Initiated at Simon Fraser University, the Virtual-U project has branched out across Canada. Over 50 faculty and over 3,000 students have participated in Virtual-U course offerings to date. Patterns of interaction differ significantly in the various courses, determined especially by the course design. Using statistical summarization and data visualization, we can see not only how the instructor organized the course but how it actually unfolded and how student participation and interaction flowed according to various designs. While patterns of participation are different according to the course design, there are also significant commonalities among online course activity.
Attrition rates are also very low in the online course.
Instructors note that collaborating online, in Vgroups, helped students think more critically about their own and the work of others. Data to date indicate that faculty who opt to teach courses entirely or primarily online are typically more senior in their career path, and who characterize their motivation for change as commitment to expanding opportunities for effective learning for their students. Denise Stockley and Maria Bakardjieva, two doctoral students at Simon Fraser University working with Dr. Linda Harasim are studying the strengths and limits of intentional design for active group learning, and proposing new directions including hypertextual tools, concept maps, and educational scaffolds online. Dr. Milton Campos, a post-doctoral fellow working with Dr. Harasim from the State University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, is examining conditional reasoning by identifying the flow of meaning implications in online discourse. Cindy Xin is working with Dr. Harasim and with Dr. Richard Wolfe of OISE to explore how the qualitative transcript analysis software, Latent Semantic Analysis, can be used to study conceptual change and the development of expertise among students in online course activities.