Robust correlation between student engagement and positive academic achievement has been established in many studies since the mid 90s (Trowler, 2010). Student engagement is underpinned by the social constructivist theory of learning.
Computer Science courses have some of the highest non-progression rates of all higher-level courses and these rates are increasing (Liston, Frawley and Patterson, 2016). Computer Science students are typically much more introvert than the general population (Chandler, Carter and Benest, 2003). Increasing student engagement for these courses should therefore be deemed imperative, urgent and particularly challenging.
This work rises to the challenge by reporting on the innovative use, over the past four years, of Google Docs as an e-Learning medium in the third year Software Development module (Meudec, 2016) of a four year Honours Degree course in Software Development.
Google Docs, a free cloud-based suite of office tools, has been used to deliver a blended, collaborative, cloud-based approach to learning (Meudec, 2014). The learning, with no reduction in face time, is facilitated by the teacher and relies on the use of informal multimedia blog entries, quizzes and collaborative tasks facilitated online. It is delivered entirely in a lab where students bring their own computing device.
For the past four years, the Google Docs commenting facility has been available on all learning resources for this module to encourage increased engagement through social constructivism. The use of this public commenting facility by students (n=133) is positively correlated (R=0.50, statistical significance ⍴<0.01) with their academic performance. The effect strength measured implies that students contributing ten comments during the academic year increased their overall academic mark by seven percentage points on average.
This finding validates the use of Google Docs comments as a means of increasing engagement and is in line with the existing body of research on the positive benefits of student engagement on learning.
More significantly, the overall effect on the four cohorts of students subjected to date to the innovative teaching based on Google Docs has been quantified relative to the other modules on the course (which employ traditional means of teaching at higher level: lectures using PowerPoint). Analysing academic results from both pre and post teaching innovation periods, Blended Collaborative Cloud Learning is shown to be of particular benefit to the most able (>+1σ, i.e.students more than one standard deviation above their class mean score) as well as the weakest (<-1σ) students with an improvement of +0.4σ and +0.5σ respectively in their average academic performance for this module.
A deeper interpretation of these results based on the fundamental characteristics of Blended Collaborative Cloud Learning, the quality of the engagement through commenting as well as the anonymous qualitative feedback provided by the students themselves, is presented.
References
Chandler,J., Carter,J., and Benest,I. (2003). Extravert or Introvert? The Real Personalities of Computing Students. Proceedings 4th LTSN-ICS Conference.
Liston,M., Frawley,D., and Patterson,V. (2016). A Study of Progression In Irish Higher Education. HEA, Ireland.
Meudec,C. (2014). Under Pressure: How to do More and Better with Less by Using Google Docs at Third Level, EdTech ILTA, Dublin. https://goo.gl/IzAqyN [Accessed 06/04/2016].
Meudec,C. (2016). CW207-3 Software Engineering for Web, Cloud and Mobile Apps module. https://goo.gl/K6uFil [Accessed 06/04/2016].
Trowler,V. (2010). Student Engagement Literature Review. The Higher Education Academy, UK.
Evaluation for impact - contributing to the evidence-base , Jenn Burke Award
