Andragogy and the single session lecture: A critical reflection on the planning and delivery of a standalone postgraduate teaching event

This paper focuses on a lecture delivered each year to postgraduates within the Department of Information Science at City University. The teaching context is outlined at personal, institutional and national levels through which the challenges facing a visiting lecturer are illustrated. The relevance of andragogy to this piece is then introduced. These andragogical principles provide a framework in which to examine how the challenge of student engagement was resolved or exacerbated by the single lecture format, and how planning and delivery may also have contributed to this challenge. Engagement in the postgraduate context can be seen to depend on how well each of these principles is supported by the teaching methods used, and so realistic alterations which could be made in the future to promote deeper engagement are also considered

Classtalk: A Classroom Communication System for Active Learning

This pdf file is an article describing the advantages of using Classtalk technology in the classroom to enhance classroom communication. Classtalk technology cab facilitate the presentation of questions for small group work, collec the student answers and then display histograms showing how the class answered. This new communication technology can help instructors create a more interactive, student centered classroom, especially when teaching large courses. The article describes Classtalk as a very useful tool not only for engaging students in active learning, but also for enhancing the overall communication within the classroom. This article is a selection from the electronic Journal for Computing in Higher Education. Educational levels: Graduate or professional

Innovating Lecturing: Spatial Change and Staff-Student Pedagogic Relationships for Learning

Lecture halls, an enduring feature of higher education landscapes, are undergoing a spatial revolution. These materialize a pedagogic imaginary of technology-enhanced, student-centered learning. This article investigates the pedagogic performance of a contemporary lecture theater in regional Australia, presenting mixed-method data from a broader case study. Four design principles – learner-centricity, connectivity, flexibility, and affordances – organize the analysis, finding that spaces, technologies, staff, and students work in conjunction to perform a spectrum of teaching modes. In practice, staff pedagogic repertoires, spatial literacies, and teaching philosophies entangle in socio-spatial pedagogic relationships that facilitate, rather than dictate, student learning in lecturing spaces

Innovating lecturing: spatial change and staff-student pedagogic relationships for learning

Lecture halls, an enduring feature of higher education landscapes, are undergoing a spatial revolution. These materialize a pedagogic imaginary of technology-enhanced, student-centered learning. This article investigates the pedagogic performance of a contemporary lecture theater in regional Australia, presenting mixed-method data from a broader case study. Four design principles – learner-centricity, connectivity, flexibility, and affordances – organize the analysis, finding that spaces, technologies, staff, and students work in conjunction to perform a spectrum of teaching modes. In practice, staff pedagogic repertoires, spatial literacies, and teaching philosophies entangle in socio-spatial pedagogic relationships that facilitate, rather than dictate, student learning in lecturing spaces

The impact of professional learning on the teaching identities of higher education lecturers

Higher Education is currently undergoing some of the most profound changes in its history. Against a backdrop of increasing marketization, rising levels of student debt and far greater fully online offerings, the higher education lecturer is grappling with new ways of working and high expectations of teaching quality. This 3 year qualitative study based in The Open University UK investigates the ways in which HE distance learning lecturers are approaching professional development and learning, identifying what type of learning may be most effective in creating and sustaining an online teaching identity. The study also examines ways in which resistance discourse is shaping these identities and practices revealing emerging re- conceptualisations of what it means to be an effective and well-motivated distance learning lecturer. The investigation uses a framework for identity analysis which analyses professional identity via the expression of hegemonies, phenomenological, narrative articulations of identity, and a post-modern, constructivist view of identity which is shaped by social interactions and communities of practice. It highlights the importance of personal agency in identity formation. The results revealed a number of insights into the ways in which a combination of resistance discourse, professional learning and reflections from student interactions are shaping new understandings of professional knowledge in this context

Effective Pedagogical Strategies for STEM Education from Instructors’ Perspective: OER for Educators

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) OpenCourseWare (OCW) was launched in 2001. It is one of the earliest Open Educational Resources (OER). MIT OCW has published more than 2,400 courses which are available at no cost, the majority of which are STEM related. The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine the pedagogical strategies through reviewing instructor insights of 15 MIT OCW STEM courses using thematic analysis. The most effective pedagogical strategies used found by instructors were active learning, personalizing instruction, engaging learners, providing feedback, building learning community, and clarifying learning objective. Instructors used in-class formative assessment, such as quizzes and oral exams, for just-in-time teaching and online automatic assessment environments for students’ self-assessment. The primary summative assessments were final exams and projects. Instructors encountered challenges such as assessing students’ learning and changing pedagogical beliefs. Implications for practice were discussed as well

Of clouds and cables: what do students need when they learn with technology?

Discussions of technology and education often promise revolution, and freedom from the constraints of campuses and classrooms. There is less discussion of why such infrastructures were needed in the first place, or of the challenges facing learners when these are no longer available. In order to explore such critical alternatives, we can begin to ask different kinds of question. What is the cloud made of? What do learners work with, when they study? Where are they, and what places do they move between? From a sociomaterial perspective, such questions draw attention to the ways in which academic work is encoded, transmitted and stored; how the cloud, far from being nebulous, relies on undersea cables and server farms; and how learners try and coordinate all this as they take bus journeys, sit in class or meet with friends in the bar. These points will be illustrated with examples from a longitudinal study of University students’ uses of technology, in which they recorded and described how, where and when they studied. This analysis has implications for the design of e-learning, raising questions about whose responsibility it is to build the infrastructure that students need to learn, and introducing a note of caution to discussions about the transformational potential of technology

The video lecture

Vocabulary for describing the structures, roles, and relationships characteristic of traditional, or ‘offline’, education has been seamlessly applied to the designs of ‘online’ education. One example is the lecture, delivered as a video recording. The purpose of this research is to consider the concept of ‘lecture’ as realised in both offline and online contexts. We explore how media differences entail different student experiences and how these differences relate to design decisions associated with each. We first identify five features of traditional lecturing that have been invoked to understand its impact. We then describe a taxonomy of online lecture design derived from digital artefacts published within web-based courses. Analysis of this taxonomy reveals six design features that configure differently the experience of lectures in the two presentational formats: classroom and video. Awareness of these differences is important for the practitioner who is now increasingly involved in developing network-based resources for learning

Rethinking Hybrid Teaching: The Hybrid Rhombus Model as an Approach to Understanding Hybrid Settings

[EN] After extended periods of remote-only teaching at university, lecturers tried to come back to lecture halls. Due to restrictions not all students could participate on-site. Therefore, hybrid teaching models proliferated. To reflect the transformative effects on teaching practice, we conducted focus groups with lecturers and found that didactic models aimed at capturing dynamics of the in-situ learning experience do not provide sufficient understanding of the bifurcated nature of hybrid teaching. The hybrid rhombus model is an approach to conceptual understanding of the newly developed situation of teaching in a hybrid way. This paper gives a brief description of the model description and the empirical background, to contribute to the debate of hybrid teaching in relation to digital or on-site teaching.Handle-Pfeiffer, D.; Winter, C.; Löw, C.; Hackl, C. (2022). Rethinking Hybrid Teaching: The Hybrid Rhombus Model as an Approach to Understanding Hybrid Settings. En 8th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd'22). Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 1367-1375. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAd22.2022.146021367137

Linking teaching and research in disciplines and departments

This paper supports the effective links between teaching and discipline-based research in disciplinary communities and in academic departments. It is authored by Alan Jenkins, Mick Healey and Roger Zetter