[University of the Philippines] Beyond the Screen: Exploring Students' Perceptions of Learning Management Systems
Good afternoon everyone. And how about we try that again? Let's let's get the energy in the room again. Good afternoon everyone. I love it. I love it when a room full of teachers and educators, you can get them to respond a lot well. Oh, welcome.
It's lovely see you all today. My name is Isaiah, or everyone just calls me Sai. I'm a customer success manager here at Instructure, and it is my pleasure to be your host today for the administration, tracked here at Canvas Connect. We have three great customer sessions lined up for you today, and I hope you're all energized and ready to go. Did you all have a good lunch? Yeah.
Well, hopefully you had a a highlight of of the food and, have some more just more food in the back and more more dessert as well. So feel free to grab some. But, yeah, we have three amazing sessions for you today, and I'm delighted to introduce our distinguished speakers who will bring a wealth of knowledge and expertise to our discussions. As a reminder to all attendees, you are welcome to go between the leadership track and the, administration track. But we ask that you refrain from moving during the session.
So without further ado, how about let's dive right into it today? So our first session is titled, beyond the screen, exploring students' perceptions of learning management systems. As education transforms with technology, understanding students' perspectives on learning management systems is pivotal. The speakers for our first session will delve into this topic shedding light on aspects on of the online learning environment valued by student So allow me to introduce our esteemed speakers for our first session. I'll introduce Maria Eliza Aguila, is a professor and Dean at the College of allied medical professions at the University of the Philippines. Professor Agala is not only a therapists and researcher, but also the product leader of the UP Manila Canvas project management team, driving the integration of Canvas at UP Manila.
Also joining us today is Riza Ruiz, is a former faculty member at the University of Philippines Manila, who assisted in the transition to incorporating the use of Canvas during the pandemic. Currently pursuing her master's in physical therapy. She's an advocate for innovative teaching methods and technology. Please, would you give the biggest round of applause for our speakers today. Thanks, Sai.
Good afternoon, everyone. Yeah. Because it's just after lunch. Let's start light and Why don't we start with some imagination? Let's imagine a world where technology blends seamlessly with teaching and learning where technology facilitates connection connection between and among students. Sorry.
Teachers and content. Where content and courses also connect with university processes and where everyone in the university sort of shares a sense of belonging to the same university community. And where online learning also connects with real world learning. In this kind of environment, we'll Learning transcends the boundaries of the classrooms and takes on a personalized and interconnected form. And in this kind of environment then, how do learning management systems shape the learning experiences of students.
And maybe we can ask ourselves how do students perceive this kind of environment So in the next half hour or so, we share with you the perceptions of students on aspects of learning environment beyond the digital interface and describe what happens beyond the screen. Perceptions of online learning, using learning management systems. So I am Maria Eliza Agala, like what Si mentioned, and together with my co presenter, Riza Marie. We are pleased to share our findings of a research we did with our colleagues, assistant professor, Michael Valdez, and Ms. Gessil Gem Alcantara.
In online learning environments, teaching learning activities are not limited to print based materials are confined to confined by time or space. And as such, learning environments bridge the space between physical locations among the different members of the learning community. And in such a learning environment, learning management systems streamline the online learning environment and act as a virtual classroom by providing a platform for managing content and delivering courses. Learning management systems also use technology to provide interactivity and immersive experience through, for example, different features like, collaborative assignments or discussion boards. We're familiar with that.
And also, learning management systems enhance administrative and pedagogical aspects such that they assist in planning the course, distributing, course materials and evaluating learning of students. So taking all these together, learning management systems promote the social engagement that students need in their learning. From a social constructivist standpoint, students are expected to actively participate in the creation of their own knowledge while engaging in reflective collaboration their peers and their teachers. So these elements are evident as students log in to access resources for example, as the LMS is used to manage content. Okay.
I tried again. Sorry. And students participate in the learning activities either synchronously or asynchronously and interact with their peers and teachers, as the LMS provides communication tools such as, you have the inbox, you have, chat functions, you have discussion boards, you have announcements. Students also learn real life applications as the LMS serves as a platform for learning activities that use cognitive realism, such as case based scenarios or virtual simulations, and students practice active learning as they are made aware of their king and their learning processes through feedback and other forms of evaluation delivered through the LMS. And lastly, students engage in collaborations through features like group assignments, and third party collaborative applications.
