Final Exam DigitallyMediatedLearning Cardenas

Running head: DIGITALLY MEDIATED LEARNING ACTIVITY 1

Digitally Mediated Learning Activity

Jacqueline Cardenas

Post University

Digitally Mediated Teaching and Learning

EDU520

Michelle Herrera

February 16, 2014

DIGITALLY MEDIATED LEARNING ACTIVITY 2

Digitally Mediated Learning Activity

If one were to examine the materials for the pediatric specific training classes provided to

nurses at Children’s Hospital, she might think she was viewing the contents of time capsule.

Binders full of hard copies of printed materials are given to each learner. Lectures are by

educators via PowerPoint. There is rarely any pre-work, and there is never any post work or

assessment unless the class is specifically for teaching a skill and checking off an official

competency for the employee file. The teaching and learning experience is flat. New

technology is slow to gain traction at Children’s, and for most academics in nursing. According

to the 2013 Horizon Report, one of the main barriers to adopting technology in education today

is “Many researchers have not had training in basic digitally supported teaching techniques, and

most do not participate in the sorts of professional development opportunities that would provide

them (Johnson et al., 2013, p. 10).” Because most educators have not been trained to use new

technologies in their teaching, but most learners are using new technology, educators at

Children’s need a simple learning activity that will engage and motivate them to learn from each

other to leverage new technologies and enhance teaching and learning experiences in their

classrooms.

Coincidentally, the organization is in the process of creating a structure of shared

governance for nursing, revising new employee orientation and new graduate nurse training, and

at the same time, vendor that provides the Learning Management System (LMS) is also rolling

out a social media component of the LMS. The timing of these new elements in the structure and

technology of the organization is prime for the ten educators who are responsible for training

new nurses and staff to learn about the social media piece of the LMS. This paper is the proposal

of a learning activity designed to teach clinical educators at Children’s hospital to describe how


the components of social media in the LMS work on a basic level for users, evaluate the potential

use of the technology for communication among a nursing groups, and create a posting of their

unit newsletters as a method of dissemination alternative to email.

Theoretical Framework

This activity draws on the learning theory that best complements the learners in

this educational context. As the learners for this activity are all adults in their forties and fifties

who have master’s degrees in nursing leadership, the first theory to inform the construction of

the activity is Andragogy formulated by Malcolm Knowles in 1989 (Knowles, Holton, &

Swanson, 2011). The core principles that guide andragogy are, 1) the why – explain to adults

why they need to learn the information; 2) adults learn by experience, and by doing, so there

should be specific tasks involved; 3) allow for different styles of learning and varying levels of

experience and backgrounds; 4) instructors acts as facilitators and allow learners to direct their

own learning pathways (Knowles, 1975 as cited in InstructionalDesign.org).

Andragogy is the most appropriate theory for this digitally mediated educational activity

because it involves educated experienced adult learners who will also be using this technology to

teach their own learners if they find value in it. It is of utmost importance to consider their prior

experience with social media and online learning, relate the information to them in a way that

clearly explains how the technology can help them in their jobs, and how they can use it

immediately. The instructor will facilitate the live demonstration and participate in question and

answer during active learning. The educators will be able to complete the learning activity and

create groups in the LMS to which they can add either class attendees, the nurses on their units,

or the nurses in their unit based councils. They will be able to disseminate their newsletters to

the groups using a blog or discussion post rather than a group-wide email, and this will allow


their learners to respond to them immediately with questions, the answers to which all learners

will have access via comments.

Another assumption of Andragogy is that “adults learn best when the topic is of

immediate value (InstructionalDesign.org, n.d.).” The educators will be able to take their

knowledge of the social community in the LMS and look at the possibilities for its uses in pre-

and-post classroom work as well as building communities of practice for shared governance and

evidence based practice projects. Andragogy is not only one of the main theories that the

educators and Children’s use to try and guide their learning principles, but it is also one of the

main learning theories used by researchers toward a goal of developing a new instruction design

theory that supports learning communities (Snyder, 2009).

While the educators will not be developing a community of practice during the learning

activity, they will gain the knowledge and skills needed to begin the process of creating a

learning community using social media in the LMS. The educators will find during this activity

that using social media will make collaboration via asynchronous electronic means much more

organized and efficient. In her article on building community in professional organizations,

Margaret Zalon (2008) applied the assumptions of andragogy to creating meetings via social

media:

Concepts derived from Knowles’ andragogical model helpful when planning a cyber meeting include each member brings unique knowledge and competencies to the organization, members have their own perspectives about how to best advance the organization’s mission, flexibility, members want to feel that their name is used productively, members want to make a contribution to the organization, and members are excited about opportunities to make a contribution to the organization (Knowles, 1998 as cited in Zalon, 2008).


