THE TRIMMACC APPROACH TO TEACHING IN A CARIBBEAN CLASSROOM

Fariel Mohan

Information & Communications Technology The University of Trinidad & Tobago

Point Lisas, Trinidad & Tobago fariel.mohan@utt.edu.tt

Abstract— The rapid technological changes in the world have caused universities to keep changing their approach to teaching by incorporating technology into teaching. In the universities in the Caribbean, technology is incorporated in the teaching in ways such as providing open and distant education or providing course management systems. This paper presents a different approach to an online course. This approach uses a blended approach to teaching, using a virtual classroom and a traditional classroom. The virtual classroom was used for teaching the students while the traditional classroom was used for tutorials. This blended approach was based upon eight 21st century teaching skills. The paper first presents the blended approach which is followed by discussing the results of this approach and ending with presenting a conclusion.

Keywords-Virtual classroom, TrimMacc approach, blended approach to teaching, 21st century teaching skills

I. INTRODUCTION In the past decade, computer technology has

impacted all aspects of life to a degree that even those who think they are not good computer users simply cannot avoid using computers [10]. This has created a generation which is often referred to as digital natives who grew up with the technology and those that did not grow up with the new technology digital immigrant [11]. The universities all around the world are increasingly finding it difficult to adapt the delivery style of

teaching to suit this digital generation. This has led the universities to focus on research of integrating technology into the classroom [4]. Some are also calling this research 21st century teaching and learning skills. This research must be conducted in a limited budget with the constraint of large student numbers. At the same time, the universities are focusing on the students who require online courses due to many reasons such as distance, culture, cost or class schedules. Bates [14][2] suggest that incorporating technology in learning by offering online learning provides tools beyond the classroom for the students to use a variety of computer related technologies such as email, discussion boards, chat rooms and so on.

In the Caribbean, educational attainment is low and the young people are not equipped to take charge and rise to the possibilities since improving education was perceived as increasing buildings [3]. Added to this, the Caribbean has a very limited budget for research at the tertiary level. Marsh [13] has stated that the social benefits of the classroom for learning activities requiring a face-to-face interaction with online self-individualized content can be incorporated by blended learning. At UTT, a blended approach was used by incorporating technology into the classroom to create a virtual classroom. The aim of this virtual classroom was to use technology to create a learning environment to engage students in an ongoing interaction in an attempt to strengthen the foundational content necessary for teaching a mathematics course. On the other hand, the course content was taught in a physical classroom thus using blended approach to learning. Mohan [5] showed that the students had

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self-individualized content since the comments posted were the thoughts and understanding of the individual student. The students were motivated to share their thoughts since a student posted comments with an anonymous name. The result of the supportive virtual classroom demonstrated the 21st century skills of motivation, reflection, interaction & interactivity with technology [5].

This paper presents the second stage of the supportive virtual classroom. The second stage is also a blended approach to teaching using a virtual and a physical classroom. The motivation behind this stage was at UTT, a number of students from Mechanical, Petroleum and Electrical Engineering were unsuccessful at a 1st year Mathematics course. Some of the students were not able to repeat the course at 5:00pm – 9:00 pm. The late time for some of the young full time students was creating a problem for them to get back home. This caused the supportive virtual classroom to be moved to its second stage which was to use the virtual classroom to be the only classroom for teaching and the physical classroom used for tutorials. This blended approach was based upon the following eight 21st century teaching skills; Transformative learning, Reflection, Interaction and interactivity with technology, Motivation, Meditative & transmitive learning, Adaptive learning, Critical thinking and Cognitive skills. The acrostics of the eight 21st century used in the order listed results in TRIMMACC. The name of this experiment was the TrimMacc approach which reflected the eight 21st century used.

II. THE TRIMMACC APPROACH

This TrimMacc approach to teaching was named since it is based upon eight 21st century strategies. Since all the teaching was being carried out using the virtual classroom, this implied that the TrimMacc approach must be thoroughly researched. This was even more necessary since the sample for TrimMacc was 30 of the students who failed the 1st year mathematics course. If these students failed the same course twice these

students can be asked to take a 2-year break. The TrimMacc approach was based upon:

• Transformative learning

• Reflection

• Interaction & interactivity with technology

• Motivation

• Meditative & Transmitive

• Adaptive learning

• Critical thinking

• Cognitive skills

The concept behind the TrimMacc approach to teaching was to build knowledge in stages as shown in the diagram below.