At the University of the Philippines Manila, the use of elements has changed over those three periods, and I'm guessing that that might be similar to your scenarios. As in the case of probably your universities, the COVID nineteen pandemic moved learning environments fully online, And prior to the pandemic in twenty twenty, well at least at the university of the Philippines Manila, the use of a homegrown LMS was sort of fragmented and sparse, fragmented in a way that there was another department that used their own LMS and sparse in a way that only twenty two percent of teachers use all of their, all used LMSs for all of their, courses and fifty percent of teachers have never used the LMS in any of their course. Other than, that there were other free versions of, commercial LMSs used in other courses. So at that time, that first period, the pre pandemic period. You could imagine that students may be using two, three, or even more.
LMSes across different courses. And I felt your agreement there with size of frustration, I think. But during the pandemic, there was a rapid adoption of a new then a newly subscribed LMS, which was Canvas. And at that time, the university mandated no more than two LMSs to be used. Monday that was different from compliance, but then there was that mandate.
So, but as we transition now to the post pandemic period with more courses being moved back to being delivered on-site, we anticipate some change in the use of LMS we still do not know what these changes would be. We eagerly await them, but what is sure is that LMS continues to be part a blended learning environment or full face to face modalities. Through these periods and changes, Students reported positive, impact of LMS on their learning. For instance, students report that LMS has helped build important skills in them like organization, time management, and communication. LMS has increased their motivation promoting their learning, their interaction, and support.
And LMS has enhanced their self regulated learning in an online environment such that they think they are more disciplined and more motivated. Despite these feedback from students and available literature on, student satisfaction with LMS or the impact of LMS use with, academic performance there is limited information on the perception of students on the extent to which their online learning environments engage them and reflect and collaborative learning. Understanding student perceptions is critical in designing and implementing online learning environments that are student centered and consistent with the mission of the university in developing practitioners who are reflective and collaborative. This presentation, therefore, seeks to answer the following questions based on a recent study we conducted at our university Number one, what do higher education students value in the use of LMS during online learning? And number two, how do the currently available LMSs at the university affect their online learning? These questions were explored in the context of LMS being a feature of the online learning environment that is presumed to develop learners who are reflective and who are collaborative and who engage with others in co creating new knowledge. Eventually understanding student perceptions would contribute to improving online learning management systems or online systems in general.
Enhancing student learning experiences and aligning the learning experiences with the the the anticipated program outcomes. So I turn you over to Riza who will then describe how we collected our information and, the first part our results. Good afternoon again. So to answer questions that were posted earlier, we surveyed the students of the UK College of allied medical professions, our home college, as an illustrative case for health sciences students. The college is one of the degree, granting units of, up Manila, It educates occupational therapists, physical therapists, speech pathologist, and clinical audiologist.
Who are competent, responsive, future focused, informed, and service supported advocates for disability, inclusive health, and the quality of life of Filipinos. Toward that purpose, the college aims to deliver an advanced transformative, collaborative, and innovative education integrated with research and public service. Does the participants of this survey are as follows. We had fifty nine students from the BS Physical Therapy Program, fifty five students from the BS occupational therapy program, seventy seven speech pathology students, ten students from the master of physical therapy program two students from the master of Rehabilitation science, speech pathology program, and four students from the master of clinical audiology program. So in order to answer the questions, we use this questionnaire, which is called call us, or the constructivist online learning environment survey.
This is a self report survey that reflects the importance of learner centered environment for effective learning. This is based on a social constructivist theory of learning. It is a twenty four item questionnaire, which comprises of two forms. So there is one for students' perception of the actual learning experience, and then the other one for the perceptions of their for learning environment. So these two college forms actually have parallel items comprising of six aspects.
So, namely, as you can see here from this screen, we have professional relevance, which, has to do with the extent to which their engagement in their online learning environment. How much is it relevant to their own professional world views and their related practices? Reflected thinking for in the extent to which their critical reflective thinking is occurring in association with their discussion with their peers. We have communicative interactivity, which is occurring between students as well as between students and teachers. We also have peer support wherein we look into the peers, providing their cognitive and effective support with each other. And then we have teacher support wherein teachers provide challenges while acting as role models well as providing encouraging support.
