Educational design research in collaboration with students : using digital tools to learn about reindeer herding within a vocational Sámi pedagogical context

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The Impact of Virtual Exchange on Teachers’ Pedagogical Competences and Pedagogical Approach in Higher Education

The following report presents the outcomes of a study on the effect of implementing Virtual Exchange on the evolution of teachers' pedagogical competences. In the report we use the term Virtual Exchange (VE) to refer to sustained online interaction between peers who are geographically distant and/or from different cultural backgrounds and affiliated to different Higher Education institutions, supported by their respective teachers and eventually facilitators. This pedagogical method, due to its high versatility, can be adapted to address various educational contexts, hence its growing popularity. While various aspects of students' participation in VE projects have attracted numerous research studies, little is known about how VE design and delivery stimulate, if at all, teachers' professional growth. The study is part of a large-scale research conducted within the EU-funded Erasmus+ KA3 project EVOLVE (Evidence Validated Online Learning through Virtual Exchange) into the impact of Virtual Exchange as an educational method in Higher Education contexts. The current report concentrates on how the process of designing, implementing and carrying out VE affects the teachers involved. In particular, it investigates how they view the evolution of their general teaching competence, their VE-related competences as well as their approach to nurturing student-centeredness and other active pedagogical approaches in the academic courses they teach. The study also casts light onto the motives behind VE implementation, the targeted learning objectives and teachers' perceptions of VE-related challenges

Design and Implementation of a Logo-based Computer Graphics Course

Two years ago the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics at Sofia University makes a decision to design a new series of Logo-based courses which make use of the modern technology. The pedagogical component of the challenge is to design a multidisciplinary course suitable for students with different skills and interests. From a development perspective the challenge is to build an entirely new one. And finally the course must be attractive regardless of the seriousness and complexity of the topics included in it. The paper discusses the structure of the course including the final weeks when topics emerging from students’ course projects are taught. Each lesson from the course is based on sets of sample programs representing the general lifecycle of software development. This includes designing, coding and debugging. Samples are created on-the-fly, thus different instances of the course results in different final projects. Lessons are interactive and students may interfere with the direction of demonstrated software development. Three lessons from the course are sketched in the paper. The first one is taught in week 4 and spans over Computer Science, Calculus, Analytical Geometry; and Applied Statistics and Probability. The lesson in week 6 is focused on composition of complex movements and their synchronization. It uses elements from Computer Science, Geometry, Physics, and Trigonometrics. The third lesson is about relative transformational geometry and its application in the form of Turtle Graphic

Proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET 2013)

"This book contains the proceedings of the International Workshop on EuroPLOT Persuasive Technology for Learning, Education and Teaching (IWEPLET) 2013 which was held on 16.-17.September 2013 in Paphos (Cyprus) in conjunction with the EC-TEL conference. The workshop and hence the proceedings are divided in two parts: on Day 1 the EuroPLOT project and its results are introduced, with papers about the specific case studies and their evaluation. On Day 2, peer-reviewed papers are presented which address specific topics and issues going beyond the EuroPLOT scope. This workshop is one of the deliverables (D 2.6) of the EuroPLOT project, which has been funded from November 2010 – October 2013 by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) of the European Commission through the Lifelong Learning Programme (LLL) by grant #511633. The purpose of this project was to develop and evaluate Persuasive Learning Objects and Technologies (PLOTS), based on ideas of BJ Fogg. The purpose of this workshop is to summarize the findings obtained during this project and disseminate them to an interested audience. Furthermore, it shall foster discussions about the future of persuasive technology and design in the context of learning, education and teaching. The international community working in this area of research is relatively small. Nevertheless, we have received a number of high-quality submissions which went through a peer-review process before being selected for presentation and publication. We hope that the information found in this book is useful to the reader and that more interest in this novel approach of persuasive design for teaching/education/learning is stimulated. We are very grateful to the organisers of EC-TEL 2013 for allowing to host IWEPLET 2013 within their organisational facilities which helped us a lot in preparing this event. I am also very grateful to everyone in the EuroPLOT team for collaborating so effectively in these three years towards creating excellent outputs, and for being such a nice group with a very positive spirit also beyond work. And finally I would like to thank the EACEA for providing the financial resources for the EuroPLOT project and for being very helpful when needed. This funding made it possible to organise the IWEPLET workshop without charging a fee from the participants.

