Profiling “User Bases” of Online Social Contexts

One aspect of profiling to enhance teaching and learning involves the various contexts in which learners will engage, such as particular social media ecosystems and their attendant microcultures (the social norms and common practices in these spaces), particularly if learners will be engaging with individuals outside of the formal classroom. Understanding the larger online social context helps define the affordances and constraints of what can be effectively taught and learned. This involves profiling the current user base of the online social spaces where the learners will be engaging and interacting and co-creating knowledge.

Understanding Learners' Self-Expressed and Self-Professed Core Personal Values for Effective Teaching and Learning

Adult learners, beyond being practical in their learning focus (based on andragogy), tend to use values (core and peripheral) to guide their attitudes, learning pursuits and behaviors, and other aspects. One approach to profiling learners may be based on learners' self-professed core personal values as those that cannot be contravened without causing offense and negative learner reactions. The professing of core values is not only by spoken/written/shared expressions (which can be “cheap talk”) but also by actions. Observing the actions of learners, one may infer underlying values (albeit in a noisy way). For effective teaching and learning, instructor and curricular alignments with learner core values may be integral to the success of the teaching and learning efforts. This work provides a literature review of learner values and learning and explores the implications of considering such values in instructional design and teaching and learning.

Situated Learning Online

In online situated learning, enabled through enhanced information and communications technology (ICT), learning management systems (LMSes), learning content repositories, immersive virtual worlds, simulations, games, augmented reality enablements using mobile technologies, web meeting tools, digital libraries, and other software and hardware, target learners may be profiled based on the practical learning-context-defined roles: the functional roles, the defined target learning skills, the requisite interactions between learners, the interactions between learners and digital and analog artifacts and online environment, and others. This work explores defined idealized learning profiles in situated learning online.

Using a Diversity and Inclusion Approach in Designing Learning for All (in Full Human Dimensionality)

To enable a fair playing field and to advance learning domains and to enable the advancement of pluralistic social systems, those engaged in designing, developing, and deploying learning in all modalities (face-to-face/F2F, blended, fully online) need to include and support diverse learners to fully engage in the learning and to contribute their utmost. This work explores the types of approaches that benefit diversity and inclusion approaches in teaching and learning. This also proposes some diversity inclusion design interventions based on five general categories—demographics, cultures, languages, learning preferences, and accessibility needs—in an approach dubbed diversity inclusion learning design + development + deployment (DIL3D).

Identifying and Constructively Engaging Learner Resistances in the Online Classroom

Learner resistances—based on learning frustrations, differing world views, personality differences, political aims, and other challenges—occur in online learning contexts as they do in face-to-face learning ones, but they may be missed by the teachers and even peers given the lack of non-verbal communications and informal contexts when indicators of such resistances may occur. This work addresses what learner resistances are and what causes them based on a review of the literature. Then, this work suggests some ways to identify learner resistances in online learning contexts and constructively engaging such resistances (to affirm learners, address identified issues, and promote learning, while maintaining factuality).

Profiling “Future Learners” to Design and Develop Teaching and Learning Based on Anticipated Future Needs

Who are future learners in higher education? In the simplest sense, these are the individuals who will experience a particular learning program, course, experiential learning sequence, or learning object at a later point in time, whether in the near-term, mid-term, or far-future. While learners are not thought to fundamentally change in terms of basic biology (at least not in the near- and mid-terms), future learners (in higher education) may be conceptualized as somewhat different from present-day learners based on various changing contextual factors: macro-level socio-cultural developments, subject domains, educational methodologies and practices, technological advances, workforce requirements, and other factors. This work explores some ways to operationalize the exploration of “future learners” in order to enhance the design of teaching and learning.

Authentic Learner Profiling Based on Human Drives and Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations

An “authentic” learner is one who is true to their core identity through their expressions and actions in the world. What informs this authenticity includes various sources, from both nature (biology) and nurture (socio-cultural factors, social experiences, and personality), and others. An important part of learner effort in a learning context comes from an individual's own (1) internal drives and (2) intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, as expressed in a particular context. Ideally, people express their authentic (learning) selves fully (within reasonable constraints). This work summarizes some of the research literature on human drives and motivations and analyzes how these may be understood per learner and what these may mean for the design of teaching and learning.