And lastly, interpretation of meaning in which this is the extent to which, students and teachers co construct meaning in a congruent and connected manner. So in order to give you guys a view of what the form looks like. We have excerpts of some of the questions from the form. So, for example, for the aspect of professional relevance, so all of these questions would have something to do with with their with the online content or the things that they engage in, their learning activities they engage in, would have, something to do. Oops.
Sorry. This one. Sorry. Would have something to do with, their, professional practice. So one of the questions would say, what I learned is important for my professional practice? And then we have reflective thinking wherein it would ask, of all the things that they engage in in their online learning environment, would this promote their critical thinking? So an example question would be, I think critically about ideas in the readings.
For interactivity. Again, this is something to do with how they interact with their peers or with their teachers. So it would have questions such as, I explained my ideas to other students or to their teachers. Then we have teacher support were in questions that would have something to do with cognitive demands or effective supports, pertaining to their teachers. An example question would be, the teacher stimulates my thinking.
And then for peer support, this one would have something to do with their interactions with their, classmates, with other students that are part of the courses. So they would have questions such as other students empathize with my struggle to learn. And then lastly, for interpretation of meaning, So this would have something to do with questions that would pertain to, their students, understanding other students or the students understanding their teachers whenever they communicate or interact through the learning management system. So an example question would be the teacher makes good sense of my messages. So these results attempt to answer the first question.
So for the first question, just so you guys can be reminded again, what do higher education students value in the use of LMS during online learning? So as you can see from here, we, sort of color coded it. We actually used a likert scale for this questionnaire. So it's a scale of one to five. So as you can see there in the legend, where one is almost never, and it's indicated in red, and the highest score is five where it says almost always. So as you can see from our results over here, which is from the, preferred, forms you can see that all of the answers are, under the often, scale.
And if you can see starting from my end towards, that end, the higher scores come from the professional relevance aspect, and then the lowest course are there towards the interactivity. So let me just, go through them real quick. So for our illustrative example, these health sciences students prefer their online learning environment to often contain relevant content, related to their professional practice. Students expect their trust actually often provide adequate balance of effective support and cognitive demands in an online learning environment. And with enough opportunities for interaction with peers and teachers, students expect to often be able to interpret any communication during online activities.
Students also prefer to be engaged in critical reflective thinking. For peer support and interactivity, which are the last two, towards that end, students' preference are almost on the same scale as the rest of the ask but a little bit lower. So students expect peers to often provide effective and cognitive support through encouraging, praising, and valuing their contribution, as well as empathizing in their own learning struggles. The students generally prefer to often have online interaction with peers and their teachers. Taking their souls of the six aspects of learning together, students highly value reflective thinking and learning from other students.
So for the next part of this presentation, I'm passing you on back to Dean Moore. Thanks, Rais. So now you know the answer to the first question, and that is, students, value experiences that are presented to them often in terms of the six aspects of online learning. So to answer the second question, How do the currently available LMSes affect online learning of students? We compare the preferred learning environment in this slide called ideal. And their actual learning environments, at least how they perceive their actual learning environments.
So using the same scale on the right hand side of the slide, results indicate that the at all learning environment provide opportunities to often experience, professional relevance, reflective thinking, teacher support, interpretation and interpretation of meaning and peer support. For these five of the online learning environment, you will notice that the actual and preferred are similarly colored green. Because the actual learning environment approximates their preferred online learning environment. So scores for both preferred and actual learning ments are about four or often or green. And if you look closer, I hope the numbers can be seen clearly from where Jung is sitting, but, you might note that, the the scores for the active learning environment are lower or higher than preferred.
They're generally lower than the scores for preferred learning environments and, maybe these point to areas of improvement in designing and implementing learning environments. The exception is peer support where we were pleasantly surprised to note that the actual environment was perceived to have a higher score than the preferred, environment. So in contrast to these five aspects of online learning environment, you might be missing one. So where is that one? Interactivity appears to be the only aspect that differed between preferred and actual learning environments. So the left hand side shows the preferred learning environment and the right hand side shows the actual learning environment.
And you can see that the left hand side is a green, so that's often. And the right hand side, their active learning environment is a yellow, which means that they experience interactivity just sometimes. So students prefer that they often explain their ideas to other students that they often ask students to explain their ideas that they that other students often ask them to explain their ideas and that other students often respond to their ideas. That's what they want. But in the actual learning environments, students perceive interactivity to happen only sometimes.
