An inductive, blended learning environment, which teaches for mastery is currently a difficult thing to implement effectively in a high school setting. Blended learning got its start a long time ago, but the term "blended learning" has only been around since the beginning of the 21st century. Educators have always been trying to incorporate technology to make education more effective, for example, toward the end of the 20th century, showing videos on televisions with VCRs. Recently, with the development of tools on the internet and its vast reach into many, if not most, homes today, one type of blended learning has become increasingly popular. This is known as the flipped classroom.
Blended learning has the potential to solve many issues currently facing education. One of these issues is the fact that moving through the curriculum at one pace, is likely not optimal or appropriate for every student in the class. Some students may get bored because the pace is too slow for them, when they could be learning much more. Other students may fall so far behind that they actually have to drop their enrollment from the class and try again after another semester or year passes, only to start over from the beginning of the class and spend their time on topics they already know. This doesn’t have to be the case, and blended learning can help.
Mastery learning models attempt to work with the students pace of learning, and inductive learning models allow students to seek out the information they need, when they realize they need it. Instead of a situation where the student listens to a lecture and wonders why this knowledge is needed and only listens because it’s going to be on the test, the student actually tries to figure something out, or perform a task for use in a project, and recognizes the need for more information before it is provided to them. It’s a very effective way of engaging the student in the information they are learning because they are invested in it. Inductive learning relies on the students needing the information, and unless they all miraculously need it at the same time, that information would need to be provided individually at many different times. Therefore, a blended learning system utilizing accessible technology could provide information to students as needed when they are completing a project.
Many teachers would be willing to try blended learning, or the flipped classroom, but it can be a daunting task to embark upon. If teachers are going to make blended learning effective, they are going to need effective tools that are designed for this purpose.
The purpose of this project is to develop a working model of a learning management system website that solves many of the problems and potential pitfalls currently associated with blended learning and learning for mastery. More specifically, the website should be a good model to help teachers who want to implement an inductive, blended learning environment, which teaches for mastery. The website was initially designed and implemented based around the needs of a woodshop class, and was later designed to be adaptable for use by any class willing to adopt the classroom structures and learning styles it supports.
The website is a form of a learning management system, which allows students to choose a project they want to complete, and directs them down the path of completion of that project, providing the necessary learning content needed for that project at the moment they need it, along the way.
It is intended that full implementation of this website will make possible a classroom environment that allows students to engage in work they are interested in, and allow the teacher to be as confident as possible that students are engaged, and genuinely paying attention to content, and not simply going along for the ride while daydreaming in an environment that could potentially otherwise lend itself to that. This website will address the fact that many students will try to get the work done without learning anything because it is quicker or easier. This website will employ some new strategies to make learning of the material the quickest and easiest way for the students to get their work done, and discourage students from taking the approach of guessing until mastery is achieved.
The designer’s inspiration for building this website came from the needs of his high school woodshop class. Safety is of the greatest importance in a class with so many potentially dangerous tools, machines, and teenagers. If a student was absent from school, tardy to class, or otherwise not paying attention during a safety demonstration, the teacher cannot allow that student to use the tools or machinery of which they missed instruction. The teacher cannot simply disallow the student from using these things all year, however, because completion of assignments relies on their use. The teacher would simply have to catch the student up, repeating entire demonstrations, which may not be of the same quality as the original demonstration, but that is all that could be done. Meanwhile, the students who had seen the original demonstration could not be supervised as well as they should have been. Often times, the rest of the class would not be able to do anything while the teacher was catching people up. The teacher also had to meticulously keep track of which students had seen demonstrations, and which had not, as the students would often claim they had, when they really had not, simply so they could use the tool, which could lead to a very dangerous situation.
The instructor started taking videos of his lessons, with the video camera set up in the best possible vantage point for the demonstration, so that all of the students could see from that perspective, and the video, on dvd, could be played as often as necessary for students who needed to see it. It was a step in the right direction, but there were still problems. The television that students were watching the videos on, obviously could not check for understanding, make sure students were paying attention, or interact in any way. Students were also now able to claim they had seen the demonstrations on video, when they really had not, and it was too much for the teacher to keep track of, while also supervising the shop.
The class also had safety tests, which students had to take before using machines. If a student got any of the questions wrong, they needed to correct them before being allowed to use machines. This added difficulty in managing the class, and encouraged students to guess and pay less attention, knowing that their safety tests would eventually be 100% correct, despite the fact that it consumed a lot more of the teachers time.
The next solution the teacher wanted to try would require a web server, and the help of a good friend who was a web programmer. The friend agreed to the project, and the teacher became a godaddy.com customer. The solution was to put the videos on a website, and use
Students had a login, and the website would keep track of who completed the lesson, which at the time was a lesson on the miter saw. Although students could log in and there was a SQL database keeping track of them, the content of the lesson on the website existed statically, which meant that if anything needed to be changed, or another lesson needed to be added, the teacher had to actually hand code all of it, which was time consuming. The good thing was that when the students used the website for the miter saw lesson, it worked very well, and solved almost all of the pre-existing problems. Additionally, the teacher noticed a difference in the shop, as it seemed like there was a much better understanding of miter saw safety considerations.
