More and more, social technologies and virtual work methods are facilitating new ways of crossing boundaries in professional development and international collaborations. This paper examines the peer development of higher education teachers through the experiences of the IVBM project (International Virtual Benchmarking, 2009-2010. The e-benchmarking process in which teachers applied authentic learning criteria (Herrington & Oliver, 2000
Higher education institutions are challenged to develop innovative educational solutions to meet the competence development requirements set by the emerging future. This qualitative case study aims to identify the future competences considered important for higher education students to acquire during their studies and how the development of these competences can be supported with learning analytics. Reflection on these issues is based on three dimensions (subject development, object, and social environment) of future competences. A special emphasis is placed on the views of 19 teaching professionals gathered from group interviews and analyzed through a qualitative content analysis. The findings indicate that subject development-related future competences, such as reflective competence, self-awareness and self-management, learning literacy, and personal agency and self-efficacy were strongly identified as necessary future competences. The potential of learning analytics to support their development was also widely recognized as it provides means to reflect on learning and competence development and increase one’s self-awareness of strengths and weaknesses. In addition, learning analytics was considered to promote goal-orientation, metacognition and learning to learn, active engagement as well as learning confidence. To deal with complex topics and tasks, students should also acquire object-related competences, such as changeability and digital competence. In addition, they need cooperation and communication competence as well as a developmental mindset to operate successfully in social environments. The use of learning analytics to support most of these object and social environment-related competences was considered promising as it enables the wide exploitation of digital tools and systems, the analysis and visualization of social interactions, and the formation of purposeful learning groups and communal development practices. However, concrete ways of applying learning analytics were largely unacknowledged. This study provides useful insights on the relationship of important future competences and learning analytics while expanding on previous research and conceptual modelling. The findings support professionals working at higher education institutions in facilitating successful conditions for the development of future competences and in advancing purposeful use of learning analytics.
In this paper we examine the kinds of mentoring models and practices employed in Finnish higher education and working-life to support continuous skill development, focusing especially on the working-life-centric digital mentoring of students. The theme interviews at 11 HE institutions and four enterprises were conducted as part of an eAMK project. The results show that classical and new implementations are employed in mentoring in HE and the workplace. While traditional pair mentoring continues to be the most widely used mentoring model, group and cross mentoring are increasingly utilised. Likewise, an agile combination of different mentoring models is identified as a feature of emerging mentoring practices. Digitalisation is increasingly part of the examined mentoring implementations and in HE especially trials are carried out to develop digital mentoring. Emerging learning ecosystems call for mentoring that is agile, adaptable and digitally accessible. We also examine the viable features and development needs of the presented mentoring models, especially from the perspective of digital devices.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.