Authentic Tasks or Task-Centered Instruction?

I recently read an excellent article by Jan Herrington, Tom Reeves and Ron Oliver about Authentic tasks entitled Authentic Tasks Online: A Synergy among Learner, Task, and Technology (2006). This article begins by saying that the most common online learning tries to break down information into digestible chunks and distance education needs to be seen as part of a synergistic system.

The authors believe that the authentic tasks model will fill this need for synergy. They give some guidelines for authentic tasks, outlining what an authentic task is. When I first read this, I realized that the authentic tasks outlined in this article are somewhat different than the whole-task approach we have been working on in our higher-education institution. We work with Dr. M. David Merrill to follow First Principles of Instruction (2002), converting traditional lecture-based classes into task-centered ones.

Authentic tasks seem more drawn out than the tasks Merrill talks about in First Principles (2002), but I think the distinction is blurred somewhat. Either way, the tasks that we have been implementing in higher education class are usually shorter in length (1-2 weeks to complete) and the tasks mentioned by Herrington, Reeves and Oliver (2006) can take a whole semester to solve, or no less than a third of that semester.

Among the definitions of authentic tasks listed in this article, several stand out to me:

Authentic tasks are ill-defined, students have to define the tasks and sub-tasks to complete, also they are open to multiple interpretations and solutions.

Authentic tasks provide the opportunity for students to examine the task from different theoretical, practical perspectives. students must distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information.

The items above require that students must choose their own methods for solving the problem, and they must examine the task from differing perspectives. This is perhaps the furthest departure from what we are doing with our classes. In our approach, heuristics and rules of thumb are provided for solving a problem and students are taught how they might go about solving the problem themselves. Pitfalls with our approach may include decreased authenticity of the task (people in the "real-world" don't have someone showing how to do a problem, they are just asked to do it), and a lack of creativity of solutions (students will solve the next problem in much the same way as the first).

Pitfalls with the authentic tasks method stem from it's sink or swim approach. Students will have little guidance on where to start (although often the technology provides affordances), or what process to take in solving the problem.

Overall, I still think that it is best to scaffold students' performance with some guidance for completing the task or they may fail. Without this guidance, it is easy for a student to become frustrated and give up on a complex task. Perhaps vanMerrienboer's 4CID model (1997) is a good middle ground, tasks are kept complex, but are scaffolded only as much as students need and this scaffolding is removed as student performance increases.

The article also mentions:

Authentic tasks can be integrated and applied across different subject areas.

In dealing with the realities of higher education we have not been able to integrate differing subject areas to a very high degree. But in our approach, we have successfully combined English as an International Language instruction with Biology. I see no pitfalls with these approaches except perhaps that students will become confused, but only because they have been taught within the confines of subject areas for so long.

Also, authentic tasks would be very difficult to implement on a full scale in our outdated education systems. There is a very strong mentality that information should be broken down into manageable chunks and then fed to students. The whole system of education, from colleges, to schools to programs to courses to credits follows this approach. If things like authentic tasks are going to take off, this mindset will have to change and the idea of courses will have to go away.

Another pitfall with the authentic tasks approach is that we are asking students who are novices to do what professionals do and to produce professional work. I like the high expectations that this conveys, but students are not experts. They will not produce completely professional work unless it is in a very narrow topic area. At the same time, many undergraduate students do not take their education seriously enough to produce work at this level.


References:

Herrington, J., Reeves, T. C., & Oliver, R. (2006). Authentic Tasks Online: A Synergy among Learner, Task, and Technology. Distance Education, 27(2), 233.

Merrienboer, J. J. G. V. (1997). Training Complex Cognitive Skills: A Four-Component Instructional Design Model for Technical Training. , 338. Educational Technology Pubns.

Merrill, M. D. (2002). First Principles of Instruction. Educational Technology Research and Development, 50(3), 43.

Peer-Assessment in Higher Education

I have recently done a mini-review of Peer-Assessment in higher education. The results of studies are mixed but generally support that peer-assessment is as valid as instructor assessment as long as it is scaffolded properly.

Here are a few of the articles I looked at and what they said:

• Cho, K., Schunn, C. D., & Wilson, R. W. (2006). Validity and Reliability of Scaffolded Peer Assessment of Writing from Instructor and Student Perspectives. Journal of Educational Psychology, 98(4ov), 891.

  • Students and instructors do not trust peer-grading schemes, however, there is high reliability and validity in these schemes if done correctly.

  • Instructors often have no time to grade and therefore skim through assignments while peer graders will take time on each assignment, judging its quality more in depth

  • Instructors grade papers with no other help, while peer graders will usually grade multiple papers, giving each paper a combined rating from multiple peers. Bias can be reduced with this method.

