China WBI

This iteration came off to a good start with the conversion of the View Study Group page to the MVP pattern.

As the screenshot shows, I was also able to get the first name and last name appended in one data column. It sounds amazingly trivial, but again, with the traditional ASP control, it’s just not straightforward. Using MVP, it feels like everything just fell into place, and I knew exactly what I had to do and where to do it.

I also made the class name a link to the View Class page. Other than that, nothing significant or abnormal to report, which is really a good thing — it means it programmed out just the way I expected it to.

It’s time for the next iteration. The broad view of this iteration is that we want to finish up the user data model and associated account management/record views. Here are the stories:

• Convert the View Study Group page to the MVP Pattern. This time, consolidate Last Name and First Name columns to a single Full Name column.
• Convert the View Student page to the MVP pattern. Reformat and don’t use a DetailsView.
• Consolidate Teacher and Admin roles to a single Admin role.
• Use the UserService to create Student and Admin users in the Create User process.
• Fix class assignments in Create User to apply differently to students and teachers.

That’s quite a bit of stuff to do, so this iteration may be a little longer than the last, in terms of coding time. I also need to be finishing up a basic outline for my lit review, which should be forthcoming soon.

This release had a significant amount of upfront work in terms of learning how to implement MVP in ASP. After some initial adjustment and uncomfortability, though, the pace picked up quickly, and I feel much more comfortable using MVP than relying on many of the built-in ASP controls.

As iI’ve said before, the ASP controls are nice — they do a lot of things behind the scenes that save a lot of “glue work” between the view and the data. But I felt like this was at the cost of relinquishing a little too much control, and it was preventing me from understanding more about what was happening behind the scenes.

Other than falling behind schedule due to external reasons, I think this iteration went very well, and for the portions of the site I edited, I didn’t have the feeling as I completed each part that I was sacrificing what I really wanted to do just for the sake of getting the minimal requirement done and moving on. I think those pages are a good base to build upon.

I’m definitely going to continue using MVP as I implement new features for future iterations. There are still some places in the site that can be converted to use the MVP pattern, but I will defer these to the point at which they fall into the schedule, since I have planned around implementing specific domain areas.

This page took long to convert like I expected, primarily due to learning how to persist profile changes using MVP.

After finally getting it working, I’m not sure I understand 100% why exactly it works the way it does… or more specifically, what the deal is with checking IsPostBack, and how that affects what the values I retrieve from the ASP controls. Anyhow, it works.

This conversion actually looks a little different on the surface as the previous version, because as predicted, I wasn’t able to keep the ASP control I had been using to show the profile fields (which was a DetailsView). As it turns out, I much prefer what I have now, which are individual TextBoxes and an ASP Button to handle Save Changes. Again, I feel like I understand what is going on beneath the hood better, and have more direct control of the data and its presentation.

I learned some important things in this story, which will undoubtedly help in later stories and iterations.

As I mentioned last time, implementing MVP for many of the existing pages was going to be relatively quick and painless now that I did it for one page. I was half right. In the case of the My Study Groups page, that certainly is the case, since it’s very similar to the My Classes display.

Again, nothing should be different on the surface, so no surprises.

I got this implemented very quickly, although there were a surprising number of new classes needed to support this. Anyhow, this step wasn’t the issue — what I realized was that so far I’ve just been writing MVP to handle viewing existing information. The last part of this iteration is to implement the Profile page, which is not just viewing, but also editing. That’s something that I don’t recall seeing an article on, and there’s a lot of “magic” that goes on behind the ASP control that I implemented without MVP for the profile page, which I’m thinking I might have to undo to get working. Anyhow, I’m anticipating more of a challenge to close out the iteration. But I’ll savor the relative ease of today’s story…

Taking the first step on this iteration took much, much longer than I anticipated… partly because of an extra heavy workload at work for a few weeks, but also because there was definitely a learning curve to getting set up on MVP.

Part of the problem was that there isn’t a standard way that MVP is implemented in ASP, and reading several articles with different implementations confused me more than it helped me. I ended up taking most of the ideas from Mike Mason’s excellent blog article, as he described a similar scenario to mine.

There’s a significant amount of setup involved to get MVP started. Take a look at the new files in my project:

Everything in the App_Code folder is new. There are two new domain classes (WbiUser and Course), as well as some service layer classes (CourseService and UserService), as well as a presenter and view interface for the My WBI page.