Figure 1: The stages of the TrimMacc approach In order to give the students the best chance of

success using the TrimMacc approach, research lead to using eight approaches to the 21st century teaching which were as follows: Mezirow [7][1] who stated that the theory of transformative learning is based on the idea of checking whether what one thinks actually makes sense, or is it valid given the context one find oneself in. Henniger [9] who said that reflection and critical thinking enable students to learn from their experiences. Armstrong [16], aimed to capture, analyse and communicate the complex interactions between students, lecturers and technology that occur in the classroom by using the interactive whiteboard

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technology. Armstrong states that lecturers are the critical agents in mediating and integrating software into teaching so that to promote quality interactions and interactivity. In this digital era which is so visual, relevance or adaption to usefulness can be a motivational factor in wanting to learn.

Scardamalia [12] stated that people process information differently and that meditative and transmitive technologies have affected thinking and perception, which in turn has affected learning. According to Kalyuga [15], adaptive learning indicates that learner’s interests, ability, and cognitive characteristics greatly influence learning effectiveness. The stimulation of critical thinking involves in-depth examination of topics from many different perspectives. Cartier [8], suggests that students and teachers who are engaged in learning that involves generative learning are regularly involved in constructing, testing and revising models. This will require cognitive skills such as comparison, classification, sequencing, patterning, webbing, and planning.

The TrimMacc approach aim was to establish a convenient and simple environment for the students to explore, meditate, transmit, compare, classify and sequence their understanding of Mathematics for Technician I. The virtual classroom was established using one of the Web 2.0 technology, blogs. The choice of blogs was that it is free, accessible to anyone with internet connection and relatively simple to use. This integration of technology into teaching would be successful if TrimMacc promotes quality interactions and interactivity among the students. The success of TrimMacc would be demonstrated by the motivation of the students to use the virtual classroom. Using a virtual classroom requires much more time than a physical classroom since it portrays a lecturer for every student. Mohan [6] demonstrated in phase 1 of the blended approach to teaching the great number of usage by the students. It must be noted that the student had to register himself anonymous so that were encouraged to be reflective on their current knowledge or understanding of mathematics.

The TrimMacc approach can be considered as an online course or distant learning since it is definitely online and the students are all distant.

On the other hand, the TrimMacc approach does not have prior lectures, notes or handouts. The TrimMacc approach comprises of the lecturer posting questions that have no numeric answers but will stimulate critical thinking. The student had different approaches to posting a comment which were as follows:

• Student answer a question which means thinking, reflecting and meditative then sharing his answer using his own perception or using transformative learning

• Student answer by illustrating the question by adapting learning

• Student answer by asking a question based on the topic being discussed using reflection

• Student answer by checking what he thinks is makes sense using critical thinking

• Student answer by using cognitive skills and commenting on the comments posted by the previous students

The students were motivated to use the virtual classroom since the discussions were at the level of the students and they could very easily relate the comments made by each other. The collaboration by the students was achieved since the knowledge among the students were reinforced, correction or enhanced. This was shown by a given student acting the role of a student by asking question or by the same given student acting the role of the lecturer by illustrating or by correcting or enhancing a comment made by another student. It must be remembered that the collaboration was encouraged since all the students were anonymous so the peer pressure factor was removed.

The students of the virtual classroom had no physical classroom for teaching. The physical classroom was 2 half-an-hour tutorials a week during lunch time. The course had 50 % coursework assessment and 50 % written final examination. A part of the coursework assessment was the usage of the virtual classroom (10%). The result of success of the TrimMacc approach was measured by the mark of the final written examination only.

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III. RESULTS This experiment was conducted with a class of

29 full time students. The virtual classroom set up for these students was using the blog which was called www.maths110dclass.blogspot.com. This virtual class was conducted over a nine weeks period. The students registered with blogger.com to become a user of this virtual classroom. The virtual classroom was not for anybody only for registered blogger.com users. Three of the 29 students did not register with blogger.com and hence were not able to use the virtual classroom. These students can be thought of as students who never come to class. This was one of problems observed using this TrimMacc approach. Since physical contact with the student was so limited (2 half an hour tutorial), following up with the student none usage of the classroom was difficult.

