Open World Learning

This book provides state-of-the-art contemporary research insights into key applications and processes in open world learning. Open world learning seeks to understand access to education, structures, and the presence of dialogue and support systems. It explores how the application of open world and educational technologies can be used to create opportunities for open and high-quality education. Presenting ground-breaking research from an award winning Leverhulme doctoral training programme, the book provides several integrated and cohesive perspectives of the affordances and limitations of open world learning. The chapters feature a wide range of open world learning topics, ranging from theoretical and methodological discussions to empirical demonstrations of how open world learning can be effectively implemented, evaluated, and used to inform theory and practice. The book brings together a range of innovative uses of technology and practice in open world learning from 387,134 learners and educators learning and working in 136 unique learning contexts across the globe and considers the enablers and disablers of openness in learning, ethical and privacy implications, and how open world learning can be used to foster inclusive approaches to learning across educational sectors, disciplines and countries. The book is unique in exploring the complex, contradictory and multi-disciplinary nature of open world learning at an international level and will be of great interest to academics, researchers, professionals, and policy makers in the field of education technology, e-learning and digital education

Sources for Learning. Understanding the Role of Context in Teacher Professional Learning

This thesis investigates how context serves as a source for teacher learning. The complexities of teaching are growing and so is the need for teacher life long learning. Recent studies suggest that professional learning can be understood as the result of an array of experiences, but only if existing ideas and practices are being challenged through these experiences. If indeed professional learning emerges out of challenge, then it is relevant to take a closer look at teachers’ contexts, the kinds of challenges these contexts accommodate, and the ways they are perceived and processed by teachers. Building on the principles of Participatory Action Research, this exploratory study addresses the question of how these processes can be understood: how teacher contexts can work as a source for teacher learning. The participants were teachers who followed a master’s programme. In the first study their reflective work was explored to identify which context factors had served as a source for their professional learning. In the second study, these identified factors were used to co-construct a reflective tool to prompt and capture teachers’ engagement with context factors. The master’s students then had their workplace colleagues engage with the tool and Study 3 explores the data that were generated through this deployment. The results suggest that teachers’ contexts can be divided into three domains: a personal practice domain, a social domain, and a theoretical domain, and that confrontations within these domains can be the result of both planned and unplanned events. Teachers appear to have a preference for unplanned learning that emerges from their own personal experiences. The thesis examines the mechanisms behind this, and it explores how teachers might be stimulated to expand the reference points they tap into. The implications of these findings are discussed at macro, meso and micro level

Digital assessment in the clinical workplace : Design, implementation, opportunities, challenges

Peer reviewe

Designing and implementing online assessment in the clinical workplace

Peer reviewe