EnquiryBlogger: using widgets to support awareness and reflection in a PLE Setting

Blogs provide environments within which people can articulate, refine and reflect on practice. These characteristics make them useful for learners who are developing the practical skills and learning dispositions that are associated with authentic enquiry. The EnquiryBlogger tool is being developed to extend the core features of a robust, open source blogging platform in order to support awareness and reflection for enquiry-based learners. The first phase of the project developed blog plug-ins, together with associated teacher dashboards, and piloted their use. Feedback and use data show that the tools support reflection and are valued by learners. The pilot study has informed the development of a second phase of the project, which will support customization of these tools and increase learners’ opportunities to develop awareness of the experiences of others

Designing an online mentoring system for self-awareness and reflection on lifelong learning skills

Mentoring supports the processes of becoming self-aware of personal beliefs and engaging with a topic of concern in a reflective manner. With new media, new opportunities and new means for mentoring have arisen. In this contribution, we outline how an established face-to-face mentoring process has been ‘translated’ into an online mentoring system. The paper outlines the design decisions made for an initial online mentoring system supporting mentees to gain self-awareness of and to reflect about life-long learning skills. The purpose of the development process was to detect the essential and the suitable elements for an online version of a face-to-face mentoring practice

Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Awareness and Reflection in Technology Enhanced Learning

Awareness and reflection are viewed differently across the disciplines informing Technology Enhanced Learning (CSCW, psychology, educational sciences, computer science and others). The ARTEL workshop series brings together researchers and professionals from different backgrounds to provide a forum for discussing the multi-faceted area of awareness and reflection. Through the last ARTEL workshops at EC-TEL the addressed topics are converging towards the usage of awareness and reflection in practice, its implementation in modern organisations, its impact on learners and questions of feasibility and sustainability for awareness and reflection in education and work. To reflect the growing maturity of research in ARTEL over the years the workshop particularly invited contributions that dealt with the application of awareness and reflection in practice. This is encapsulated in the workshop motto: 'Awareness and Reflection in Practice: How can awareness and reflection technology become common in work practice and how does it change work practices?

ALT-C 2012 Abstracts

This is a PDF of the abstracts for all the sessions at the 2012 ALT conference. It is designed to be used alongside the online version of the conference programme. It was made public on 7 September 2012

Exploring the experiences of instructors teaching massive open online courses in tourism and hospitality: a mixed methods approach

