Issue 13.5 Editorial

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 2-4
Author(s):  
Alisa Percy ◽  
◽  
Dominique R. Parrish ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Active Learning ◽  
Student Agency ◽  
Teaching Innovation ◽  
Pedagogical Strategies ◽  
Learning And Teaching ◽  
Multimedia Resources ◽  
The Face ◽  
Educational Videos ◽  
Support Students

This final issue for 2016 contains ten papers that broadly cover the use of multimedia resources and tasks to engage students in active learning, curriculum and pedagogical strategies designed to support students’ transition and success, and the complex issues facing higher education in the face of increasing casualization of staff and multi-campus delivery. The first four papers of this issue describe and evaluate pedagogical strategies that involve the use of multimedia in teaching and tasks as one means for promoting active learning and fostering student agency. Dune, Bidewell, Firdaus and Kirwan describe a learning and teaching innovation informed by popular culture where students produce and evaluate educational videos in a competitive context. The approach was designed to increase student agency and engagement in what the authors refer to as a ‘consumer culture’ in higher education. The authors identify the significant constraints with this kind of approach, but suggest that this project highlights the benefits of harnessing popular genres for student agency and engagement.

Active Learning Online

2022 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Viktor Wang ◽  
Leslie Hitch ◽  
Geraldine Torrisi-Steele
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Active Learning ◽  
Learning Experience ◽  
Thinking Skills ◽  
Strategic Learning ◽  
Learning And Teaching ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Current Century ◽  
Teaching Goal ◽  
Current Article

Preparing graduates for the present and future workforce is an important strategic learning and teaching goal of higher education. Towards realizing this goal, institutions are expending significant effort promoting active learning as an institution-wide teaching approach. Active learning defined as learners deeply participating in the learning process are being increasingly used in face-to-face contexts, but can it be used just as effectively in the online environments now common in higher education? In their 2017 paper, the authors established that active learning online is certainly possible. In this current article the authors assert that not only is active learning online possible, but that it is a necessity to bolster workforce and higher order thinking skills needed in this current century. Importantly, the faculties have a crucial role to play in implementing active learning online, and active learning online permeate the whole of the online learning experience within courses.

scholarly journals Rising to the occasion: Exploring the changing emphasis on educational design during COVID-19

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Bellaby ◽  
Michael Sankey ◽  
Louis Albert
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Education Sector ◽  
Emotional Impact ◽  
Teaching Staff ◽  
Educational Design ◽  
Teaching Online ◽  
Teaching Activities ◽  
Learning And Teaching ◽  
The Face

With the advent of COVID-19, the majority of universities in Australasia have had to adjust quickly to provide the bulk of their learning and teaching activities online. To a great extent this involved learning/educational designers (and titles similar to this) needing to provide a range of tasks (some new) associated with supporting many teaching staff unfamiliar with teaching online. In some cases, this has meant a change in role, while for others it was transitioning to new and higher levels of responsibility. Regardless, the emotional impact of this should not be understated, or at least should understood. This paper explores these concepts based on the feedback from 90 educational designers, mainly from the Australasian higher education sector. It presents details of the results of a semi-structured qualitative study of those working in the field of educational design at universities. These designers were asked to consider how COVID-19 has impacted the ways in which they undertook their work, the types of issues they are dealing with, and the solutions they were proposing and contributing. Their accounts document the changing nature of their roles and their emotions in the face of potentially unalterable changes.

scholarly journals Should we care about what the students do? Challenging how we design for online learning

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bettina Schwenger
Keyword(s):  
Online Learning ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Active Learning ◽  
Focus Groups ◽  
Course Design ◽  
Hybrid Learning ◽  
Learning And Teaching ◽  
The Times ◽  
Support Students ◽  
Remote Learning

