The use of digital technologies is now widespread and increasing, but is not always optimized for effective learning. Teachers in higher education have little time or support to work on innovation and improvement of their teaching, which often means they simply replicate their current practice in a digital medium. This paper makes the case for a learning design support environment to support and scaffold teachers' engagement with and development of technology‐enhanced learning, based on user requirements and on pedagogic theory. To be able to adopt, adapt, and experiment with learning designs, teachers need a theory‐informed way of representing the critical characteristics of good pedagogy as they discover how to optimize learning technologies. This paper explains the design approach of the Learning Design Support Environment project, and how it aims to support teachers in achieving this goal.
This paper reports on an iterative design‐based research project to develop an online design tool (the Learning Designer) to support “teachers as designers.” The aim is to evaluate the potential of the tool to develop and support a knowledge‐building teaching professional community. The Learning Designer was embedded and evaluated through international online “design challenge” events, and a series of MOOCs, providing both quantitative and qualitative data. Findings indicate that the Learning Designer enables an online community of teachers from across the K‐12, further and higher education sectors (~400 per day) to build and share their developing knowledge of learning design, and that this would be strengthened by further functionality to support collaboration and peer review of the learning designs created. The research shows how digital technology could bring about large‐scale improvements in teacher professional development of TEL. The paper concludes with users’ priorities for new features to mobilise community knowledge via large‐scale professional development of teachers as innovative TEL designers.
Search engines are very popular tools for collecting information from distributed resources. They provide not only search facilities, but they also offer directories for users to browse content divided into groups. In this paper, we've adopted an individual differences approach to explore user's attitudes towards various interface features provided by existing Web directories. Among a variety of individual differences, cognitive style is a particularly important characteristic that influences the effectiveness of information seeking. Empirical results indicate that users' cognitive styles influence their reactions to the organization of subject categories, presentation of the results, and screen layout. We developed a set of design guidelines on the basis of these results, and propose a flexible interface that adopts these guidelines to accommodate the preferences of different cognitive style groups.
In response to the ever-increasing need of private and public organizations for lifelong learning, research in technology-enhanced learning has been geared towards the provision of systems that will better support those who pursue education at a number of different stages in their life, move between institutions while pursuing a course of study, or make use of resources and facilities from more than one institution/ organization. The new generation of mobile phones can support applications that would facilitate contextual learning through life. This chapter presents our approach to designing a mobile application for contextual lifelong learning and the prototype created. The application assists learners to access, compose and manage their learning in a range of institutional, informal and work-based settings by keeping them connected with content that is relevant to their studies, and its use is demonstrated in three lifelong learning scenarios.
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