Technology

This activity will occur in a hybrid format such that there will be live demonstration in a

classroom in which the learners will also participate in active learning during and after the

demonstration on their own laptop computers. The hybrid format best supports this activity

because the learners will have an instructor to facilitate the demonstration of the social media site

and the components while all users are present to participate and ask questions as needed. In

addition, the learners will have opportunity to meet in person during the live demonstration and

to collaborate online via the social learning community. This online communication piece is

key, especially for busy adult learners who require flexibility in their schedules.

The LMS is provided by a third party vendor to the organization, and they are

implementing a social media component that will go live as a pilot project in the second quarter

of 2014. This technology will be used on desktop or laptop computers inside the organization,

and occasionally users may access the technology from home. The social learning community

includes the ability to add photos or avatars for identity, badges for participating and rating, polls

for evaluating, tabs for file sharing, wikis, blogs, discussions, and access to each user’s personal

learning history and current list of learning. Members must be added to groups by an

administrator and only administrators can create groups. Some researchers actually recommend

using the online social community to build peer interaction for online learners (Swan, 2002 as

cited in Bates & Watson, 2008).

One technology to integrate into this activity after the social media/online community is

the blog. The blog supports the teaching and learning of this activity, first because the blog will

be a response to the topic we are learning about (online social learning communities). “Research

has shown that the use of blogs substantially enhances students’ overall learning experience


(Shim & Guo, 2009 as cited in Revere & Kovach, 2011).” They also indicate that it may be

easier and faster for learners to respond to blogs via the web on mobile technology. The blogs

available in the LMS community are not the same as Wordpress or Blogspot blogs in that they

do not reside on the web outside of the LMS. They are only accessible inside the community to

the specific group assigned, and they are not customizable with headers, photos, and the many

customizations available in typical blog sites. The blogs may assist busy educators and busy

nurses in participating in any communities of practice that could develop as a result of this

activity. Other researchers point to the very nature of blogs as appropriate for educational

technology due to the user’s ability to voice opinion in response, for a collective response, for

questions and answers to develop, and for reflection to occur (Baird & Fisher, 2006).

Learning Activity

The plan for this particular learning activity is to teach the ten clinical educators at

Children’s Hospital how an online social learning community can be used as learning and

community space during the pilot of the new online social media piece of the LMS. The learners

in this activity as previously stated are masters educated nurse educators. Theses educators have

limited time, and their courses lack creativity because their technology options thus far have

been limited due to budget constraints, knowledge, and technical barriers. They all have a strong

desire to make their educational activities more interactive, more engaging, more learner-

centered, and less paper-based.

The activity itself will be a live presentation of the social media component via LCD

projector in a conference room in which all educators can participate and follow along on their

own personal laptops. The activity will begin with the demonstration of access to all of the

locations on the social media site and will include an active learning component for the learners


to also access tabs, discussions, and other locations on their laptops during the live session.

While this is a hybrid format of teaching and learning, researchers Bates & Watson (2008)

discuss the importance of using an active component for the online portion is important to

enabling students to participate in the environment, test their knowledge, and see their outcomes

(42). Part of their participation will be that educators respond via comments to a document

posted in the file section of the community that is a journal article related to nursing communities

of practice.

The expected outcomes for this activity are that the educators will be able to describe

how the components of social media in the LMS work on a basic level for users, evaluate the

potential use of the technology for communication among a nursing groups, and create a post of

their unit newsletters. According to researchers Halawi, McCarthy, & Pires, (2009), e-learning is

an effective tool to use in the framework of Bloom’s Taxonomy which consists of six levels,

remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. The learning

activity at Children’s Hospital with outcomes based on Bloom’s Taxonomy will include lower

level functions of the hierarchy as the educators describe how the components of social media

work in the LMS, they will remember and understand the various tabs, links, and locations and

their functions. On Bloom’s higher levels, they will evaluate how this technology will work for

them in communicating with their learners and their nursing units. They will compare what they

read in the posting about an online nursing community of practice and its uses, to the potential

for learning and practice at Children’s and they will respond by evaluating the article and its

potential application in the organization via comments. Finally, they will use the social

community to create their own post using their newsletters. The post can be either a blog post,

discussion post, or document posting, depending on how the educator decides she wants to use or


further develop the social learning community to communicate, share training information,

materials, and evidence.

