Hello all!
Being in the early stages of my academic career (working on my MA thesis on communications graduate students’ experiences of the three presences), the CIDER sessions are nothing short of invaluable to me. The diversity of research goes a long way toward broadening my appreciation of the CoI framework while taking me outside my very insular thesis “box.” Since I cannot usually attend live, I greatly appreciate the fact that I can view the slides and listen to the audio files at my convenience. At the risk of gushing, I thank each and every one of the presenters for sharing their knowledge through this forum. I am the only grad student in my program who is pursuing CoI research, so it is comforting to feel as though I am part of a real community. (It can get a bit lonely down here. Haha.)
Helen Dolan, Student
Mount Saint Vincent University
P.S. If you are an iPhone / iPad user and you want to catch up on the sessions without being tethered to your computer, I highly recommend downloading the free Puffin browser app. It allows us to play the Adobe Connect sessions on our Apple products. (I actually listened to a full session at the gym. LOL!) So, grab your earbuds and voila. Just thought I’d share. 
Hi Merica and all,
I have been following this discussion with great interest because I too will be administering the CoI survey at the end of the current semester. I echo Merica’s concerns about the response rate. Adding another dimension to this thread, I am using a mixed methods approach for my study of social, cognitive and teaching presence: the qualitative phase runs from February 9 – March 8, while the CoI questionnaire will be be accessible to the students beginning March 22. I should note that, for the qualitative phase, I am asking students (five sections of four different courses) to use journalling as a means of expressing their emotional responses to online learning.
I know that it’s still early (the study just opened a week ago), but I am very concerned about the deafening silence from the prospective volunteers. I anticipated that I would have received at least a comment or a question by now.
Any thoughts would be tremendously appreciated. I have visions of a thesis with no data…which is not even a thesis in the first place! Yikes.
Sincerely,
Helen
Hello Madelaine,
Profuse apologies for the delayed reply! (I am not sure how I missed your response, but I am pleased to have discovered it now!) In any case, thank you so much for directing me to Dr. Irvine’s website. The multi-access learning framework directly conforms to the environment that I described in my initial post. In particular, we employ the Tier 1 and Tier 2 levels as described in Realigning Higher Education for the 21st-Century Learner through Multi-Access Learning (Code, Irvine & Richards, 2013).
I look forward to exploring Dr. Irvine’s blog and publications in greater depth, and apologize again for my tardiness in acknowledging your very helpful reply! It is greatly appreciated.
Kind regards,
Helen Dolan
Hello all,
I am new to the CoI forum and am looking forward to sharing knowledge and experiences with everyone! For my first post, I’ll dive right in with a question that I’ve had for some time now.
As a grad student, I have been enrolled in a number of blended learning courses. In some cases, the course is configured such that some of the students are in the classroom with the professor while others (distance students) join the weekly class online via Blackboard Collaborate. All students participate in the Moodle asynchronous discussion threads. In my experience, the ‘division’ between the in-class students and the online students has been very problematic. There exists a widespread sentiment that the in-class students are developing a closer relationship with the professor, and that the online students are at a distinct disadvantage as a result (favouritism, professor ‘not paying as much attention to us,’ etc). I would be interested in learning whether this sort of format is common among Canadian universities, or whether most universities employ an “either/or” set-up; i.e. “everyone is in class or everyone is online” — not a combo of the two. (I should note that the asynchronous Moodle threads have been generally well received as a component of blended learning. The problem rests in the weekly classroom / Collaborate sessions.)
I would be most grateful to hear others’ thoughts and experiences!
A little bit about me: I am enrolled in the Master of Arts (Communications) program at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax. I am currently preparing the proposal for my thesis, which will examine the creation of community among graduate students in blended learning environments. Through a comparative mixed methods approach, I hope to explore graduate students’ experiences of community in blended learning environments at two Canadian universities: MSVU and another university of a similar size (TBD). Among the relationships that I aim to elucidate are the impact of students’ experiences of community on course satisfaction, academic performance, and the development of cohesive learning communities through blended learning approaches.
Many thanks!
Helen Dolan
helen.dolan@msvu.ca
helenkdolan@gmail.com