  • Studies in the past have either predicted high or low validity in peer grading, they produced mixed results, some because of errors.

  • Even when peer grade validity is high, students may not perceive it as such.

  • Self assessments are generally less accurate than peer assessments and are often more influenced by self-esteem than actual performance. This is one of the reasons students often feel that peer-assessments are not accurate.

  • Multiple peers should be used to rate each other

  • What an instructor views as reliable peer assessment is usually different than what a student views as the same.

  • Overall, peer assessment may be more valid than instructor assessment because multiple people are rating a single work, instead of a single person rating a single work.

  • Peer review is part of student's learning process.

  • Concerns about reliability and validity are not valid reasons to shy away from peer assessment.

• Lejk, M. & Wyvill, M. (2001b) The effect of the inclusion of self-assessment with peer assessment of contributions to a group project: a quantitative study of secret and agreed assessments, Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 26(6), 551–561.

  • Peer assessment is better done without self assessment

• Magin, D. J. (2001) A novel technique for comparing the reliability of multiple peer assessments with that of single teacher assessments of group process work, Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 26(2), 139–152.

  • Group members are generally more able to assess each other than mentors or teachers

• Struyven, K., Dochy, F., & Janssens, S. (2008). The Effects of Hands-On Experience on Students' Preferences for Assessment Methods. Journal of Teacher Education, 59(1), 69.

  • Teachers and student teachers generally react negatively to forms of assessment that they are not used to

  • Traditional assessment methods were often negatively looked upon by students and alternative methods were perceived to enable quality learning

• Kilic, G. B., & Cakan, M. (2007). Peer Assessment of Elementary Science Teaching Skills. Journal of Science Teacher Education, 18(1), 91.

  • Peer scores significantly correlate with instructor scores

• Ryan, G. J., Marshall, L. L., Porter, K., & Jia, H. (2007). Peer, Professor and Self-Evaluation of Class Participation. Active Learning in Higher Education: The Journal of the Institute for Learning and Teaching, 8(1), 49.

  • One study with 144 students in higher ed led to a 0.83-0.9 correlation coefficient between instructor and student ratings with forced distribution

  • Another similar study with another 144 students led to a correlation of 0.72 between instructor and student ratings.

  • This study found that rankings were statistically different but not academically different (not enough to affect a student's grade).

  • Problems arising from group grades include “inflated grading of friends, lack of discrimination among members of a group, individuals dominating to seek higher marks, and students who do less work but still benefit from a group grade.” forced distribution or ranking reduces all of these problems to some degree.

  • Students did not like this type of grading overall.

  • Forced distribution (ranking) of each other's grades affected whether students gave a higher or lower grade to their peers.

  • Peer assessment should be scaffolded

• Wen, M. L., & Tsai, C. (2006). University Students' Perceptions of and Attitudes toward (Online) Peer Assessment. Higher Education: The International Journal of Higher Education and Educational Planning, 51(1), 27.

  • Peer assessment can increase student-student interaction, enhance students understanding of other student's ideas, increase learner's understanding in the cognitive and meta-cognitive domains, and develop transferable and social skills

  • Peer assessment methods should make criteria clear to students

  • Anonymous assessment may produce better validity of assessments

  • A study with 280 college students found that most felt it appropriate to use peer assessment as a small portion of their grade

  • Students had a positive attitude toward peer assessment

  • Results suggest that “more effort needs to be placed on giving students responsibilities for grading, to develop a sense of learner control and ownership of their own learning, especially in higher education.”

Recent efforts of ours to implement a group peer-ranking system into a general education course have come under attack by uninformed people with authority over the course. This will provide some good points of discussion as we go through the process of testing the course.

Blackboard Still Vastly Inferior to Moodle

I received some comments on my last post “Blackboard Vastly Inferior to Moodle.” An anonymous poster wished for more information, more support to backup my claims. While it was not my intention to make a long discussion about whether Blackboard is better than Moodle for everybody, I will address some of the comments.

It is always good form to consider the source when you get comments from somebody. Comments that are from persons who have only used one cms or another could not be considered very valid because that person has no experience using both systems. Comments from Blackboard's lawyers should be treated differently than comments from a Moodle developer. Blackboard's lawyers have allegedly been calling Desire2Learn customers and bullying them into switching to Blackboard.

Clearly the ethos of a potential poster is an important indicator of why they are really posting. But online, we do not have the advantage of knowing a poster on our Blogs, especially if they hide behind the name anonymous. But for this posting, I am going to assume the comments were made by someone with an open mind who is pushing me to give more evidence that supports my claims that Blackboard is vastly inferior to Moodle. I will provide this evidence.

The commenter first asked:

I'm not sure I understand how you can view that Blackboard is vastly inferior to Moodle. The only example you list is the clicks it takes to set up a group.

