This study identified barriers and enablers of a university-wide pedagogic shift to Active Blended Learning (ABL). ABL is an approach to learning and teaching that promotes student centredness through teaching in small groups, with a focus on sense-making activities and interactions in and outside the physical or virtual learning space. Data gathered through a survey of academic staff, followed by in-depth interviews, were analysed using thematic analysis. The normalisation and effective embedding of digital technology and small group teaching were two major enablers of pedagogic transformation to ABL. Inconsistent teaching practices and the lack of student engagement with learning activities emerged as two of the main barriers. An in-depth understanding of effective, student-focused higher education teaching is a cornerstone of large-scale pedagogic change processes. Recommendations are put forward for higher education institutions considering changes to their learning and teaching strategies.
The field of socio-educational services is focused on the value of relationships, proximity, support and intervention on site, at home or in users’ facilities, and all those elements are difficult to convert digitally. Nevertheless, during the period of the Covid-19 pandemic, smart working also became part of the everyday life of social educators. This study discusses the role of technology in the work of the educator during the pandemic period and possible future developments. The study offers an insight into the influence of Covid-19 on socio-educational services, focusing on the function of technology both in maintaining contact with the users where the service was suspended and in reshaping the assistance that continued to be provided. The research study highlights that, despite the challenges and the initial disorientation faced by educators, digital technologies can constitute important working tools to assure the continuity of the pedagogical relationship also in the socio-educational and care contexts.
During the lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, several online initiatives have been enacted to provide teachers and educators with the skills needed to face the transition to online learning and teaching. Voluntary attendance of these kinds of initiatives for continuous professional development can be considered as a self-directed learning strategy enabling users to reduce a perceived skill gap. In this work, we explore and describe the expectations and the perceived learning needs of a group of participants who voluntarily decided to attend a webinar series concerning “Emergency Remote Education”, carried out by the European Distance E-learning Network (EDEN). The data collected through a short questionnaire, filled in by 607 participants, show that more than 50% of the respondents self-assessed their level of expertise as high. The results may provide insights into how to design online continuous professional development initiatives which are open to different targets.
COVID-19 started spreading in Latin America amidst the beginning of academic year (March, in the Global South). In response, the Faculty of Science within the Universidad de la Republica de Uruguay rapidly switched to Emergency Remote Education. As part of this strategy, specific support was provided to students with connectivity and equipment needs. However, teachers’ different levels of pedagogical and digital skills resulted in diverse efficacy in students’ emergency learning experiences. This work explores the Universidad de la Republica’s science education provision from the students’ perspective as expressed in accordance to their learning experience. The results show a positive direct association between the clarity of the tasks the students were set and positive feedback. Moreover, while the provision of educational resources was key to supporting emergency education assessment, technological aspects had little or no impact. Finally, the results also indicate greater critical digital literacy on the teachers’ part would improve science education.
Teachers have been asked to integrate new technologies with didactic education as it happened during COVID-19 times; this has been a real opportunity to review disciplinary and methodological approaches and to enhance features that usually traditional teaching does not use. The learning and the epistemological constructions are promoted also by the use of targeted software that may support the conceptual difficulties in Physics Education through high level of students’ interaction. Our work proved to be quite successful in achieving this support in learning: during the first lockdown period, we proposed a learning unit on the concept of force according to the Newtonian Dynamics using the Desmos software to students in the secondary school. The technological integration is crucial to complete the educational project and it could also be promoted in a non-emergency teaching setting.
Technology-enhanced learning is being used in nurse education and training to promote active development of professional knowledge and skills among university students as well as among professional nurses. Although many studies have focused on enablers and barriers to e-learning in nursing education, there is still little knowledge regarding the specific functionalities that allow to instantiate flexible and effective learning activities as well as the user satisfaction of these functionalities. This study examines the students’ opinions about the ease of use and usefulness of the functionalities of the Open Online Tool (OOT) platform that was implemented and used for an online initiative for professional training on Family and Community Nursing (FCN) in Greece. The results of the research showed that most of the features of the OOT were considered by the participants to be easy to use and at the same time useful in contributing consistently to their training.
