GUIDANCE AND MONITORING OF LEARNING VIA INTERNET

Analysis of a Practical Experiment

Isabel Cuadrado Gordillo and Inmaculada Fernández Antelo

Department of Psychology and Sociology of Education, and Department of Education Science

University of Extremadura Badajoz, Spain

Keywords: EHEA, ECTS, virtual tutorials, psychopædagogical guidance.

Abstract: During the 2005/6 academic year, we experimented with adapting the subject of Psychology of Instruction

in the undergraduate Psychopædagogy degree course to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). This

involved transforming presencial tutorials into virtual tutorials. We here describe our experience and

analyze the strengths and weaknesses that we encountered in using different tools of synchronous and

asynchronous virtual communication to monitor the students' learning. The results showed a greater

willingness of the students to become involved in the study of the material, a significant increase in their

grades and in particular in the number of passing grades, and a change of attitude from one of total passivity

to an optimal degree of activity, responsibility, and commitment.

1 INTRODUCTION

The adaptation to the European Higher Education

Area (EHEA) of the subjects taught in Spain's

degree courses entails major structural and

methodological changes that are determinants in the

teaching and learning process. The transformation to

a model of teacher education centred on the

development of skills that will allow the prospective

teacher to adapt to the new situations and demands

of a constantly changing society means that the

university will have to renounce, at least in part, the

excessive specialization that has been the case until

now. In the process of European Convergence in

Higher Education, it is of prime importance that

prospective teachers finish their studies not only

with the knowledge needed to master a certain area,

but also with the skills required to apply that

knowledge in practice, to resolve the problems that

they will face, to manage information, work in

groups, analyze, synthesize, organize, plan, etc.

(Reichert and Tauch, 2003).

To put these changes into effect, Spain's

universities must undergo a process of

transformation which will require both the

acceptance of a new structure (undergraduate–

graduate) and a modification of the roles of the

faculty and the students. Nevertheless, these new

roles are really no more than a reflection of a long

suppressed demand that has on many occasions not

been allowed to come to the surface because it

would have meant a break with the monotony and

commodity that had been forged over years, because

of a lack of time, because of the constraints imposed

by the system itself, because of the lack of

commitment of some of the stakeholders (faculty or

students), etc.

If we were to ask students what they expect from

a teacher, or what they would wish their teachers to

be like, we would almost certainly get answers such

as that she (or he) should be a pleasant person who

makes her classes participative and attractive, who

explains things comprehensibly, who is easy to

make contact with to resolve points of doubt or to

ask questions, who allows the student a certain

margin of autonomy and initiative, who makes her

material appear interesting and useful, etc. Likewise,

if we were to ask teachers what type of students they

would like to have in class, it is not hard to imagine

what some of the answers would be: active people

with initiative, responsible in their dedication to

study, participative, showing a certain degree of

uncertainty and curiosity that leads them to go

deeper into the content that they have been presented

with, etc.

In these foreseeable answers, one discerns

already the 'new' roles that faculty and students are

expected to play. The students are asked to be more

378

Cuadrado Gordillo I. and Fernández Antelo I. (2007).

GUIDANCE AND MONITORING OF LEARNING VIA INTERNET - Analysis of a Practical Experiment.

In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Society, e-Business and e-Government /

e-Learning, pages 378-382

DOI: 10.5220/0001267903780382

 SciTePress

active in their own teacher education, with a greater

capacity for autonomy, responsibility, decision

making, and dedication to study. The teacher is

asked to act as a manager of learning, i.e., to

perform the functions of programming and

coordinating the teaching and learning process,

giving priority to the development of skills for the

acquisition and reproduction of academic knowledge

(Lugo, 2003).

In this sense, the adaptation of Spanish credits to

the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS)

promotes and facilitates this reorganization of the

roles of teacher and student, as well as encourages

the use of new formulas for communication and

monitoring that allow the participants not all to be

physically present. In particular, we refer to virtual

tutorials carried out either synchronously or

asynchronously. Indeed, the tutorial function can be

said to be one of the pillars consolidating on-line

education (Padula, 2002).

In the University of Extremadura, as in many

other Spanish universities, this process of adaptation

to the EHEA has been initiated by putting into

practice pilot projects focused on specific subjects or

entire courses. The present work deals in particular

with the material of the Psychology of Instruction

course taught in the Psychopædagogy undergraduate

degree syllabus, and presents an analysis of the

measures adopted and the results.

