=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3099/paper12
|storemode=property
|title=Learning From Students. Uses of Non-Formal Digital Spaces in Distance Higher Education
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3099/paper12.pdf
|volume=Vol-3099
|authors=Alberto Izquierdo-Montero,Javier Morentin Encina,Belén Ballesteros Velázquez
}}
==Learning From Students. Uses of Non-Formal Digital Spaces in Distance Higher Education==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3099/paper12.pdf
Learning From Students. Uses of Non-Formal Digital
Spaces in Distance Higher Education
Alberto Izquierdo-Montero1[0000-0002-1146-9299], Javier Morentin-Encina1[0000-0002-8845-
0019]
and Belén Ballesteros-Velázquez1[0000-0001-7836-2966]
1
Dpto. Métodos de Investigación y Diagnóstico en Educación I (MIDE I), Facultad de Educación,
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), C/Juan del Rosal, 14, 28040, Madrid, Spain.
{aizquierdo, jmorentin, bballesteros}@edu.uned.es
Abstract. Self-managed learning through non-formal uses of social networks and
virtual spaces by university students is a fact of life today. Recognising this and
assessing its possibilities is the starting point for this research, which aims to
obtain keys that will facilitate the adaptation of our teaching to current scenarios.
To this end, we have carried out this research in two successive phases: the first,
based on the information gathered in an extensive questionnaire, offers a general
description of the uses that students make of virtual spaces, both institutional and
non-formal; in the second, we work with focus groups to deepen the experience
of communication and learning in these spaces. The results offer guidelines for
the improvement of our teaching platforms by indicating key aspects of the
substance and form of the interactions, as well as technological considerations.
Keywords: self-managed learning, social networks, university teaching.
1 Introduction
Distance higher education has incorporated successive methodological and structural
changes as technological innovations have appeared that can be used as pedagogical
and communicative resources. Thus, the appearance of the Internet has already meant
a significant turn towards digital connectivity, and the rapid and incessant increase in
the possibilities offered by the Network continues to pose a challenge to distance
universities in order to ensure their institutional sustainability in the medium and long
term in such a changing and uncertain scenario [1].
In this sense, the emergence of COVID19 and its consequences in the education systems
has accelerated this link between education and the Internet, increasing dependence on
virtual connectivity and, therefore, providing an almost forced opportunity to rethink
and recalibrate the multiple nuances inserted in this new situation of almost generalised
blended learning [2]. Taking this into account, in the framework of distance higher
education -which is our field of study- it will be necessary to make an extra effort to
offer communication possibilities between the different educational agents, trying to
incorporate among the institutional virtual resources the necessary improvements to
Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons
License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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facilitate dynamic, accessible and efficient interactive processes, which can also
facilitate teaching.
The way in which the Internet has been incorporated globally into many people's daily
lives suggests new links between distance education methods -and not only that- and
online tools such as virtual social networks, among others, without ceasing to present
complexities to be considered [3]. Some studies have shown how the integration of the
use of virtual social networks in well-defined instructional designs can improve the
students' experience during the course, especially in terms of social presence [4]; this
being one of the dimensions to be improved in distance higher education, as we have
observed in previous studies by our teaching innovation group [5].
Other studies have also provided evidence of the positive influence on learning of the
use of instant messaging in dialogic tasks such as journaling, dialogic, transmissive,
constructionist with peer feedback, helpline and assessment [6]. Furthermore, in tasks
related to the debate within the framework of subjects, we have clues that while the use
of the usual forums of institutional platforms may lead to communications that are more
directed towards the construction of knowledge, the use of mobile instant messaging
applications may lead to greater social interactions [7], although they also present
certain limitations to be taken into account in communication between peers for
educational purposes [8]. On the other hand, the characteristics of this type of instant
messaging can also contribute to improve communication between teachers and
students, modifying certain traditional practices and forms of relationship [9].
With all this we wanted to briefly explain the need to explore new forms of
communication and educational use of digital tools and spaces in distance higher
education in order to adapt teaching to current scenarios. This is the basic premise on
which this study is based. As we shall see, a questionnaire was applied and five
triangular focus groups were developed with students from the UNED (National
University of Distance Education) to find out the reasons why they use other non-formal
virtual platforms in the context of organising their learning in Bachelor's and Master's
courses, thus trying to understand what benefits their use could bring to official virtual
spaces to improve the teaching-learning processes at the distance university;
understanding, furthermore, that the current context of blended and virtualized teaching
due to COVID19 may also make this subject interesting for higher education
institutions as a whole.