So this is one aspect of online learning environment that could be intentionally targeted when designing the online learning environment using LMS's. For sure, further research is required to explain that gap between the preferred learning environment and the actual learning environment in terms of interactivity. For example, the questions that, ran in her heads, include, could the variation in access to device and internet connectivity have played the role in this gap, or maybe could the asynchronous versus synchronous modes of learning explain this difference? And I'm sure you have your own questions in your head forming right now. And also further research could also investigate if there are changes in the beliefs of students in reflective thinking like what Riza presented just then. Now that learning has transitioned out of full remote mode, but we will need another set of, another run of the study.
But it is worth emphasizing that these student perceptions were taken from a small sample of, students, two hundred seven of health sciences, and ninety seven percent of those were using just one LMS. So we are not sure if these perceptions are related to that one LMS called Canvas. Not to the survey done when fifty percent or more courses were conducted online. But Results could inform still our efforts in improving pedagogical strategies as we continue to use elements in a post pandemic learning environment and I hope you agree. Regardless of the learning environment being remote, blended, or hybrid, there are implications of the results of the survey if the pedagogical goal is to develop practitioners who are reflective and collaborative.
So the first part, professional relevance, reflective thinking, teacher support, peer support, and interpretation of meaning may be better facilitated by improving utilization of LMS features, including communication tools such as discussion boards, collaboration tools such as a whiteboard and knowledge construction tools such as annotation or mind mapping. On the other hand, interactivity could be improved by streamlining communication and collaboration tools for more effective interactivity And perhaps from a larger scale, some strategies to address technological barriers. And from what I caught from this morning, It's, very inspiring and, it provides some optimism that these are the same directions that we are hoping to see in the future from our LMS. So in conclusion, students value and often experience aspects of online learning that develop them as and collaborative learners. Students prefer an environment that provide opportunities often for them to experience learning the task professional relevance and that fosters reflective thinking, interactivity, peer support, teacher support, and good interpretation of meaning or making sense of messages.
While the actual learning environment of students using LMS provides these experiences, there is some room to intentionally target these aspects of the online learning environment to approximate or maybe even exceed what they perceive as their preferred or ideal environment. So on behalf of our research group, we thank you for your attention. We thank the University of the Philippines for the academic improvement grant that funded this research. And, you may reach out to Riza and myself through these addresses. And I think now we will be happy to answer some questions if that's what I, would want. Yeah.
It's lovely see you all today. My name is Isaiah, or everyone just calls me Sai. I'm a customer success manager here at Instructure, and it is my pleasure to be your host today for the administration, tracked here at Canvas Connect. We have three great customer sessions lined up for you today, and I hope you're all energized and ready to go. Did you all have a good lunch? Yeah.
Well, hopefully you had a a highlight of of the food and, have some more just more food in the back and more more dessert as well. So feel free to grab some. But, yeah, we have three amazing sessions for you today, and I'm delighted to introduce our distinguished speakers who will bring a wealth of knowledge and expertise to our discussions. As a reminder to all attendees, you are welcome to go between the leadership track and the, administration track. But we ask that you refrain from moving during the session.
So without further ado, how about let's dive right into it today? So our first session is titled, beyond the screen, exploring students' perceptions of learning management systems. As education transforms with technology, understanding students' perspectives on learning management systems is pivotal. The speakers for our first session will delve into this topic shedding light on aspects on of the online learning environment valued by student So allow me to introduce our esteemed speakers for our first session. I'll introduce Maria Eliza Aguila, is a professor and Dean at the College of allied medical professions at the University of the Philippines. Professor Agala is not only a therapists and researcher, but also the product leader of the UP Manila Canvas project management team, driving the integration of Canvas at UP Manila.
Also joining us today is Riza Ruiz, is a former faculty member at the University of Philippines Manila, who assisted in the transition to incorporating the use of Canvas during the pandemic. Currently pursuing her master's in physical therapy. She's an advocate for innovative teaching methods and technology. Please, would you give the biggest round of applause for our speakers today. Thanks, Sai.
Good afternoon, everyone. Yeah. Because it's just after lunch. Let's start light and Why don't we start with some imagination? Let's imagine a world where technology blends seamlessly with teaching and learning where technology facilitates connection connection between and among students. Sorry.