For the purpose of this analysis, page loads should be considered more detrimental to performance in the course management system than clicks because they usually take longer than a simple click.

• Adding an item to a course Blackboard 3 clicks, two page loads, Moodle 4 clicks, two page loads.

• Removing the same item Blackboard 2 clicks, 1 page load, Moodle 2 clicks, two page loads.

• Hiding an item in the course Blackboard 4 clicks 2 page loads, Moodle 1 click no page loads

• Re-showing an item Blackboard 4 clicks, 2 page loads, Moodle 1 click no page loads

• Adding a discussion board Blackboard 4 clicks, 3 page loads, Moodle 3 clicks, 2 page loads

• Remove discussion board Blackboard 2 clicks, 1 page load, Moodle 2 clicks, 2 page loads

• Add 4 users to a group Blackboard 20 clicks, 6 page loads, Moodle 6 clicks, 2 page loads

• Remove a user from a group Blackboard 8 clicks, 6 page loads, Moodle 6 clicks, 2 page loads

• Add an assignment to a course Blackboard 6 clicks 2 page loads, Moodle 4 clicks 2 page loads

• Removing an assignment Blackboard 2 clicks one page load, Moodle 2 clicks, 2 page loads

• List all users in the course Blackboard 4 clicks, 3 page loads, Moodle 1 click, one page load

• Viewing and grading an assignment for 4 students with comments Blackboard 22 clicks, 6 page loads, Moodle, 15 clicks, 1 page load

If you were to do all of the above tasks in each management system the total clicks and page loads would be:

• Blackboard – 76 clicks, 33 page loads
• Moodle – 41 clicks, 18 page loads

This IS a significant difference between the two. Feel free to post requests for more click/page load tests if you are still curious since these do not cover every possible activity in the learning management systems. Any additional requests will likely follow the same lines, with Moodle requiring only about 53% of the clicks and 54% of the page loads than Blackboard to do the same thing.

Lets look at the important factor of satisfaction with an online learning system. The folks at Humboldt state university did a study that supports my hypothesis that Blackboard is vastly inferior to Moodle. It is a good read. http://www.humboldt.edu/~jdv1/moodle/all.htm. I have done no independent research on this, but then again satisfaction was not my claim except for my own satisfaction of the course management systems.

The anonymous person also asked:

What are the many more features that Moodle has compared to Blackboard?

Comparing potential features, like those featured on a website but not added into the cms, is not good practice since those features could cost too much for your institution or may be in beta versions. Therefore, only features that come with the default installation of Moodle and standard versions of Blackboard are compared here. This was part of an analysis I did of learning management systems including Blackboard, Moodle and another learning management system. Keep in mind that the quality ratings are somewhat subjective, but the present ratings are not:

Feature	Blackboard	Moodle
Forum	7/10	8/10
Email	8/10	2/10
Notes	8/10	8/10
Chat	6/10	6/10
Blog/Journal	Not present	10/10
Whiteboard	8/10	Not present
Course Calendar	10/10	10/10
Help features	2/10	10/10
Groups	5/10	8/10
Quizzes	8/10	10/10
Gradebook	8/10	8/10
Customizable interface	2/10	7/10
Linear lessons	5/10	5/10
Survey Tools	7.5/10	6/10
Wiki	Not present	10/10
Workshop	5/10	7/10
Total Present	14	15
Total Quality Score	87.5	115

I may have missed a few of the features, but those listed above are the ones important to my work. I also missed some features that are obviously a part of any system, such as user authentication, assignments etc. Whether or not you agree with my quality ratings of the different cms features is up to you. But before you decide, I hope you have as much experience as I do building and teaching courses in both course management systems so that you can make an educated decision.

There are plenty of other works done comparing Moodle and blackboard and it only takes a minute to search for them in google if you care to take the time. Here are a few of these:

http://ssedro.blogspot.com/2007/05/why-moodle-instead-of-blackboard.html

http://learnonline.wordpress.com/2007/07/04/moodle-vs-blackboard-in-nz/

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=9345 (Login as a guest)

The anonymous commenter also added:

I don't see how Moodle is any more "designed for constructivism" than any other cms...

I cannot give a detailed list of constructivist features of all course management systems, but I can write about what I have experience in. Let's also take another look at the chart above and determine if features that are more constructivist are part of Blackboard's or Moodle's standard installations.

Constructivism often emphasizes shared knowledge, especially the ability to discuss and defend ones knowledge with peers. This is supported by communication tools that allow discussion of subject matter among peers including chat, forums and blogs/journals. Other constructivist features of forums include forum rating systems that allow grading. Group features are considered constructivist because they allow group collaboration. Surveys could be considered constructivist because they allow instructors to find out what students are thinking. Wiki's fit within the constructivist view, more specifically in the idea of constructionism, where learners are encouraged to collaborate in the creation of a unique artifact. Workshops, or peer-assessments are used to allow peers to grade peers, allowing peers to learn more in the process.

