Learning and Retention of Learning in an Online Postgraduate Module on Copyright Law and Intellectual Property

Various forms of knowledge can be distinguished. Low-level learning focuses on recognition and remembering facts. Higher level learning of conceptual knowledge requires the development of some form of mental structural map. Further, application of knowledge requires learners to put theories and concepts into use in authentic and novel situations. This study concerns learning at a number of levels. The context is a fully online module on copyright laws and intellectual property, designed as an introductory course for all postgraduates at a university in Hong Kong. The paper also explores whether the knowledge learnt through the web-based medium was retained after three to six months. Findings ascertained the effectiveness of the new medium, not only in delivering facts but also for assisting the learning of higher level knowledge. As expected, the performance of students declined in the delayed post-tests but not to any alarming degree. Retention of factual knowledge, however, was much lower than retention of other forms of knowledge. This perhaps suggests that the role of e-learning, just as in face-to-face classes, should focus on concepts and the applied knowledge, rather than on memorization of facts alone. 1 LEVELS OF COGNITIVE REASONING Learning involves different levels of cognitive activities. Levels of cognitive reasoning are often described by Bloom’s taxonomy (Bloom, 1956), namely: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. The knowledge level of the original taxonomy is concerned with the retention of information. Comprehension refers to the understanding of this retained knowledge. At the application level, learners apply the theories and concepts to practical situations. At the analysis cognitive level, learners are able to break down the knowledge and concepts in a scenario into their subcomponents. The last two levels of cognitive reasoning are synthesis and evaluation. Synthesis focuses on the assembly and putting together of the learned knowledge in new ways. Evaluation is concerned with learners making value judgments about what they have learnt and produced. There are has been a great deal of debate over the ‘knowledge’ level which is somewhat problematic because the word knowledge, in common usage, has a broad range of meanings. The revised Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001; Krathwohl, 2002) tackles this challenge and contains two dimensions instead of one – a knowledge dimension and a cognitive process dimension. The knowledge dimension now clearly classifies and distinguishes between forms of knowledge: factual knowledge, conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge and metacognitive knowledge (Table 1). Anderson and Krathwohl (2001) described factual knowledge as “knowledge of discrete, isolated content elements”; conceptual knowledge as involving “more complex, organized knowledge forms”; procedural knowledge as “knowledge of how to do something”; and metacognitive knowledge as involving “knowledge about cognition in general as well as awareness of one’s own cognition” (p. 27). 273 McNaught C., Lam P., Leung S. and Cheng K. (2007). LEARNING AND RETENTION OF LEARNING IN AN ONLINE POSTGRADUATE MODULE ON COPYRIGHT LAW AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies Society, e-Business and e-Government / e-Learning, pages 273-280 DOI: 10.5220/0001265802730280 Copyright c © SciTePress As educators we are interested in students acquiring conceptual, procedural and metacognitive knowledge, as well as factual knowledge. It is somewhat paradoxical that formal education has often overemphasized factual knowledge in beginning classes, calling such knowledge ‘foundation knowledge’, and then expected students to make the transition to other forms of knowledge with little overt support. For example, Conway, Gardiner, Perfect, Anderson and Cohen (1997) remarked that students who achieve higher grades on essay-based examinations show conceptual organization of knowledge while simple listings of facts and concepts are correlated with low grades. The development of mental structural maps of knowledge (Novak & Gowin, 1984) and “accompanying schematization of knowledge is what educators surely hope to occur in their students” (Herbert & Burt, 2001, p. 633). 2 LEARNING AND KNOWLEDGE RETENTION IN E-SETTINGS The use of the web as a strategy to deliver learning activities has been of growing importance as technology advances. Research studies have been carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of e-learning in achieving learning outcomes. While many studies claimed that students learn well in the new media, most of these studies did not differentiate or compare the forms of knowledge being investigated. This paper compares and contrasts students’ learning on four levels of knowledge in an online course. The first objective is to investigate whether e-learning can support the acquisition of higher order knowledge. For e-learning to be an effective learning tool, it has to be able to facilitate acquisition of knowledge at the higher levels. The second objective of the study is to explore how well the knowledge acquired at these various levels is retained. The study of knowledge retention in non-web settings in general tends to show that the retention rate for specific facts falls behind that for a broader base of more general facts and concepts (Semb & Ellis, 1994). For example, Conway, Cohen and Stanhope (1991) studied very long-term knowledge retention by monitoring the performance of 373 students over ten years on tasks related to a cognitive psychology course. They found that “the decline in retention of concepts is less rapid than the decline in the retention of names” (p. 401). This finding supports Neisser’s (1984) schema theory that describes how conceptual knowledge is developed when students construct linkages between specific facts in their minds. Such linkages or webs or maps are called knowledge schema. They are more resistant to forgetting than isolated pieces of detailed knowledge. There might be exceptional cases, though, if the specific facts are involved in very personal contexts. Herbert and Burt (2004) suggested that context-rich learning environments (such as problem-based tasks or tasks with connections to learners’ own lives) allow the building of a rich episodic memory of specific facts and this improves the motives of learners to pay attention to learning. Learners are “more likely to then know the material and schematize their knowledge of the domain” (p. 87). Relatively little is known, however, about learning and knowledge retention patterns in esettings. Yildirim, Ozden and Aksu (2001) compared the learning of 15 students in a hypermedia learning environment with that of 12 students in a traditional situation. They found that students learnt and retained knowledge better in the computer-based environment, not only in the lowerlevel domains that were about memorization of declarative knowledge, but also in the higher domains of conceptual and procedural knowledge. Bell, Fonarow, Hays and Mangione (2000), however, in their study with 162 medical students, found that “the multimedia textbook system did not significantly improve the amount learned or learning efficiency compared with printed materials ... knowledge scores decreased significantly after 11 to 22 months” (p. 942). The problem with many of these studies is that the design of the online module does not provide any advantage over the printed version from the students’ perspective (Reeves & Hedberg, 2003). We were conscious of the need to design for a learning advantage when deciding to use a fully online module. The present paper aims to provide further information about knowledge retention in an online course through analysing student performance levels on a fully online introductory course for postgraduate students on copyright law and intellectual property. The course was structured to include learning activities on four levels: (1) specific facts, (2) more general facts and rules, (3) concepts, and (4) applied knowledge. These are related to the revised Bloom’s taxonomy in Table 1. For the fourth category, we will use the term ‘applied knowledge’ but, as shown in Table 1, the tasks in this category WEBIST 2007 International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies