Students' Interaction and Perceptions in a Large-Enrolled Blended Seminar Series Course.

Seminar series can address cutting-edge topics not covered in existing courses, but it is time-consuming for interaction between students in large-enrolled seminars. To promote student interaction without compromising course goals, a large blended seminar series course was designed by combining traditional offline lectures and online discussions for Educational Technology Frontiers course. The study collected posts from online discussion forums. Social network analysis and descriptive statistics were used to analyze students’ interaction. The study also conducted three surveys to investigate students’ perceptions of course success on the aspects of subject understanding and active learning. Wilcoxon signed rank test was used to determine significant differences of students’ subject understanding before and after class. Descriptive statistics were used to explore students’ active learning. The results showed that the course promotes students to participate in interaction and students show a high level of enthusiam in interaction. The study also documented a strong and positive influence on students’ perceptions of their subject understanding and active learning. INTRODUCTION A seminar course can address topical areas considered essential elements of the curricula that do not easily fit with any existing courses (Romanelli, 2008). Further, research shows that seminars encourage students’ development of interpersonal communication skills (Popovich, & Jackson, 2004), improve student satisfaction (Porter & Swing, 2006), and enhance students’ development of self-efficacy (Popovich, Katz, Iramaneerat, & Smith, 2007). However, the classroom discussion and interpersonal interactions are a practical challenge for course design. Students’ interaction in seminars is a time-consuming task, and it is greatly influenced by the amount of quality time (Popovich, & Jackson, 2004). Recently, professors have used online discussion forums (ODFs) to supplement classes (Alzahrani, 2017) and to facilitate social interaction among students (Cho, & Tobias, 2016). Online discussion allows time for learners to reflect and respond to issues being discussed (Havard, Du, & Olinzock, 2005), which promotes student understanding of a topic (Cho, & Tobias, 2016). Further supporting the value of ODFs, research shows that most students like the atmosphere of peer discussion outside of class (Dao, & Zhu, 2014) . Students’ interaction in large-enrolled seminar course is limited. BL in seminar course is highly effective (Extavour & Allison, 2018). Combining the advantages of seminars and online discussions, we designed a blended-learning seminar series course (BSSC) to promote interaction among students, which combined largeenrolled offline lectures and online discussions in a seminar series on the course of Educational Technology Frontiers. The stdudy is to explore the interaction among students and the overall perceptions of course success of the students who participated in the BSSC. Three research questions of the study are specified as follows: • How do students interact in a BSSC? TOJET: The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology – July 2019, volume 18 issue 3 Copyright © The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology 89 • What level of enthusiam for participation in interaction do students show in a BSSC? • Is there a change and if so how do students perceive the BSSC success on the aspects of subject understanding and active learning? LITERATURE REVIEW BLENDED LEARNING (BL) Learning is developed through interactions (Vygotsky, 1978). Online discussion promotes the communication and collaboration among students (Al-Ibrahim & Al-Khalifa, 2015). It provides authentic learning opportunities that are not readily available in a classroom setting. BL refers to the integration of such online communication into courses (Alzahrani, 2017; Extavour & Allison, 2018). BL can improve students’ flexibility in learning and encourages interaction among students (Ellaway & Masters, 2008). Research on BL shows that it promotes student learning, especially facilitating students’ interaction with peers (Extavour & Allison, 2018). Course designers have taken several approaches to designing seminars that use BL. Roseth et al. (2013) blended synchronous face-to-face and computer-supported cooperative learning in a doctoral seminar. Meretsky and Woods (2013) designed a seminar combining students, remote experts, and practitioners together via a virtual space, which helped students gain additional insight into their field of practice. STUDENTSTUDENT INTERACTION Student-student interaction plays a vital role in learning (Jacobs & Ward, 2000; Sher, 2009), supporting maximal achievement, socialization, and healthy development (Johnson, 1981). They are also significant contributors to student satisfaction (Sher, 2009) and perceptions of course effectiveness (Flottemesch, 2000). Many researchers have found that