The use of online support to supplement face-to-face lectures in this course was inspired by the university's adoption of a learning management system (LMS) with a modular object-oriented and dynamic learning environment (Moodle) as the official LMS. Why are these experiences so relevant to student learning in business management education? This pattern varied by age, gender, race, background, and the frequency with which students engaged with the LMS during the semester.
The research process led to the emergence of the following descriptive categories as findings in phenomenographic research: resource repository, support for learning, complexity of epistemological access, communication channel, social effect on learning, and cognitive effect on learning. It goes on to suggest designing a method of socializing students in online-supported learning, and also augmenting the basic computer literacy course offered to new students at the entry level to include elements of online learning. Finally, this study proposes a model for LMS-mediated case-based pedagogy for Business Management Education.
SASSA South African Social Security Agency SPSS Statistical Package for Social Sciences SRC Students' Representative Council SSSE School of Social Science Education. A MODEL FOR STUDENTS' EXPERIENCES WITH ONLINE-SUPPORTED LEARNING IN BME: LMS-MEDIATED CASE-BASED PEDAGOGY 198 8.3.1.
INTRODUCTION 1
The primary purpose of this study is to explore the participants' experiences of engaging in learning using online support by eliciting their thoughts and feelings about this mode of learning, and also to understand its impact on student learning in BME. This chapter presents an overview of the study, which includes the critical questions and their relationship to my dual involvement as both a teacher on the module and as a researcher in this study. The rationale for implementing online support in a module that traditionally used to be delivered through face-to-face lectures will also receive attention.
The chapter will end with a summary of the chapters to follow.
IMPORTANCE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY 2
This support was limited to the News Forum for the simple reason that students at this level of their learning were still taking their foundational computer skills course and were still not very familiar with using the computer, let alone the LMS. By doing this, it was hoped that using the LMS would improve student learning. It is for such reasons that online chats had to take place according to a timetable, while forum discussions did not have to take place at a specific time.
BME assigned three sessions each week according to the faculty timetable, two of which were for face-to-face contact in the lecture hall and one for participating in tutorial activity with students. The significance of this is the flexibility with which teaching and learning are carried out as students with distinct personalities can benefit from ways of learning that suit their personalities, thus increasing inclusiveness in the process. The research problem that this study tries to address is related to the learning experiences of students as they engage with the online support.
While at face value it may seem reasonable to expect that online support is likely to improve learning, there is still much uncertainty about how students in a South African context are likely to experience learning using this innovation, given given that students at UKZN have had a wide range of learning experiences related to exposure to learning using ICT. So the problem is that I don't know how students will experience learning using the online support in BME.
AIM AND OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY 5
MY ROLE AS BOTH TEACHER AND RESEARCHER 5
Attempts to mitigate this conflict of interest therefore led to the deployment of an independent interviewer and the introduction of a questionnaire in addition to the data collection protocol that existed prior to the first-stage analysis.
THE NEED TO INTEGRATE ONLINE SUPPORT INTO A FACE-TO-FACE
I originally set out to elicit and understand the qualitatively different ways in which students experienced online support using a phenomenographic approach (a methodological framework for researching experiences of learning) within a qualitative study. This will ensure that teachers graduate with the ability to pass web-based learning skills from the current generation to the next generation. Integration of computer-mediated learning in the form of a learning management system (LMS) in higher education, especially in developed countries, has gained momentum in recent years and has had an impact on how universities conduct teaching and learning (Coates, James , & Baldwin, 2005 ).
Thus, in 2001, the formation of the Presidential National Commission on Information Society and Development provided an advisory body to the government on how ICT could be used to solve South Africa's development problems and improve South Africa's international competitiveness (Education, 2003). In South Africa, different approaches to the delivery of curriculum content have been introduced and discarded, leading to a search for new teacher competencies (Education, 2003). The larger the class, the greater the need to consider learner-centered approaches (Jones, 2007) such as online support.