Teachers and content. Where content and courses also connect with university processes and where everyone in the university sort of shares a sense of belonging to the same university community. And where online learning also connects with real world learning. In this kind of environment, we'll Learning transcends the boundaries of the classrooms and takes on a personalized and interconnected form. And in this kind of environment then, how do learning management systems shape the learning experiences of students.
And maybe we can ask ourselves how do students perceive this kind of environment So in the next half hour or so, we share with you the perceptions of students on aspects of learning environment beyond the digital interface and describe what happens beyond the screen. Perceptions of online learning, using learning management systems. So I am Maria Eliza Agala, like what Si mentioned, and together with my co presenter, Riza Marie. We are pleased to share our findings of a research we did with our colleagues, assistant professor, Michael Valdez, and Ms. Gessil Gem Alcantara.
In online learning environments, teaching learning activities are not limited to print based materials are confined to confined by time or space. And as such, learning environments bridge the space between physical locations among the different members of the learning community. And in such a learning environment, learning management systems streamline the online learning environment and act as a virtual classroom by providing a platform for managing content and delivering courses. Learning management systems also use technology to provide interactivity and immersive experience through, for example, different features like, collaborative assignments or discussion boards. We're familiar with that.
And also, learning management systems enhance administrative and pedagogical aspects such that they assist in planning the course, distributing, course materials and evaluating learning of students. So taking all these together, learning management systems promote the social engagement that students need in their learning. From a social constructivist standpoint, students are expected to actively participate in the creation of their own knowledge while engaging in reflective collaboration their peers and their teachers. So these elements are evident as students log in to access resources for example, as the LMS is used to manage content. Okay.
I tried again. Sorry. And students participate in the learning activities either synchronously or asynchronously and interact with their peers and teachers, as the LMS provides communication tools such as, you have the inbox, you have, chat functions, you have discussion boards, you have announcements. Students also learn real life applications as the LMS serves as a platform for learning activities that use cognitive realism, such as case based scenarios or virtual simulations, and students practice active learning as they are made aware of their king and their learning processes through feedback and other forms of evaluation delivered through the LMS. And lastly, students engage in collaborations through features like group assignments, and third party collaborative applications.
At the University of the Philippines Manila, the use of elements has changed over those three periods, and I'm guessing that that might be similar to your scenarios. As in the case of probably your universities, the COVID nineteen pandemic moved learning environments fully online, And prior to the pandemic in twenty twenty, well at least at the university of the Philippines Manila, the use of a homegrown LMS was sort of fragmented and sparse, fragmented in a way that there was another department that used their own LMS and sparse in a way that only twenty two percent of teachers use all of their, all used LMSs for all of their, courses and fifty percent of teachers have never used the LMS in any of their course. Other than, that there were other free versions of, commercial LMSs used in other courses. So at that time, that first period, the pre pandemic period. You could imagine that students may be using two, three, or even more.
LMSes across different courses. And I felt your agreement there with size of frustration, I think. But during the pandemic, there was a rapid adoption of a new then a newly subscribed LMS, which was Canvas. And at that time, the university mandated no more than two LMSs to be used. Monday that was different from compliance, but then there was that mandate.
So, but as we transition now to the post pandemic period with more courses being moved back to being delivered on-site, we anticipate some change in the use of LMS we still do not know what these changes would be. We eagerly await them, but what is sure is that LMS continues to be part a blended learning environment or full face to face modalities. Through these periods and changes, Students reported positive, impact of LMS on their learning. For instance, students report that LMS has helped build important skills in them like organization, time management, and communication. LMS has increased their motivation promoting their learning, their interaction, and support.
And LMS has enhanced their self regulated learning in an online environment such that they think they are more disciplined and more motivated. Despite these feedback from students and available literature on, student satisfaction with LMS or the impact of LMS use with, academic performance there is limited information on the perception of students on the extent to which their online learning environments engage them and reflect and collaborative learning. Understanding student perceptions is critical in designing and implementing online learning environments that are student centered and consistent with the mission of the university in developing practitioners who are reflective and collaborative. This presentation, therefore, seeks to answer the following questions based on a recent study we conducted at our university Number one, what do higher education students value in the use of LMS during online learning? And number two, how do the currently available LMSs at the university affect their online learning? These questions were explored in the context of LMS being a feature of the online learning environment that is presumed to develop learners who are reflective and who are collaborative and who engage with others in co creating new knowledge. Eventually understanding student perceptions would contribute to improving online learning management systems or online systems in general.