2 THE VIRTUAL PSYCHOLOGY

OF INSTRUCTION TUTORIAL

On-line tutorials may be conducted using a variety

of communication tools. These may be synchronous

(IRC, videoconferencing, digital blackboard) or

asynchronous (e-mail, discussion fora, FAQs).

An IRC (Internet Relay Chat) allows the real-

time exchange of messages in order to resolve

doubts, share opinions, reflections, etc. The tutor and

the students agree on a timetable for entrance to a

virtual 'chat room' in which these exchanges of

communication will take place. One of the

advantages of this tool is its immediacy and

simultaneity. Nevertheless, it does not allow for the

concept of flexibility that is the backbone of virtual

on-line education and in particular of virtual

tutorials. The fact of setting a timetable can make it

difficult for some people to access and use this

means of tutoring. It may require major changes to

the management of their study time which they do

not always willingly accept. Also, an IRC channel

involving an extensive group of students such as an

entire undergraduate class can generate a situation of

chaos that makes it necessary to consider a more

restricted use of this medium for very specific

situations and with smaller groups. If all the students

participate, the tutor can not attend to them all at the

same time, and the delay can become interminable

and boring, as well as the session extending for long

hours that the students could instead be devoting to

studying and planning the material. In our case, the

large number of students enrolled in the course

(more than one hundred and forty) made it

unfeasible to activate a single virtual chat room. But

using different IRC channels, and dividing the

students into groups, would have required devoting

an entire working day to the task, when there are

other tools available that facilitate these exchanges

and provide better results with less investment of

time.

Videoconferencing still has to overcome various

technical drawbacks (speed, precision, cost), and it

requires some innovations at the software level to be

optimally acceptable as a tool of virtual tutoring.

When videoconferencing is as simple as making a

phone call, it will represent a major advance in on-

line education. Our students lack the necessary

means and resources (both material and in terms of

know-how) for videoconferencing to be established

as a way to conduct tutorials. In sum, this system

was inviable in our case.

Within the group of asynchronous

communication tools, we would highlight the use of

e-mail. This medium allow each student to set out

his or her doubts and questions without the

limitations of time and space represented by the

dynamics of an IRC channel, and allows the

response to be individualized and thorough. The

effectiveness and utility of this tutoring system are

greater the more promptly the response is given to

the e-mails received. It is at least recommendable

not to exceed twenty-four hours. Again, the large

number of students enrolled in the course appeared

as one of the main problems in virtual tutorials of

this type. This unsurprisingly was especially notable

on the days or weeks prior to the deadline for

handing in a work or to an examination. On those

occasions, we received an average of 80 e-mails

daily, which made it practically impossible to

respond to all of them in a reasonable time. Also,

this task required the teacher to work exclusively on

answering e-mails, an aspect which is really not

permissible. In those cases when the questions

referred to points corresponding to some practical

work on the material that counted towards the final

GUIDANCE AND MONITORING OF LEARNING VIA INTERNET - Analysis of a Practical Experiment

379

grade, the students were asked to use group e-mails

through a mailing-list type address that all the

members could consult. This measure led to a

reduction in the number of e-mails received, and

helped streamline the responses.

Nonetheless, we think that many of these e-mails

become unnecessary if one makes the appropriate

use of discussion fora and FAQs (Frequently Asked

Questions). These tools allow one to make public

both the questions that the students raise and the

teacher's answers. The advantage of this system is

that the teacher's explanations can resolve the doubts

of many students without each of them having to be

answered personally. We encountered two basic

problems using these means for tutoring. First, the

students often made inappropriate use of the

discussion fora. They used the system to comment

on situations or questions that were unrelated to the

material or the topics under discussion. This

converted the fora into bulletin boards and meeting

places for extra-academic subjects. And second, the

distrust and insecurity of many students led them to

use e-mail as the main means of communicating

with the teacher. One of the reasons was their

preference for a personal response (e-mail) over a

group response (discussion forum).

3 ADVANTAGES AND

DISADVANTAGES OF THE

VIRTUAL MONITORING OF

LEARNING

From the experience of adapting the Psychology of

Instruction content to the EHEA and adopting the

ECTS tutorials as the means for guidance and

monitoring of the students' learning, we were able to

extract a series of apparent strengths and weaknesses

of the process.

