Visualising alignment to support students’ judgment of confidence in open learner models

Knowledge monitoring is a component of metacognition which can help students regulate their own learning. In adaptive learning software, the system’s model of the student can be presented as an open learner model (OLM) which is intended to enable monitoring processes. We explore how presenting alignment, between students’ self-assessed confidence and the system’s model of the student, supports knowledge monitoring. When students can see their confidence and their performance (either combined within one skill meter or expanded as two separate skill meters), their knowledge monitoring and performance improves, particularly for low-achieving students. These results indicate the importance of communicating the alignment between the system’s evaluation of student performance and student confidence in the correctness of their answers as a means to support metacognitive skills

Supporting students’ confidence judgement through visualising alignment in open learner models

Supporting students’ knowledge monitoring skills, a component of metacognition, can help students regulate their own learning. This thesis investigates the alignment of learners’ confidence in their knowledge with a computer’s assessment of their knowledge, visualised using an Open Learner Model (OLM). The research explored students’ preferred method for visualising inconsistent data (e.g. misalignment) in an OLM, and the ways in which visualising alignment can influence student interaction with the computer. The thesis demonstrates that visualising alignment in Open Learner Models signifi-cantly increases students’ confidence compared to a control condition. In particular, visualising alignment benefited low-achieving students, in terms of knowledge monitoring and this was associated with improvements in their performance. Students showed a preference towards the visualisations that provides an overview of the in-formation (i.e. opacity) rather than ones, which provide detailed information. Graph-ical representation is shown to be more beneficial in motivating students to interact with the system than text-based representation of the same information in the con-text of representing the alignment within OLMs

Influence of employer support for professional development on MOOCs enrolment and completion: Results from a cross-course survey

Although the potential of open education and MOOCs for professional development is usually recognized, it has not yet been explored extensively. How far employers support non-formal learning is still an open question. This paper presents the findings of a survey-based study which focuses on the influence of employer support for (general) professional development on employees’ use of MOOCs. Findings show that employers are usually unaware that their employees are participating in MOOCs. In addition, employer support for general professional development is positively associated with employees completing MOOCs and obtaining certificates for them. However, the relationship between employer support and MOOC enrollment is less clear: workers who have more support from their employers tend to enroll in either a low or a high number of MOOCs. Finally, the promotion of a minimum of ICT skills by employers is shown to be an effective way of encouraging employee participation in the open education ecosystem.JRC.J.3-Information Societ

Developing the scales on evaluation beliefs of student teachers

The purpose of the study reported in this paper was to investigate the validity and the reliability of a newly developed questionnaire named ‘Teacher Evaluation Beliefs’ (TEB). The framework for developing items was provided by the two models. The first model focuses on Student-Centered and Teacher-Centered beliefs about evaluation while the other centers on five dimensions (what/ who/ when/ why/ how). The validity and reliability of the new instrument was investigated using both exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis study (n=446). Overall results indicate that the two-factor structure is more reasonable than the five-factor one. Further research needs additional items about the latent dimensions “what” ”who” ”when” ”why” “how” for each existing factor based on Student-centered and Teacher-centered approaches

Using a teacher knowledge framework to connect teaching practice with theory

© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/).The process Shulman described as ‘teacher-knowledge growth’ is complex, particularly for student teachers. This article presents an ‘Eraut-Shulman teacher knowledge framework’ that provides a structure and language to use to extend student teachers’ learning about knowledge. The article describes how the framework was created and draws on student teachers’ accounts of their teaching whilst on placement to demonstrate how it could be used to connect personal experiences of teaching with theoretical understandings of teacher knowledge. The students’ accounts were written whilst they were completing a new BEd degree programme in Malaysia. Seven accounts are presented, each with two ‘focus points’, to illustrate how a teacher educator could use the knowledge framework to engage the student teacher in dialogue that links their experience of teaching with theory. Issues explored in these examples include categories and types of knowledge; conceptions of knowledge; sources of knowledge; theories of knowledge and learning; and the nature of personal knowledge in teaching. Significantly, this article presents a practical approach that provides opportunities for teachers to relate their practice to theory; contributes to the conceptualisations of teacher knowledge; and extends our ability to unpack the nature, development and use of knowledge in teaching.Peer reviewe