The learners for this activity will have full exploration and demonstration of the

community, including how to manage files, users, and administration as a mediator. More than

support for this learning activity and the outcomes, in order for this technology to take hold and

for educators and learners to experience the benefits from it both in formal continuing education

and informal communities of practice, the organization must support it. As indicated the

Harvard Business Review, communities of practice must be cultivated such that they are

provided with the right resources including people and indirect budgets that employees are

empowered to work creatively without dictation from management (Wenger & Snyder, 2000).

Because the educators are participating in this activity to learn the technology so they can

use it as a teaching method going forward, it has extended learning components. In addition, if

the project is successful and a community or communities of practice do develop as a result,

there are many opportunities for informal learning to occur based on informal sharing among

peers, other evidence shared and posted by members, and other new technologies added into the

utilization of this tool such as wikis or Twitter. The community could also be used to post

formal learning components of the educators’ classes such pre-and-post tests, evaluations, polls,

surveys, in addition to all of the informal possibilities.

Assessment

Students participating in this activity will be assessed in two ways: 1) by completing a

pre and post self-assessment that includes their goals and accomplishments, 2) by participating in

an online forum in the form of a discussion board in the online community. As discussed by

Garrison and Ehringhaus (n.d.), self-assessment is a formative assessment that incorporates the


learner's meta-cognitive thinking as they are in the process of learning. In addition, according to

Stanic (2013), forums are can promote critical thinking, communication, self-reflection, and

opportunity for evaluation.

The pre-assessments will be in a questionnaire that learners will complete on paper prior

to the live session. The post-assessment will be a discussion post to which the learners will

respond with their answer via the comments in the forum. The questions will be open ended to

help the learners and the instructor understand how much they know and learn about using online

social learning communities and the various features offered and to help the learners think

critically during the activity about how they can use a social learning community to mediate

teaching and learning in nurse training, continuing education, and communities of practice. The

questions for the pre-assessment will be as follows: 1) How do you currently use social media?

2) What are some features of social media that could be used for teaching/learning in your

classes? 3) What are some components of social media that could be used for communication

with your learners or among nurse groups? 4) What are some advantages and disadvantages to

using social media for learning and work group communication? 5) What are your goals for this

activity? On the post-assessment, the changes will be questions 1) How will you use social

media differently after this activity? 5) What goals did you accomplish for this activity or will

you accomplish as a result of this activity? A final question will be added to the post-assessment

for use in evaluating the activity: 6) How has this activity changed your teaching practices? In

addition these self-assessments, the learners and the instructor will be able assess their learning

as they participate in the discussion forums.

Forums in this activity provide opportunity for learners to assess their own learning as

well as the instructor to conduct formative assessment of the learning activity while it is in


progress and provide timely descriptive feedback. The goal of these assessments is to involve

the learners in the assessment process as part of active learning during this activity. Encouraging

them to participate in this self-evaluation and reflection aids in the learning process according to

process (Boud, Keogh & Walker, 1985; Sadler, 2010; Schön, 1983, 1987 as cited in Rourke,

2012). The following rubric will be used to assess participation in the forum.

Criteria Acceptable - 1 Good - 2 Excellent - 3

Discussion QuestionResponse

Posts adequate response with

superficial thought and preparation;

doesn’t address all aspects of the task

Posts well developed response that

addresses all aspects of the task; lacks full development of all

concepts

Posts well developed response that fully

addresses and develops all aspects

of the task

Content Contribution Repeats but does not add substantive

information to the discussion

Posts information that is factually correct;

lacks full development of

concept or thought

Post factually correct, reflective and substantive

contribution, advances discussion

Clarity & Mechanics Communicates in friendly helpful

courteous manner with some errors in clarity or mechanics

Contributes valuable information to the

discussion with minor errors in clarity or

mechanics

Contributes to the discussion with

comments that are clear and concise in an easy to read style

that is free of grammatical or spelling errors.

Rubric adapted from: http://www.udel.edu/janet/MARC2006/rubric.html

Evaluation

Evaluation of this learning activity will take place in two parts. To use Kirkpatrick’s

(1994) evaluation model, the first two components, reaction and learning, will be evaluated

immediately following the activity (as cited in http://www.businessballs.com/

kirkpatricklearningevaluationmodel.htm). As a result of the assessments the learners complete,

the instructor will determine their reaction to the activity and whether it was positive, negative,

useful, or not. The instructor will evaluate their learning based on the differences between the

http://www.businessballs.com/

http://www.udel.edu/janet/MARC2006/rubric.html


pre and post-assessment answers and the discussion rubrics. The last two components of

Kirkpatrick’s model, behavior and results can only be evaluated after some time passes.

