Social Learning for Engineering

By Kalyan Chatterjea, first published: March 2004

The world-wide-web is being explored by the Singapore Maritime Academy of

Singapore Polytechnic with the aim of improving the learning platform for varied
groups of learners. A Blackboard-based case study was recently conducted at the
Singapore Maritime Academy, where the viewpoints of the learners were given the
central stage and these learner inputs were further
processed by the learners themselves through
individual as well as group projects to build up
individual domain knowledge through constructivist
approaches. The study emphasized the social
dimension of learning (Vygotsky, 1978) through the
asynchronous e-learning channel, which was
considered essential for validating the learner’s own
knowledge domain.

The study was done for “Shipboard Training &

Assessment”, which was an Advanced Diploma
module in Marine Engineering for practicing marine
engineers. The module was originally taught as a
classroom-based module. To switch to an online
mode the participants needed extensive support. The
majority of the students in the module were foreign
students having minimal exposure to computers and
most of them had to be literally coaxed to use the
computers to communicate.

Reflective Practice

The domain knowledge was made available to the

students via Blackboard. The students were then
asked to go through these resources in Blackboard
and put some reflective entries on any of the related
issues on the Blackboard Discussion Forum. To
create a non-threatening environment and to entice
the students initially, they were assured that all of
them would get 10% marks if they provided a single
input on any of the relevant issues, which would not
even be qualitatively graded. These 10% marks were
originally attributed to ’student attendance’ in the
normal classroom-based module. A further 10%
marks were attributed to a short input on the
Blackboard Discussion Board for their entry on
critical reflections on some specific topics. Again
they were assured of these marks without any

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qualitative grading. Originally, these marks were attributed to the tutorials submission
for the module. The temptations of 20% easy marks proved to be too attractive and
about 80% of students gave these initial inputs.

What followed was interesting, as some of the issues raised by students triggered
further discussion and a flood of inputs poured in. It appeared that as the discussion
topics became of interest to the learners, they got motivated themselves and no further
extrinsic intervention was necessary on the part of the facilitator.

As the number of inputs exceeded expectations, the discussion forum became difficult
to track individual learner inputs as the ‘forum’ was only structured to track the
various ‘threads’ of discussion. To tackle this problem, 47 individual forums were
created for all 47 participants, and these became their online portfolios. The next step
was to encourage learners to delve into the knowledge domain of their peers. An
individual project was planned, where the participants were asked to go through the
submissions by their classmates and prepare a reflective summary of these inputs. The
students had the benefit of going through the different student perspectives of the
issues discussed and constructing their own meanings in the summary. The summaries
were also posted on the individual student forums and became a part of their portfolio.
These summaries were graded.

Group Project

The final assignment for the module was the Group

Project. The groups were asked to work on ‘Specific
Training Procedures’, which were earlier worked on by
the individuals as their individual project. The group
had to critically look through these earlier submissions
and suggest improvements. The findings were finally
presented as web-based slide shows.

Communication and Collaboration

With this emphasis on communicative processes, the

focus of the module shifted from content-based
approach, where the instructor plays a key role in
disbursing the content resources to one of
communication-rich, collaborative scenario, where the
group members were depending on each other for their
knowledge source.

Although the module started on a shaky note, the

establishment of the viable learning community was
probably possible due to following reasons:

• It was ensured that the group members had

adequate knowledge or support to handle
technology related issues.
• There was adequate extrinsic motivation, when

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 20% of the module marks could be obtained by participating in the
asynchronous discussion forum.
• The novelty of this method made the learners curious to join in this new
activity of learning through Internet.
• The individual WebPages made the learners conscious of their own image in
the public domain and made and effort to improve the quality of their inputs.
• An effort was made on part of the instructor to reduce the stress level in the
course and this led to some enjoyment in participating in this new learning
environment.

This negotiation of knowledge though computer-mediation, among peers in the class,

was very new to students. This gave credibility to their interactions as the consensus
among all in the class validated their directions in discussions.

Multiple Perspectives

As we experiment with the online environment, some of its potential benefits become
more apparent in these situations. For example, the
online asynchronous forums or discussion boards
create a medium of knowledge capture, particularly
when dealing with mature students with diverse
experience. This was evident in the case study where
multiple perspectives of the content knowledge was
generated and shared by the learners. It became clear
that such interactions could lead to development of
learning communities with potential for growth of
both the community and a resulting knowledgebase,
which gets automatically updated during these
processes.

Learning Communities

To capitalise from these findings, it appears that the

institutes of higher learning could do well to create
such learning communities in various disciplines and
perhaps in conjunction with the industry to make
these resulting knowledge-bases useful for both
academia for pursuing research and teaching while
for the industry to tap these as knowledge
repositories for their day-to-day problem solving.

Reference

Vygotsky, L. S. 1978. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological

Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Original work published
1934).

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Author

Kalyan Chatterjea

Kalyan Chatterjea is Course Manager at the Singapore Maritime Academy, Singapore

Polytechnic