Journalism Education 2016 Vol 5(2): Guest Editor

“It’s the story that matters! Teaching journalism’s storytellers” Special Edition of Journalism Education Guest Editor: Karen Fowler-Watt, Bournemouth University, UK. Storytelling is the journalist’s craft skill. Shaped by the tenets of objectivity and accuracy, the news narrative informs the debate and brings us the human stories. If journalism is a craft, then the story is the journalist’s work of art. In a rapidly changing landscape of technological revolution, shifting business models and ethical challenges, one thing remains certain – the story still matters. As award winning BBC foreign correspondent, Fergal Keane reminds us, the journalist is first and foremost a storyteller who is ‘trying to tell them what it is like to stand where I do and see the things I see.’ But this core skill is being challenged on all sides. The demands of the 24/7 news cycle emphasise story – processing, rather than storytelling. Originality – the storyteller’s stock-in-trade - is often sacrificed as newsrooms shrink in size and journalists fail to get out of the office. The online environment moves us away from linear storytelling and focuses on the imperative of interactivity. Stories require simplicity and multi media features to engage an audience consuming in byte-size, whilst on the move. If storytelling lies at the heart of journalism practice, how do journalism educators face these challenges? How do we teach the next generation of journalists to find original stories and to tell them in innovative ways? How do we encourage young journalists to engage audiences through their storytelling techniques? How does investigative, in-depth research and long-form storytelling fit in to this digital context? This special edition of Journalism Education aims to invite discussion and debate about a range of factors currently informing the role of storytelling in journalism education. It will devote particular attention to the ways in which journalism educators are embracing multimedia and new media approaches to storytelling. Possible topics to be examined may include: - Definitions of storytelling in a digital age - Teaching storytelling to journalists: - the role of accuracy, redefining objectivity - reporting human interest, reporting conflict - Original storytelling - Influences of social media on journalistic narrative - Understanding the role of audience in storytelling - Ethical issues in storytelling - Technological innovation, experimentation and teaching multimedia storytelling techniques - Experiential approaches to teaching storytelling - Teaching storytelling using data - Selling stories - teaching entrepreneurship: pitching story ideas, getting stories commissioned Articles will be peer-reviewed in accordance with the JE guidelines for peer review Guest Editor Dr Karen Fowler-Watt is Head of the School of Journalism, English and Communication in the Faculty of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University. She is a former BBC journalist and co-editor (with Stuart Allan) of Journalism: New Challenges (2013, CJCR) Contact Dr Karen Fowler-Watt Head of School, Journalism, English and CommunicationW338, Faculty of Media and Communication Bournemouth University Talbot Campus Fern Barrow Poole. Dorset. BH12 5BB Email: [email protected] Tel: + 44(0) 1202965129 Web: www.media.bournemouth.ac.uk “It’s the story that matters! Teaching journalism’s storytellers” Special Edition of Journalism Education Guest Editor: Karen Fowler-Watt, Bournemouth University, UK. Storytelling is the journalist’s craft skill. Shaped by the tenets of objectivity and accuracy, the news narrative informs the debate and brings us the human stories. If journalism is a craft, then the story is the journalist’s work of art. In a rapidly changing landscape of technological revolution, shifting business models and ethical challenges, one thing remains certain – the story still matters. As award winning BBC foreign correspondent, Fergal Keane reminds us, the journalist is first and foremost a storyteller who is ‘trying to tell them what it is like to stand where I do and see the things I see.’ But this core skill is being challenged on all sides. The demands of the 24/7 news cycle emphasise story – processing, rather than storytelling. Originality – the storyteller’s stock-in-trade - is often sacrificed as newsrooms shrink in size and journalists fail to get out of the office. The online environment moves us away from linear storytelling and focuses on the imperative of interactivity. Stories require simplicity and multi media features to engage an audience consuming in byte-size, whilst on the move. If storytelling lies at the heart of journalism practice, how do journalism educators face these challenges? How do we teach the next generation of journalists to find original stories and to tell them in innovative ways? How do we encourage young journalists to engage audiences through their storytelling techniques? How does investigative, in-depth research and long-form storytelling fit in to this digital context? This special edition of Journalism Education aims to invite discussion and debate about a range of factors currently informing the role of storytelling in journalism education. It will devote particular attention to the ways in which journalism educators are embracing multimedia and new media approaches to storytelling. Possible topics to be examined may include: - Definitions of storytelling in a digital age - Teaching storytelling to journalists: - the role of accuracy, redefining objectivity - reporting human interest, reporting conflict - Original storytelling - Influences of social media on journalistic narrative - Understanding the role of audience in storytelling - Ethical issues in storytelling - Technological innovation, experimentation and teaching multimedia storytelling techniques - Experiential approaches to teaching storytelling - Teaching storytelling using data - Selling stories - teaching entrepreneurship: pitching story ideas, getting stories commissioned Articles will be peer-reviewed in accordance with the JE guidelines for peer review Guest Editor Dr Karen Fowler-Watt is Head of the School of Journalism, English and Communication in the Faculty of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University. She is a former BBC journalist and co-editor (with Stuart Allan) of Journalism: New Challenges (2013, CJCR) Contact Dr Karen Fowler-Watt Head of School, Journalism, English and CommunicationW338, Faculty of Media and Communication Bournemouth University Talbot Campus Fern Barrow Poole. Dorset. BH12 5BB Email: [email protected] Tel: + 44(0) 1202965129 Web: www.media.bournemouth.ac.u

