schooling became the norm. Even if the pandemic tails off somewhat, remote K-12 schooling will likely remain more frequent than it was before the pandemic. A mainstay technique of online learning, at least at the college and graduate level, has been the online discussion. Since it does afford the potential for meaningful learner-learner and instructor-learner interaction, which are vital for distance learning, it is worth considering online discussions for K-12 remote schooling. One challenge with online learning in general, and online discussion in particular, is that it is labor intensive for teachers to moderate. Effective moderating of online discussions is vital for discussions to be nurturing, effective learning situations. Yet, moderating of online discussions is notoriously labor-intensive for teachers/instructors. Further, since younger learners are more likely to drift off topic, in general, but particularly in small group online discussions, automated early warning systems are helpful. The current study collected small group, “book club”, discussion data from fourth graders reading web-based eBooks in Slovenian primary schools, qualitatively coded the data and analyzed postings using computer-based natural language processing to predict when students went off-topic. One indicator that postings are on-topic is book relevance, i.e. that the posting is relevant to eBook content. The computer algorithm correctly predicted book relevance of postings 90 percent of the time, suggesting that automated computer algorithms could assist teachers with moderating online discussions, providing real-time notifications of problems in online discussions. Further, this study provided a proof-of-concept that small group online discussions, in web-based eBooks can be practical and educationally meaningful in fourth grade classes.
The present study contributes to the understanding of the effectiveness of online discussion
forum in student learning. A conceptual model based on ‘theory of online learning’ and ‘media
richness theory’ was proposed and empirically tested. We extend the current understanding of
media richness theory to suggest that use of multiple media can enrich the communication
context and perceived learning. Hierarchical regression was applied to investigate the
relationships between antecedent factors, interaction and perceived learning. The results show
that the perceived richness of online discussion forum has significant positive effect on student
participation and interaction, and learning, when used along with traditional classroom lecture.
Implications of these findings are discussed as they provide important guidelines for
management educators.
Over the last few years, second generation Internet-based services, or Web 2.0 technologies, have emerged as the new buzzwords in information communication technologies. The Handbook of Research on Web 2.0 and Second Language Learning investigates how those involved in education teachers, students, and administrators can respond to the opportunities offered by Web 2.0 technology, within existing institutional and pedagogical frameworks. Containing nearly 30 chapters by experts from across the globe, this defining body of research is the first of its kind to focus on second language learning in relation to the history of computer assisted language learning.
How did the Internet affect learning in higher education? What methodological and theoretical issues characterized research on Internet-Supported Learning (ISL)? What implications existed for future research? A constant comparative, qualitative analysis of 29 studies indicated grade achievement was the prime measure of effectiveness in ISL environments although some additionally assessed student motivation, participation and satisfaction. Some 45% of the studies reported positive results, whereas 55% reported no significant differences. Most studies used quantitative design methodologies. Generally, ISL was found to be more (a) student, group, and/or project-focused and (b) feedback intensive than its classroom counterpart. Other results and implications are discussed. (Contains 4 figures.)
During the 1994-95 academic year, Catalano taught a first-time senior capstone design class with the goal of entering a student-designed and built, solar-powered race car in the Department of Energy's Sunrayce '95 competition. This course came from an effort to move toward a more fully integrated mechanical engineering curriculum designed to supplement the learning experiences of students in their more traditional engineering courses. In this paper, we summarize the planning for the course, the design and construction phases of the class—especially how students and faculty perceived their design work, the cadets' perceptions of their learning during the class, and experiences of the students and faculty during the race. Teaching this new course provided insights into some of the dilemmas raised when changes to an existing curriculum are made.
We investigated whether students liked and learned more from PowerPoint presentations than from overhead transparencies. Students were exposed to lectures supported by transparencies and two different types of PowerPoint presentations. At the end of the semester, students preferred PowerPoint presentations but this preference was not found on ratings taken immediately after the lectures. Students performed worse on quizzes when PowerPoint presentations included non-text items such as pictures and sound effects. A second study further examined these findings. In this study participants were shown PowerPoint slides that contained only text, contained text and a relevant picture, and contained text with a picture that was not relevant. Students performed worse on recall and recognition tasks and had greater dislike for slides with pictures that were not relevant. We conclude that PowerPoint can be beneficial, but material that is not pertinent to the presentation can be harmful to students' learning.
Homeless persons lack economic capital, but it is less clear whether they concomitantly lack important information capital. The basic information needed by the homeless is not available on the Internet as this is information controlled by governmental social services agencies, but does this result in a state of information poverty? This paper examines the issues of how the lack of access to information technology does not affect how the homeless access basic-needs-level information. The study investigates the information needs of the homeless, information sources, and information-seeking behaviours within the analytical constructs of information outsiders and insiders and the theory of information poverty posed by Chatman (1996). The study explores the differences in information seeking pursuits based on whether the catalyst for the search is internally or externally motivated. Finally, the paper speculates on whether making basic level needs information available via the Internet would be useful and/or used.
Organised knowledge structures (schemas) in long-term memory (LTM) alter the characteristics of working memory (WM). Therefore, tracing the content of WM during problem solving may provide a measure of levels of acquisition of corresponding schematic knowledge structures. In this paper, a proposed rapid approach to diagnostic assessment of levels of acquisition of organised domain-specific knowledge structures has been used as a means of optimising cognitive load by tailoring instructions to levels of learner expertise in an adaptive computer-based tutor in kinematics. Two alternative adaptation procedures were compared to the control condition without an adaptation. The first procedure used only results of learners' rapid test performance, and the second one combined rapid measures of performance with measures of mental load. The study indicates that the developed assessment instruments could be embedded into adaptive e-learning packages as diagnostic tools for tailoring instructional materials to changing levels of student expertise in cognitively optimal ways. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.