Social work educators’ perceptions of instructor characteristics, student characteristics, and university supports critical for the creation of an effective learning environment in social work distance education.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Social work education is increasingly changing, and instructors are experimenting with new methods to deliver social work curricula to reach a larger population of social work students. Students previously excluded from university education based on their geographic location, financial limitations, family or work demands now have an opportunity to access social work programs in Canada using distance education, and distance education has become an emerging field of research. The current study identified instructor and student characteristics and university supports that were assessed as critical in creating an effective learning environment for delivering an entire undergraduate program of social work via distance education. The exploratory-descriptive study utilized a mixed-methods design to examine the perceptions of social work distance educators from four universities that offer a complete BSW degree accredited by the Canadian Association for Social Work Education (CASWE-ACFTS) through distance education: the University of Calgary, the University of Manitoba, the University of Victoria and Dalhousie University. Thirty-four social work distance educators completed a survey questionnaire, and 24 of these participated in qualitative interviews to identify the critical characteristics and university supports. Study findings suggest that effective performance of five distinct roles by both instructors and students are essential to creating an effective learning environment in social work distance education. The required university supports to maintain those roles are also identified. Based on these results a conceptual model for achieving effectiveness in social work distance education is identified. The study suggests what is needed to establish an effective learning environment in social work distance education and confirms the benefits of distance education in social work undergraduate programs. Suggestions for future research are included along with recommendations for building an effective distance learning environment in social work education.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".