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Collaborative learning in teachinginformation managementN. Natho a , L. Knipping a , O. Pfeiffer a , C. Schröder a , E. Zorn a

& S. Jeschke ba Center for Multimedia in Education and Research, School ofMathematics and Natural Sciences , Technische UniversitätBerlin , Straße des 17. Juni 136, 10623, Berlin, Germanyb Center for Learning and Knowledge Management andDepartment of Information Management in MechanicalEngineering , RWTH Aachen University , Dennewartstraße 27,52068, Aachen, GermanyPublished online: 19 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: N. Natho , L. Knipping , O. Pfeiffer , C. Schröder , E. Zorn & S. Jeschke (2010)Collaborative learning in teaching information management, European Journal of EngineeringEducation, 35:4, 405-413, DOI: 10.1080/03043797.2010.483278

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European Journal of Engineering EducationVol. 35, No. 4, August 2010, 405–413

Collaborative learning in teaching information management

N. Nathoa*, L. Knippinga, O. Pfeiffera, C. Schrödera, E. Zorna and S. Jeschkeb

aCenter for Multimedia in Education and Research, School of Mathematics and Natural Sciences,Technische Universität Berlin, Straße des 17. Juni 136, 10623 Berlin, Germany; bCenter for Learning andKnowledge Management and Department of Information Management in Mechanical Engineering, RWTH

Aachen University, Dennewartstraße 27, 52068 Aachen, Germany

(Received 23 February 2010; Accepted 15 March 2010 )

In this paper, we present the course called ‘New Media in Education and Research’, which employs ablended learning approach. This course is a part of a new bachelor’s programme ‘Natural Sciences in theInformation Society’ that is in place in TU Berlin. The main goal of this course is to provide the studentswith the appropriate information technology literacy that they will need during their studies and beyond.A more specific goal of the course is to train the students to collaborate in small groups. Tablet PCs withOneNote installed on it act as agents to communicate some of the technological aspects as well as softskills in a blended learning scenario. We discuss the pedagogical and technological backgrounds of thecourse and we present the implementation of the course. We conclude with a review of our results and anoutlook to future work.

Keywords: university education; e-learning; student involvement; pedagogy (didactics) of higher educa-tion; ICT in education

1. Background

The bachelor’s programme ‘Natural Sciences in the Information Society’ was introduced at theSchool of Mathematics and Natural Sciences of Technische Universität Berlin (TUB) in the winterterm 2007/2008 as one of the first new programmes to follow the academic reform initiated by theBologna declaration (European Ministers of Education 1999 and Confederation of EU Rectors2000). The bachelor of ‘Natural Sciences in the Information Society’ also is the first programmethat was established by the Galilea study reform project at TUB (Jeschke et al. 2007a, 2009,Natho et al. 2010). The three main goals of Galilea are:

1. improving the image of natural sciences and engineering programmes for prospectivestudents;

2. increasing the total number of students in mathematics, computer science, natural sciencesand technology-focused (MINT) disciplines;

3. especially increasing the number of female students in MINT programmes.

*Corresponding author. Email: natho@math.tu-berlin.de

ISSN 0304-3797 print/ISSN 1469-5898 online© 2010 SEFIDOI: 10.1080/03043797.2010.483278http://www.informaworld.com

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In order to achieve these ambitious objectives, to ameliorate the teaching and learning conditionsand to meet the industry’s rising demand for MINT graduates, the Galilea team deals with therevision of existing programmes and the design of new programmes. Female pupils and studentsare assisted to pave the way for their early integration into the research landscape. This is also beingsupported by a programme that pays attention to functional as well as individual requirements.Students can individually choose approximately one-third of their courses. This counters thetendency to have quite inflexible class schedules in many bachelor programmes in Germany.Furthermore, Galilea sees itself as a platform that encourages girls and women especially to starttechnology-focused studies. For a comprehensive summary of the bachelor of ‘Natural Sciencesin the Information Society’ we refer to Jeschke et al. (2009).

