Progress of the Action Research Project

The action research spiral of the project itself consisted of three cycles of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting. These three cycles with their timelines are de-scribed in the table below:

Table 7. Progress of the Cycles.

Cycle 1

Planning Fall 1995

Acting and Observing Spring term 1996 (January–May)

Reflecting Overlapping with the acting and observing stage and the re-planning stage in the fall of 1996.

Cycle 2

Planning Fall 1996

Acting and Observing Spring term 1997 (January–May)

Reflecting Overlapping with the acting and observing stage and continuing in the fall of 1997.

Cycle 3

Planning Spring 1998

Acting and Observing Fall term 1998 (September–December)

Reflecting Overlapping with the acting and observing stage and continuing throughout the year 1999.

Cycle 1

The first Environmental Communication course started in January 1996 with high expectations although Partner and I shared our concerns about having to deal with so many novel aspects: the content of the course itself, the use of the Web, discus-sion forums, and the biggest novelty of all, videoconferencing. The more ICTs were involved, the more uncertainties were in the offing. I appreciated having As-sistant to look after the various practical arrangements needed, ranging from room reservations for the face-to-face sessions to renting the videoconferencing facilities.

The first two videoconferences in the first course were built around a simula-tion in which the students represented various stakeholder groups such as the state, foreign buyers of paper, private owners of forests, consumers, environmentalists, and Finnish paper companies. Although the simulation was a good way to get eve-rybody involved, the students themselves expressed the wish that they would like to represent their real selves in the last conference in which they discussed the topic of environmental ethics and values using a current real life case as the basis for their discussion. The case, which the HSE group had chosen and prepared, dealt with a well-known Finnish factory’s way of handling an environmental accident in which poisonous discharges were emitted into the Vantaa River near Helsinki, which had resulted in the death of a large number of fish. As regards the other two

Environmental Communication courses, simulated situations were not used any more as students preferred to present their own views.

As the first sixty-minute videoconference between the two groups went with-out problems, the students also seemed to relax and were starting to look forward to the next one. Although both groups were well prepared for the second videocon-ference, the conference did not turn out to be very successful although for that very reason it was a good communication exercise. During the conference both groups seemed to stick to their own prepared agendas and were not really listening to what the other party was saying. Consequently, the discussion was not very fruitful. It was a good lesson to both groups as it actually showed how communication prob-lems can arise if there is no genuine willingness to listen to and understand the other party’s views. Everybody tried very hard to make the last videoconference a success, which then turned out well. This is how one HSE student describes the second and third videoconference:

In a way the second conference was better [than the first one] but on the other hand, there was a clear setback, too. A written agenda was understood in many different ways. The lesson was learned by everybody before the third conference, and then it was time to discuss. The atmosphere was encouraging in the third conference, and then the core idea of video conferences was understood. The main learning process was that you should listen to the other party carefully and try to clarify all the misunderstandings. Only after that it is possible to negotiate effectively.

(Student F4/Cycle 1) As their final assignment my group wrote a lengthy course report analyzing various aspects of the course and the learning environment, thus giving me valuable data for my research purposes. I gave the students an outline of questions that they were expected to cover (see Appendix 1).

Cycle 2

Partner and I had planned to run our second course in the spring of 1997. In the fall of 1996 all faculty and staff had to move out from HSE’s main building for a pe-riod of two years because of the full-scale renovation of the building. Although somewhat concerned about the functioning of technology in the temporary facili-ties, I was optimistic about starting the second course. Although there was not much funding left any more, I was also able to hire a new graduate student to help with some course-related tasks for a few hours a week. In fact, she was a student who herself had participated in the Cycle 1 course and therefore was already fa-miliar with the course format and its goals.

Fortunately funding was not needed any more for renting the videoconferenc-ing facilities as both universities had now purchased their own equipment. In their course feedback reports all Cycle 1 HSE students indicated their appreciation of the

three videoconferences, considering them useful learning experiences. Partner re-ported that his students had felt the same way. Consequently, I had taken every opportunity to make as much noise as possible about the opportunities that video-conferencing seemed to offer, thus hoping to contribute to speeding up HSE’s deci-sion to purchase the equipment, which decideci-sion then was made. In Partner’s uni-versity, a similar purchase had also been made.

Various other problems that Partner and I had not thought of during Cycle 1 started surfacing, though. For instance, for administrative reasons Partner was not able to integrate the course into the language curriculum under the same name as we did—Environmental Communication—but had to come up with another name,

“English for Videoconferencing”, which from their group’s perspective somewhat shifted the focus of their course away from environmental communication although this was not a real problem with the groups then participating in the course. A somewhat more disturbing issue was that for administrative reasons the number of course credits could not be the same in his university as the number of credits allo-cated at HSE, which some of the students were quick to note. Consequently, he also had some problems negotiating the number of hours that the course corre-sponded to in his workload. These were the first indications of administrative is-sues that may arise in connection with such multi-site courses which may not di-rectly accommodate certain department’s own curriculum.

As the second Environmental Communication course actually started, my ini-tial optimism regarding the functioning of technology started to fade as, indeed, we were faced with a host of technical difficulties. First, we had problems with the computer facilities as a result of our having had to move to temporary facilities.

