Teachers’ education and professional development

Day 1: Tuesday 15 June 2021, 15.40 – 17.05

  1. Catalogue of new forms of teaching, learning and assessment in Computer Science in Edu 4.0 and related teachers’ skills and competences
  2. The CPD2 Change Cycle: Enabling development for Online Higher Education
  3. Equity Focused Digital Clinical Simulations for K-12 Computer Science Teacher Education: Exploring the detection and dynamic response to confusion
  4. Online work-based learning: a systematic review

Day 2: Wednesday 16 June 2021, 11.00 – 11.10

Extending UTAUT toward acceptance of OERs in the context of higher education

 

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Catalogue of new forms of teaching, learning and assessment in Computer Science in Edu 4.0 and related teachers’ skills and competences

Bart Rienties, Rebecca Ferguson, Christothea Herodotou, Francisco Iniesto, Julia Sargent and Igor Balaban

The overall aim of Teach4EDU is to enable the creation of an environment that supports implementation of new Education 4.0 learning and teaching approaches in Computer Science (CS). A systematic literature review was carried out, focusing on three research questions. RQ1: Which pedagogic approaches are used to support the teaching of CS?; RQ2: Which of these approaches align with Education 4.0?; RQ3: What skills and competences do HE educators require in order to align CS with Education 4.0? Our literature search identified 66 articles.

Perhaps surprisingly none of the articles explicitly mentions “Education 4.0”. The most common Education 4.0 characteristic was “5) students will be exposed to more hands-on learning through field experience” (73%), followed by “9) students will become more independent in their own learning” (67%), “4) students will be exposed to more project-based learning” (61%). A cluster analysis indicated a three-cluster solution: 1) EDU 4.0 light (n = 18), 2) project-based/hands-on learning (n = 22), and 3) full EDU 4.0 (n = 26). In EDU 4.0 light studies teachers mostly focussed on more independent learning (61%), learning anytime anywhere (44%), and personalised learning (39%). The second cluster had a strong focus on project-based (86%) and hands-on learning (86%), with relatively limited focus on choice how to learn (5%), personalised learning (5%), and learning anytime anywhere (18%). The third and final cluster, full EDU 4.0, was strongly focussed on hands-on learning (100%), becoming more independent (96%), personalised learning (85%), learning anytime anywhere (77%) and choice how to learn (77%). Overall, while there are some engaging and diverse practices in CS and Education 4.0 in Europe, it seems that relative to other countries (e.g., USA) more work needs to be done. This is one of the aims of the TEACH4EDU project will address.

The CPD2 Change Cycle: Enabling development for Online Higher Education

Anne Adams, Elizabeth Fitzgerald, Julia Sargent, Duygu Bektick, Nashwa Ismail, Carina Bossu and Gill Clough

The Covid-19 Pandemic has challenged Higher Education to change practices towards online provision requiring a huge shift in developing teachers, administrators and university management to understand these activities. The Institute of Educational Technology has a long history of providing academic development for the Open University in its 50 years as an international distance learning university. Key to our development practices to support change in crisis has been to use innovation, adaptability and a wholistic approach to professional development. In particular, the professional and personal development required to facilitate online learning is truly interdisciplinary and can be viewed both from a bottom-up, life-long learning or a top-down, learning organisation perspective. However, bottom-up innovation can suffer from poor sustainability and top-down strategies can have limited adaptation and relevance to contextual needs. This presentation provides a research-informed connection between these perspectives of change during crisis by pulling together the advances and research evaluations, often related to technology enhanced learning. These wholistic perspective reviews cross-disciplinary professional development activities that come from, or have relevance to, the Higher Education context. Through this work we have identified three key factors that are critical elements of professional development for developing online learning in a crisis: Context, Philosophy and Delivery (CPD). We have further identified, through connecting the individual and organisational level of change, a CPD2 cycle. This cycle can support effective implementation (from organisational to individual needs) and evaluation (from personal to contextual impacts) of professional development enablers and barriers. There is an evidenced account of delivery tools, methods and approaches that have been used within three CPD2 cycle case studies (online learning design and Tricky Topics, knowledge exchange and Evidence Cafés, and personalisation in online learning). The findings identify impacts from these professional development activities which are discussed with reference to ‘squaring the CPD2 cycle’ in crisis change situations (i.e. completing the impact evaluation side of the cycle). Finally, we conclude with insights for HE to help implement and advance their own philosophies and contexts for professional development to support developing online HE learning in a time of crisis.