Also, the guts of the My WBI page changed significantly, as the SQL statements were no longer embedded in the file. This large change, though, is totally transparent to the user looking at the web page… My WBI looks just the same (and as ugly) as before:

So why all the fuss? What MVP has accomplished, is allowed me to separate my UI, presentation, and data access logic into separate layers. Each of these layers can be independently tested and modified without affecting the others, which improves maintainability.

So how do I feel about using MVP so far? Well, I have to say, I’m not sure how to explain it, but my programming soul feels “cleaner.” I feel less like what I just coded was a hack… and I feel like I understand how I’m getting the data and how it’s being transformed into formatted information that’s usable to the user. There was a bit of upfront work to get started, but the conversion for most of the rest of the pages should be straightforward and quick now (famous last words).

I’m a bit behind in schedule, but I will try and make up for it by zipping through the rest of iteration 0.1.4.

We continue with responses to the new readings I’ve pulled, this time with the articles dealing with the use of educational technology in China.

• Gu, Y. (2006). An ecological model of e-learning in a Chinese context: critical reflections of five years’ practice of e-learning management in the BIOE. Studies in Continuing Education, 28(2), 99-120.

This article is not a research study, but a commentary/reflection on the experience of a Chinese educational administrator, who was tasked with setting up an institute of online education in Beijing, which after 5 years, had 15,000 registered students. Although the author did not present this as research, it was in interesting insight into the mindset of an indigenous Chinese educator in China.

Something intriguing was that he tried to implement many constructivist methods, especially because this is how the educational community in language studies most commonly believes that instruction should be presented. But, this did not work as well as he would have hoped, attributing difficulties to general busyness of the students, and the poor quality of online curriculum materials, which were simply transferred into digital format from traditional materials. Also, as he acknowledges, “implementation requires the adoption of new practices and/or learning styles or attitudes which are in conflict with existing ones.”

The author reports that through the experiences of those 5 years, he found that students needed much more support than initially thought — “It will never do that students are simply given the resources with the cheapest form of service, such as ‘Here you are. Help yourself please!’” This is notable, as it could have resulted from a desire to have students more self-directed, however, as some other studies have found, particularly in China, students need more structure and support, especially when adopting learning approaches they are not accustomed to.

• Huiyu, Z., Yan, D., & Geng, C. (2005). Educational technology training for higher education teachers in China and some suggestions for improving it. Chinese Education and Society, 38(6), 69-78.

This article was translated from Chinese, and is a survey study of attitudes of Chinese teachers towards CAI, and ways to improve this. The study did not provide much discussion of the data, other than reporting actual raw results, so it is a little hard without more background on the study to figure out the larger implications. However, it does point to current attitudes of teachers as being overwhelmingly positive towards using computer technology, and a rising percentage of educators who feel comfortable using computer technology in the classroom. This seems to point to tangible results from the Chinese Ministry of Education’s initiatives to technologize the Chinese classroom and train teachers for technology use.

• Forrester, G, Motteram, G., & Bangxiang, L. Transforming Chinese teachers’ thinking, learning and understanding via e-learning. Journal of Education for Teaching, 32(2), 197-212.

This article discusses a collaborative effort between UK and Chinese educators to create an e-learning curriculum and program at Beijing Normal University. From the tone of the article, though, it sounds like the UK educators played more of a lead and advisory role. It was my impression as well that there was a bit of an assumption that the UK educators knew the “best” way, and that they were helping their fellow Chinese teachers. For example, when commenting on Chinese learning preferences, the UK authors quote Woodrow & Shaw (2001): “[Chinese reverence for facts and the teacher's authority] contrasts strongly with the concentration on the individual and the nurturing of personal learning which dominates much of secondary education in Britain.” I don’t know if it’s just me, but the quote seems to have a negative attitude towards Chinese pedagogy.

The authors do recognize that the development of an e-learning in China needs to be “sympathetic to Chinese cultural values and existing methods of teaching and learning.” But even in the way this is phrased, it places the foreign teachers in the superior role, urging the foreign educator to be patient and understanding with backwards Chinese educational thinking. Maybe I am reading too much in between the lines, though.

One finding of the authors was that to their surprise, Chinese educators were much more willing and flexible to accommodate new approaches. This gives credence to some other researchers’ claim that Westerners tend to make overarching judgments about Chinese pedagogy on the basis of only surface practices. Because of the structure of the Chinese classroom and viewing interactions through a cultural lens, Westerners might view Chinese educators as being inflexible or even uncaring to their students, when in fact the teacher-student relationship goes much deeper than this.

What is promising is the authors’ finding that Chinese educators truly valued the new opportunities that an e-learning approach was providing them, and that there was great potential for further development and exploration.

