Evaluating an online learning community: Intellectual, social and emotional development and transformations.

Developing online learning communities is a promising pedagogical approach in online learning contexts for adult tertiary learners, but it is no easy task. Understanding how learning communities are formed and evaluating their efficacy in supporting teaching-learning involves a complex set of issues that have a bearing on the design and facilitation of successful online learning experiences. This paper presents findings of a case study of a semester-long online graduate course designed to facilitate a learning community at a New Zealand tertiary institution. It adopts a sociocultural analytical framework and argues for a multiple developmental analytical approach to evaluating learning that considers lecturer and student intellectual, social and emotional development and transformations. Implications are presented for online lecturers, course designers and institutional administrators

An overview of the nature of the preparation of practice educators in five health care disciplines

Practice education is a core element of all educational programmes that prepare health care professionals for academic award and registration to practice. Ensuring quality and effectiveness involves partnership working between Higher Education Institutions (HEI’s) and health care providers, social care communities, voluntary and independent sectors offering client care throughout the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland. Clearly practitioners who support, supervise and assess learners for entry to their respective professions need to be well prepared and supported in their roles as practice educators. However it would appear that the nature of this support and preparation varies across disciplines and that good practice is not easily shared. With this in mind, the Making Practice Based Learning Work (MPBLW) project aims to make practitioners more effective at supporting and supervising students in the workplace across a range of health care disciplines namely Dietetics, Nursing, Occupational Therapy, Physiotherapy and Radiology. The Department of Employment and Learning (Northern Ireland) and the Higher Education Funding Council for England has funded this collaborative project involving staff from Ulster, Northumbria and Bournemouth Universities. The outcomes for each phase of the project are: Phase One: • Identify and document good practice on how practitioners are prepared for their educational role. Phase Two: • Develop and evaluate learning materials for use by practitioners across five health care disciplines. • Make learning materials available in a number of efficient media, e.g. paper, electronic, CD-ROM and web-based. • Develop a programme applicable to interprofessional and uniprofessional contexts. • Widen access for a multicultural workforce. Phase Three: • Embed best educational practice through the establishment of an academicpractitioner network. • Disseminate a range of materials and processes across the wider academic and health and social care communities

Virtual pedagogical model: development scenarios

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The Importance of Conflict Resolution Techniques in Autonomous Agile Teams

Today, software companies usually organize their work in teams. Social science research on team development has shown that for a team to reach a productive and autonomous stage, it has to be able to manage internal conflicts and disagreements efficiently. To better facilitate the team development process, we argue that software engineers' needs additional training in negotiation skills and conflict resolution. In this position paper, we outline ideas for what aspects to consider in such training. As an example, we argue that a majority of the conflicts originate from team-level factors and that they, therefore, should be managed on the team-level instead of in relation to dyads.Comment: Accepted at 1st International Workshop on Autonomous Teams (A-TEAMS), 201

Creative idea exploration within the structure of a guiding framework : the card brainstorming game

I present a card brainstorming exercise that transforms a conceptual tangible interaction framework into a tool for creative dialogue and discuss the experiences made in using it. Ten sessions with this card game demonstrate the frameworks' versatility and utility. Observation and participant feedback highlight the value of a provocative question format and of the metaphor of a card game

A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Face-to-Face and Virtual Communication: Overcoming the Challenges

Virtual communication has become the norm for many organizations (Baltes, Dickson, Sherman, Bauer, & LaGanke, 2002; Bergiel, Bergiel, & Balsmeier, 2008; Hertel, Geister, & Konradt, 2005). As technology has evolved, time and distance barriers have dissolved, allowing for access to experts worldwide. The reality of business today demands the use of virtual communication for at least some work, and many professionals will sit on a virtual team at some point (Dewar, 2006). Although virtual communication offers many advantages, it is not without challenges. This article examines the costs and benefits associated with virtual and face-to-face communication, and identifies strategies to overcome virtual communication\u27s challenges

Chapter 3: Building an Online Learning Community

The OTiS (Online Teaching in Scotland) programme, run by the now defunct Scotcit programme, ran an International e-Workshop on Developing Online Tutoring Skills which was held between 8–12 May 2000. It was organised by Heriot–Watt University, Edinburgh and The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK. Out of this workshop came the seminal Online Tutoring E-Book, a generic primer on e-learning pedagogy and methodology, full of practical implementation guidelines. Although the Scotcit programme ended some years ago, the E-Book has been copied to the SONET site as a series of PDF files, which are now available via the ALT Open Access Repository. The editor, Carol Higgison, is currently working in e-learning at the University of Bradford (see her staff profile) and is the Chair of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT)

Team Learning: A Theoretical Integration and Review

With the increasing emphasis on work teams as the primary architecture of organizational structure, scholars have begun to focus attention on team learning, the processes that support it, and the important outcomes that depend on it. Although the literature addressing learning in teams is broad, it is also messy and fraught with conceptual confusion. This chapter presents a theoretical integration and review. The goal is to organize theory and research on team learning, identify actionable frameworks and findings, and emphasize promising targets for future research. We emphasize three theoretical foci in our examination of team learning, treating it as multilevel (individual and team, not individual or team), dynamic (iterative and progressive; a process not an outcome), and emergent (outcomes of team learning can manifest in different ways over time). The integrative theoretical heuristic distinguishes team learning process theories, supporting emergent states, team knowledge representations, and respective influences on team performance and effectiveness. Promising directions for theory development and research are discussed

Social networks and performance in distributed learning communities

Social networks play an essential role in learning environments as a key channel for knowledge sharing and students' support. In distributed learning communities, knowledge sharing does not occur as spontaneously as when a working group shares the same physical space; knowledge sharing depends even more on student informal connections. In this study we analyse two distributed learning communities' social networks in order to understand how characteristics of the social structure can enhance students' success and performance. We used a monitoring system for social network data gathering. Results from correlation analyses showed that students' social network characteristics are related to their performancePostprint (published version