L’educazione in medicina negli ultimi decenni ha conosciuto una serie di cambiamenti radicali, accentuati attualmente dall’emergenza Covid-19. Obiettivo del contributo è condividere i risultati di un percorso di innovazione didattica nella Medical Education basato sull’approccio Team Based Learning (TBL) attuato nell’ambito di un corso elettivo all’interno del Corso di Laurea magistrale in Medicina e chirurgia. I risultati della ricerca valutativa mixed-method hanno consentito di individuare elementi interpretativi rispetto all’engagement degli studenti, ai learning outcomes e alle percezioni relative all’approccio didattico. Il TBL, se introdotto in modalità progressiva e realizzato con opportune azioni di scaffolding, può facilitare - anche grazie alle tecnologie educative - un maggiore coinvolgimento degli studenti, una mobilitazione delle conoscenze acquisite autonomamente per affrontare compiti di complessità via via superiore dal punto di vista cognitivo, nonché l’attivazione di un processo di empowerment rispetto allo sviluppo della competenza trasversale definita “apprendere ad apprendere”, nella prospettiva del lifelong learning.
Social media may be an important tool for students to develop and improve their employability skills. This paper reports the results of a survey conducted in Osun State Technical Colleges (Nigeria) that investigated the use of social media (LinkedIn, YouTube, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter) and their influence on students’ employability skills. The study adopted a quantitative design approach and involved a sample of 354 randomly selected students. An instrument called “Use of Social Media Platform and Students’ Employability Skills Questionnaire (SMSESPQ)” was used for the purpose. Data were analyzed using multiple regression statistics. The findings showed that the use of YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter contributed significantly to students’ employability skills, and that students perceived this same benefit of social media.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic it was impossible to carry out on-campus teaching and examinations as planned for the first-year elementary school Bachelor's degree teacher training courses during the summer term of 2019/2020. Therefore, we moved our on-campus STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) related courses to schooling at home. For their course examination, students designed outdoor trails in groups with the educational technology MathCityMap based on an integrated STEAM approach. Hence, they combined STEAM with real-world situations (e.g., monuments, marketplaces, playgrounds). The tasks within the trails required the use of technologies such as augmented reality (AR), digital modelling (e.g., GeoGebra 3D Graphing Calculator), and GPS. Analogue measuring tools (e.g., triangle ruler) were also used in the task designs. We collected data from 21 trails with 259 tasks from 49 pre-service teachers to analyse the effects on professional growth in STEAM education. Through hierarchical cluster analysis we identified three different clusters with patterns regarding STEAM in outdoor trails. This paper will describe a pedagogical framework for the integrated STEAM approach to designing and evaluating outdoor trails. Furthermore, we will explain patterns pre-service teachers developed during this professional development.
The authors discuss the applicability of common assessment types used in online instruction to the context of emergency remote education. Written assignments, online discussions, fieldwork, tests and quizzes, presentations, and e-portfolios are specifically addressed. The discussion includes the concepts of synchronous versus asynchronous assessments and issues related to academic integrity. The authors conclude by noting that empathy and radical flexibility are integral to assessment in emergency remote education.
This paper overviews a summer 2020 pilot survey of educators’ perspectives on the intersection of educational technology and datafication in higher education classrooms. The brief, international survey of university teachers used four proxy questions to frame a baseline snapshot of higher education teaching populations’ knowledge, practices, experience, and perspectives on data and online learning: this paper focuses specifically on the results of the knowledge and practice questions. The paper suggests that, in the Emergency Remote Education (ERE) context generated by the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education instructors teaching online demonstrate patterns of limited knowledge and practice surrounding the data aspects of their classroom tools. The paper posits an urgent need for institutional and sector-wide policy and faculty development around data and online classroom tools, and for data ethics to be addressed as part of institutions’ ERE transition online.