2 Context
UNED is a public semi-attendance university that combines virtual learning scenarios
(videoconferences, forums, chats, teaching material in various formats, continuous
2
assessment activities...) with optional face-to-face learning moments (weekly or
fortnightly tutorials for reinforcement in Associated Centres -spaces linked to UNED
where tests and tutorials are carried out- throughout Spain and abroad) and other
compulsory moments (external practices and exams, although this has been temporarily
modified within the framework of COVID19). In this context, the UNED has the aLF
platform as its main virtual e-Learning space designed to create and develop training
courses and other pedagogical research projects. Although it has been developed
specifically for UNED teaching staff and students.
The work presented here arises from a teaching innovation project on learning practices
in open digital spaces and their impact on teaching at the UNED. The project has been
developed from "CO-Lab UNED. Open and collaborative laboratory for teaching
innovation" and financed by the Vice-rectorate for Digitalisation and Innovation of the
University Institute for Distance Education (IUED) in the call for teaching innovation
projects for the 2019/2020 academic year.
The reason for the study starts from a basic question: where are the students? This
question responds to an observation shared in conversations between UNED teachers
about the marked absence of students in the university's official virtual spaces (aLF
platform). This situation is highlighted in the answers to the questionnaire applied in
the framework of this research, as we will see later. Consequently, the objective is to
find out where students are, what other non-official virtual spaces they mainly use, how
and for what purpose in terms of self-organising the learning required in the Bachelor's
and Master's subjects. The aim of finding out about these motivations, as well as the
practices that take place in these informal spaces, is to be able to incorporate a series of
improvements in the teaching practice at the UNED in order to offer more satisfactory
educational scenarios, based on discussion with other researchers along similar lines
[10,11].
This pedagogical adaptation of the official platforms and teaching methodologies is
conceived, in any case, as an end in itself, independently of the decision corresponding
to each student on the type of space in which to be most present; in other words, we do
not intend for students to stop using non-formal virtual resources for their educational
achievements, but rather to be able to incorporate some of the most valued
characteristics of their use into the official learning spaces of the UNED.
3 Methodology
The research was carried out in two complementary phases: the first, extensive, aimed
at establishing a exploratory map of the uses that students make of virtual spaces, both
institutional and non-formal; the second phase looked in depth at the communication
3
and learning experience in these spaces. For the information gathering, a questionnaire
composed of 31 items was initially used, where the informants indicated on a Likert
type scale (1-5) the level of use of the different virtual spaces and what functionality
they had for the study. In the next phase, small-scale discussion groups were proposed;
this format is suitable for online development because it facilitates the participation of
all components.
The questionnaire, which was applied online, has been completed by students of
Bachelor's and Master's degrees in the Faculties of Education, Philology and
Philosophy. It was disseminated through the communication tools of the official
teaching platforms and through the mediation of student representatives, who reported
on the questionnaire in non-official virtual spaces. The time frame for accessing the
questionnaire was established between 12 June and 15 July 2018 and, in the end, 320
responses were collected, which allows us to justify their sufficiency in relation to the
total number of students in these studies, accepting equality of variance, an estimation
error of 5.3 and a confidence level of 95%. The unofficial virtual spaces asked about in
the questionnaire were Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter and YouTube.
The focus groups were developed based on a flexible script that allowed teaching to be
rethought in terms of the role played by unofficial virtual spaces in students' learning
processes. There were 5 focus groups, combining students from different studies,
different academic courses and different degrees of participation in the official spaces:
1) 1st and 2nd year students who regularly attend the Associate Centre; 2) 1st and 2nd
year students who do not regularly attend the Associate Centre; 3) Final year students,
doing the Final Degree Project; 4) Master's students; 5) student representatives. A total
of 17 students and 5 facilitators participated. The thematic analysis of the information
has been supported by Atlas.ti, following a mixed categorisation process. The initially
agreed categories (motivation, teaching aspects, cognitive aspects and social aspects)
enabled the 4 participating analysts to organise their work.