At that time, the teacher decided that it would be worth the effort to program the site to operate dynamically, allowing lessons to be built and changed from the website itself, as a teacher-user, and never have to actually use HTML or look at the SQL tables on the server, that way, other teachers who did not have access to the web programming required to build these lessons could benefit from this idea. One or two weekends per month for about two years, in their spare time, the two met to work on the website. They focused on major components one at a time, that they identified as needing to be done before other components could be built, while keeping in mind the look, feel, and functionality desired for the end product.
This project had already been in the process of being created when the research was done for this project, however, the research did validate the objectives and components of this project. Concerns about Flipped learning and ensuring mastery are at the core of the components developed for this website. First, users needed to be created, so the overall structure of the user tables in the database was designed. The decision was made to create a hierarchy of users who belong to other users; students belonging to teachers, and teachers belonging to schools. The reason for this was to allow students to have multiple teachers using this website, while only needing one login. Teachers needed a way to input new student users, and to be able to view students’ information, so the "students" page was created. After users existed, the "lesson builder" page was created. This page interacts intimately with everything else the website does, so when other site features or page templates were added or changed, this page always needed revisiting. The "lesson builder" page was filled with functionality such as the selection of which lesson is to be viewed or edited, and functionality to add and delete lines within the selected lesson. Of course, without any lessons to begin with, a page was needed to actually add, delete, and rename the lessons themselves. That page was created, and named "lesson manager". Additionally, a link to this page, which reads "insert", was placed to the right of the lesson selection dropdown menu in the lesson builder page.
After the lessons could be created, the "lesson builder" page was programmed with the ability to edit the content of a selected lesson. The types of pages that a student could see in a lesson were created. These include video, which would play a video for the student to watch, multiple choice question, true or false question, and user input, which would all require the student to submit a different type of response. Additionally, checkpoint and prerequisite were included, which limit the students access to lessons, or their ability to proceed in lessons. After these item types were created, a dynamic table was created which would fill in all the properties of that item for use in the lesson. Specifically, videos could be selected, the start and stop times could be specified to play only a segment of the video, and fast-forwarding the video could be disabled. For question types, a picture could be selected, answer lists could be created, and correct answers could be specified. For prerequisites, other lessons could be specified as needing to be complete before proceeding. With all item types, whether it is a video, question, checkpoint, or prerequisite, a message can be displayed, and the ability to specify which item to go to next is included, based on successful or unsuccessful completion of the current item.
The next step was to make all of this information actually execute for the students view during a lesson. Next, the teacher user type gained all of the pages necessary to view, sort, and filter student progress and checkpoints. After that was complete, a system was put in place to award points to students for completing the lessons, and a space was created for the teacher to leave a message on the home page for the students.
All of the programming was done in ASP.NET, SQL, Visual Basic, JavaScript, and HTML, using Microsoft Visual Studio as the compiler. The se programming languages were necessary because the specific procedures and database requirements were not available through any "do it yourself" website creation/hosting service. Web hosting was purchased through GoDaddy.com. An alternative to godaddy could have been a physical server plugged in at the high school the teacher worked at, but the school’s technology department was unwilling to allow that, because of their own security concerns.
The design of this project was a direct result of the teacher’s experiences with his students. His students would not all comprehend the information in woodshop lessons, either because they were physically not there, were not at a good vantage point to see, were not paying attention, or any number of other possibilities. It was absolutely vital to make sure the students knew this information, because of safety concerns with potentially dangerous tools, and it was obvious to the teacher that the students were not being held accountable for the information on a high enough level, because many safety violations were observed, and questions were asked by the students that they really should have known.
Even after students were required to acknowledge proper safety procedures and answer questions designed to prove understanding, the safety violations and obvious misunderstandings of procedures continued. When the teacher asked the students why they don’t know something that they already specifically acknowledged, in most cases, the student admitted to copying the answer from another student, or guessing until they got it right. The teacher decided at that point, that every effort has to be made to prevent cheating, and to prevent lack of knowledge caused by laziness. The idea for this project was the result.
The teacher who developed this website noticed a need for a type of a blended, or flipped classroom which integrates mastery learning, while being utilized by any of the inductive learning environments. The website would need to be straight forward, easy to use, and come with powerful features for building lessons, keeping track of student progress, and ensuring the integrity of student progress as much as possible. The teacher wanted to make the website potentially useful to many other teachers of various subjects at the same, or at different schools.
The project was developed and written by hand, using web hosting by Godaddy.com. Features were included that would allow students and teachers to log in and use the site. For teachers, features were added to allow the teacher to add students by curriculum and period, to build lessons, add them to a menu, manage media, and view and manage student progress. For students, they were given the ability to make their way through lessons built and made available to them by their teacher.