Even more importantly, there were problems arising from the incompatibility of the two different types of videoconferencing equipment that our two universities had.

The following message, sent by me late in the evening to the course Café forum that was a popular place for all sorts of personal reactions, is an example of my venting my frustrations on having to be at the mercy of technology.

Environmental Communication: Café To: envic-cafe@oyt.oulu.fi

From: Maija Tammelin <tammelin@hkkk.fi>

Subject: Technology is wonderful ...urghhh..

Date: Wed, 12 Feb 1997 22:44:31 +0200

What a day! First of all, I think the Oulu server has been down today since I couldn’t get to our Cafe earlier today but now the server seems to be working again (22.30). I wonder if anybody else tried it today and had the same problem.

Today we were supposed to have a test conference with Lappeenranta and see how Lappeenranta’s Videra equipment and our PictureTel system would go together - well they didn’t. We could see and hear Lappeenranta and they could see us BUT not hear us - several people are looking into the problem - and we just have to hope for the best.

See you around.

Maija

If being at the mercy of technology seemed very stressful, there were also some positive developments during the course that helped to convince Partner and my-self that, despite the frustrations caused by technology, the efforts made were still worthwhile. In the following message Partner is pondering over the students’

learning outcomes after having come back from the annual educational ICT con-ference held in Hämeenlinna.

Hi Maija!

Yeah, greetings from Hämeenlinna. I thought this year’s conference [the an-nual ICT conference in Hämeenlinna] was better than last year’s. Difficult to say why. Perhaps because this time I got more information about research findings related to learning. In other words, from the perspective of our course it seems that this kind of constructivist approach to knowledge and learning seem to be more effective for reaching lasting learning outcomes. (translated from the Finnish original)

Of all three Environmental Communication courses, the two groups participating in this second course were most compatible with each other both with regard to their environmental interests and their level of communication skills in English. There were also more business students among the Lappeenranta participants than in the other two courses, which may also have contributed to creating a more balanced setting for the course. Despite the initial technical difficulties, the actual videocon-ferences worked out well. Again, according to the students’ own comments and the observations of Partner and myself, attending the videoconferences were what the students appreciated most about the course.

Cycle 3

In the fall of 1998, HSE’s Department of Languages and Communication was able to move back to the renovated main building and thus a two-year trial in dispersed locations and temporary teaching facilities was over. In the renovated building there certainly was no lack of technology; indeed, our department had four net-worked media labs at our disposal. To many of the department’s teachers the

amount of technology seemed startling and almost scary. The videoconferencing equipment that was so essential for our course was now available in a state-of-the-art studio. The action research Cycle 3, the third Environmental Communication course with a new set of participants, thus started under promising signs.

Despite the promising start, problems soon started mounting. First, the amount of technology that had been installed in the renovated building turned out to be too much for HSE’s network system, which broke down for several weeks in the mid-dle of the term. The system that suffered most was the network that the students had access to. At the time, for most of the HSE group students, the Internet access from inside HSE was their only way to access the network. This technical distur-bance had a direct impact on the frequency of the HSE students’ visits to our web site and participation in any of the discussion forums.

Another problem occurred in connection with student enrolments. In the first Environmental Communication we had limited the HSE group size to nine because the videoconferencing premises used by the HSE group seated only nine partici-pants. Keeping the group size at nine seemed wise in the second course as well be-cause of the potential technical uncertainties involved. However, this time I was ready to increase the number of participants in the third HSE group to be more in line with the regular class size of 20–24 students, but for some reason or another only eight students signed up. The Lappeenranta group had its share of problems as well. Out of the ten students enrolled on the course, five students had to drop out for various personal reasons just as the course was about to start. Of the five left not all were able to attend the videoconferences which led to an imbalance between the number of participants in the videoconferences.

As the course was about to start I decided to make a change in the HSE group’s course program. I had noticed from the students’ course registrations that three students were actually in the process of writing their Master’s thesis on an environmental management-related topic and there were some who were studying environmental management as their minor subject. Consequently, I introduced a new assignment to be included in the HSE group’s course requirements as I had started suspecting that preparations for the videoconferences might not require as much work for these students as originally calculated. The students were to write an academic paper on an environmental topic that was in their own sphere of inter-est. Their topics ranged from certain companies’ environmental policies and com-munication practices to questions of environmental legislation. The papers were placed on our course web site and they were peer reviewed by two other partici-pants. The reviews were then also published. I gave my comments on the papers to the students individually as the comments also included suggestions on language improvements.

The assignment of writing an academic paper first seemed like a very tradi-tional assignment. Yet, I discovered that technology did bring a new dimension to

the assignment. The fact the students knew that not only would the papers be pub-lished on our password-protected web site but also that they would be reviewed by two other course mates seemed to raise the quality of the papers as the students put a tremendous effort into writing them.

Despite the imbalances and frustrations caused by technical disturbances de-scribed above, the Cycle 3 participants seemed to complete the course in high spir-its. As for myself, I noticed that as I didn’t have a course assistant to help me with various problems any more, I was getting exhausted and for the first time started to wonder about the cost effectiveness of the course format.