4 Results
Firstly, results are shown on the use that UNED students make of unofficial virtual
spaces during the course (Fig. 1.). The use of these networks is self-managed by the
students themselves without the participation of the teaching staff.
4
Fig. 1. Percentage of use of unofficial virtual spaces during the course.
Almost 80% (47.81, 26.56, 4.38) of students normally use these spaces to study at the
UNED. According to the results, the most used is Whatsapp (66.3%), followed by
Facebook (49.1%), and the least used is Twitter (9.4%).
About the purpose of the use that students make of the non-formal virtual spaces, we
can see (Fig. 2 and 3)) that the vast majority use these spaces mainly as a means of
communication and transmission of knowledge among classmates.
Fig. 2. Purpose of the use of the unofficial WhatsApp virtual space .
5
Fig. 3. Purpose of the use of the unofficial Facebook virtual space
These results show that communication and knowledge transmission between peers
takes place in unofficial virtual spaces. Moreover, there is a small part of the students
(approximately 20%) who use the non-official spaces to access basic materials of the
subjects and exams and activities already solved, so, apart from the need for
communication between peers, they also find in these spaces the possibility of sharing
different resources and materials.
The analysis of the responses of focus groups reveals the contribution of the Social
Networks and non-formal virtual spaces as facilitators of fundamental learning of the
subjects. Among others, mainly Whatsapp and Facebook offer the opportunity to create
and join groups of students who share studies. When investigating the valued aspects
of these networks that support their use in front of/alongside official platforms, we
found reasons related to content and form of communication.
These non-formal spaces are used for the purpose of sharing resources and materials,
offering the possibility of finding almost all the information needed for the study and
implementation of practical and evaluative activities:
5:46 the fact that you don't know well what the guidelines are for doing a job,
that a colleague says to you: "oh look, if you want I'll give you mine so that
you can see how it's done or how I've done it, or look they've given me a job
from last year you can get an idea" [...], I've often done a job that I thought had
to be done in a certain way and then I've seen the work of my colleagues and
I've said: "...they're much better off", then I've taken mine, erased it and started
again. That in the end makes you better, it makes you end up with a better
grade
In addition to these materials and resources, the possibility of raising questions and
sharing answers reinforces the use of these networks as learning spaces and, at the same
time, fosters a sense of fellowship, including moral support.
6
1:150 a question from a PEC [practice of continuous evaluation], I don't know
how to approach it, you put it in and it helps you a lot. It seems to me that
UNED, if there is one thing I am getting out of it that is positive, above all, for
me, it is fellowship.
Regarding the form that communication takes, three essential features are highlighted:
the immediacy of responses, closeness and spontaneity of expression.
1:153 On social networks you ask a question and it is answered immediately,
you get a notice on Facebook that such a person has answered you, it is much
faster.
5:38 I think there are two aspects, one of having instant information and, two,
having information without being moderated by the teacher, because it's true
that sometimes there are people who are more shy and don't dare or you think
that maybe asking a slightly silly question like that, between quotes, is going
to influence the teacher to look at you differently and not evaluate you the
same way.
1:151 It's like writing a letter [referring to official platforms] or talking
[referring to non-official spaces].
In this way, social networks are valued as scenarios of freedom, forming an alternative
to the hierarchical organisation that characterises official spaces:
5:37 …and thinking about an alternative, it occurs to me that if there were a
group moderated by the teacher, then it would be easier for all the students to
be in that group, but I think that even so, the rest of the students would look
for another way where the teacher is not, without moderating (they laugh). So,
I think it's something universal.
The feeling of comfort comes from the use of these networks; they are configured as a
safer and friendlier space where relationships between "acquaintances" are interwoven
against the anonymity of the official platforms:
1:169 [in] Facebook is a person, however... aLF is very... I sometimes look at
it, if someone says a comment very out of place, I look at it to understand
where the comment comes from
In addition to these questions of content and form of communication, technological
aspects are also relevant in the choice of networks versus official platforms, which are
often considered obsolete, complexly organised and not very intuitive.
1:155 the forums are not functional; it is not easy to search for things because
even the search tool does not work.