Like a school (of fish) in water (or ICT-Enhanced Skills in Action)

The paper presents pilot experiences related to an educational methodology developed within the European Innovative Teacher (I*Teach) project for building ICT-enhanced skills [1]. The methodology is presented in the context of a workshop for teachers in mathematics and informatics with a special focus on enhancing presentation skills. The authors share their experience in treating the very workshop as a project with specific stages - analyzing the audience’s interests, developing a presentation scenario around a leading metaphor in harmony with the setting, distributing different roles among the presenters, involving the audience in an active reasoning and sharing. Thus the workshop has demonstrated at a meta-level how the collective intelligence of teachers could be harnessed in action. The main message is: such an approach makes teachers feel like co-creators of the I*Teach project´s ideas and teachers need only a bit of praise or encouragement to recognize themselves as innovative teachers

Context based learning: a survey of contextual indicators for personalized and adaptive learning recommendations. A pedagogical and technical perspective

Learning personalization has proven its effectiveness in enhancing learner performance. Therefore, modern digital learning platforms have been increasingly depending on recommendation systems to offer learners personalized suggestions of learning materials. Learners can utilize those recommendations to acquire certain skills for the labor market or for their formal education. Personalization can be based on several factors, such as personal preference, social connections or learning context. In an educational environment, the learning context plays an important role in generating sound recommendations, which not only fulfill the preferences of the learner, but also correspond to the pedagogical goals of the learning process. This is because a learning context describes the actual situation of the learner at the moment of requesting a learning recommendation. It provides information about the learner current state of knowledge, goal orientation, motivation, needs, available time, and other factors that reflect their status and may influence how learning recommendations are perceived and utilized. Context aware recommender systems have the potential to reflect the logic that a learning expert may follow in recommending materials to students with respect to their status and needs. In this paper, we review the state-of-the-art approaches for defining a user learning-context. We provide an overview of the definitions available, as well as the different factors that are considered when defining a context. Moreover, we further investigate the links between those factors and their pedagogical foundations in learning theories. We aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of contextualized learning from both pedagogical and technical points of view. By combining those two viewpoints, we aim to bridge a gap between both domains, in terms of contextualizing learning recommendations

Experts on e-learning: insights gained from listening to the student voice!

The Student Experience of e-Learning Laboratory (SEEL) project at the University of Greenwich was designed to explore and then implement a number of approaches to investigate learners’ experiences of using technology to support their learning. In this paper members of the SEEL team present initial findings from a University-wide survey of nearly a 1000 students. A selection of 90 ‘cameos’, drawn from the survey data, offer further insights into personal perceptions of e-learning and illustrate the diversity of students experiences. The cameos provide a more coherent picture of individual student experience based on the totality of each person’s responses to the questionnaire. Finally, extracts from follow-up case studies, based on interviews with a small number of students, allow us to ‘hear’ the student voice more clearly. Issues arising from an analysis of the data include student preferences for communication and social networking tools, views on the ‘smartness’ of their tutors’ uses of technology and perceptions of the value of e-learning. A primary finding and the focus of this paper, is that students effectively arrive at their own individualised selection, configuration and use of technologies and software that meets their perceived needs. This ‘personalisation’ does not imply that such configurations are the most efficient, nor does it automatically suggest that effective learning is occurring. SEEL reminds us that learners are individuals, who approach learning both with and without technology in their own distinctive ways. Hearing, understanding and responding to the student voice is fundamental in maximising learning effectiveness. Institutions should consider actively developing the capacity of academic staff to advise students on the usefulness of particular online tools and resources in support of learning and consider the potential benefits of building on what students already use in their everyday lives. Given the widespread perception that students tend to be ‘digital natives’ and academic staff ‘digital immigrants’ (Prensky, 2001), this could represent a considerable cultural challenge