A Blended Socio-Constructivist Course with an Activity-Based, Collaborative Learning Environment Intended for Trainers of Conference Interpreters, PhD dissertation
I am very pleased to announce a (provisional) online version of Barbara Class (2009) A Blended Socio-Constructivist Course with an Activity-Based, Collaborative Learning Environment Intended for Trainers of Conference Interpreters, PhD Thesis, School of Psychology and Education, University of Geneva (download: 5.4MB PDF).
I am pleased for several reasions: It's the first completed PhD in education I directed at University of Geneva. (A few years ago, before becoming a full time academic, my role was being a "techie" at TECFA). The thesis is an example of design-based research, and it uses IMHO an appropriate mix of design languages and research methods (though as of today I'd suggest to use another educational design language, e.g. coUML or the easy CompendiumLD). This thesis is also a conclusion of a 1991 idea to use Community, Collaboration and Content Management Systems (C3MS) in education (C3MS is a name we invented for portalware like Drupal, Postnuke, Joomla).
Below, we quote from the summary (p. 5) [I also inserted some links to edutechwiki articles]:
This dissertation concerns the transformation of a successful two-week face-to-face course for interpreter trainers into a one-year blended socio-constructivist course. This change entailed not only redesigning the course curriculum but also designing it for an online context and changing its status from a Certificate to a Master of Advanced Studies course. The research was carried out over two editions of the course and involved 55 learners, seven faculty members, one technical support person and one pedagogical advisor.
From a theoretical point of view, the design of the course is based on a model that lies somewhere between whole scale models like Merrill's (2002) first principles of instruction or Van Merrinboer's (2007) 4C/ID, We have used a developmental research approach (Collins et al., 2004; Reeves, 2000). The pilot study conducted between 2000 and 2003 generated the initial Tutoring Support Structure (TSS) design framework, which was then used to design the interpreter trainers' course and which eventually evolved into a new model that we present as a practical outcome. and agile design models such as Tripp & Bichelmeyer's (1990). Our approach could also be qualified as "constructional design" (Jonassen et al., 2007) since the design of activities is clearly based on constructivist strategies (Hannafin & Hill, 2007).
The study focuses on three goals: 1) to design, implement, and describe a blended socio-constructivist course, 2) to evaluate the course from the perspective of both the faculty and the learners, and 3) to formulate design rules for similar training contexts, i.e. adult, higher education, blended and activity-based courses. To meet the first goal, we have used conjecture maps and activity diagrams. To meet the second goal, we have appealed to both quantitative data - responses to a questionnaire administered to learners and data gathered from the learning environment - and qualitative data - interviews with teaching staff. Finally, to meet the third goal, we have derived design rules from conjectures that are grounded in both theory and empirical findings.
The findings indicate a clearly positive answer to the question of whether we did in fact implement a socio-constructivist learning design. They also confirm that learners did acquire skills. They show that the C3MS portal is an effective socio-constructivist learning environment and that the tools supported pedagogical goals. The TSS framework helped to create an effective socio-constructivist learning design. On the whole, the teaching staff considered the change to teaching with a portal a positive experience and are in favour of expanding its use within the unité. three learner profiles were identified by statistical analysis and suggest three different ways of approaching the learning enterprise. Learners from the "few" profile are definitely not sufficiently involved and allow themselves to be carried by the rest of the group. Learners from the "average" and "a lot" profile are active knowledge builders and know where to look for information and how to regulate their work. The difference between these latter two groups is that learners from the "average" profile practise reflection whereas learners from the "a lot" group do not.
Findings also led to the development of a new design framework, referred to as the "component model of activity-based training", which is more comprehensive than the former TSS framework. From a design perspective, this new framework is the result of both empirical findings and recent theories in educational technologies.