The communication articulated in forums is static in front of the dynamism of the
networks. Although its use is extensive for the reasons we have explained, it is also
7
interesting to note certain risks and limitations that students identify: over-saturation
and the possibility of finding incorrect information:
2:77 ...a teacher told us the other day that she had found some nonsense in an
exam and it was because someone had put it in some notes. We all studied
with the same notes, sometimes there are people who don't even look at their
books.
2:37 Awful. I am in three groups of Whatsapp of statistics, all three are full,
257 people in each […], they don't even read the three messages above. You
answer one question and after ten minutes they answer the same thing again.
5 Discussion
The use of non-formal virtual spaces by UNED students seems to be fulfilling various
functions, as we have seen in the previous section. Our initial question (where are the
students), which emerged when we did not find the expected activity on the official
virtual platform, is answered by the contributions to the questionnaire and the focus
groups: they are self-organising their learning in virtual social networks, such as
Facebook, and instant messaging applications, such as Whatsapp. This self-
organisation of learning involves the use of these other spaces, which are mainly
focused on consulting colleagues and exchanging materials, coinciding with similar
research [11].
In addition, it seems that the lack of a social dimension in the official UNED courses
[5] is compensated for by the creation of and participation in spaces where the feeling
of "companionship" and "belonging" is reinforced by increasing the number of social
interactions and doing so in a more fluid, close and relaxed tone, coinciding with other
researchs on the instructional incorporation of Facebook [4] and on the educational use
of instant messaging applications [6 and 7]. Moreover, immediacy, intuitive use and
dynamism are characteristics of these non-formal spaces that we should consider to
make the teaching-learning processes in university teaching more flexible [10].
On the other hand, the absence of teachers generates a more relaxed communicative use
of these spaces, although sometimes they end up becoming -especially in the case of
instant messaging applications- overloaded exchanges in which the same questions and
answers are constantly repeated, presenting limitations that could be solved -for
example- with student moderation, thus also mitigating other communicative problems
that seem to occur in extensive and complex conversations, linked to collaborative
tasks, through Whatsapp and similar [8].
8
6 Conclusions and recommendations
The results of this exploratory research on non-formal virtual spaces used by students
at UNED, and their reasons for doing so, invite us to reflect on a series of aspects to
take into account to improve teaching-learning processes in contexts of distance higher
education. Results and reflections have been communicated to the Vice-rectorate for
Digitalisation and Innovation as a starting point for redesigning policies and guidelines
that can improve our teaching practice in the current context.
Among other issues, it will be important to recognize the potential of learning that
occurred in non-formal virtual spaces and, in addition, to assess the introduction of
some of its characteristics into official didactic models. We are not talking about
necessarily incorporating the use of virtual social networks to teaching, but about
partially replicating the advantages of these tools for distance education. To do this, it
will be useful to ask how to generate more accessible and intuitive and dynamic virtual
platforms, compatible with various devices (not just computers) to facilitate their use at
different times and scenarios of the students' daily lives. It will also be interesting that
students can create profiles in which they will include the information they consider
offering, as occurs in certain social networks.
Furthermore, it could be important to make an effort to avoid the image of a “chat box”
teacher, betting on more fluid and close styles that generate the confidence and climate
necessary for interactions and pedagogical debates to emerge with fewer corsets
(certain unnecessary formalities inherited from the academic authority) in official
spaces. In this sense, it may also be useful to diversify the communication channels and
formats as much as possible by combining text and audio-visual interaction.
On the other hand, since it is not our objective that students stop using non-formal
virtual spaces, and taking into account that there they continue to encounter certain
conditions that we cannot incorporate into institutional virtual platforms (e.g., absence
of teachers in the chats), we consider that it will be appropriate to offer some guidance
from the teaching teams to the students to prevent some of the problems and limitations
that seem to occur in instant messaging applications and social networks. Among
others: Incorporating the figure of the mediator in unofficial spaces to avoid
oversaturation of messages; Clearly report what plagiarism is and what it means
academically; The need to contrast the notes of other colleagues with the book or
material provided from the tutorials, or even choose to collectively prepare notes.
Non-formal virtual spaces have clearly made the self-management capacity of students
visible in the teaching-learning process. Recognizing the interest of learning in non-
formal contexts and incorporating the voice of the student in the design of the subjects
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makes it easier for us to rethink the teaching methodology beyond the limits of
academic praxis in higher education.
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