THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

For the purpose of this research a new model was elaborated integrating two basic theoretical frameworks: The Community of inquiry (CoI) for online learning environments developed by (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 1999); and the Online collaborative learning (OCL) theory proposed by Linda (Harasim, 2012). Community of inquiry CoI model is one of the most popular models for blended and online courses that are designed as active learning environment where learning occurs through the interaction among three elements: social, cognitive, and teaching presence (Garrison & Arbaugh, 2007). Although social and cognitive presences are required, the creation of a learning community can occur only through effective teaching presence. Teaching presence (what the teacher does) may have a significant impact on cognitive presence (level of student thinking and understanding) but it has yet to be empirically demonstrated (Garrison, Cleveland-Innes, & Fung, 2010). (Garrison & Cleveland-Innes, 2005) suggested that the role of teaching presence is significant in the development of critical thinking and knowledge construction through dialogue. Social presence is the ability of learners to integrate themselves affectively in the learning community, and to project their personal characteristics into the community of inquiry (Rourke, Anderson, Garrison, & Archer, 2001). In this study educators’ and students’ perceptions of teaching presence and cognitive presence in online environment was investigated.

Teaching presence is the work of the teacher before, during, and after the course. Before the course commences the teacher, acting as instructional designer, plans and prepares the course of studies, during the course the instructor facilitates the discourse and provides direct instruction when required, and after the course the instructor implements various forms of assessment and reflection. Usually a formal distance education course consists of much more than dialogue between and among teacher and students and includes course readings, web explorations, exercises, and collaborative projects (Anderson, Rourke, Garrison, & Archer, 2001). Teaching presence requires the instructor to focus on the learner, the learning materials, and the content. (Garrison et al., 2007) stressed that instructors should master both content and pedagogy. According to (Garrison et al., 1999) teaching presence has three categories: design and organization, facilitating discourse, and direct instruction. Each category includes the following indicators:

• Indicators for design and organization: Setting curriculum; designing methods; establishing interaction; making macro-level comments about course content; setting parameters for the inquiry.

• Indicators for facilitating discourse: Seeking to reach consensus/understanding; encouraging, acknowledging, or reinforcing student contributions; setting climate for learning; prompting discussion; assessing the efficacy of the process.

• Indicators for direct instruction: Presenting content/questions; summing up discussions; confirming understanding through assessment and explanatory feedback; responding to technical concerns; providing steps to solutions.

On the other hand, cognitive presence is defined as the extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through continuous reflection in a critical community of inquiry (Garrison et al., 1999). Cognitive presence is the key element in critical thinking (Kanuka & Garrison, 2004). And the development of critical thinking is an important rationale for higher education (Hidayati & Sinaga, 2019). According to Redmond (2011) teaching presence can be found in a range of places beyond online discussion, it does change over time, and it can impact on students’ cognitive presence and critical thinking in a course. Cognitive presence was more elaborated by the Practical Inquiry (PI) model (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2001). This model described the process of developing cognitive presence in four phases: Triggering event, exploration, integration, and resolution. Triggering event is the initiating stage, where students are engaged in an attempt to locate and describe the problem. The second phase focuses on understanding the nature of the problem where students explore various resources searching for relevant information to generate possible explanations or solutions. In exploration students do not identify the relationships among information. In the third phase students start to make sense of the information by identifying relationships and constructing meanings. The fourth phase is a testing phase for the effectiveness of a solution/hypothesis in the real world. Each category includes the following indicators:

• Triggering event: Sense of puzzlement by asking questions; describing and stating the problem.

• Exploration: Brain storming, search for insights, and exchange of information.

• Integration: Connecting ideas, computations, justifying, comparing, contrasting, logical reasoning, elaborating, or explaining, and creating solutions.

• Resolution: Achieving solution, analyzing solution, testing solution, implementation through observation or experimentation.