As new technology, policies, and various other changes tend to move slowly through the

organization, the final evaluation piece for this activity will not take place until six months after

the activity. To determine if the activity had any impact on the learners’ teaching or their

“applied learning and implementation,” the final evaluation survey will be delivered to them via

SurveyMonkey six months after they have had time to implement their new knowledge. This

will also give them more time to determine the results or outcomes for their teaching using this

the social learning community as a tool.

Conclusion

Educators at Children’s Hospital have long been subject to using the same old

educational methods that they learned when they were nurses being taught by educators in their

field. Most of them, while they are masters educated, did not have extensive training in

education or adult education. They are familiar with terms, and some techniques, and theories,

and they are aware of some of the new technologies available to them, but they lack the time and

resources to embrace these new ideas. Improving interactivity, engagement, and motivation for

our learners is a goal we set for ourselves every year. We have yet to do anything differently to

achieve that goal. This learning activity, based on adult learning principles to motivate the

educators to see a new perspective in technology is an attempt to challenge old standards and

bring in new ideas toward a future in learner centered learning.

If the educators that participate in this learning activity find that the online social learning

community is engaging, motivating, recognizes them as adult learners, and offers the ability to

teach using multiple levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, they may be the first adopters in our


organization. As leaders in their units that staff go to for education, and as persons responsible

for training new staff and new graduate nurses, these educators have the ability to shape this new

technology into a tool that supports classroom and online learning, communities of practice, and

councils of shared governance within the organization. While there is much learning and support

required to reach that potential, it is a possibility, and this learning activity is a beginning. Find

this paper and more information and resources on conducting a digitally mediated teaching at

http://learningmuse.wordpress.com/portfolio/edu520/


References

Baird, D. E., & Fisher, M. (2006). Neomillennial User Experience Design Strategies: Utilizing

Social Networking Media to Support "Always On" Learning Styles. Journal of

Educational Technology Systems, 34(1), 5-32.

Bates, C., & Watson, M. (2008). Re-learning teaching techniques to be effective in hybrid and

online courses. Journal of American Academy of Business, Cambridge, 13(1), 38-44.

Garrison, C. and Ehringhaus, M. (n.d.). Formative and summative assessments in the classroom.

Retrieved from

http://www.amle.org/BrowsebyTopic/Assessment/AsDet/TabId/180/ArtMID/780/

ArticleID/286/Formative-and-Summative-Assessments-in-the-Classroom.aspx

Halawi, L. A., McCarthy, R. V., & Pires, S. (2009). An evaluation of e-learning on the basis of

bloom's taxonomy: An exploratory study. Journal of Education for Business, 84(6), 374-

380.

Instructionaldesign.org (n.d.). Retrieved from

http://www.instructionaldesign.org/theories/index.html

Johnson, L., Adams Becker, S., Cummins, M., Estrada, V., Freeman, A., & Ludgate, H. (2013).

NMC horizon report: 2013 higher education edition. Retrieved from New Media

Consortium website: http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2013-horizon-report-HE.pdf

Knowles, M. S., Holton, E. F., & Swanson, R. A. (2011). The adult learner: The definitive

classic in adult education and human resource development (7th edition ed.).

Rourke, A. (2012). Assessment 'as' Learning: The Role that Peer and Self-Review can Play

towards Enhancing Student Learning. International Journal Of Technology, Knowledge

& Society, 8(3), 1-12.


Stanic, T. (2013). Why and how you should get your students to collaborate and communicate?

Retrieved from http://blog.edynco.com/instructional-design/why-and-how-you-should-

get-your-students-to-collaborate-and-communicate/

Revere, L., & Kovach, J. V. (2011). Online technologies for engaged learning a meaningful

synthesis for educators. [Article]. Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 12(2), 113-

124.

Snyder, M. M. (2009). Instructional-design theory to guide the creation of online learning

communities for adults. Tech Trends, 53(1), 48-56. Retrieved from http://online-

educator.pbworks.com/f/Snyder09OLlearningcommunity.pdf

Wenger, E. C., and Snyder, W.M. (2000). Communities of practice: the organizational frontier.

Harvard Business Review. January-February. 139-145.

www.businessballs.com. Kirkpatrick’s learning and evaluation theory. Retrieved from

http://www.businessballs.com/kirkpatricklearningevaluationmodel.htm

Zalon, M. (2008). Using technology to build community in professional associations. Journal of

Continuing Education in Nursing, 39(5), 235-240. doi:10.3928/00220124-20080501-10

http://www.businessballs.com/

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