Rapidly responding in the times of a pandemic, tertiary courses in New Zealand have implemented emergency remote learning and teaching by increasing learning online. Many staff require support though to purposeful redesign and facilitate online as part of blended or hybrid learning and teaching. This article reports about a study of redesign for such a purpose. The course demands were identified to then consider how to use online features to support the assessment for Māori and non-Māori students. Research instruments with students included questionnaires and focus groups; conversations and reflections were used with staff. The paper includes key findings, firstly how online features can contribute to active learning and secondly, considerations and tools to enhance a course design with increased online learning, for example an explicit plan of how and when certain affordances support students learning.

scholarly journals University Social Responsibility, Service Learning, and Students' Personal, Professional, and Civic Education

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Márcia Coelho ◽  
Isabel Menezes
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Service Learning ◽  
Social Responsibility ◽  
Civic Education ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Self Assessment ◽  
Pedagogical Strategies ◽  
European Universities ◽  
The Face ◽  
Societal Problems

The long-standing vision of universities as the “alma mater” of students and graduates is a demonstration of its role as sustaining the person, the expert/professional, and the citizen. This role has persisted in the face of rising global challenges such as the emergence of new learning spaces, the growing diversity of publics, the call for productivity and performativity, and the hope for a significant engagement with the community and the public good. These sometimes conflicting tendencies have also stimulated higher education institutions to further pedagogical strategies that articulate in novel ways the classical elements of learning: action/experience and reflection/theory. In this context, service learning received a new impetus, particularly in the post-Bologna European Higher Education Area, as universities were looking for ways in which to articulate the social dimension of HEI and their “third mission” as institutions not only committed to addressing and solving societal problems, but also committed to fostering public-minded alumni through powerful experiences of engagement for both the students and the community.This paper is based on the experience of Erasmus+project ESSA, a service earning based project focused on University social responsibility (USR). ESSA engaged four groups of students from three European universities (Edinburgh, Porto, and Kaunas) in conducting a 1-week on-site USR audit based on an ecologic and situated concept of social responsibility. We will consider the perceived impact of ESSA on 44 students through a thematic analysis of focus group discussions and student self-assessment reports produced during and after their participation in the USR audit.

scholarly journals Drivers of Faculty Pedagogical Digital Competence or How to Get Things Going Online

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nora Jansone-Ratinika ◽  
◽  
Tatjana Koķe ◽  
Raimonds Strods ◽  
Māris Brants
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Research Programme ◽  
Academic Community ◽  
Learning Needs ◽  
Digital Competence ◽  
Health Crisis ◽  
Learning And Teaching ◽  
Study Results ◽  
Support Students

The world`s health crisis was started and the area of higher education was significantly challenged by the spread of the virus SARS-CoV-2. The academic community was forced to rethink its ways of learning and teaching dynamically. It transformed the understanding of the faculty competence as an essential component of the continuity of qualitative education, which emphasizes the need to increase the competence to work in a technology-enhanced study environment and to support students in achieving learning outcomes remotely. The aim of the article is to explain the pedagogical digital competence of faculty, which reflects one of the research aspects covered in the State Research Programme (SRP) dedicated to mitigating the consequences of COVID-19. The research methodology consists of a set of quantitative data, which was obtained by surveying 349 faculty from 33 higher education institutions of Latvia. In turn, a questionnaire was developed based on the obtained conclusions, performing an analysis of literature and educational guidelines. Patterns of the use of educational technologies of faculty were analyzed and described in the framework of the research. The wide analysis performed during the research can be summarized in several conclusions. (1) Skills that faculty have self-assessed as the highest primarily characterize the use of technologies and technological solutions (TTS – analogous to hardware and software) to meet students basic learning needs. In turn, skills in the use of TTS, which would help students to develop digital competence and achieve study results in line with labor market trends, are assessed lower. (2) Faculty consider themselves to be more proficient in using TTS to promote students’ cognitive skills than in acquiring practical skills. (3) Faculty feel more proficient in providing feedback to students, rather than collecting it from them and performing summative rather than formative assessment. (4) The improvement of pedagogical digital competence (PDC) of faculty is driven more by cooperation with students than by administrative pressure.

scholarly journals From confounded to common ground: Misunderstandings between tertiary teachers and students in online discussions