Back to (con)textuality: using chat services to teach legal reasoning

This paper discusses the technology-enhanced learning (TEL) environment named indicatively the 'Virtual Court', a text-based learning platform designed to introduce law students to the general dynamics of legal reasoning, particularly the argumentative character and open texture of the law. In the first two parts of the paper we reflect on the theoretical background behind the TEL, its earlier implementation and the lessons for the future drawn from that experience. In the third part, we propose developing the Virtual Court TEL environment into a cross-platform software application (app) that could be utilised within any programme and course for teaching law

Learner models in online personalized educational experiences: an infrastructure and some experim

Technologies are changing the world around us, and education is not immune from its influence: the field of teaching and learning supported by the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), also known as Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL), has witnessed a huge expansion in recent years. This wide adoption happened thanks to the massive diffusion of broadband connections and to the pervasive needs for education, highly connected to the evolution in sciences and technologies. Therefore, it has pushed up the usage of online education (distance and blended methodologies for educational experiences) to, even in lately years, unexpected rates. Alongside with the well known potentialities, digital-based educational tools come with a number of downsides, such as possible disengagement on the part of the learner, absence of the social pressures that normally exist in a classroom environment, difficulty or even inability from the learners to self-regulate and, last but not least, depletion of the stimulus to actively participate and cooperate with lectures and peers. These difficulties impact the teaching process and the outcomes of the educational experience (i.e. learning process), being a serious limit and questioning the broader applicability of TEL solutions. To overcome these issues, there is a need of tools to support the learning process. In the literature, one of the known approach to improve the situation is to rely on a user profile, that collects data during the use of the eLearning platforms or tool. The created profile can be used to adapt the behaviour and the contents proposed to the learner. On top of this model, some researches stressed the positive effects stimulated by the disclosure of the model itself for inspection purposes by the learner. This disclosed model is known as Open Learner Model (OLM). The idea of opening learners' profile and eventually integrate them with external on-line resources is not new and it has the ultimate goal of creating global and long-run indicators of the learner's profile. Also the representation aspect of the learner model plays a role, moving from the more traditional approach based on the textual and analytic/extensive representation to the graphical indicators that are able to summarise and to present one or more of the model characteristics in a way that is considered more effective and natural for the user consumption. Relying on the same learner models, and stressing the different aggregation and representation capabilities, it is possible to either support self-reflection of the learner or to foster the tutoring process to allow proper supervision by the tutor/teacher. Both the objectives can be reached through the graphical representation of the relevant information, presented in different ways. Furthermore, with such an open approach for the learner model, the concepts of personalisation and adaptation acquire a central role in the TEL experience, overcoming the previous limits related to the impossibility to observe and explain to the learner the reasons for such an intervention from the tool itself. As a consequence, the introduction of different tools, platforms, widgets and devices in the learning process, together with the adaptation process based on the learner profiles, can create a personal space for a potential fruitful usage of the rich and widespread amount of resources available to the learner. This work aimed at analysing the way a learner model could be represented in visual presentation to the system users, exploring the effects and performances for learners and teachers. Subsequently, it concentrated in investigating how the adoption of adaptive and social visualisations of OLM could affect the student experience within a TEL context. The motivation was twofold. On one side was to show that the approach of mixing data from heterogeneous and not already related data sources could have a meaningful didactic interpretations, whether on the other one was to measure the perceived impact of the introduction on online experiences of the adaptivity (and of social aspects) in the graphical visualisations produced by such a tool. In order to achieve these objectives, the present work analysed and addressed them through an approach that merged user data in learning platforms, implementing a learner profile. This was accomplished by means of the creation of a tool, named GVIS, to elaborate on the collected user actions in platforms enabling remote teaching. A number of test cases were performed and analysed, adopting the developed tool as the provider to extract, to aggregate and to represent the data for the learners' model. The GVIS tool impact was then estimated with self- evaluation questionnaires, with the analysis of log files and with knowledge quiz results. Dimensions such as the perceived usefulness, the impact on motivation and commitment, the cognitive overload generated, and the impact of social data disclosure were taken into account. The main result found by the application of the developed tool in TEL experiences was to have an impact on the behaviour of online learners when used to provide them with indicators around their activities, especially when enhanced with social capabilities. The effects appear to be amplifies in those cases where the widget usage is as simplified as possible. From the learner side, the results suggested that the learners seem to appreciate the tool and recognise its value. For them the introduction as part of the online learning experience could act as a positive pressure factor, enhanced by the peer comparison functionality. This functionality could also be used to reinforce the student engagement and positive commitment to the educational experience, by transmitting a sense of community and stimulating healthy competition between learners. From the teacher/tutor side, they seemed to be better supported by the presentation of compact, intuitive and just-in-time information (i.e. actions that have an educational interpretation or impact) about the monitored user or group. This gave them a clearer picture of how the class is currently performing and enabled them to address performance issues by adapting the resources and the teaching (and learning) approach accordingly. Although a drawback was identified regarding the cognitive overload, the data collected showed that users generally considered this kind of support useful. There is also indications that further analyses can be interesting to explore the effects introduced in the teaching practices by the availability and usage of such a tool

