To act, or not to act, upon feedback? A case study in academic development, students’ experience and student feedback

This case study reports on a recent module evaluation of the Engaging and Enhancing Student Learning (EESL) module. This module forms part of the Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice (PGCAP) at the University of Salford and is offered mainly to new academics and other professionals who support learning. The EESL module aims to introduce participants to teaching and learning in HE, and is aligned with the UK Professional Standards Framework (UK PSF). It is delivered over 10 weeks, including eight face-to-face workshops and two online weekly seminars. Active, collaborative and technology-enhanced learning are coupled with more creative and experimental approaches. The development of reflective skills is enabled through peer, mentor and tutor observations and feedback conversations and reflective accounts. Participants are invited to experiment in a safe environment and within a learning community with ideas and concepts, to challenge their own beliefs linked to teaching and learning in HE, and to begin shaping their teaching philosophy and academic identity. Reviewing feedback is part of our continuous evaluation and enhancement process and this case study reports on how learners’ feedback has been used to develop an EESL module further

Using an extended food metaphor to explain concepts about pedagogy

It is anathema for educators to describe pedagogy as having a recipe - it is tantamount to saying it is a technicist process rather than a professional one requiring active, informed decision-making. But if we are to help novice teachers understand what pedagogy is and how it can be understood, there must be a starting point for pedagogical knowledge to shape both the understanding and design of appropriate curriculum learning. In order to address this challenge, I argue that food preparation processes and learning how to competently cook are analogous to understanding how pedagogy - also about process, design, and making knowledge knowable - facilitates learning about teaching specific curriculum knowledge. To do so, I use evidence from an ITE cohort lecture on pedagogy as a case study. In essence, viewing pedagogy through the lens of food and recipes may help make some abstractions of pedagogy more concrete and make some principles of pedagogy more accessible to novice teachers as they learn to design learning

Technology-enabled Active Learning (TEAL) – A Study of its Influence on Student Learning

Using an active learning framework proposed by Shroff et al (2019), our study evaluates the impact of technology-enabled active learning (TEAL) on student learning in an Australian business school, using the individual reflections of accounting students as data collection strategy. We found positive influence of the three constructs of the framework - interactive engagement, problem solving and feedback on learning. Our study found interactive engagement, development of problem-solving skills and individualized learning context enabled by accounting technology have positively contributed to the learning effectiveness. Technology-enhanced scaffolds designed in the learning process have contributed to the consolidation of learning and to learning effectiveness. Our study observed that though students’ interest and curiosity enabled by technology is expected to have positive influence on learning, lack of student effort, poor timing of feedback, and absence of a sense of challenge, have limited their learning

Feature ranking of active region source properties in solar flare forecasting and the uncompromised stochasticity of flare occurrence

Solar flares originate from magnetically active regions but not all solar active regions give rise to a flare. Therefore, the challenge of solar flare prediction benefits by an intelligent computational analysis of physics-based properties extracted from active region observables, most commonly line-of-sight or vector magnetograms of the active-region photosphere. For the purpose of flare forecasting, this study utilizes an unprecedented 171 flare-predictive active region properties, mainly inferred by the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO/HMI) in the course of the European Union Horizon 2020 FLARECAST project. Using two different supervised machine learning methods that allow feature ranking as a function of predictive capability, we show that: i) an objective training and testing process is paramount for the performance of every supervised machine learning method; ii) most properties include overlapping information and are therefore highly redundant for flare prediction; iii) solar flare prediction is still - and will likely remain - a predominantly probabilistic challenge

Assessing the benefits of Ajax in mobile learning systems design : a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a Master of Information Studies at Massey University

Today, mobile technology is rapidly changing our life with increasing numbers of services supported by mobile phones, including mobile Internet access and Web-based mobile learning. The growth of the wireless Internet technology opens new path for people to study in anytime and any location. Using Web-based mobile application to present learning resources for mobile learners is a challenge for developers, because the mobile Internet access performance over GPRS networks is often unacceptably slow. A new Web development model, Ajax, may help to address this problem. Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), is a new desktop approach to Web application development that uses client-side scripting to provide a seamless user application experience and reduce traffic between client and server. In this paper, we address the question of whether mobile Ajax provides measurable performance advantages over non-Ajax mobile learning applications. A real-life Web-based mobile learning application performance over a GPRS network study was done based on comparing an Ajax application and an Active Server Pages (ASP) application with identical functionality. Our results suggest that mobile Ajax can reduce the bandwidth requirement by 71%, and cut the server's response time in half. In addition, these performance improvements were noticed by users in our small group usability test