This TrimMacc approach imposes new challenges on the educators and students. The student must develop motivation to use the virtual classroom since there is no fixed time to classes. The same can be said for the lecturer suing the TrimMacc approach. The lecturer has a new role with this approach to teaching which is management and the fact that the teaching is now 24-hours a day since students can use the virtual classroom 24-hours a day. Another role of the lecturer is being a motivator to the students not only for using the system but for encouraging meditative thoughts and stimulating critical thinking. The TrimMacc approach attempted to motivate the students by assigning marks to the student based on number of entries with the exception of 1 liner comments which was invalid. This way a student would spend less focus on whether he is right or wrong. A flaw to this mark scheme was some comments were quite long.

The main problems encountered in this initial TrimMacc approach were as follows:

• Speed of internet access • Computer access • University’s Filtering of sites • Support staff to assist in the management

of comments • Email contact of students not provided

• Lunchtime tutorial had poor attendance • Official quiz was difficult to schedule • A tutor require to assist in the tutorials

The result of the TrimMacc approach was encouraging. Out of the 29 students, 22 students passed the written final examination. The two highest numbers of entries by student was 110 and 108. This virtual course spanned 9 weeks. The average of each student was hence calculated by dividing the number of entries made by each student by 9. The average usage per week ranged from 1 to 9. The graph below shows the number of students with a same average. From the graph it can be seen the following:

• 2 students had the highest average of 12 • 9 students had an average of 1

The unsuccessful students of the TrimMacc approach had the averages of 1 or 2 usage a week with an exception of 1 student getting an average of 11.

The next graph below shows the mark on the final examination by each student represented in the bars at the back compared with the student’s usage of the TrimMacc approach represented in the bars at the front. The success of this TrimMacc experiment was determined on the successfulness of the students to pass the final

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written examination which was out of 50. The graph shows all the students who failed (7) had very little usage of the blog except for one student who had 96. The usage shows out of 50 even though there were usages such as 92, 96, 108, 110. These 4 students usage would cause the graph scale to be too high so these 4 students are shown as 50. From the graph, the students with the highest five marks in final written examination are not any of the four maximum users. This indicates a more in depth analysis of the results has to be conducted.

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The screen shot shown is a print screen of accessing the virtual classroom, www.math110dclass.blogspot.com. In this screen shot, it can be observed that a user, impersonator (the anonymous blog username) is actually teaching. This adds an interesting aspect to the TrimMacc approach where a user (student) can share his approach to answering a question. This provides the student with choice of approach to answering a question or choice for understanding a question. This TrimMacc approach requires the lecturer to act as a guide and allow the students to think and discover their thoughts some more.

IV. CONCLUSION The TrimMacc approach used blogs for

students to interact and create activities by sharing their personal understanding (transformative) and by their illustrations of understanding (adaptive). The skills required from the students for these types of comments would require cognitive skills such as comparing, classifying, planning, etc. Since students process knowledge differently, the cognitive skills causes the student to meditate, think and then present his perception. The fact that each student is anonymous motivates the student to think critically and reflect on the perception that he has and he is willing to share it with others. A virtual classroom requires much more time by the student than a traditional classroom. The lecturer’s time would also be a great deal more than the traditional classroom requirements. The great benefit of this TrimMacc is the collaboration among students and the uncovering of how much students can help each other without realizing this. The problem with the TrimMacc approach was slow internet connection, extra help required in managing the

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virtual classroom with bigger classes, typing in blogs is not very suitable for mathematics and tutorial time is very helpful but should not be scheduled on a student’s lunchtime.

The next stage of the TrimMacc approach would be to analyse the result obtained in some more details. Was there any relationship the usage and the final mark? Examining the result and determine which students use the teaching role and which students used the illustration role and was there any topic that had a lot more questions etc. The students of this experiment were students who had failed and had to repeat this course. Another testing of the TrimMacc approach can be to use this approach to a set of students who are attempting the course for the first time.

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