Aiding Participation and Engagement in a Blended Learning Environment

1. INTRODUCTION Statistics is a required component of business curricula, but many students exhibit lack of interest and effort in business statistics classes. Through observations and solicited feedback from faculty members and students, we found that the lack of interest can be attributed to students having a negative perception of statistics, which translates into not doing their homework. Statistics courses have been traditionally lecture-based and students depend heavily on the teacher for their learning. The classroom meeting and office hours provide some student-teacher interaction, but the courses require students to be more active and engaged. This provided the motivation to examine anchored asynchronous online discussions as a potential creative solution. Several instructional theories predict that a course environment where teachers and students are able to co construct pedagogical practices in a participatory manner (Chickering and Ehrmann, 1996; Chickering and Gamson, 1987) will produce better learning outcomes. Williams and Chinn (2009) found that online assignments using Web 2.0 technologies increased student engagement and contributed to the level of connectivity. When students actively share ideas, information, and engage themselves in discussions using information & communication technologies (ICT), they can mutually benefit. A greater degree of student involvement can improve the asynchronous learning of the student (Stefanou and Salisbury-Glennon, 2002). Moreover, several researchers (Gunawardena et al., 2001; Pena-Shaff and Nicholls, 2004; Veerman and Veldhuis-Diermanse, 2001; Weinberger and Fischer, 2005; Sfard, 1998; Zhu, 1996) have proposed measures for assessing students' knowledge construction through posts in online discussions. The criteria these studies used are varied, but all of them considered understanding of concepts/terms to given topics/questions as parts of knowledge students learn. For example, Zhu (1996) considered knowledge that students built from their discussions, which were restricted to questions posted by instructors; Gunawardena et al. (2001) suggested that the first stage of knowledge building in online discussion is sharing/comparing information, which can be observed from how students learn from clarifying a problem; and Veerman and Veldhuis-Diermanse (2001) focused on understanding of concepts' meanings together with how students used these concepts. In this study, we examine the effectiveness of two kinds of asynchronous online discussions to increase the interest and involvement in business statistics for information systems majors. Online discussions can facilitate the co-construction of knowledge (Lord and Lomicka, 2008) and student participation. Students who are apprehensive about learning statistics and those who have trouble doing computations tend to have a high level of anxiety (Pace and Barchard, 2006; Bawden and Robinson, 2009). Vandergrift (2003) described it in terms of a fear that "often springs from a tacit assumption that [students] must understand every word, as well as [their] unsatisfactory experiences with a 'listen and answer the following questions' approach to listening activities [in the classroom]" (p. 426). An instructor can use asynchronous online discussions as a tactical resource to help students avoid some of the in-class frustrations and assist them when they are outside of the classroom to supplement their face-to-face (F2F) meetings in a blended instructional approach. This blend of classroom and online learning modes stands to enhance the student experience provided that individuals are typically not single-method learners (Masie, 2002). The rest of the paper is laid out as follows: First, we discuss the theoretical foundations of the research and restate our key research question. Then, we describe the study methodology. Next, we specify the results of the study. Finally, we draw conclusions, discuss limitations, and outline future research ideas. …