Enhancing student learning experiences and aligning the learning experiences with the the the anticipated program outcomes. So I turn you over to Riza who will then describe how we collected our information and, the first part our results. Good afternoon again. So to answer questions that were posted earlier, we surveyed the students of the UK College of allied medical professions, our home college, as an illustrative case for health sciences students. The college is one of the degree, granting units of, up Manila, It educates occupational therapists, physical therapists, speech pathologist, and clinical audiologist.
Who are competent, responsive, future focused, informed, and service supported advocates for disability, inclusive health, and the quality of life of Filipinos. Toward that purpose, the college aims to deliver an advanced transformative, collaborative, and innovative education integrated with research and public service. Does the participants of this survey are as follows. We had fifty nine students from the BS Physical Therapy Program, fifty five students from the BS occupational therapy program, seventy seven speech pathology students, ten students from the master of physical therapy program two students from the master of Rehabilitation science, speech pathology program, and four students from the master of clinical audiology program. So in order to answer the questions, we use this questionnaire, which is called call us, or the constructivist online learning environment survey.
This is a self report survey that reflects the importance of learner centered environment for effective learning. This is based on a social constructivist theory of learning. It is a twenty four item questionnaire, which comprises of two forms. So there is one for students' perception of the actual learning experience, and then the other one for the perceptions of their for learning environment. So these two college forms actually have parallel items comprising of six aspects.
So, namely, as you can see here from this screen, we have professional relevance, which, has to do with the extent to which their engagement in their online learning environment. How much is it relevant to their own professional world views and their related practices? Reflected thinking for in the extent to which their critical reflective thinking is occurring in association with their discussion with their peers. We have communicative interactivity, which is occurring between students as well as between students and teachers. We also have peer support wherein we look into the peers, providing their cognitive and effective support with each other. And then we have teacher support wherein teachers provide challenges while acting as role models well as providing encouraging support.
And lastly, interpretation of meaning in which this is the extent to which, students and teachers co construct meaning in a congruent and connected manner. So in order to give you guys a view of what the form looks like. We have excerpts of some of the questions from the form. So, for example, for the aspect of professional relevance, so all of these questions would have something to do with with their with the online content or the things that they engage in, their learning activities they engage in, would have, something to do. Oops.
Sorry. This one. Sorry. Would have something to do with, their, professional practice. So one of the questions would say, what I learned is important for my professional practice? And then we have reflective thinking wherein it would ask, of all the things that they engage in in their online learning environment, would this promote their critical thinking? So an example question would be, I think critically about ideas in the readings.
For interactivity. Again, this is something to do with how they interact with their peers or with their teachers. So it would have questions such as, I explained my ideas to other students or to their teachers. Then we have teacher support were in questions that would have something to do with cognitive demands or effective supports, pertaining to their teachers. An example question would be, the teacher stimulates my thinking.
And then for peer support, this one would have something to do with their interactions with their, classmates, with other students that are part of the courses. So they would have questions such as other students empathize with my struggle to learn. And then lastly, for interpretation of meaning, So this would have something to do with questions that would pertain to, their students, understanding other students or the students understanding their teachers whenever they communicate or interact through the learning management system. So an example question would be the teacher makes good sense of my messages. So these results attempt to answer the first question.
So for the first question, just so you guys can be reminded again, what do higher education students value in the use of LMS during online learning? So as you can see from here, we, sort of color coded it. We actually used a likert scale for this questionnaire. So it's a scale of one to five. So as you can see there in the legend, where one is almost never, and it's indicated in red, and the highest score is five where it says almost always. So as you can see from our results over here, which is from the, preferred, forms you can see that all of the answers are, under the often, scale.
And if you can see starting from my end towards, that end, the higher scores come from the professional relevance aspect, and then the lowest course are there towards the interactivity. So let me just, go through them real quick. So for our illustrative example, these health sciences students prefer their online learning environment to often contain relevant content, related to their professional practice. Students expect their trust actually often provide adequate balance of effective support and cognitive demands in an online learning environment. And with enough opportunities for interaction with peers and teachers, students expect to often be able to interpret any communication during online activities.
Students also prefer to be engaged in critical reflective thinking. For peer support and interactivity, which are the last two, towards that end, students' preference are almost on the same scale as the rest of the ask but a little bit lower. So students expect peers to often provide effective and cognitive support through encouraging, praising, and valuing their contribution, as well as empathizing in their own learning struggles. The students generally prefer to often have online interaction with peers and their teachers. Taking their souls of the six aspects of learning together, students highly value reflective thinking and learning from other students.