online discussion enhanced students’ learning and facilitated their interaction (An, Shin, & Lim, 2009; Hew & Cheung, 2013; Hrastinski, 2008). Social network analysis (SNA) is often used to analyze the networks of student interaction. It’s an effective method to analyze interaction among students in ODFs (eg. Zheng & Warschauer, 2015; Suraj & Roshni, 2016). STUDENT PERCEPTIONS Prior research has demonstrated that student perceptions can be both reliable and predictive of learning (Wallace, Kelcey, & Ruzek, 2016). Further, students’ perceptions shape their learning motivations (Spearman & Watt, 2013). Research on students’ perceptions of different course designs has generally been conducted through surveys. Brunton et al. (2015), for example, evaluated students’ perceptions of seminar and lecture-based teaching in restorative dentistry. Their survey on effectiveness, self-development, and interaction showed that students preferred the seminar format to the lecture format. Gajbhiye et al. (2014) evaluated the perceptions and attitudes of graduate students towards seminars from the aspects of satisfaction, collaboration, and understanding. They concluded that the postgraduate seminar method is effective and well-accepted among postgraduate students. Ruchi et al. (2012) investigated students’ perception of seminars of first year medical subjects, and the majority of students felt that their school should continue to offer seminars in the future. Extavour and Allison (2018) assessed students’ perceptions of BL in a pharmacy seminar course. Questions addressed the effectiveness of learning resources, course activities, the instructor, and the blended delivery, as well as perceptions of the development of critical-thinking. COURSE CONTEXT This study was based on the BSS course, Educational Technology Frontiers, which was offered in the Fall semester in 2017. The purpose of the course was to share cutting-edge research areas in the field of educational technology. The instructors consisted of a professor and an assistant whose responsibility was to contact with guest speakers, record offline attendance, and organize online discussions. LARGE-ENROLLED OFFLINE LECTURES In light of research showing that guest speakers bring value to courses (Popovich & Jackson, 2004) in particular in seminar series (Zorek et al., 2011), we invited nine famous guest speakers at home and abroad in the field of educational technology to carry out 14 offline lectures. One lecture shares one subject, so there are 14 subjects included in the course. The course was open to all graduate students in a university in China. There were 106 students enrolled in the course. Course meetings took place once a week with a duration of 90 minutes. ONLINE DISCUUSION The online discussion for the course was carried out on Daxia, an online learning platform based on Blackboard. After each offline lecture, the teaching assistant uploaded the lecture slides to Daxia and created an ODF TOJET: The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology – July 2019, volume 18 issue 3 Copyright © The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology 90 corresponding to the subject of the lecture. According to Dao and Zhu (2014), imposing a deadline for students to contribute is crucial to maintaining student participation to create an active discussion. Therefore, each ODF was open for a week. A WeChat group was also created by the assistant to release learning materials and course notices to all students. METHOD ACTION RESEARCH According to Butz and Stupnisky (2017), an online discussion intervention in hybrid course can improve students’ feelings of relatedness with others, which contributes to increasing interactions among students. To design the intervention, a sequence of events that take place at various time points over the course should be incorporated (Butz & Stupnisky, 2017). Action research emphasizes on intervention (Warden, Stanworth, Ren, & Warden, 2013), and involves important issues over long periods of time (Eden & Huxham, 1996) to improve the cycles of action. Therefore,we conducted an action rearch based on students’ performances and feedbacks to promote students’ interaction, which included three stages of teaching interventions throughout the course, as follows: Stage 1 (weeks 1-4): • In each offline lecture, students are required to fill out the attendance form. • In each ODF, each student must post at least three times. • ODF discussion topics are freely created by students, but they should be related to the subjects of that week’s lecture. Problems arising in stage 1 : • Although almost all students took part in the discussion, most students posted less than three times. • There was minimal student interaction because students were more inclined to create their own topics than to reply to others’ posts. • Many topics were duplicated. Stage 2 (weeks 5-8): • Each student must reply at least twice in each week’s ODF. • Students should contribute comments to existing posts instead of creating