The course ‘New Media in Education and Research’ covers the use of information technology(IT) in the fields of scientific communication, collaboration, teaching presentation and publica-tion as well as for data acquisition in research. The course addresses the basics of new mediaby discussing digital representation of graphics, audio, video and textual data. Similarities anddifferences of the most popular desktop operating systems (Windows, Linux and OS X) and net-work basics are additional technical topics. In addition, the course introduces typographic anddesign aspects of printed and electronic materials and communication models that are used inpresentations. All participants practice their presentation skills by giving short scientific talks.

In this paper, we describe the pedagogical set-up and implementation of the course ‘New Mediain the Education and Research’ as one of the most important courses, tailored to the ‘NaturalSciences in the Information Society’ programme. The next section introduces the problem. In thethird section, we discuss how a blended learning approach can help mitigation. Details of theimplementation of this blended learning approach and the advantages of the technology used arediscussed in the fourth section. We conclude with a résumé and an outlook on our future work.

2. Course design

The flood of information is the curse of the digital age (ACRL 2000, Stross 2008). Efficientlyorganising information on a specific subject without losing track has become a complicated task. Ineducation, and especially in academic education, information management is a sensitive topic forfirst-year students. Many students are not equipped to organise and manage all the new knowledgedelivered in their courses. The use of new media by lecturers and students provides an opportunityto overcome these challenges. Unfortunately, many of the suitable software applications requirea lot of training time for the students. Lecturer’s time is scarce and because of the complexity ofthese software applications, preparing the computerised courses requires a lot of time. How canwe assist both parties?

Collaborative software applications possess a high potential to support the learning, teachingand research processes at universities because they support the development of social skills thatare important in modern education. Two new innovative courses at TUB use this approach. Onestarted in winter term 2007/2008 and summer term 2008, respectively:

• Scientific Information Management (first-semester course) and• New Media in Education and Research (second-semester course).

These innovative modules are designed to be interdisciplinary; they offer a broad spectrum oftopics in natural sciences, mathematics and computer science to a manageable group of about 30students.

The courses ‘Scientific Information Management’and ‘New Media in Education and Research’have been tailored to complete this programme. They are mandatory courses and they are perfectly

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European Journal of Engineering Education 407

suited to introduce the concepts of information management using Tablet PCs as well as key skillsfor engineers as the courses are based on a blended learning pedagogy.

3. Blended learning

Blended learning combines traditional didactical methodologies with new media technologies forthe presentation and distribution of knowledge. Therefore, this method unites the flexibility andefficiency of the new media with social components such as face-to-face communication, which isan important factor in modern higher education (Kerres 2002, Kerres et al. 2002, Schweizer et al.2003). Done right, blended learning ensures the quality of the academic education (Reichlmayr2005, Hayashi et al. 2006, Simington 2006, Hoic-Bozic et al. 2009). Moreover, from a psycho-logical point of view, blended education brings together different kinds of didactical theoriessuch as constructivism, behaviourism and cognitivism (Fosnot 1996) to support different typesof learners in their individual learning process (McNutt and Brennan 2005). In addition, facultycan concentrate on special topics in tutorials and seminars. However, in all models of education,it is obviously complicated to integrate new media concepts. In Germany, the deployment of newmedia has been promoted since 2000 to augment the professional use of new media for teaching,learning and examinations. The outcomes of these efforts are small as new media are only usedsparsely (Benita 2006). Many lecturers have attempted to integrate new media into their traditionalclasses to create a blended learning approach and they concluded that it is hard to choose appropri-ate software and hardware, that the didactical concepts are missing and that it is time-consumingto integrate new things into the curriculum and to learn how these new technologies work. Theadvantages for lecturers to introduce new media are not immediately apparent. As a consequence,the lecturers’motivation to use new media tends to decrease during the initial implementation andmaintenance (Euler et al. 2006, Hasanbegovic and Kerres 2006, Kolbe and Nikolopoulos 2007,Zwellweger Moser 2007). In conclusion, lecturers and administrators are aware that new mediarequire substantial financial investments and personnel expenditure.