Equity Focused Digital Clinical Simulations for K-12 Computer Science Teacher Education: Exploring the detection and dynamic response to confusion

Garron Hillaire, Laura Larke, Deborah Kariuki, Jack Chen, Alison Fang, Danilo Symonnette, Natalie Mionis and Justin Reich

In this talk we will share the progress and setbacks we experienced in seeking to model confusion based on audio recorded responses (and transcripts of audio) from simulations about equity focused problems of practice in K-12 computer science teaching. The aim of the presentation is to illustrate a chain of evidence (which ranges from null findings to significant results) that helped shape the direction of detecting and responding to confusion in equity-focused simulations. The coordination of multiple investigations has led to our current understanding with the first set of results focused on detection of confusion and the second set of results focused on responding to confusion. We first review and report results from four approaches explored to detect confusion: 1) transcripts of audio recordings, 2) prosodic features of audio files, 3) self-evaluation by participants, 4) and researcher coding. Second we report results focused on responding to confusion considering both how confusion related to moments where teachers would provide students with support as well as the potential for technology to provide dynamic support. This talk serves two purposes: First it illustrates interesting results related to equity-focused research and second it highlights the work coordinated by Garron Hillaire, a Leverhulme Scholar from the Open World Learning program at the Open University. The set of studies reported illustrate how his thesis work informed his current research trajectory.

Online work-based learning: a systematic review

Bart Rienties, Blazenka Divjak, Francisco Iniesto, Katarina Pažur Aničić and Mirza Zizak and Iona Jivet

It is widely acknowledged that graduates need to develop skills and competences beyond theoretical knowledge nurtured within higher education curricula. In the last twenty years there has been a push to support undergraduates and post-graduates with work-integrated or work-based learning (WBL) opportunities in the form of apprenticeships, practice-based lab sessions, project-based learning, and hands-on learning activities. With COVID-19 there has been a push to support and provide these opportunities for skills development online.

In this systematic literature review as part of the EU-funded RAPIDE project, we will explore 1) how to design inclusive online WBL practices, and 2) how effective are these online WBL practice in terms of developing graduate skills. We conducted a review using Web of Science and Sciencedirect using the search terms (“online” OR “virtual” OR “remote” OR “distance”) AND (“work-based learning” OR “WBL” or “work-integrated learning”) AND “higher education” for the period 2016-2021. In total 264 unique articles were identified, which were manually analysed to identify appropriate fit. 41 articles were subsequently read in detail by the research team and subsequently double coded. The preliminary findings will be presented at CALRG.

Extending UTAUT toward acceptance of OERs in the context of higher education

Samia Almousa

Knowledge is arguably the most valuable asset one can have.Even when shared, its value does not get any less. In most cases, when you share your knowledge with someone, you do not risk losing anything, unlike when you share money or any other materialistic objects, such as food, property, and so forth.In fact, sharing knowledge is a win-win situation for both the sharer and the receiver.For the former,sharing knowledge with others is an opportunity to engage in discussions that may broaden their already existing knowledge. For the latter the newly gained knowledge is highly valuable and can be a tool to accomplish many things.
As an academic,after using Open Educational Resources (OER) with my students,I realised that by using OER, it is possible to make education more effective by providing every student with a personal,free, softcopy of the textbook for the subjects they study.However, in the Arab context, we suffer to find appropriate resources due to many reasons,the most important is language and different context.
Saudi Arabia has the National Transformation Program,which aims to improve all life aspects, including educational technology aspects,and realise the Saudi Vision 2030,led to the establishment of the National Centre for E-Learning.The centre plays the role of a supporter of e-learning for public and higher education. In 2018, this centre launched “SHMS” as an OERs platform for educational institutions.The platform is dedicated to connecting people and ideas for the enrichment of all communities and is committed to improving educational outcomes through sharing and collaboration. As the adoption of this platform is new in my country,it is vital to study OERs implementation in Higher Education (HE). Thus, this study aims to understand the academics’ perceptions of the use of OERs, and determine how to mainstream OERs in HEIs.To achieve this, a mixed-methods approach for data collection was adopted through two stages, distributing questionnaires to the universities academics, as well as conducting semi-structured interviews with the academics and eLearning assistants.This presentation will report the findings of the first phase which was a questionnaire method used to evaluate the developed Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology model

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