A Learning Process in Resource-Based Well-Structured Instruction in Web-based Distance Learning Environment

This research is to articulate a learning process in resource-based well-structured instruction in webbased distance learning environment. To explore the learning process, a web resource-based self-learning program, which is highly structured with structuring elements from literature review, was developed as a college level course. Sixty-seven junior students at a cyber university in Korea, aged from 20s to 50s, were required to learn the program given for eight weeks. Students’ perceived learning processes from Questionnaires, achievement scores, satisfaction levels, interview data, were collected and analyzed. As a result, an observable action model and a conceptual model of the learning process were derived, which students and experts verified. Cognitive achievement factor and satisfaction factor were also considered in the learning process model. Consequently the learning process constitutes a major phase (initiation ? contact learning material ? internal process ? individual understanding ? externalization ? internalization) and a minor phase (minor informal offline interaction among students) in resource-based highly structured self-learning. Implications of each stage in the model and recommendations for further study were suggested. Context of the Research Web and multimedia technology is changing the way of teaching and learning. There is also an increasing demand for a flexible learning framework that does not tie the learner, especially adult learner with full time job, down to a specific time or place. This is the very need for distance education. In distance education, people cannot interact well because of the ‘distance’. For thousands of years, learning and teaching always took place in close proximity, and this has become firmly anchored in human consciousness. Learning and teaching at a distance has been therefore regarded as something extraordinary and as a defect. Because of the distance, educators have tried to make every effort to get over this spatial separation. The first pedagogic approaches specific to distance education aimed at finding ways by which spatial distance could be bridged, reduced or even eliminated. The question was asked (Peters, 1998): what must be done to make distance equivalent to proximity in distance education? The pedagogics of distance education is derived basically from the efforts to answer to this question. One of the try to answer to this question is making and managing learning materials as best ever as possible, which almost does not need teacher’s interaction. Educators at traditional distance university used most funds and most efforts for the professional development and production of qualitatively excellent teaching materials for the purposes of self-study, which are then distributed by post in early distance education and by web-based cyber instruction program in these days. They tried to include teacher’s interaction into the wellstructured material for self-learning. Moore(1993) conceptualized these characteristics as ‘structure’, because he regarded the main characteristic of the making and managing programs as the structuring of the learning and teaching. Also researches have presented elements and rationale of course/contents structure as well as instructional strategies for structuralization. Researchers emphasizing structure in distance learning seem to believe that well-structured material can get over the absence of teacher. Based on this belief, educators in Korea have provided mainly structure dependent program a lot, which are for self-learning with little interaction. Unfortunately, however, it is not easy to find how the structure influences on learning process. Although majority of the literature on web-based distance education focuses on the effectiveness of web-based distance education or educational medium, and emphasizes structuring (converting existing, traditional course materials to a wed-based format), they don’t show how student’s learning process is going in highly structured