As part of this iteration, I’m also doing another search in the literature and updating some of my references.

The two main searches I did were to beef up my references on Bloom’s mastery learning approach and its relationship with web-based instruction (WBI) and computer-assisted instruction (CAI); and to search for any new, good references on the use of WBI in China in the last year or so.

After reading through the articles, here are summaries are what I found in my search for mastery learning articles:

• Kim, S. (2005). The relationship between enactive mastery experiences and online-course self-efficacy (OCSE). Retrieved from ERIC on September 4, 2007.

This turned out to be not exactly relevant. This is a study about how using mastery learning can facilitate self-efficacy, where the curriculum is actually using computers; not where computers are used as an instructional tool. Interesting discussion here, but it’s not something that would go into this literature review.

• Brothen, T. Transforming instruction with technology for developmental students. Journal of Developmental Education, 21(3). Retrieved from ERIC on September 4, 2007.

This was a commentary, not a research study. Nevertheless, it was interesting to me, because the kinds of assertions it poses are the main impetus for me to look more into the issue of contextualizing Western-based WBI in a Chinese setting. For example, it asserts, “[As opposed to lectures,] discussion, for example, is clearly superior at fostering student retention of information, transfer of knowledge, problem solving, thinking ability, attitude change, and motivation.” Really? Is that so sure of a fact, even in Western settings? If a teacher were to use discussion instead of lecture as the instructional method in China, he might find that students actually have much more difficulty learning, as many Western teachers who have taught in China have found.

The commentary also includes a discussion on Bloom’s model and Keller’s Personalized System of Instruction, saying that computer technology has opened up new possibilities for these models of instruction, as they are a good fit for computer-assisted instruction and the individualized tutoring that such tools can facilitate. I mostly agree with this, but perhaps fall short of the optimism that the author has on how easily computer technology will be able to be integrated and used. The author points to teachers being able to write their own courseware that will help students get individualized tutoring, by using new course authoring tools. Having spent more than half a year on writing a single tool for a limited purpose, that could hopefully be the precursor to an authoring tool that a non-programmer could use — well, I’m not sure it’s that easy. Moreover, I’ve made tons of little decisions about administrative issues — how classes are organized, assessed, scheduled, etc. that are totally outside the realm of even the curriculum — that would need to be supported and customizable as well.

• Dalton, D. W. & Hannafin, M. J. (2001). The effects of computer-assisted and traditional mastery methods on computation accuracy and attitudes. Journal of Educational Research, 82(1), 27-33.

This study was a great source of insights on the use of CAI in mastery learning. The study’s literature review was also very informative. It addresses one of the difficulties with mastery methods due to applying it in group settings — also known as the “time-achievement-equality dilemma.” The basis of this is the mastery methods may can slow down able learners for the sake of less able learners, or can leave behind less able learners so that able learners achieve more. In essence, it’s a synchronization issue — because there is (usually) only one teacher following one schedule that the entire class has to follow, either people are going to be left behind or slowed down. Or both. The benefit of CAI is that now instruction can be more individualized, and that there are now opportunities for able learners to go faster or less able learners to go slower, since the teacher is not the “instructional bottleneck” anymore.

An interesting finding in this study is that “while both traditional and computer-based delivery systems have valuable roles in supporting instruction, they are of greatest value when complementing one another.” This finding echoes many studies that have been done in studying blended learning approaches, and it bodes well for my proposed approach for my tool of combining in-class instruction with individualized tutoring/drilling with the system.

• Pape, L. (2006). From bricks to clicks: Blurring classroom/cyber lines. School Administrator 63(7). Retrieved from ERIC on September 4, 2007.

This was not a research article, but just an informational article mostly about hybrid classrooms/blended learning – the use of online and face-to-face teaching approaches. It contains some sections that delve into the role of mastery, and how the instructional variable becomes time, and unit mastery as the constant, rather than the other way around with the face-to-face approach alone. The article doesn’t have a bibliography, so it was pretty much a dead end.

• Lyuben, P. D., Hipworth, K., & Pappas, T. (2003). Effects of CAI on the academic performance and attitudes of college students. Teaching of Psychology, 30(2, 154-158.

This study starts with the idea of mastery learning and CAI, but goes looks beyond how assessments are traditionally performed with this approach. Specifically, this study is concerned about the idea of fluency — that is, the rate at which a learner can answer questions correctly, and the durability of the learner, which enables the learner to solve problems even when distracted. This is an interesting angle to look at, but it’s beyond the scope of what I am looking at, so most likely I won’t be including this in the literature review.