A framework for strategic planning of data analytics in the educational sector

The field of big data and data analysis is not a new one. Big data systems have been investigated with respect to the volume of the data and how it is stored, the data velocity and how it is subject to change, variety of data to be analysed and data veracity referring to integrity and quality. Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have a significant range of data sources across their operations and increasingly invest in collecting, analysing and reporting on their data in order to improve their efficiency. Data analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) are two terms that are increasingly popular over the past few years in the relevant literature with emphasis on their impact in the education sector. There is a significant volume of literature discussing the benefits of data analytics in higher education and even more papers discussing specific case studies of institutions resorting on BI by deploying various data analytics practices. Nevertheless, there is a lack of an integrated framework that supports HEIs in using learning analytics both at strategic and operational level. This research study was driven by the need to offer a point of reference for universities wishing to make good use of the plethora of data they can access. Increasingly institutions need to become ‘smart universities’ by supporting their decisions with findings from the analysis of their operations. The Business Intelligence strategies of many universities seems to focus mostly on identifying how to collect data but fail to address the most important issue that is how to analyse the data, what to do with the findings and how to create the means for a scalable use of learning analytics at institutional level. The scope of this research is to investigate the different factors that affect the successful deployment of data analytics in educational contexts focusing both on strategic and operational aspects of academia. The research study attempts to identify those elements necessary for introducing data analytics practices across an institution. The main contribution of the research is a framework that models the data collection, analysis and visualisation in higher education. The specific contribution to the field comes in the form of generic guidelines for strategic planning of HEI data analytics projects, combined with specific guidelines for staff involved in the deployment of data analytics to support certain institutional operations. The research is based on a mixed method approach that combines grounded theory in the form of extensive literature review, state-of-the-art investigation and case study analysis, as well as a combination of qualitative and quantitative data collection. The study commences with an extensive literature review that identifies the key factors affecting the use of learning analytics. Then the research collected more information from an analysis of a wide range of case studies showing how learning analytics are used across HEIs. The primary data collection concluded with a series of focus groups and interviews assessing the role of learning analytics in universities. Next, the research focused on a synthesis of guidelines for using learning analytics both at strategic and operational levels, leading to the production of generic and specific guidelines intended for different university stakeholders. The proposed framework was revised twice to create an integrated point of reference for HEIs that offers support across institutions in scalable and applicable way that can accommodate the varying needs met at different HEIs. The proposed framework was evaluated by the same participants in the earlier focus groups and interviews, providing a qualitative approach in evaluating the contributions made during this research study. The research resulted in the creation of an integrated framework that offers HEIs a reference for setting up a learning analytics strategy, adapting institutional policies and revising operations across faculties and departments. The proposed C.A.V. framework consists of three phases including Collect, Analysis and Visualisation. The framework determines the key features of data sources and resulting dashboards but also a list of functions for the data collection, analysis and visualisation stages. At strategic level, the C.A.V. framework enables institutions to assess their learning analytics maturity, determine the learning analytics stages that they are involved in, identify the different learning analytics themes and use a checklist as a reference point for their learning analytics deployment. Finally, the framework ensures that institutional operations can become more effective by determining how learning analytics provide added value across different operations, while assessing the impact of learning analytics on stakeholders. The framework also supports the adoption of learning analytics processes, the planning of dashboard contents and identifying factors affecting the implementation of learning analytics