Helping design educators foster collaborative learning amongst design students

This paper discusses the development of online teaching resources that enable design educators to foster collaborative learning amongst students in the design disciplines. These online teaching resources will be made available through the Design Collaboration website. This website was recently set up by Northumbria University, a UK based institution, to provide an online resource for design educators wishing to develop collaborative pedagogies in design education. It currently contains case studies of collaborative student projects but lacks practical teaching resources. As a result, a research project was set up to compliment the current case studies by creating a suite of design-specific tools and resources that will help foster team management and development. Although various institutions have addressed the subject of group work and collaborative learning, there has been no online resource dedicated to the development of practical teaching tools to help design students work and learn together. This paper focuses on showcasing the range of teaching tools and resources developed through classroom-based trials. These resources have been developed specifically in consultation with Northumbria University's design educators and trialled with undergraduate and postgraduate students from different design disciplines. In addition, issues surrounding the translation of these tools into a practical, easy to use and accessible in an online format is discussed. The Icograda World Design Congress 2009 Education Conference is the ideal international platform to share these tools with the wider design education community. More importantly, we hope to grow the website by encouraging other design educators to submit case studies to the website, using it not only as a means of sharing good practice but also as a tool for reflection. The research value is two-fold (a) translating implicit knowledge of collaborative learning into a practical teaching resource and, (b) helping tutors improve their teaching practice, by linking the teaching resource to real experiences through case studies and interviews

Why do we teach the way we do? : the relationship between tutors' conceptions of teaching and learning, the design/teaching of their online courses and effecive online teaching principles : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for degree of Master of Education at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand

There is an increase in the use of e-learning within tertiary institutions and many courses are moving to online learning as the means to deliver all or part of courses that were previously delivered face-to-face. Online delivery, primarily through the internet, provides new challenges for tutors in delivering courses that demonstrate effective teaching principles. This study researched the perspectives and practice of twelve tutors from three different New Zealand polytechnics via a multiple case study. It investigated how tutors’ conceptions of teaching and learning aligned with the design and teaching of their online courses, and with effective online teaching principles. Enablers and barriers to tutors using effective online teaching principles were also examined. Interaction between students, between tutor and student and between tutor and content were all found to be important conceptions of teaching and learning shared by the participants. It appeared that an understanding of learning theory was related to tutors’ conceptions of teaching and learning aligning with the design of their courses. In addition, this understanding influenced tutors’ use of effective online teaching principles. The research identified that all tutors’ courses aligned with the effective online teaching principles of constructive alignment, the chunking of content and tasks into appropriate sizes, and scaffolding of information. The principles related to student interactivity with content, between students and with the tutor were evidenced on two of the polytechnics’ courses with limited evidence on the third polytechnics’ site. The effective online teaching principles of promoting student ownership of the learning process, and interaction with a larger learning environment was demonstrated on few of the tutors’ online courses in this study. The enablers and barriers experienced by tutors played a key role in the extent to which tutors implemented effective online teaching principles in their courses. Institutional processes related to course design, and tutor professional learning and support played a critical role in providing tutors with the knowledge and time they needed to effectively teach online

Webs of activity in online course design and teaching

In this study, we followed three faculty members' experiences with designing and teaching online courses for the first time. In order to complete the activity, the faculty members had to work -collaboratively with others across the university. Activity theory provided a framework within which to study faculty members' collaborative activities with members of different activity systems that had different goals, tools, divisions of labor and accountabilities. In concordance with activity theory, such differences led to contradictions, disturbances, and transformations in thinking and work activities. The results of the study have implications for individuals and systems undertaking technology integration in teaching

Emotions in response to teaching online: Exploring the factors influencing teachers in a fully online university

The aim of this paper is to understand the emotions associated with the experience of teaching online in an online university and the factors that influence these emotions. Nine hundred and sixty-five (965) online teachers at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (www.uoc.edu) were surveyed. Three emotions linked to teaching online were identified: satisfaction, relief and pleasure. Multiple regression analyses were used to make inferential judgments and test the effects of the teachers' demographic and professional variables. Findings suggest that satisfaction is associated with the instructional design and learning support roles and with the knowledge building approach; relief is inversely related to the content acquisition approach; and pleasure is linked to variables such as academic background and amount of online teaching hours, as well as the knowledge building approach. The practical implications of these results are discussed

A Model of an E-Learning Web Site for Teaching and Evaluating Online

This research is endeavoring to design an e-learning web site on the internet having the course name as "Object Oriented Programming" (OOP) for the students of level four at Computer Science Department (CSD). This course is to be taught online (through web) and then a programme is to be designed to evaluate students performance electronically while introducing a comparison between online teaching , e-evaluation and traditional methods of evaluation. The research seeks to lay out a futuristic perception that how the future online teaching and e-electronic evaluation should be the matter which highlights the importance of this research

CHINESE LEARNING THROUGH INTERNET INSPIRED BY CONTRUCTIVIST LEARNING THEORY

With the changing concept of education, there is growing emphasis on “student-centered” principle. This is one of the characteristics of Constructivist learning theory. On network teaching Chinese, Constructivist learning theory is indispensable. This article is the design of online Chinese teaching which is basic on the Constructivist learning theor

Charting the role of the online teacher in higher education: winds of change

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of the online teacher at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. In this paper, it is intended to identify the issues and dilemmas facing those who are navigating the online teaching environment, to elaborate on the issues/dilemmas, and to offer some ways of addressing these issues by referring to the responses of experienced practitioners, online students, to the literature and to data collected for an Australian Government-funded educational evaluation project. Much of the data presented in this paper relates to an online course, Designing Instruction for Flexible Learning, which is part of the totally online initiative, launched at USQ in 1997. The authors of this paper have been involved in both teaching and instructional design of online courses for several years and have identified a significant shift in the role of the online teacher

A didactical design perspective on teacher presence in an international online learning community

This paper is based on a study of the student learning experience in a particular module of an international Masters programme that included a large element of online learning. It builds on earlier work which highlighted the importance of design and development of social infrastructure for supporting the development of an online learning community by revisiting the data from the perspective of a didactical design framework. The overall aims of this study are to consider how, as teachers, we designed and developed teacher presence and how this was achieved in practice from the design of teaching-studying-learning processes through development to interaction in the online learning community