In the elaborated model for this research we added reflection as an indicator in the resolution phase which includes reflection on the learning outcomes and reflection on the learning processes (Redmond, 2011). The term reflection does not appear within the categories or indicators of the practical inquiry model. However, there are many elements of cognitive presence that are associated with reflection: reflective reading, reflective questioning, and reflective discussion including attentive listening.

The second model adapted is the Online Collaborative Learning (OCL) model proposed by Linda (Harasim, 2012) that focuses on the facilities of the Internet to provide learning environments that foster collaboration and knowledge building. OCL is a form of constructivist teaching that takes the form of instructor-led group learning online. In OCL, students are encouraged to collaboratively solve problems through discourse instead of remembering correct answers. The teacher plays a crucial role as a facilitator as well as a member of the knowledge community under study. According to Harasim, there exist three phases of knowledge construction through discourse in a group:

• Idea generating: the brainstorming phase where divergent thoughts are gathered.

• Idea organizing: the phase where ideas are compared, analyzed and sorted through discussion and argument.

• Intellectual convergence: the phase where intellectual synthesis and consensus occur, including agreeing to disagree, usually through an assignment, essay, or other joint piece of work.

Harasim believes that the teacher is critical to this knowledge construction, not only through facilitating the process and providing resources to the group, but also through ensuring that the core concepts and practices of the subject domain are fully integrated. The teacher is here understood to be a representative of the knowledge community or subject domain under study.

According to the new elaborated model for online teaching and learning represented in Figure 1 the courses are considered as learning communities based on the interaction between three constructs: teaching presence, cognitive presence, and collaborative activities, in addition to the assessment tools used.

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

In the Lebanese University context, instructors were forced to deliver their courses online without any preparation. The online environment was a new experience for both instructors and students. Research is required to investigate the perceptions of both instructors and their students about their experience. The findings of this study will explore the essential elements of online higher education teaching and learning experience based on the two theoretical frameworks.

PURPOSE

The purpose of this research was to investigate the perceptions of science and math educators and their students at the Lebanese University, faculty of education related to online teaching and learning. The research addressed the following questions:

• What are the science and math educators’ perceptions- at the faculty of education of Lebanese University- of online teaching and learning related to teaching presence, cognitive presence, collaborative activities and assessments? How do perceptions of math and science educators compare?

• What are the science and math students’ perception- at the faculty of education of Lebanese University- of online teaching and learning related to teaching presence, cognitive presence, collaborative activities and assessments? How do perceptions of science and math students compare?

PARTICIPANTS

The participants of this study were the faculty of education members of the science department at the Lebanese University in the first, second, and Deanery branch. In addition, both undergraduate and graduate, French and English educated students / pre-service teachers with science and math as major or minor participated in the study. A total of 35 educators: 14 math educators and 21 science educators, and 245 students: 109 math students and 136 science students which constitutes around 60 % of the total population at this faculty participated in the study.

ETHICAL ISSUES

The participant educators voluntarily and anonymously answered the questionnaire that was sent by e-mail for all faculty members explaining the purpose of the research. Similarly, the student voluntarily and anonymously answered the google form of the questionnaire sent to them via whatsapp groups. Instructions were given to students to answer the questionnaire based on their general experience during online teaching and not on a specific course or instructor. If students were to respond while having in mind one course only, they would be directed to evaluate the instructor which is not the aim of this study.

DATA COLLECTION TOOLS

Two questionnaires for educators and students were constructed, validated by several tests, and piloted by a collaborative work among three researchers, two math educators and one science educator at the faculty of education, Lebanese University (Shehayeb, Shaaban, & Haifa, ).