3.1 Strengths

A first advantage of the ECTS tutorials arises from

the use of e-mail. This time-delayed means of

communication adapts itself to all the students'

timetables, since they use it when needed or when

convenient. In this sense, ECTS tutorials satisfy the

criteria of flexibility that are indispensable in virtual

education. For instance, it facilitates independent

management of study time according to each

student's possibilities and needs.

The second advantage is the potential of this

instrument for thorough in-depth monitoring of the

student's learning. The questions that a student puts

to us in e-mails allow us to observe the degree of

understanding of the material that he or she has

reached, the learning strategies used, the level of

reasoning and expression, etc. With this information

available, guidance will not only be directed to

resolving conceptual content, but also to fostering

reflection and the acquisition of metacognitive

strategies that will allow the student to adopt a more

effective strategic form of behaviour. This

information also allows a re-orientation of the

instructor's teaching. When the teacher detects

difficulties that the students show in carrying out

some task, he or she can propose new activities,

follow other procedures, complete part of the

syllabus, check that the methodological strategies

match the students' needs and demands, etc. In this

sense, the virtual ECTS tutorials constitute an

exceptional evaluation tool in the sense of being an

instrument of improvement as well as of monitoring.

Also, the information contained in the e-mails makes

it possible to evaluate the effort that the student has

made, how he or she has managed study time,

organization, planning, etc.

A third advantage lies in the possibility of using

new formulas for teacher-student interaction.

Sometimes, fear of ridicule or of making their lack

of knowledge public leads some students to be

reticent to participate in class, to ask questions, to

contribute observations, etc. In these cases, the

anxiety, tension, or stress generated by a public face-

to-face intervention with the teacher or with their

classmates disappears, or is at least softened, as the

contact is not direct but deferred. In this way, the

students can present their doubts and the teacher can

access their prior knowledge and conceptual

relationships with respect to the content dealt with in

class. This all allows the teacher to more easily

guide the learning process.

And a fourth advantage is the students' enhanced

involvement in and positive predisposition towards

their own learning. This was reflected in the present

experiment in an increase in the number of passing

grades in Psychology of Instruction relative to the

results in previous years in which the tutorials were

exclusively presencial and at set hours. The students

observed that the almost immediate resolution of

their doubts and the contribution of complementary

material avoided interruptions in their study time

and learning process. Some of them too indicated

that the teacher's monitoring of their e-mails

demonstrated interest and concern for their learning,

and led them to accept greater levels of commitment

to study and carrying out course work. For other

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students, being able to get a personalized answer

from the teacher gave them a greater sense of

security and confidence because they no longer had

to guess what the teacher was going to consider as

valid or incorrect, but now had this information

directly and immediately. This sense of security

encouraged them to continue advancing in their

learning, to look for new information, to explore

other forms of resolution, etc.

3.2 Weaknesses

The weaknesses that we detected were of two types:

those that directly affected the figure and functions

of the teacher, and those that were more related to

the activity of the students.

With respect to the teacher, the large number of

students enrolled meant the reception of an

enormous amount of e-mail, especially at certain

times of the course. If to this one adds the

promptness with which the teacher must reply for

the answer to provide the student with the help

expected, the result was an excess of work load that,

together with the preparation and teaching of the

classes themselves, meant that all of the teacher's

working hours and a large part of personal time as

well had daily to be devoted to monitoring and

instruction.

The new educational approach accompanying

adaptation to the EHEA – learning general content,

with the focus on the acquisition of skills, as

opposed to learning excessively specific content –

implies breaking with an individualistic culture and

encouraging coordination between teachers by

providing and constructing new routes of

communication and cooperation.

Finally, the need arises for greater support and

endowment of teacher education centres and

departments to enable content to be adapted to the

EHEA and to put ECTS tutorials into practice. In

particular, the need is for more personal resources

and technological infrastructure, and greater

organizational flexibility such as in class timetables.

With respect to the students, we perceived an

apathy or resistance on the part of some concerning

the change from presencial to virtual tutorials, and

fundamentally towards the new system of

orientation and monitoring of learning. We found

one of the possible explanations for this resistance to

the change to be the modifications that they have to

incorporate into how they work on the subject.

