CHAPTER I:
STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
1
1.1
Problematic Situation
Technology is becoming a necessity in everyday life for people. It offers a huge
quantity of tools that anybody with enough resources and curiosity can get them.
Besides the different uses that someone could give to technology or one of its
tools, an affected area by this new wave is education.
In many countries around the world, schools and colleges are implementing as
much as they can the use of technology in the classrooms, so a new modality of
education has appeared. It is called E-Learning. E-learning is commonly referred to
the intentional use of networked information and communications technology in
teaching and learning1.
In El Salvador, schools’ infrastructure is still of the 19 th century, teachers are in the
20th but students are forward to the 21st. So the question is: How to solve that
situation? The Universidad de Oriente has been improving in technological
resources during the last five years. Students now have free access to Wi-Fi in the
whole university, free access to a computer center and to an English laboratory for
improving their language skills, accompanied by the E-Learning modality of
education through the use of their own resources like laptops, desktops computers,
smartphones, etc. But the problem relies in the way that students use those
resources, and that is when teachers have the responsibility of instruct them how
to adequately use them. In order to achieve that, teachers have to be a step ahead
of students in the use of technological tools for learning.
One of the situations that has been identified by the researcher group, is that when
in the classroom is performed a presentation or a research, it is necessary to share
the information that all the different groups of students have worked. Some of the
teachers recommend sharing the files by e-mail or by flash drives, but it implies
many complications. Sometimes it is heard that students lost their flash drive and
1
Naidu, Som. E-Learning A Guidebook of Principles, Procedures and Practices. 2a. New Delhi: CEMCA, 2006.
e-book
2
cannot give the presentation because they had the information on it, or that they emailed the file to another classmates but they misspelled the e-mail addresses.
When teachers need to share a task, a document or a text book that will be used
for a course, they have to ask students to get photocopies of the whole material
which implies a lot of expenses for them. Some others share the documents using
a flash drive but nowadays, that is extremely harmful for computers because of the
transmission of viruses and all kinds of malwares, besides the physical effort that
implies to be plugging in and plugging out one hundred flash drives in a computer.
Those complications sometimes hinder the development of a good group-based
learning, in this case e-learning, even if there are enough technological resources.
1.2
Research Question
To what extent does the use of cloud storage systems foster asynchronous groupbased e-learning among English Teachers at UNIVO?
3
Rationale
Technology can have a reciprocal relationship with teaching. The emergence of
new technologies pushes educators to understanding and leveraging these
technologies
for
classroom
use;
at
the
same
time,
the
on-the-ground
implementation of these technologies in the classroom directly impact how these
technologies continue to take shape. With technology standards becoming an
integral part of students’ education, teachers are more enthusiastic than ever to
learn new technologies and methods. Most teachers are eager to embrace new
technologies as they have seen their students’ excitement and motivation increase
when they do so. Teachers who have brought technology into their classrooms are
aware that it provides an opportunity to differentiate instruction and change their
classrooms into dynamic learning environments. Here is where the E-Learning and
Cloud Storage Systems appear; E-Learning defined as the intentional use of
networked information and communication technology in teaching and learning 2;
and Cloud Storage System as a model of networked online storage where data is
stored in virtualized pools of storage.3 The most important reason why Cloud
Storage Systems can be an excellent tool in the classroom is because these
softwares allow files to be easily shared between students and teachers. A
collaborative Cloud Storage Use could be an effective tool in group projects, for
students to easily submit files to the teacher for grading, and for teachers to share
files, such as notes and demonstration files with students. Here specifically appear
two sites that offer this storage services online: Dropbox.com and Box.com. With
all this, the research team decided to investigate if the use of Cloud Storage
Systems fosters Asynchronous Group-Based E-Learning, the last as one of the Elearning modalities that refers to situations where groups of learners are working
over an intranet or internet network where exchanges among participants occur
with a time delay4. And by trying to improve the English Teachers-Students
rapport, communication and relationship is why this research takes place. With the
2
Naidu, Op cit., pag.1
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.,. «en.wikipedia.org.» 31 de October de 2011. Cloud storage. 20 de February de
2012. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_storage>
4
Naidu, Op cit., pag.2
3
4
present research the group tries to identify which cloud storage system is
appropriate to use among teachers and students for the improvements of
asynchronous group-based E-learning by applying a workshop where these topics
will be developed, and at the same time the teachers will be assessed in order to
discover some weaknesses in the use of those elements and suggest some tools.
5
1.3
Scopes
1.4.1 Geographic Context:
The population that will be taken into account to perform the study is located in San
Miguel city, and consists of all the English Teachers at Universidad de Oriente.
1.4.2 Time Context
The research development, starting from the workshop planning until data
processing, will last three months (May to August 2012)
1.4.3 Theoretical Context 5
The theory that supports this research study is based on information about Elearning, and one of its modality that is Asynchronous Group-based E-learning.
Another source of information comes from Cloud Storage Systems, specifically
Dropbox.com and Box.com that are two of the most used systems.
According to Som Naidu, PhD, E-learning is commonly referred to the intentional
use of Networked information and communications technology in teaching and
learning. And other terms are also used to describe this mode of teaching and
learning. They include online learning, virtual learning, distributed learning, network
and web-based learning. Fundamentally, they all refer to educational processes
that utilize information and communications technology to mediate asynchronous
as well as synchronous learning and teaching activities.
Group-based e-learning asynchronously refers to situations where groups of
learners are working over an Intranet or the Internet where exchanges among
participants occur with a time delay (i.e., not in real time). Typical examples of this
kind of activity include on-line discussions via electronic mailing lists and textbased conferencing within learning managements systems.
5
Naidu, Op cit., pag.1
6
While Cloud Storage Systems is referred to saving data to an off-site storage
system maintained by a third party server. Instead of storing information into
computer's hard drive or other local storage device, it is saved to a remote
database. The Internet provides the connection between the computer and the
database.6
DropBox.com
Dropbox is a free cloud storage service that allows users bring all kind of files from
anywhere. This means that any file that is saved to Dropbox will automatically be
saves to all the related computers, phones and even the Dropbox website. Also, it
makes super easy to share with others, whether someone is a student or
professional, parent or grandparent. 7
Box.com
Box was founded on a simple, powerful idea: people should be able to access and
share their content from anywhere. Since 2005, Box has helped more than 8
million individuals, small businesses and Fortune 500 companies do just that. The
want to reinvent what businesses can do with their content through Box's content
sharing platform, made for a new kind of worker, a new kind of workplace and a
new kind of IT.8
6
Sullivan, Tom. «www.earthlinkcloud.com.» 22nd de September de 2011. Cloud Computing – A Brief
History. 9 de March de 2012. <http://www.earthlinkcloud.com/2011/09/cloud-computing-%E2%80%93-abrief-history/>
7
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. "en.wikipedia.org." 1st November 2011. Dropbox (service). 9th March 2012.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropbox_%28service%29>.
8
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. "en.wikipedia.org." 31st October 2011. Box (service). 9th March 2012.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box.com>.
7