The successful introduction of new media in courses starts with the lecturers. Hagner definedfour personality types that should be addressed differently if they are to be inspired to change theircourses. These four types are entrepreneurs, risk aversive types, careerists and reluctant types.These personality types differ in traits such as motivation, unstableness, readiness to assumerisk for innovations, their willingness and abilities (Hagner and Schneeback 2001, Owston 2006,Kolbe Nikolopoulos 2007). Each type should be motivated in a different way. Entrepreneurs areeasy to manage because they are motivated primarily intrinsically using all offers on their owninitiative. All other types need external motivation and they must be supported in technical andorganisational matters. A durable implementation of new media within higher education dependson miscellaneous factors, and the complexity of most of the educational innovations obfuscatesthe positive properties and advantages (Euler et al. 2006, Owston 2006). It appears that individualsupport is the most effective way to encourage lecturers to implement e-education applications(Euler et al. 2006).

Which methodologies can be employed in higher education to develop practical expertise bythe lectures for blended learning? According to Hasanbegovic and Kerres (2006), the followingfundamental requirements have to be provided and adapted to the target audience defined byHagner and Schneeback (2001): development of quality especially for educational scenarios,advisory support and augmentation of the lecturers’ readiness.

One of the most important issues regarding implementation of new media is the lecturer’s abilityto conceive the didactical benefits of new media rather than the disadvantages and challengessuch as time pressure, complexity of the implementation and missing support. To intercept these

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primary problems, it is advisable to combine one specific didactical methodology with specificcommunication or IT to systematise the benefits between traditional didactical methodologies andnew media concepts.

4. Implementation of OneNote in the course

To overcome the challenges discussed in Section 2, we use the collaborative platform OneNote2007 (Figure 1) in the course ‘New Media in Education and Research’ as a software applicationespecially for blended learning scenarios (Grauer and Stover 2008). OneNote is a digital notepadwith the flexibility of a classical handwritten notepad. Because of its affinity to other well-knownoffice products, it only requires a very brief training period. The use of OneNote in this context isbased on the fundamental assumption that almost everyone knows how to use office applications.Respectively, this collaborative platform offers the possibility to integrate several other officeproducts. All notes are freely placeable and can be archived by different methods such as taggingor sorting by usefulness. Starting other applications and recording talks or small videos (podcasts)within this digital notepad is also possible. Internet resources can also be attached and taggedto notes. Besides all of this, OneNote supports mobile devices such as Tablet PCs, PDAs andgraphics tablets for handwritten notes. Summarising, the benefits of this application are its clarity,usability and the opportunity to convey soft skills.

OneNote follows an ‘electronic binder’ metaphor to organise one’s life your life. Students canuse it to replace a shelf full of ring binders and lab books. Some faculty are using it for presentationsin the classroom. One of the advantages of using OneNote compared with a traditional whiteboardlecture, where the lecturer is the only one with access to the desktop is that we can level off one ofthe flaws of behaviourism: learning to read a book is an important skill, but while reading a bookby oneself engages the reader’s mind with the author’s mind, it remains a one-way street. Readingthe same book with others and talking it over takes learning to a new level. Secondly, every studentcan share all course material with his/her fellow students and the lecturer. Moreover, a OneNotenotebook, containing all the lectures of a semester, can be searched and results will be foundeven in handwritten notes. Students had to prepare presentations to exercise their presentation

Figure 1. Screenshot of Microsoft OneNote 2007 from the lecture Academic Writing with Word and Co.

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European Journal of Engineering Education 409

skills. Another highlight of Tablet PCs emerged: presentation slides can be annotated duringpresentations ‘on the fly’, giving way for corrections and additional annotations and to someinteractivity. Without the inking capabilities of the Tablet PC, presentations are a one-way street,which has brought intense criticism when the audience has the feeling of attending a ‘slide-show’rather than a speech (Garber 2001). Another OneNote feature, although unused in our lecturebecause of technical issues, is the possibility of audio recording while taking notes. Notes andaudio recording are time synchronised, i.e. if sound was travelling faster than the hand was able tofollow and one cannot remember or decipher the notes taken in the last calculus lecture, clickingin the notes starts the audio playback at the time this note was taken. Needless to say that richmedia like videos and audio files can be integrated into the OneNote documents. Finally, theTablet PC allows the teacher to face and keep eye contact with the students, thus enabling a timelydiagnosis of comprehension problems in the audience.