So for the next part of this presentation, I'm passing you on back to Dean Moore. Thanks, Rais. So now you know the answer to the first question, and that is, students, value experiences that are presented to them often in terms of the six aspects of online learning. So to answer the second question, How do the currently available LMSes affect online learning of students? We compare the preferred learning environment in this slide called ideal. And their actual learning environments, at least how they perceive their actual learning environments.
So using the same scale on the right hand side of the slide, results indicate that the at all learning environment provide opportunities to often experience, professional relevance, reflective thinking, teacher support, interpretation and interpretation of meaning and peer support. For these five of the online learning environment, you will notice that the actual and preferred are similarly colored green. Because the actual learning environment approximates their preferred online learning environment. So scores for both preferred and actual learning ments are about four or often or green. And if you look closer, I hope the numbers can be seen clearly from where Jung is sitting, but, you might note that, the the scores for the active learning environment are lower or higher than preferred.
They're generally lower than the scores for preferred learning environments and, maybe these point to areas of improvement in designing and implementing learning environments. The exception is peer support where we were pleasantly surprised to note that the actual environment was perceived to have a higher score than the preferred, environment. So in contrast to these five aspects of online learning environment, you might be missing one. So where is that one? Interactivity appears to be the only aspect that differed between preferred and actual learning environments. So the left hand side shows the preferred learning environment and the right hand side shows the actual learning environment.
And you can see that the left hand side is a green, so that's often. And the right hand side, their active learning environment is a yellow, which means that they experience interactivity just sometimes. So students prefer that they often explain their ideas to other students that they often ask students to explain their ideas that they that other students often ask them to explain their ideas and that other students often respond to their ideas. That's what they want. But in the actual learning environments, students perceive interactivity to happen only sometimes.
So this is one aspect of online learning environment that could be intentionally targeted when designing the online learning environment using LMS's. For sure, further research is required to explain that gap between the preferred learning environment and the actual learning environment in terms of interactivity. For example, the questions that, ran in her heads, include, could the variation in access to device and internet connectivity have played the role in this gap, or maybe could the asynchronous versus synchronous modes of learning explain this difference? And I'm sure you have your own questions in your head forming right now. And also further research could also investigate if there are changes in the beliefs of students in reflective thinking like what Riza presented just then. Now that learning has transitioned out of full remote mode, but we will need another set of, another run of the study.
But it is worth emphasizing that these student perceptions were taken from a small sample of, students, two hundred seven of health sciences, and ninety seven percent of those were using just one LMS. So we are not sure if these perceptions are related to that one LMS called Canvas. Not to the survey done when fifty percent or more courses were conducted online. But Results could inform still our efforts in improving pedagogical strategies as we continue to use elements in a post pandemic learning environment and I hope you agree. Regardless of the learning environment being remote, blended, or hybrid, there are implications of the results of the survey if the pedagogical goal is to develop practitioners who are reflective and collaborative.
So the first part, professional relevance, reflective thinking, teacher support, peer support, and interpretation of meaning may be better facilitated by improving utilization of LMS features, including communication tools such as discussion boards, collaboration tools such as a whiteboard and knowledge construction tools such as annotation or mind mapping. On the other hand, interactivity could be improved by streamlining communication and collaboration tools for more effective interactivity And perhaps from a larger scale, some strategies to address technological barriers. And from what I caught from this morning, It's, very inspiring and, it provides some optimism that these are the same directions that we are hoping to see in the future from our LMS. So in conclusion, students value and often experience aspects of online learning that develop them as and collaborative learners. Students prefer an environment that provide opportunities often for them to experience learning the task professional relevance and that fosters reflective thinking, interactivity, peer support, teacher support, and good interpretation of meaning or making sense of messages.
While the actual learning environment of students using LMS provides these experiences, there is some room to intentionally target these aspects of the online learning environment to approximate or maybe even exceed what they perceive as their preferred or ideal environment. So on behalf of our research group, we thank you for your attention. We thank the University of the Philippines for the academic improvement grant that funded this research. And, you may reach out to Riza and myself through these addresses. And I think now we will be happy to answer some questions if that's what I, would want. Yeah.