I then made a presentation to the students on how to log in and navigate the online module window and this prepared the students to start experiencing online support in a BME second year module at the start of the first academic term in the year 2012. Although online learning is relatively new and has not undergone the same scrutiny as classroom teaching, particularly in developing countries, this study has attempted to explore how online support is used to complement conventional face-to-face classroom learning, an approach that is conveniently known as blended learning (Seng & Mohamad, 2002).
THE NATURE OF ONLINE SUPPORT OFFERED TO STUDENTS IN BME 8
RESEARCH APPROACH AND PARADIGM 10
Phenomenography (details of which follow in chapter 3) is a theoretical approach to qualitative research and is situated in the interpretive paradigm. This approach provides the basis for the design of this study and assumes that there are a number of qualitatively different ways of experiencing an aspect of the world (Marton & Booth, 1997). The choice of this approach was motivated by the desire to understand the phenomenon through the experiences of other people as the approach was long ago identified as a useful framework for studies researching experiences of learning (Ireland, Tambyah, Neofa, & Harding, 2008). .
Since human experience differs qualitatively from one person to another, it can best be explored and described in qualitative terms, so qualitative research was the most appropriate design for this study. Due to circumstances that emerged during the analysis of the interviews conducted by the researcher (where participants provided overwhelmingly positive answers to questions), the. The interpretive paradigm is primarily committed to providing rich and thick descriptions of phenomena as studied in their natural environments, which makes it the appropriate choice of paradigm in the pursuit of experiential knowledge (Visconti, 2009) under these circumstances.
It could be expected that the change in design would necessitate a change from the interpretive to a pragmatic paradigm. However, this would not be necessary in this study as the use of the questionnaire was intended to establish whether quantitative data either supported or contradicted qualitative data.
SAMPLING 11
DATA PRODUCTION TECHNIQUES 12
This independent individual was a postgraduate student recruited from the ranks of the Student Representative Council (SRC), a structure established to represent the interests of students in higher education institutions such as a university. This was a means of checking whether participants were doing so, in addition to the interviews conducted by the independent person.
DATA ANALYSIS TECHNIQUES 13
SCOPE OF THE STUDY 13
Descriptive statistics from the questionnaire analysis in the form of tables serve to complete these categories of description. A learning management system as an agent for online supported learning e) Literature gap .. f) Business management education as a study context g). Students in the current study also had to access online support related to the Moodle learning management system (LMS) to engage in mutual interaction with others (Lazakidou & Retalis, 2009).
The selection of the sample in phenomenographic research is influenced by the desire to achieve maximum variation in the ways of experiencing the aspect of the world – the phenomenon – (Akerlind, 2005). The sampling, data generation and analysis of the qualitative component have been covered in the above paragraphs. It was also motivated by the consideration that I was also the lecturer who taught the participants as students in the module which is the context of the study.
The highlight of these statements is the participants' awareness of the constant availability of work schedules in the online space where students' online personal files are located. This happened when students were unsure about something that was being discussed during the chat room conversation. Independent interviews also revealed that students benefited from the online space's ability to keep permanent copies of activities conducted in the online space.
This point of view is also evident from the descriptive statistics resulting from the analysis of the questionnaire. This finally brings me to the second category of description as presented in the next paragraph. In the following case, the Participant acknowledges the capacity of the web space to disseminate information about upcoming incidents.
Students' attention in the lectures was partly driven by announcements circulated via the online space before the lecture. This indicates the variation in the ways in which participants experienced online chats and/or the Chat Room. This tension in the online discussion of case studies can be addressed by further research to improve the use of the system in support of learning.
Independent interviews revealed another variation in the causes of low participation rates in the early stages of using online support. The participants in the following cases from the online reflective journals acknowledged that they had encountered difficulties in negotiating access to the learning activity. The next chapter attempts to discuss these findings in the context of the literature reviewed in Chapter Two of this study.
This indicates the presence of the learning element of the CoI model in the delivery of BME courses when mediated online.
