Suchergebnisse

The Cardiff Commitment Continuing Professional Development (CPD) programme was a collaboration between Cardiff Council, Cardiff and Vale College and The Open University (OU). Initial contact with Cardiff Council's Cardiff Schools Service (Cardiff Council) began with discussions around supporting teacher CPD needs through a co-designed teacher focussed workshop. The Global Covid19 Pandemic resulted in this collaboration being extensively redesigned to reflect the need for teaching staff to support their learners via a blended online distance learning model. Cardiff and Vale College also agreed to join the initiative. This programme ran between November '20 and March '21 with a total of 12 workshops and a sample of 32 teachers and lecturers from across 23 institutions. Key benefits identified to participating staff included the professional development and upskilling opportunity, input into the co-creation of resources for peers and the wider sector and effecting change within their organisation and wider cluster through peer to peer approach.

Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have become an accepted way to make learning opportunities available at large scale and with low cost to the learner. However, only if these are made accessible will they be able to offer flexibility of learning and benefits to all, irrespective of disability. Experience in providing accessible online learning at distance universities suggests that this can be best achieved through understanding different roles and the options in planning for adjustments to be made. To effectively apply similar approaches to MOOCs, it is necessary to understand the various viewpoints and roles of stakeholders and how these impact on accessibility. This includes educators who create materials and facilitate learning, and technologists who develop and maintain platforms. In this paper, we report the results from a study involving semi-structured interviews to investigate the perceptions and accessibility-related processes of MOOC platform accessibility managers, platform software developers and designers, and MOOC accessibility researchers. Our results show the awareness that MOOCs can be valuable for disabled learners, and indicate that legislation acts as a driver for accessibility. However, our investigations suggest limited progress to date in either producing universally accessible MOOCs, or tailoring MOOCs to meet the needs of individual learners with disabilities.

AbstractFlipped classroom (FC) approaches have gotten substantial attention in the last decade because they have a potential to stimulate student engagement as well as active and collaborative learning. The FC is generally defined as a strategy that flips the traditional education setting, i.e., the information transmission component of a traditional face-to-face lecture is moved out of class time. The FC relies on technology and is therefore suitable for online or blended learning, which were predominant forms of learning during the COVID-19 pandemic (March 2020–July 2021). In this paper we present a systematic literature review (SLR) of studies that covered online FC approaches in higher education during the pandemic. We analyzed 205 publications in total and 18 in detail. Our research questions were related to the main findings about the success of implementation of online FC and recommendations for future research. The findings indicated that those who had used FC approaches in face-to-face or blended learning environments more successfully continued to use them in online environments than those who had not used it before. The SLR opened possible questions for future research, such as the effectiveness of the FC for different courses and contexts, the cognitive and emotional aspects of student engagement, and students' data protection. It pointed to the need to examine different aspects of online delivery of the FC more comprehensively, and with more research rigor.

The move to introduce technology enhanced learning (TEL) is a trend that has been observed for decades. Following the disruption arising from Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a move to remote teaching in universities across the world. This move has put the transformation or digital revolution in the limelight in the media. TEL is of strategic importance to the conduct of teaching, learning and research in education internationally. TEL, when combined with the growing benefits of open approaches to education, leads to a potentially transformational means of learning. In this paper the authors introduce some examples of research projects from the Open University's OpenTEL research grouping. These examples highlight some of the work conducted relating to supporting students, universities, and communities using TEL during the pandemic. OpenTEL research has identified that Covid-19 has exposed the need for better institutional support for students who are facing stress and disruption in their studies; collaboration among higher educational institutions to share knowledge; better engagement in the online pivot ; and understanding of the possibilities (and limitations) for online tools to maintain existing research communities.

The following publication contains book reviews of these titles:Ferster, B. (2016) Sage on the Screen: Education, Media and How We Learn. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 197 pages. ISBN 13: 978-1-4214-2126-1.Littlejohn, A and Hood, N. (2018) Reconceptualising Learning in the Digital Age: The [Un] democratising Potential of MOOCs. Singapore: Springer. 108 pages. ISBN: 978-981-10-8892-6, ISBN: 978-981-10-8893-3.Hodgkinson-Williams, C and Arinto, P.B. (eds.) (2017) Adoption and Impact of OER in the Global South. Cape Town and Ottawa: International Development Research Centre & Research on Open Educational Resources. 606 pages. ISBN: 9781928331483.Rankin, J.G. (2016) How to Make Data Work: a Guide for Educational Leaders. New York: Routledge. 226 pages. ISBN: 978-1-317-35338-6.Saba, F. and Shearer, R.L. (2018) Transactional Distance and Adaptive Learning, Planning for the Future of Higher Education. London: Routledge. 212 pages. ISBN: 978-1-138-30233-4, ISBN: 9780203731819.

AbstractProfessional development (PD) is a key element for enhancing the quality of academic teaching. An increasing number of PD activities have moved to blended and online formats, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the desire, potential, and need for collaboration among educators to learn from innovative and best practices, several institutions have started to pool their resources and expertise together and have started to implement cross-institutional and cross-national online professional development (OPD). The questions of what type of a (cross-)institutional OPD educators might prefer, and whether educators learn effectively from (and with) peers in such cross-cultural context have not been adequately explored empirically. In this case-study across three European countries, we explored the lived experiences of 86 educators as a result of a cross-institutional OPD. Using a mixed methods design approach our pre-post findings indicated that, on average, participants made substantial gains in knowledge. In addition, several cultural differences were evident in the expectations and lived experiences in ODP, as well as the intention to transfer what had been learned into one's own practice of action. This study indicates that while substantial economic and pedagogical affordances are provided with cross-institutional OPD, cultural differences in context might impact the extent to which educators implement lessons learned from OPD.