5. Course description

‘New Media in Education and Research’is organised as an integrated course, i.e. it consists of bothfrontal lectures by the teacher and project work, accomplished by the students in groups. Severalprojects are currently set up and carried out by the students using Tablet PCs and OneNote. Thestudents gain experience with mainstream office programs as well as with LATEX. They design andcreate scientific flyers and posters and analyse the structure of scientific articles. Online journalsand Wikis are covered as alternative methods of publication. E-learning platforms, social networksandVoIP serve as communication tool examples. Revision control systems and shared applicationsare examined. The students get hands-on experience with collaborative tools like OneNote. Finally,data acquisition using databases, computer algebra systems and virtual laboratories is practicedand visualisation and critical interpretation of statistical data are discussed.

5.1. Lesson plan for an exemplary lecture

An exemplary scenario is the use of OneNote as virtual whiteboard and collaborative environmentduring a course: the lecturer can centrally store all the available information in the application,present it to the audience through means of a projector and easily transfer it to the students’applications or vice versa. In this way, students and lecturer can share and transfer informationand data without any difficulties. Within the context of the lecture ‘New Media in Education andResearch’, we have deployed OneNote in several educational units of this course. One educationalunit is described exemplarily:

A total of 16 students attended the program ‘Natural Sciences in the Information Society’ onits first year of offering; about half of them were female students. During the lecture, the studentsworked in groups of two on Tablet PCs (Figure 2). The subject of the teaching unit was ‘AcademicWriting with Microsoft Word and Co’with the ambitious aim to work out the subject together withthe students. The lecturer prepared the lecture with OneNote by creating a new digital notepadfor managing all content, i.e. examples, brainstorming notes, presentations, exercises etc., withthe Tablet PC facilitating the use of handwritten notes. The resulting exemplary 90 min lectureconsisted of the following modules.

(1) Introduction to ‘Academic writing in MS Word and Co’ (duration: 20 min): brief introductionto common problems of word processing applications in academic documents such as largedocuments, implementation of figures, images and tables and the infamous footnotes.

(2) Teamwork session ‘Explorative Examples’ (duration: 20 min): students work on somesophisticated examples with the aid of a digital worksheet.

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Figure 2. Students during a ‘New Media in Education and Research’ lecture.

(3) Discussion of the results (duration 10 min): exchange of information.(4) Teamwork session: ‘Students’ Examples’ (duration 30 min): students working on selected

problems.(5) Discussion of results (duration 10 min).

The first component of the educational unit is an introduction in the form of a presentation aboutgeneral problems of word processing programs with numerous examples. In most cases, there areseveral possible techniques to generate presentations and integrate them in OneNote; a PowerPointpresentation being one possibility, while another possibility is the use of OneNote as a digital boardfor making handwritten notes similar to a traditional lecture. Sharing this digital notepad withother participants, the students also have the possibility to add notes in this notepad. In addition,various examples can be directly executed in OneNote. For the second and fourth componentof the lecture, the lecturer prepared exercises (digital worksheets) and attached programs, whichmight be useful for the students. The students also take their own notes in these segments. As aresult of components three and five, the students shared their results with the lecturer and otherstudents for discussion purposes. Moreover, the students were able to attach additional examplesor recorded comments. Accordingly, neither the teacher nor the students had ‘rough papers’, andeverything was arranged within the digital notepad (digitalised lecture). Finally, all integratedexamples could be transferred to the students’ notebooks.

5.2. Results

Our preliminary results show that students perceive a lecture with OneNote as very fascinating,because of the variety of educational methodologies and differences with traditional lectures.Didactical concepts appear to be more similar to school education than to higher education atuniversity. Working with digital examples implies spending more time to impart knowledge. Atraditional lecture, as a non-invasive form of the Nuremberg Funnel, is designed to provide stu-dents with as much knowledge as possible in the available time. Consequently, the developedconcepts are appropriate for selected lectures or seminars and tutorials. An additional challengeemerges from the technical overhead and costs to use notebooks or Tablet PCs and applicationssuch as OneNote. Yet, blended learning scenarios accelerate the progress of educational suc-cess in excess of traditional lectures due to the fact of large-scale integration of examples andinteractivity.

