Upcoming CIDER Sessions

Evidence suggests that motivation is an important consideration for online learners. Based on this, existing research has frequently focused on exploring ways to design online environments that are motivating to learners. Alternatively, motivation has been thought of as a collection of relatively stable personal characteristics of learners with a view to identifying those traits that predict learner success. However, more contemporary views acknowledge that it is the complex and dynamic interplay of both personal and environmental factors that influence motivation to learn. This presentation reports on research that investigated the nature of motivation in online learning environments from a contemporary 'person in context' perspective. It highlights that motivation is more multidimensional and situation-dependent than first thought and identifies a range of social and contextual factors that can combine in complex ways to foster or undermine motivation.

Human use of information is constant in daily activities. Pirolli extrapolated food foraging models to information: information foraging. The internet, social media, and emerging technologies have not only made information more abundant; they have made it more fragmented and complex. Conducting research on the online information interaction activities of individuals can be difficult as information environments co-evolve with the actions of individual agents. If the research project is too structured and intrusive, participants may begin to alter their activities in response to the researcher's activity. If the project is too open, researchers will have difficulty tracking participant activity in distributed settings.

Fortunately, with digital technologies, the trails and traces that individuals leave as they interact online can provide researchers with valuable insight. Open online courses (sometimes called MOOCs: massive open online courses) are situated between structured classrooms where the educator typically defines information structures and the open web where learners are self-directed without cohort goals and objectives. This presentation will provide an overview of how our relationship to information is changing, review a grounded theory analysis of sensemaking and wayfinding activity of learners in open online courses, and present the Sensemaking Wayfinding Information Model (SWIM) for how individuals deal with complex information.

Blending diverse learning experiences has been in existence since humans started thinking about teaching. Recently, the term blended learning emerged to describe the infusion of new technologies into the traditional learning and teaching process. In particular, the Internet provides the opportunity to create, support and/or maintain a community of learners in a blend of place-based and Internet-based environments. Still under discussion are the fine distinctions and effects of activities in learning environments touched by the Internet, and its social, instructional, and cognitive impact.

In an autoethnographic account of leading and facilitating such a blended university course, descriptions of the instructor's intrapersonal and interpersonal experiences are referenced against proposed teaching strategies in a blended community of inquiry. Post-course student responses to the learning experience demonstrate that the highest value was placed on the learning environment created by the group and the instructor's support.