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dianne Forbes ◽  
Dilani Gedera
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Online Discussions ◽  
Initial Teacher Education ◽  
Learner Engagement ◽  
Pedagogical Strategies ◽  
Learning And Teaching ◽  
Postgraduate Level ◽  
Teachers And Students ◽  
Asynchronous Online Discussions

Drawing on findings from two studies, this article focuses on the expectations of students and teachers in higher education, when learning via asynchronous online discussions. In particular, this synthesis highlights a divergence of expectations. The first study investigated how students and teachers experienced asynchronous online discussion within initial teacher education at undergraduate level. The second study examined factors that affect learner engagement within asynchronous online discussions at a postgraduate level. A synthesis of key findings proposes that learning and teaching in higher education can be enhanced by awareness of how participants experience the situation. Common misunderstandings between students and teachers in online classes revolve around presence, formative/summative dimensions, language, and literature. Highlighting misunderstandings enables possibilities for negotiation, change, and improvement. While discussing the common ground for negotiation, this article suggests pedagogical strategies for effective communication and enhancement of online learning in higher education.

scholarly journals Editorial

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. v-vii
Author(s):  
Penny Welch ◽  
Susan Wright
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Higher Education ◽  
United States ◽  
Active Learning ◽  
Social Science ◽  
The United States ◽  
Science Students ◽  
Learning And Teaching ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Social

In this issue of Learning and Teaching: The International Journal of Higher Education in the Social Sciences, authors from Denmark, the United States, Taiwan and the United Kingdom analyse serendipity in anthropology teaching, the use of lecture videos in political science, peer dialogue in education studies, polarisation anxiety among social science students and active learning in criminology.

scholarly journals Fostering soft and hard skills for innovation among informatics engineering students

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Torres ◽  
Nuno Flores ◽  
Raquel Torres
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Active Learning ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Interdisciplinary Cooperation ◽  
Skills Development ◽  
Pedagogical Approach ◽  
Teaching Innovation ◽  
Progressive Development ◽  
Hard Skills

Informatics engineers are currently in the spotlight of innovation. It is, therefore, relevant to analyse and reflect on how higher education can, and should, prepare future engineers to innovate as expected in this ever-changing world. This paper aims to further research and foster scholarly debate regarding the requirements and implications of teaching innovation. For that purpose, we examine an exploratory case study on interdisciplinary cooperation between two higher education courses, designed to promote students’ active learning of innovation through the progressive development of their soft and hard skills. Both courses engaged in an emancipatory pedagogical approach, mostly grounded in project-based work, active learning, and formative assessment. To obtain feedback on this interdisciplinary cooperation, questionnaires were devised to ascertain the students’ perceptions about this pedagogical approach. Individual responses were collected from both courses and data was analysed through simple statistical procedures. Articulating a priori soft skills development with a posteriori hard skills learning process is perceived by students as beneficial in gradually, yet successfully, understanding the subject of innovation. Also, there were even some external success indicators which showed the recognition of successful innovation skills development in informatics engineering students. Thus, according to students’ perceptions of their experience with an emancipatory pedagogy that connected soft with hard skills development, we conclude that such approach encouraged students to create new knowledge and allowed them to develop the necessary skills to innovate.

scholarly journals Effective Educational Videos: Principles and Guidelines for Maximizing Student Learning from Video Content

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. es6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia J. Brame
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Student Engagement ◽  
Active Learning ◽  
Cognitive Load ◽  
Content Delivery ◽  
Educational Tool ◽  
Online Classes ◽  
Video Content ◽  
Educational Videos ◽  
Effective Use

Educational videos have become an important part of higher education, providing an important content-delivery tool in many flipped, blended, and online classes. Effective use of video as an educational tool is enhanced when instructors consider three elements: how to manage cognitive load of the video; how to maximize student engagement with the video; and how to promote active learning from the video. This essay reviews literature relevant to each of these principles and suggests practical ways instructors can use these principles when using video as an educational tool.

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