SoTL Project

Rationale

All people are inquisitive; they all are asking questions to find answers. That is why the goal of education is to encourage this process of finding answers to the people’s questions. Hence, my mission as a teacher is to spark students’ interests in learning, provide the effective tools that help to make a process easier and more engaging and relate the subject to everyday life. Applying your principles and theories into your classroom is rather challenging. However, teaching in distance education (DE) requires a different pedagogy than the traditional classroom (Johnson 2003) due to a couple of existing challenges. Firstly, group learning is rather neglected in Distance Education, as there is no “physical” classroom where students can interact with each other. Online discussions, group projects, and emails can be used as a tool of communication between the students, however, the depth of interaction and, as a result, the level of knowledge can be diminished by a large number of distant learners. Secondly, lack of variety in the online activities can lower the student engagement. Hence, it is of interest to explore the following question: how an instructor can transform the student experience in distance education through a collaborative online learning?

Student interaction and cognition in online role playing discussions

This study describes evidence supporting the effectiveness of role playing discussion for science communication in online education and offers strategies for its implementation The effectiveness of role playing discussions was assessed through three measures:

1. Student perceptions of the activity,
2. Student interaction using the Interaction Analysis Model, and
3. Level of cognition using the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy

The results demonstrated that students were highly engaged in this activity, with limited presence of off topic threads In addition, students adjusted the cognitive level of their participation as they embodied different roles and performed at high levels of cognition Role playing enables rich and adaptable online discussions, facilitating peer learning in distant settings