Students’ Perspective on Intrinsic Motivation to Learn: A Model to Guide Educators

The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand the collective perspective of what motivates students to exert effort and energy towards learning tasks in a classroom setting. To reach this goal, the researcher utilized a qualitative methodology, the Insider Perspective Approach, to take a deep look inside the classroom experience and examine the broad view of the students’ collective perspective. A model for situational motivation is presented suggesting factors that educators can manipulate to enhance students’ intrinsic motivation to learn: control, competence, active involvement, variety, curiosity, challenge, a sense of belonging, and honored voices. When teachers integrate these constructs as they plan activities and assignments, students’ intrinsic motivation to learn will be enhanced

Deep Active Learning for Classifying Cancer Pathology Reports

Background: Automated text classification has many important applications in the clinical setting; however, obtaining labelled data for training machine learning and deep learning models is often difficult and expensive. Active learning techniques may mitigate this challenge by reducing the amount of labelled data required to effectively train a model. In this study, we analyze the effectiveness of 11 active learning algorithms on classifying subsite and histology from cancer pathology reports using a Convolutional Neural Network as the text classification model. Results: We compare the performance of each active learning strategy using two differently sized datasets and two different classification tasks. Our results show that on all tasks and dataset sizes, all active learning strategies except diversity-sampling strategies outperformed random sampling, i.e., no active learning. On our large dataset (15K initial labelled samples, adding 15K additional labelled samples each iteration of active learning), there was no clear winner between the different active learning strategies. On our small dataset (1K initial labelled samples, adding 1K additional labelled samples each iteration of active learning), marginal and ratio uncertainty sampling performed better than all other active learning techniques. We found that compared to random sampling, active learning strongly helps performance on rare classes by focusing on underrepresented classes. Conclusions: Active learning can save annotation cost by helping human annotators efficiently and intelligently select which samples to label. Our results show that a dataset constructed using effective active learning techniques requires less than half the amount of labelled data to achieve the same performance as a dataset constructed using random sampling

Enhancing students’ confidence, competence and knowledge with Integrated Skills Challenge

Introduction/background: In today's complex healthcare environment, new nursing graduates are expected to master nursing skills in a timely manner and become critical thinkers with the capacity of solving complex healthcare problems efficiently. The increased complexity of the clinical setting requires competence-building begin in introductory courses, establishing foundational skills for critical thinking and prioritisation. In the healthcare professions, teaching and learning methods are focused on integration of clinical knowledge and skills. However, traditional teaching and learning methodologies do not always facilitate the development of a requisite level of these clinical skills. For the Master of Nursing Studies (MNSt) students whose program is shortened this means the acquisition of these skills must be achieved more rapidly. Aim/objectives: The purpose of this study is to investigate the feasibility of developing simulation scenarios (Integrated Skill Challenge [ISC]) as a supplemental teaching-learning strategy to enhance the transfer of student self-confidence and competence to the clinical nursing environment. Methods To examine potential effects of ISC on the MNSt students, a pilot study was conducted including 52 participants. Data were collected weekly over 11 week period by using pre and post-test design. Results: Analysis showed a significant increase in the confidence, competence and knowledge. Confidence, competence and knowledge scores increased when students were pre-loaded with knowledge prior to performing in the ISC. Results generally indicated that the ISC had the anticipated effects. Conclusions: This study reveals a high feasibility of developing simulation scenarios as an active learning methodology and that it should be developed further and piloted on a larger sample

Facilitating active learning and enhancing student self-assessment skills

This paper offers a reflective discussion of recent developments in active learning pedagogical approaches, with a focus on class-flipping and peer instruction. We present two case studies based on the experience of the authors in promoting active learning in two large-class undergraduate modules in Introductory Macroeconomics and Descriptive Inorganic Chemistry at the University of East Anglia. Both case-studies are based on a flipping model with in-class active learning delivered through peer instruction. However, the experience of each author differs in the way the teaching approach was introduced and integrated with additional pedagogies to meet specific needs of the student population, as well as the desired learning outcomes for both modules. In the Introductory Macroeconomics case-study, we discuss how combining peer instruction with a self-assessment component can support the development of students’ metacognitive skills. In the Descriptive Inorganic Chemistry case-study, we demonstrate that peer instruction questions can be co-designed in partnership with students to foster engagement and challenge misconceptions. We argue that peer instruction can be used as an effective, scalable, and easily adaptable active learning pedagogy in many different learning environments. Reflecting on our experience, as well as the student voice, our concluding discussion considers: (i) the importance of careful question design, (ii) the role of audience response technologies, as well as (iii) present and future challenges to the promotion of active learning approaches in Higher Education