Lets see how the course management systems add up. Looking back at the chart we find the following:

• Forums – present in both Blackboard and Moodle at about the same quality
• Chat – present in both Blackboard and Moodle at about the same quality
• Blog/Journal – present in Moodle but not Blackboard
• Groups – present in both Blackboard and Moodle with Moodle's group features more enhanced
• Survey tools – present in both Blackboard and Moodle with Blackboard's survey more robust
• Wiki – present in only Moodle
• Workshop – present in both Blackboard and Moodle, Moodle's Workshop feature being superior to Blackboard's self and peer assessment.

The above evidence supports my claim that Moodle is more constructivist than Blackboard. But of course this is well documented too if you are willing to do a little research. Martin Dougiamas, original founder and builder of Moodle built Moodle to follow theories of “social constructionism,” which is deeply situated within the constructivist epistemological stance. As listed above, this philosophy shows in Moodle's features. I was unable to find any information about the underlying learning theories that guided the creation of Blackboard on Blackboard's website.

Of course, there are many factors that affect a decision on which course management system an institution should adopt, and those mentioned above are but a few of them. Factors such as cost of software, hosting, total cost of ownership, student needs, instructor needs are just a few of these. But if you choose to go with Blackboard, take a hard look at whether your institution wants to use more constructivist features. Also consider that it will take about 46 percent longer for your faculty to effectively do something in Blackboard than it will in Moodle, and factor in this cost of loss of productivity.

Blackboard vastly Inferior to Moodle

Recently I have been frustrated by something beyond my control. This insidious thing slows my work down, making some tasks take more than 2 times longer to complete. No, it is not a slow computer or other people I work with, the thing that slows my productivity down so much is the vastly inferior Blackboard course management system.

(Photo provided by Garrettc)

In 2006, Blackboard filed a patent request in many countries in 2006 and won. Then they sued Desire2Learn and won a lawsuit claiming that Desire2Learn had infringed on their patent. Blackboard also "pledged" not to sue open-source course management systems such as Sakai, Moodle and Atutor. Recently the Software Freedom Law Center filed a re-examination request on the patent and the patent office overturned the patent pending appeal on March 31, 2008. The patent was overturned mainly because Blackboard was trying to patent a system with a single user that could have multiple roles within the same system. There are in fact many different systems that precede Blackboard in featuring this and other claimed items and the fact that the patent was even issued originally to Blackboard was absurd.

Not to diminish the importance of this legal battle, but lets move away from legal/business side of things toward the more important usability side of things. I work with both Blackboard and Moodle for different classes that I am teaching and administrating. Moodle is consistently easier for me to work with and for my students to use.

For example, I recently had to add students into groups in Blackboard. To add a student to a group, I had to click "Add users to group." then I had to type in the user's last name and click search. When the user's name came up, I clicked a checkbox next to their name and then clicked submit. Blackboard showed a window that said something with the essence of "you successfully added the member to the group." This window required me to click "ok." To add another member to the group I had to start the process over again and go through these clicks for each member of the group. The amount of clicks that it took to add 4 members to each group was 5 times 4, or 20 clicks.

In Moodle the same action goes like this. I click "add/remove users," then I am presented with a list of all students in the class. I click the 4 that I want to be added into the group and then click the arrow button which adds the users to the group. That is 6 clicks total, and much faster clicks since most clicks did not take me to another page as they did in Blackboard.

When it comes to adding more members to a group, the difference between clicks required in Moodle and clicks required in Blackboard increases exponentially.

And this doesn't even mention the fact that Moodle runs faster at loading pages and responding to my clicks. Nor does it mention the fact that my students have a much easier time navigating in Moodle, and that Moodle has many more features. At BYU-Hawaii, we have worked with learning theories that the latest research supports, Including problem-centered teaching strategies. But whenever I go to Blackboard to implement these, I have to work around it's unwieldy interface just to make something happen. But in Moodle, these items are easy to implement. Probably because Moodle was built to follow Constructivist ideals, and Blackboard works well disseminating information as in the behaviorist approach to teaching. No wonder they feel like they have to sue others, they can't keep up with the latest learning theories and practices in education.

All of the hoopla about patents is troublesome when you consider that a severely inferior system like Blackboard is able to receive a patent and then potentially sue other, more superior products to make sure that we cannot use them.

Thanks a lot Blackboard. For slowing down academia by requiring them to click more, and filing patents to assure that the future is filled with more clicking and less learning.