Faculty of Education - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 1 of 1
-
ItemTeleteaching with ‘telekikan-shido’: an exploration of how online synchronous supervision of student problem-solving mimics face-to-face pedagogy( 2010)Irrespective of the methods used for its delivery, interactions or conversations with an instructor should always be the core of education. This study investigated the feasibility of applying currently evolving communication technologies to facilitate the online mimicking of the student-teacher interactions that have been identified as occurring during the face-to-face supervision of experiential learning, such as laboratory experimentations and/or problem-solving tutorial activities. Students, while performing these learning tasks in face-to-face venues, are supervised by an academic moving through the room observing and then assisting those student(s) who may require some help. Studies, conducted by others in year-eight classrooms, have identified this form of instruction as kikan-shido that, in practice, is often augmented with over-the-shoulder teaching/learning pedagogy. The empirical exploration of student-teacher communication over a local-area network was performed with a commercially available ‘collaborative teaching’ software, that was installed onto the desktop computers within a computer laboratory. This enabled an academic to supervise synchronously online, with a teaching approach that could be described as ‘telekikan-shido’, students who were performing computer-screen-based problem-solving activities. Analyses of the data collected during this trial showed that: (i) software utilities that support network-based audio communication and remote computer-desktop control enable the online mimicking of pedagogy that can be identified during face-to-face supervision of experiential learning; and (ii) post-trial feedback of participants’ perception indicated a reduction in transactional distance and an improvement in transactional presence and telepresence for students while being supervised in real-time over a local-area network. The findings of this research facilitate the implementation of wide-area network-based education platforms that will enable the real-time online supervision of experiential learning. The importance of such applications for distance educators has been articulated by those educationalists who have identified the successful delivery of laboratory content within their science-based curricula as one of the distance education providers’ greatest challenges.