The items were designed to take into consideration students’ perceptions about their experience and instructors’ perceptions about their experience and readiness based on their online teaching (Linjawi & Alfadda, 2018). The two questionnaires constituted of five parts with similar items for comparative purpose:

• Demographic information: gender, certificate, major/specialty, class standing/teaching experience, language

• Technology skills: Technology skills, obstacles and e-learning experience

• Perception measurement items: for teaching presence (10 items for instructor’s questionnaire and 7 items for students’ questionnaire), cognitive presence (16 items for the instructors’ questionnaire and 15 items for the students’ questionnaires) and collaboration (5 items for instructors’ questionnaire and 4 items for students’ questionnaire).

• Assessment methods used

• Reflection on the online teaching/ learning experience

A four point Likert scale was used for the perception measurement items mainly because they can be evenly split into simple dichotomies: Agree and Disagree. Each item was ranked from one to four in the following way: 1 = strongly disagree; 2 = disagree; 3 = agree and 4 = strongly agree. For the assessment methods and the reflection on online teaching / learning experience Checkboxes question were used in order to allow the participants to select multiple answers from a list of choices.

The data was collected from the online questionnaires prepared as Google Form through Excel Spreadsheets. The researcher later on imported that data into the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) and used descriptive and inferential analysis.

PARTICIPANTS’ PROFILE

The educators who participated in this study had the following profile: 34% females compared to 66% males; 40% math educators compared to 60% science educators; 71.5% assistant professors compared to 28.5% professors; 3% with teaching experience for less than 5 years, 31% between 5 and 10 years and 66% more than 10 years. Related to technology proficiency, 43% declared that they are not good in technology, 54% are good and only 3% are very good; 40% use video conferencing always compared to 60% that use it sometimes or rarely.

On the other hand, the majority of the participant students were females (96%) distributed as follows: 68% undergraduate and 32% graduate; 55.5 % studying science 44.5 % studying math; 33.5% first year; 26.1% 2^nd year; 40.4 % 3^rd year; 48.6 % studying in French and 51.4 % studying in English.

PARTICIPANTS’ PERCEPTIONS OF TEACHING PRESENCE

When it comes to perceptions, the answers were split into simple dichotomies: Agree and Disagree. Frequencies and percentages were calculated for all the items related to the three constructs based on the new model elaborated in the theoretical framework: Teaching presence; cognitive presence; and collaboration. In addition, Chi- square t- test was performed to determine any significant association between the independent variable teaching specialty/ major (science or math) and the dependent variable perceptions; and when the number of cells were below 5, Fisher exact t-test was performed.

The frequencies of the answers of math and science educators related to the items of teaching presence are presented in Table 1 .

The data showed that the majority of science and math educators agreed that online teaching requires course adjustment (100%), elaboration of new resources (97.1%), and sharing of online documents with students (100%). They also agreed that online teaching allowed them to encourage students to explore (94.2 %) and reflect on new concepts (91.5%). In addition, they believed that online teaching enabled them to post assignments (100%) discuss them (97.2%) with their students and give them direct feedback (88.5%). For the items: course content should be adjusted; course documents should be uploaded; and instructors can pose assignments on platform or using other media, all participants answered agree (100% agree and 0% disagree). So, there is no more a contingency two by two table (two columns with 0), consequently Chi square t-test cannot be performed for these items. So, both math and science educators believed that courses should be adjusted by adding new resources and references to fit online teaching and learning. On the other hand, statistical tests showed no significant differences between math and science educators related to the remaining items of the teaching presence. Thus, we infer that there is no significant association between teaching specialty (math or science) and educators’ perceptions related to teaching presence.

With respect to students’ perception, the results presented in Table 2 showed that more than 70% of the students agreed on the teaching presence indicators. They agreed that the course content was adjusted to fit online teaching (74.2%), ideas were clearly communicated by their instructors (85.3%), and they were encouraged by their instructors to explore new ideas (71.8%). They received instant (74.2%) and constructive (81.2 %) feedback on their assignments that are posted on Microsoft Teams or on other media. 91.4% agreed that they were asked questions during online sessions, and 95.5% agreed that assignments were posted by instructors on Microsoft teams or other media. Statistical tests showed no significant difference between math and science students related to the items of teaching presence. Thus, we infer that there is no significant association between students’ major and their perceptions about teaching presence.