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6. Conclusion and outlook

6.1. Résumé

The combination of Tablet PCs and OneNote is used to train students in cooperating in a collab-orative information platform. The future integration of handwritten scientific content in OneNoteis the next desirable feature in this context.

In conclusion, it remains to be examined whether blended learning scenarios with OneNoteare acceptable and helpful for the lecturers with only sparse technical affinities in the sense ofHagner’s four types (Hagner and Schneeback 2001).

It is worth recalling that the benefits of blended learning lectures with OneNote are obvious:lecturers prepare lectures or conduct handwritten lectures on the computer similar to traditionallectures. In summary, after a short training period, it can be deployed straightforwardly becauseof its affinity to other well-known office applications, based on the fundamental idea that lecturersfrequently use these applications. As a collaborative tool, it allows for the interactive integrationof students into lectures, and it is an attractive alternative to a traditional lecture.

Difficulties arise in lectures of mathematics, engineering and natural sciences caused by thecomplex notation and technical outlines. Therefore, it is desirable to integrate special add-ons forscientific notation and conversion tools for technical outlines into a vector graphic application.

6.2. Extending the concept to mathematics and natural sciences

When trying to apply the aforementioned techniques to a mathematics lecture, we ask too muchof the current release of OneNote, as complex formula, sets of symbols and many technicalillustrations still need to be integrated into the application to make it valuable for mathematicsor natural scientific lectures. Thus, the next version of OneNote needs to be extended to handlethese particularities. Although OneNote already offers the possibility of exporting handwrittennotes, making them available to other office applications, our goal is to support the recognitionof handwritten formula (Jeschke et al. 2007b), which shall then be evaluated by the prevalentmathematical tools Maple, Matlab and Mathematica. Additionally, it is desirable to integratea conversion tool to export technical outlines to a vector graphic application. It remains to bementioned that Windows 7 now incorporates a mathematical formula recognition algorithm. Theusability of this algorithm could not be tested in the previous runs of the lecture but will beintegrated in this year’s lectures.

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About the authors

Sabina Jeschke holds the chair for ‘Information Management in Mechanical Engineering (IMA)’ at RWTH AachenUniversity, department of mechanical engineering. Additional, she is director of the ‘Center for Learning and KnowledgeManagement (ZLW)’ and the Associated Institute for ‘Management Cybernetics (IfU)’ at RWTH Aachen University.

Lars Knipping is assistant professor for ‘New Media in Mathematics and Natural Sciences’ at TU Berlin and co-directsthe University’s multimedia service centre. He is a member of the DIN-NIA 36 expert group that cooperates with ISOSC-36 in creating e-learning standards. He received his Ph.D. with distinction and holds M.Sc. degrees in mathematicsand computer science.

Nicole Natho received her M.Sc. in Physics at TU Berlin in 1998. She studied specialized pedagogic applied to mathematicsand physics and participated in the development of ‘interactive screen experiments’ within the didactical group of thephysics department. She received her Ph.D. in mathematics for her thesis on the semantic analysis of mathematicallanguage in 2005. She is now with the Center for Multimedia in Education and Research at TU Berlin.

Olivier Pfeiffer received his M.Sc. in Mathematics at Technische Universität Berlin (TUB). His thesis in numericalmathematics investigated ‘Error Control using Adaptive Methods for Elliptic Control Problems in Matlab’. He has beenworking in several eLearning projects at the TU Berlins since 2001, as a research assistant at SFB609 in Dresden from2002–2004, and is now part with the Institute of Mathematics at TUB.

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Christian Schröder studied History and Mathematics at TU Berlin. In 2004 he became a member of the Commission forTeaching and Studying of the TU Berlin (vice chair since 2007). In 2007 he took on the role of a study dean. At the sametime he commenced his work for the studies reform project GALILEA.

Erhard Zorn studies Physics and Mathematics at TU Berlin. After receiving his Diploma in Physics from TU Berlin heworked as a teaching assistant at the School of Mathematics and Natural Sciences. He spent the academic year 2000/01at the GaTech, Atlanta. Since 2001 he worked as a project manager and lecturer at TU Berlin.

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