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have existed as a disruptive educational phenomenon for nine years. Grounded in the roots of distance education, open education, Open Educational Resources, and OpenCourseWare, MOOCs have now survived various critics and have continued growing globally. Reports about MOOCs in both the press and scholarly publications began to grow significantly in 2013 (Sánchez-Vera, Leon Urrutia, & Davis, 2015; Zancanaro & Domingues, 2017) and, since then, more and more researchers have joined the discussions, developing them to explore various new topics. To contribute to the literature of MOOC studies, this doctoral thesis begins with an in-depth analysis of the background, history, growth, and vision, and proposes a tentative definition of MOOCs. Meanwhile, by conducting bibliometric research to review MOOC studies conducted between 2015 and 2017, this thesis fills in the gap that has existed due to a lack of systematic reviews of MOOC literature since 2015. The results of the bibliometric research summarised the relevant MOOC research into nine categories, including learner focused, commentary and concepts, case reports or evaluations, pedagogy, curriculum and design, course object focused, provider focused, technology, systematic review of literature, and learning analytics and big data. They also suggested a limited amount of provider focused research, which became the research interest and focus of this thesis. In the centre of the Europe, Swiss universities have marched forward in the MOOC movement, together with other over 550 universities (Shah, 2016) around the world. Università della Svizzera italiana (USI; Lugano, Switzerland), a Swiss public university, became a MOOC provider in 2015 and offered the first MOOC in the topic of eTourism: eTourism: Communication Perspectives. This doctoral thesis is closely related to this university-level initiative, which was dedicated to producing the first pilot MOOC at USI. Therefore, the cases chosen by this thesis are positioned in the discipline of tourism and hospitality. The first MOOC with a large audience taught artificial intelligence in 2011 (Zancanaro & Domingues, 2017). Nowadays, MOOCs have broken the barrier of space and time to educate the masses in a wide range of subjects. However, the provision of MOOCs in the subject of tourism and hospitality did not appear until 2013, when two MOOCs from two American universities became available. In the past four years since these MOOCs were launched, the number of tourism and hospitality MOOCs available in the market has remained limited (Tracey, Murphy, & Horton-Tognazzini, 2016). This scarcity contradicts the fact that tourism and hospitality is the field that contributes the most to the employment of the global workforce. Pressing problems, such as high turnover, seasonality, and new global challenges have urged for solutions to quickly training people working in this area to become available (Cantoni, Kalbaska, & Inversini, 2009). A call for more studies about tourism and hospitality MOOCs has emerged. The combined reality of the lack of studies regarding MOOC providers, opportunities for first-hand experience of producing a tourism MOOC in a university, and the deficiency in both the research and practises of tourism and hospitality MOOCs has inspired the direction of this thesis in regard to exploring MOOC instructors’ experiences, using cases in the field of tourism and hospitality. It cumulates six studies, using a mixed methods approach, to tackle the two main research objectives: to investigate at large the tourism and hospitality MOOC provisions between 2008 and 2015 and to report the experiences of Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) when producing the eTourism MOOC. In order, the first two studies in Chapter 3 of this thesis focus on tourism and hospitality MOOCs in general and produce a big picture context for the other four studies in Chapter 4. The first study proposes a conceptual framework through which to describe and analyse the course design of a MOOC and applies it to 18 tourism and hospitality MOOCs produced between 2008 and 2015. The second study then continues to interview six tourism and hospitality MOOC instructors, to describe their experiences and perspectives of teaching MOOCs. After exploring a holistic view of the overall development of MOOCs in tourism and hospitality and gaining a deep understanding of the instructors behind these offerings, this thesis introduces the experiences of one single MOOC provider: Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in Chapter 4. It first introduces its overall implementation process (Study 3), and further elaborates three phases of this process: how it selected a suitable MOOC platform at the beginning (Study 4); how it assessed learner engagement in the MOOC (Study 5); and, eventually, how it evaluated the performance of the MOOC (Study 6). This thesis was written mainly from the perspective of eLearning, with the intention of benefiting its community of scholars and practitioners. It has contributed to the literature by developing a framework with which to review MOOCs (in Study 1), the implementation process of producing MOOCs (in Study 2), practical review schema of MOOC platforms (in Study 4), the MOOC Learner Engagement Online Survey (in Study 5), and how to use the Kirkpatrick model to evaluate MOOCs (in Study 6). These conceptual frameworks and experiential tools can benefit future researchers and practitioners. Meanwhile, due to its intimate connection with the field of tourism and hospitality, by directly using its cases, the research outputs of the six studies can also benefit the tourism and hospitality education and training sector as a reference for further action

Designing personalised, authentic and collaborative learning with mobile devices: Confronting the challenges of remote teaching during a pandemic.

This article offers teachers a digital pedagogical framework, research-inspired and underpinned by socio-cultural theory, to guide the design of personalised, authentic and collaborative learning scenarios for students using mobile devices in remote learning settings during this pandemic. It provides a series of freely available online resources underpinned by our framework, including a mobile learning toolkit, a professional learning app, and robust, validated surveys for evaluating tasks. Finally, it presents a set of evidence-based principles for effective innovative teaching with mobile devices

Research-Informed Teaching in a Global Pandemic: "Opening up" Schools to Research

The teacher-research agenda has become a significant consideration for policy and professional development in a number of countries. Encouraging research-based teacher education programmes remains an important goal, where teachers are able to effectively utilize educational research as part of their work in school settings and to reflect on and enhance their professional development. In the last decade, teacher research has grown in importance across the three i’s of the teacher learning continuum: initial, induction and in-service teacher education. This has been brought into even starker relief with the global spread of COVID-19, and the enforced and emergency, wholesale move to digital education. Now, perhaps more than ever, teachers need the perspective and support of research-led practice, particularly in how to effectively use Internet technologies to mediate and enhance learning, teaching and assessment online, and new blended modalities for education that must be physically distant. The aim of this paper is to present a number of professional development open educational systems which exist or are currently being developed to support teachers internationally, to engage with, use and do research. Exemplification of the opening up of research to schools and teachers is provided in the chapter through reference to the European Union-funded Erasmus + project, BRIST: Building Research Infrastructures for School Teachers. BRIST is developing technology to coordinate and support teacher-research at a European level

Web 2.0 in Higher Education in the Netherlands

This chapter outlines the current position and prospects of Web 2.0 in the Netherlands’ Higher Education. After a brief description of the national conditions for Web 2.0 services, the chapter zooms in to the Dutch Higher Education area and the agencies for driving its innovation. A topical evaluation of Web 2.0 in Higher Education is based on a quick scan amongst higher education representatives that was carried out on behalf of this survey. In conclusion, a brief description of topical Web 2.0 cases will be given

Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming: 18th International Conference, XP 2017, Cologne, Germany, May 22-26, 2017, Proceedings

agile software development; lean development; scrum; project management; software developmen