PARTICIPANTS’ PERCEPTIONS OF COGNITIVE PRESENCE

The data collected based on the answers of the math and science educators to the items related to cognitive presence are presented in Table 3 and Table 4 (Frequencies). The analysis of answers related to the triggering and exploration phases (Table 3 ) showed that almost all the participant educators (97.1%) both math and science agreed that they can design assignments/ activities and problem situations that can be implemented online in order to trigger students’ curiosity and place them in cognitive conflict. This represents the triggering phase of the cognitive presence. Moreover, the majority of participant educators agreed that they can use brain storming (82.8% of both math and science educators); discussion (100% for science educators and 85.7% for math educators); inquiry method (95.2% for science educators and 85.7% for math educators); and the majority disagreed that online courses can be delivered by lecturing only (90.5% for science educators and 85.7% for math educators). In addition, all science educators (100%) and the majority of math educators (85.7%) agreed that during online teaching they can pose problems that need variety of information sources to be solved, this can help students appreciate different perspectives. This represents the exploration phase of cognitive presence.

Moreover, the analysis of answers related to the integration and resolution phases (Table 4 ) showed that all science educators (100%) and the majority of math educators (92.8%) agreed that online teaching enabled them to urge students to combine information to solve problems and to construct explanations/ solutions to the problems posed by the activities/ assignments designed by them. This represents the integration phase of the cognitive presence. Moving to the phase of judging, defending, application, and reflection (the resolution phase of cognitive presence): the majority of both math and science educators (91. 4%) agreed that online teaching can provide the opportunity for students to make judgement on the procedure used in solving problems; describe the ways to test the constructed knowledge (100% for science educators and 78.6% for math educators); defend the procedure used to solve problems or construct new knowledge (100% for science educators and 92.8% for math educators; apply the knowledge constructed (100% for science educators and 85.7% for math educators); and practice reflection of the procedure and the process of knowledge constructed (100% for science educators and 92.8 % for math educators). This indicates that the math and science educators who participated in this study, believed that online teaching can allow them to engage students in the learning community, implement student centered teaching strategies giving the opportunity for students to explore, relate, exchange and connect information. In addition, students can construct explanations, describe and defend the process of construction, apply and reflect on their practices in an online environment.

However, despite the slight differences between the answers of math and science educators, the Chi-square t-test or Fisher exact t-test shows no significant difference, with p values >> 0.05, for all the items related to the cognitive presence. Thus, we infer that there is no significant association between the teaching specialty (math or science) and the perceptions related to cognitive presence.

On the other hand, math and science students’ perceptions related to cognitive presence are illustrated in Table 5 and Table 6 (Frequencies). The analysis of the answers related to the triggering and exploration phases (Table 5 ) showed that the majority of students agreed that “questions were posed” during online sessions in order to allow them to explore course content (89.7% for science students and 80.7% for math students), with a statistically significant difference in favor of science students (p= 0.039). This can be due to the empirical nature of science that necessitate defining problems in terms of questions to be answered while students are exploring information. In addition, 76.1% of the math students and 73.5% of the science students agree that they were encouraged to search for references other than those sent by the instructor. However, 37.1% of the students disagree that the course activities implemented during online sessions triggered their curiosity. This can be due to the lack of instructors’ experience of online teaching. The majority of participant students agreed that during online sessions their instructors implemented: discussion (89.7% for science students and 87.1% for math students); inquiry method (69.1% for science students and 76.1% for math students, with a significant difference in favor of math students, p=0.021). This can be due to the fact that instructors tried to implement the inquiry method in math teaching online to engage the students in exploring the course concepts. The majority of students disagree that online sessions were delivered by lecturing only (90.5% for science educators and 85.7% for math educators). This underlines the implementation of various online teaching methods. 36.3% of students disagree that brainstorming was implemented during online sessions.

