A coonstructive approach to online assisted instruction: An action research

This research concentrates on the problems and issues, and how they are handled withinan online assisted ?Instructional Technologies and Material Development? course. Theapplication, being a constructivist one, considered preparation, process and productionphases of content, medium, student, teacher and evaluation dimensions.This research, being a qualitative one, gathered data from different sources as: diary,semi-structured interviews, Web-Pages and Web-Logs of the course, messages, video-tape recordings, Team Evaluation Forms, Team/Project Evaluation Forms and TeacherEvaluation Forms. The validity of the data was triangulated.The following precautions were taken for the trustworthiness and the validity of the data• Data collection and analysis were detailed thoroughly for all the steps.• Anything considered important for the research has been recorded and reported.• In interpreting and describing the data an objective approach was chosen.• Sufficient and correct data were used.• A longitudinal approach was followed for the data.• Observations are recorded accurately.• Data triangulation is usedo Different data types are used.o Different data resources are used.o Data are collected in different times.o Different referees were used for the credibility of the data and findings.The reliability of the data was provided by multiple checking. Macro and microdescriptive analysis method was used for the analysis of the data.The research took place in Anadolu University, Faculty of Education in the academicyear 2003-2004. Taking 20 students of Computer and Instructional TechnologiesDepartment as the sample, the research covered 15 weeks.