Firstly, they have to replace their passive and

receptive attitude by one that is more active and

participative, in which the protagonism passes from

the teacher or the content to the students and their

system of seeking, selecting, and organizing

information.

Secondly, continuous work is required from

them, since the guidance and monitoring are not

aimed at preparing them to pass an examination, and

in particular not at concentrating this preparation in

the two weeks prior to the examination date. The

objective of the tutorials is to provide the students

with strategies that facilitate self-regulation in their

learning process and the attainment of greater

autonomy.

Thirdly, they are asked to change their

conception of learning as an individual and solitary

activity, and accept new patterns of action based on

collaboration and cooperative work. This change,

however, involves modifying and reinforcing certain

academic skills related to the acquisition of

strategies that allow one to approach a given activity

from different perspectives.

And fourthly, they have to conceive of

monitoring and evaluation as being constructive

actions aimed at facilitating and improving their

learning, and not as a form of constant control.

4 CHALLENGES FACING THE

IMPLEMENTATION OF

VIRTUAL TUTORIALS

The difficulties and obstacles that we found in the

course of our experiment of adapting to the EHEA

and applying ECTS virtual tutorials led us to

consider adopting a series of measures aimed at

facilitating and promoting new formulas for

monitoring learning, channeled through the Internet.

Among these measures, we would highlight the

following:

− Increasing the use and diversity of synchronous

and asynchronous communication tools in

tutoring. To this end, one must clearly define

the content of the discussion fora and

participation in them. One must also form the

students into groups of 25–30 to be able to

establish different IRC sessions and avoid the

interferences and saturation that are inevitable

when all the students are called to a single

session (considering the large classes in our

Psychopædagogy undergraduate courses).

− Reducing the number of students enrolled so as

to be able to carry out individual monitoring and

contribute to greater quality of the teaching and

learning process.

GUIDANCE AND MONITORING OF LEARNING VIA INTERNET - Analysis of a Practical Experiment

381

− Giving priority to collaborative work and the

acquisition of skills related to seeking, selecting,

and organizing information, as opposed to

individualist work and the reception of ready-

made content.

− Institutionalizing the figure of the coordinator of

the degree course, as well as of structures of

coordination.

− Coordinating the method of the students'

personal logging of their work.

− Fostering transversality and the interrelationship

between subjects.

− Designing a 'Degree Course Counseling and

Tutorial Plan' for Psychopædagogy.

− Introducing ECTS tutorial activities that foster

and broaden the continuous evaluation of skills.

− Recognizing the increased teaching load in core

and obligatory courses (with more than 80

students).

− Offering different models of inquiry,

exploration, and experimentation, and fostering

the acquisition of learning strategies and

metacognitive strategies that will allow the

prospective teacher to adapt to society's new

situations and demands.

− Promoting coordination and collaboration

between teachers.

− Facilitating access to and the availability of

material and organizational resources. Among

them, we would mention increased bandwidth,

access to virtual platforms with a high capacity

for downloading documents, the renovation of

computer equipment, flexibility in scheduling

and in grouping the students, etc.

5 CONCLUSIONS

Our experiment with virtual monitoring of learning

gave results that augur very positively for its

continuity. Outstanding among the conclusions we

drew from the work was that not only did more

students achieve a passing grade in Psychology of

Instruction compared to the grades in previous

years, but also that, as the students themselves

observed, some of their working schemes changed

and they acquired certain strategies which facilitated

their study of this and other subjects. They also

noted the benefit they got from the continuous

nature of the guidance and evaluation. Amongst

other aspects, they reported a greater involvement in

the study and search for complementary information,

that the on-line tutorials were an extraordinary aid to

resolving, almost immediately, the doubts that arose

in their study and preparation of the curriculum, that

it was indispensable for managing study time, etc.

In sum, when virtual tutorials have overcome the

obstacles mentioned above, they will constitute one

of the most accessible, rapid, and effective means of

monitoring undergraduate learning.

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http://www.elprincipe.com/teleformacion/junio2003/in

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Padula, J.E, 2002. Contigo en la distancia. El Rol del tutor

en la Educación No Presencial. In

http://www.uned.es/catedraunescoad/publicued/pbc08/

rol_bened.htm.

Reichert, S., Tauch, C., 2003. Progress towards the

European Higher Education Area. Forward form

Berlin: the role of universities: to 2010 and beyond,

European University Association (EUA). Trends.

Leuven.

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