Similarly, the analysis of the answers related to the integration and resolution phases (Table 6 ) showed that students agreed that the learning activities implemented during online sessions urged them to construct explanations/ solutions (81.6% for science students and 67.8% for math students) with a significant difference in favor of science students (p= 0.04). This is due to the inquiry nature of science which requires the connection between ideas to construct explanations. Moving to the phase of judging, defending, application, and reflection (the resolution phase of cognitive presence). 70.6 % of both math and science students agree that they were given the opportunity to make judgement about the strategy utilized in solving problems, and were encouraged to justify the procedure used during learning activities. 72.0% of science students and 66.9% of math student participants agree that they were encouraged to test their constructed knowledge; 69.8% of science students and 74.3% of math students believed that they were capable of applying their constructed knowledge. 72.7% of science students compared to 64.2% of math students agreed that they were encouraged to reflect on the course content, with a statistically significant difference in favor of science students (p= 0.002). Again this is due to investigative nature of science that requires more reflection on the process of learning.

Statistical tests showed significant difference between math and science students related to certain items of the cognitive presence: questions posed during online sessions (triggering phase); implementation of inquiry method (exploration); construction of explanations and solutions (integration phase); and reflection on course content (resolution phase). Thus, there is an association between students’ major and their perceptions related to these four indicators of cognitive presence mainly in favor of science students. This can be due to the fact that science and math students’ academic experience is different depending on the nature of each subject. Science is derived from, and guided by, observation or experiment (Folino, 2001). This also conforms with (Shi & Wang, 2017) that found some differences in the views between science and math students related to observation and inference dimensions.

PARTICIPANTS PERCEPTIONS RELATED TO COLLABORATION

Regarding the participants’ perception about collaboration in online environment, the results presented in Table 7 showed that the majority of math and science educators (94.3%) agreed that online teaching allows them to collaborate with colleagues to adjust their course content, and give the opportunity for students to exchange ideas with their peers and support each other. 88.5% of the educators believe that they can collaborate with their students to adjust the course content for online teaching. In addition, 100% of science educators much more than math educators (71.4%) believe that they can reinforce collaborative learning, with a significant statistical difference in favor of science educators (p=0.032). This indicates a significant association between teaching specialty and the perceptions related to collaborative learning. This can be due to the experimental nature of most science activities and projects that require more collaboration between instructors and students and between students themselves. Thus, the participant educators that represent the faculty members of the scientific department at the Lebanese University, faculty of education, agreed that online environment can provide the opportunity of collaboration between them and their students in addition to collaboration among students.

Similarly, as presented in Table 8 the majority of participant students believed that online learning environment allowed them to work in groups (86.9%), support each other (86.9%), exchange ideas (91.4%) and work as a team (80.0%) to solve problems faced as presented in Table 8. The only item that shows significant difference between math and science students is about giving the opportunity for students to exchange ideas with their peers in favor of science teachers (p=0.021). This can be due to the fact that science activities favor exchange of ideas.

Thus, students agreed with their instructors that online environment favored teamwork and enhanced collaboration. This is in agreement with a study done on utilizing WhatsApp in teaching mathematics in a digital learning environment, where students highlighted the importance and the necessity of the students-teacher online interaction and collaboration (Rouadi & Anouti, 2020).

PARTICIPANTS’ PERCEPTIONS RELATED TO ASSESSMENT

All participants (educators and students) mentioned a variety of assessment methods used during online teaching and learning like: Google Form quizzes (37.1% of educators and 35.9% of students); Microsoft Form quizzes (34.2% of educators and 28.1% of students); presentations (85.7% of educators and 88.2% of students); assignments (77.1% of educators and 84.5% of students); and projects (88.6% of educators and 93.9% of students). This indicates that projects and assignments done by students and presentations of their work were the main assessment tools used during online teaching and learning.