A Care-Centered Approach to Online Learning Design and Pedagogy

Researchers in the field of online learning have raised concerns over its lack of focus on the affective/emotional aspect of the online learning experience, despite a strong research base indicating the important role that emotions play in successful and effective learning (Ch’ng, 2019). Utilizing a phenomenological methodological approach, the researchers interviewed online students and coded transcripts based on Noddings’ Ethics of Care Framework (1984) to explore the phenomenon of care in online learning in an effort to bridge this gap and deepen our understanding of the feeling of caring and being cared-for. These findings add to the literature on the role of emotions in online learning as viewed through the lens of care-theory. The findings highlight course design issues and instructor behaviors that promote a climate of care in an online environment from a learner perspective. These findings may be of benefit to inform future teacher preparation programs.

E-Portfolios and Practicum in Teacher Education

The Teacher Education Program at the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) implemented three initiatives in 2018 to improve the practicum experience for teacher candidates. One of these initiatives was to extend the use of e-Portfolios into final practicum. E-Portfolios are first developed by teacher candidates in EDUC 431, the Education Technology course, but they were asked to continue its use in the following term during final practicum. The extended use of e-Portfolios served as one response in the teacher education program to BC’s Curriculum (2021) and changes in the K-12 system, which in turn modelled several aspects of BC’s Curriculum such as personalization, Core Competencies, formative assessment, and the First Peoples Principles of Learning. Including final practicum as part of the e-Portfolio, teacher candidates were able to deepen their understanding of the Professional Standards for BC Educators (2019), reflect on their teaching experience, and conclude the program with a presentation at the Celebration of Learning. Teacher candidates were able to maintain an e-Portfolio during final practicum, identify additional artefacts to demonstrate their understanding of the professional standards, and create a digital narrative describing who they are as educators.

Reframing Web Accessibility in Post-Secondary Education: Examining the Role of the Educator in the Curation and Creation of Accessible Digital Course Content

Web accessibility is emerging as a key issue and opportunity for educators in post-secondary institutions (Brown, 2018; Gronseth, 2018). Many factors affect web accessibility, yet little literature examines web accessibility factors relative to literacy, pedagogy, course culture, course content curation and information design for learning— areas that rest firmly within an educator’s domain. What facets are specifically relevant to post-secondary educators? The conference presentation, this proceeding, and a subsequent article for the OTESSA journal that addresses the broader construct of digital accessibility, invite critical engagement with web accessibility practices, accessible course content, and the digital accessibility of technology-mediated learning environments. Together and individually, they offer educators various points of entry that are relevant to praxis and seek to ignite discussions and interventions that build educators’ agency and self-efficacy to co-create accessible courses with students with (and without) disabilities.

Open Education Co-Design as a Participatory Pedagogy in an Online Graduate Program

This paper builds on student-instructor partnerships by describing how an instructor, students, program coordinator, and members of a research team were involved in the co-design of an open educational resource in a graduate program in education. A four-part open learning design framework was used to guide the course design: (a) clarifying the co-design process; (b) buildingand sharing knowledge, and making thinkingvisible; (c) building relationships; and (d) sustaininglearning beyond the course. The framework, alongwith the collaborative team effort that was part of alarger research project, enabled the developmentof an openly licensed and accessible digital book.The project brought together a collaborative teamwho were passionate about learning more aboutopen education and a small grant supported theadditional expense of professional copyediting torefine the book.

External Factors Explaining Students’ Persistence in Online Courses in Higher Education: A Study Among Two French-Speaking Universities in Canada

The aim of this study was to verify if external factors influence persistence in online courses in higher education. These external factors, borrowed from Kember’s (1995) model, included some students’ characteristics; cost benefits; social integration of adult students (enrolment encouragement, study encouragement, and family support); and external attribution (insufficient time, events hindering study, and distractions). Data were collected among a sample of 835 students from two Canadian French-Speaking Universities (n1 = 468 from University One and n2 = 367 from University Two) using an online questionnaire. The questionnaire included items borrowed from The Distance Education Student Progress (DESP) inventory (Kember et al., 1992). The multiple linear hierarchical regression analysis revealed that students’ characteristics and some of the external factors had an effect on students’ persistence in online courses and that the most important factor in predicting students’ persistence is cost benefits. These analyses were also conducted by university, gender, and age groups. Except for cost benefits, the results indicated different patterns of strength and significant relationships between groups.

Uncovering the Politics Behind Adobe Stock

This paper explores how the categorization of images and the searching methods in the Adobe Stock database are culturally situated practices; they are a form of politics, filled with questions about who gets to decide what images mean and what kinds of social and political work those representations perform. Understanding the politics behind artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning systems matters now more than ever, as Adobe is already using these technologies across all their products.

Evolving Access to Educational Materials

The purpose of this paper is to interrogate the ways in which the selection of educational materials results in implications that impact access to these materials. This is necessary considering the evolving nature of educational materials offered by traditional publishers, and the increase in the availability of online learning materials, among those, open educational resources. I begin by reviewing the existing literature on emerging problems and barriers to learners’ access to educational materials including textbooks, online learning resources, and open educational resources. The findings from the literature review confirm that learners are now engaging with an increasingly complex ecosystem of educational materials, both print and digital, in a multitude of differing forms and formats, with various terms of use and durations of sustained access. Educators have a variety of choices to make when considering the educational materials to be used in their courses, and while fitness for purpose still dominates as the most important selection criterion, ease and persistence of access are becoming important considerations. A model which encapsulates the findings considering the variety of educational materials is presented alongside a discussion about the specific considerations for each.

Blending Pedagogies in Higher Education

This paper presents analysis of evidence on the ways in which the connection between technology and scholarship supported a Community of Practice (CoP) for instructors in a faculty of education in Canada. The goal is to reflect on different types of pedagogical practices of CoP members. We discuss the ways in which both social learning and online technology were harnessed to support professional learning. We based the analysis on notions of collective learning and Bandura’s (1986) social cognitive theory that inform studies on professional development. The main unit of analysis is the learning community (Wenger, 1998). CoP members jointly analyzed data from aggregated questionnaires, anonymized notes, and audio and textual recordings of selected meetings, resources archived and follow-up reflection by CoP members. The results showed that four pedagogies were most highly ascribed by CoP members: Culturally Responsive Pedagogies (11.63%; e.g., caring pedagogies, Healing, Global Transformative and Reconciliatory pedagogies), Hands-on and Digital Pedagogies (11.63%; e.g., Maker Education and Materiality pedagogies), Story Telling Pedagogies (13.95%; e.g., Deep, Imaginative, Surprise, Participatory, Story Telling and Learners as Curriculum Makers pedagogies), and 21st Century Teaching (16.28%; e.g., Blended, Digital and Online pedagogies). The findings provide evidence that there is potential in harnessing digital technology for social learning environments within the context of faculty responding to changing higher education institutional factors, including those motivated by the neoliberal management culture.

Graphic Narratives of Open Scholarship

Public engagement and collaboration through networked practices—known as networked participatory scholarship (NPS)—may influence academic culture to “support, amplify, and transform scholarship” (Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2012, p. 768). This study examined the open online scholarly community #FemEdTech as it engages in NPS to create, collect, and curate value statements to generate iterative codes of conduct. Contents of tweets that include the Twitter hashtags #FemEdTech and #FemEdTechValues were thematized. The findings are represented as a visual metaphor of a map charting the fluid nature between policy design and implementation, described as the #FemEdTech Cartography. This collaborative policy creation can serve as a model to shift academic culture towards more socially just practices using open scholarship to address the pressing issues of our time.