Title of the proposal
Virtual and Actual Learning Communities in the Same Classrooms: A Case Study of Multiple High Impact Practices
Bio
Abbott, Jillian Ann and Lynch, Barbara L.; Virtual and Actual Learning Communities in the Same Classrooms
Jillian Abbott is an adjunct lecturer in English at Queensborough Community College and York college, both colleges of the City University of New York. She was a Research Associate with the Research Foundation of CUNY from fall 2011 until fall 2015. She is currently working as a consultant, writing case studies of digital media start-ups for the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Jillian’s short stories and essays, features and other journalistic works have won awards and been published in the US, Australia, UK, Ireland and India
Barbara L. Lynch is a lecturer at Queensborough Community College, City University of New York. She has just completed a Certificate Program as a Certified Listening Professional. She is also working on her dissertation looking at media literacy and participatory learning. As a member of the Speech Communication and Theatre Arts department, she has used SWIG projects in her speech classes for the past 6 years. She has presented on SWIG and assessing listening in the classroom at many local and national conventions
General description of the initiative or project
Due to block scheduling at Queensborough Community College, we found ourselves with an unintended physical learning community in classes where we each had a CAP-SWIG project (Collaborative Projects – Students Working in Interdisciplinary Groups). This meant our students had the possibility to participate in an actual learning community and also in two virtual learning communities. The Speech class was also participating in the common read. It has been suggested that participation in High Impact Practices (HIP) leads students to deeper learning and greater retention rates. It has also been claimed that students who receive more than one HIP experience do better than those who receive only one HIP class. Yet there is some evidence that the advantage dissipates after three. These classes were receiving four HIP experiences in the same semester. Our exploratory question is was this experience helpful to the students or did they suffer from HIP fatigue? We plan to present our findings about this unique group in an exploratory study to ascertain the strengths and pitfalls of the HIP experience as it relates to students encountering a class with multiple HIPs. We also plan on discussing the level of satisfaction between actual and on line learning communities expressed in their pre- and post reflections.
Furthermore, in the past students exposed to the SWIG experience have had better retention rates that those who have not. As we only have one semester’s registration rates to look at, any generalization about retention will be tentative at this point. However, the passing rates for this group on the argument part of the department wide English 101 final, showed higher grades for the group who went through this course than students who did not. This may show success in that the unit we taught that had linked assignments, to fulfill the requirements for an actual learning community, was the unit on argumentation. Pre- and post reflections shows that students faced a certain amount of frustration with the asynchronous communities. Yet they did speak of learning the value of good communication and leadership. So while they found it difficult to work with others they never met face to face and that this was their first experience with this type of learning community, they did learn for themselves the basis of good group work. Hopefully this will transfer to future projects.