Emerging technologies (ETs) will most likely have a strong impact on education (starting with higher education), just like they have already had in so many economic and social areas. This paper is based on the results obtained in the project “My Future Colleague Robot”, an initiative that aimed to improve the competence of university teaching staff regarding the introduction of ETs in teaching practices at university level. In this paper, we identified the strengths and weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that are related to the adoption in higher education of the combination of two ETs: robotics together with artificial intelligence (AI). Additionally, we analyzed the perceptions of university-level teaching staff about the potential of introducing ETs in education. The empirical data presented here were collected using written essays from 18 university teachers and students. Deductive and inductive approaches with thematic analysis were used for the data analysis. The findings support the idea that previous ET-related experience can support positive attitudes and the implementations of ETs in university teaching; in this study, university teachers had optimistic expectations towards ETs, accepting them as part of teaching practice development, while discussion about the negative effects of ETs was negligible.
The interest towards using telepresence robots in a variety of educational contexts is growing, as they have a great potential to enhance the educational experience of remote learners and provide support for teachers. This paper describes a study, examining the perception of Georgian university personnel about the use of telepresence robots in education. This exploratory research aimed to obtain evidence-based information on how the personnel (16 persons) from eight Georgian universities perceived the telepresence robots’ role in enhancing learning and teaching, and what challenges, benefits, opportunities, weaknesses and threats would characterise these robots. The results of the study revealed that the university personnel perceived telepresence robots to have a great potential to enhance educational activities. In addition, the participants indicated the major challenges, benefits, opportunities, weaknesses and threats, regarding integrating telepresence robotics into the teaching and learning in Georgia. Recommendations for future research are also presented.
Integration of technology in schools rests on effective teacher education programmes that help teachers create new teaching and learning methods and adopt them for classroom use. Social learning processes play a key role in this, but there is a lack of understanding of their role in technology adoption and in evidencing them in teacher education programmes. Using the knowledge appropriation model, we propose a self-report questionnaire instrument to evidence knowledge creation and learning practices during training. With a sample of N = 109 in-service teachers participating in the Teacher Innovation Laboratory, a teacher professional development programme that is built around school−university co-creation partnerships, we demonstrate the instrument to be reliable and to differentiate between groups who completed different programmes. The instrument predicted intended adoption of technology-enhanced learning methods beyond individual level constructs, highlighting the important role that social practices play for the eventual adoption of technologies in the classroom.
Adoption of technologies in secondary schools is still behind expectations. Investments are often made without a clear educational objective and teachers are not sufficiently involved in the process of creating new teaching and learning methods that would utilize this technology. We contribute to the emerging perspective of learning design by proposing a co-creation-based teacher development program that should lead to more effective pedagogical methods for technology-enhanced learning (TEL) and their adoption in the classroom. Using the Knowledge Appropriation Model, we first analyze social practices of how teachers and university researchers co-create materials and lesson plans for technology-enhanced math lessons in two cases involving N=42 teachers. Building on these results, we propose a professional teacher development program to institutionalize these practices and validate it in another group of N=21 teachers. Our results show that the program enhances knowledge creation, scaffolding and appropriation, and leads to higher expected adoption when meaningful learning designs for TEL are created in equal collaboration of experts from different disciplines. We discuss the necessity to perceive the technology as just one of the components of a fully developed pedagogical-didactical framework.
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