New TEL Environments for Vocational Education – Teacher’s Instructional Perspective

Abstract

Modern vocational education is increasingly taking place in new technology-enhanced learning (TEL) settings. On the one hand, vocational education can benefit from the opportunities of technological development. On the other hand, such technologies may create new challenges for teachers. Therefore, there is a particular need to pay more attention to the dialogic pedagogical approaches in which teaching should be seen as a dialogical practice involving teacher-student interactions that create contextual opportunities for teachers to trigger students' learning in new TEL settings. This article reports on an exploratory study about the different ways in which teachers' instructional activities (via teacher-student interactions) are manifested in different emerging TEL contexts. Three case studies were selected for analysis in three different TEL settings. The results of this qualitative study indicate that 'teacher-led' approaches were applied in a technology-enhanced classroom context, 'teacher-student shared collaboration activities' were actively used in a virtual 3D-game setting and 'teacher-student(s)-supervisor(s) joint learning activities' were used to empower mobile-supported work-based learning. Based on the findings raised from these three empirical studies, future prospects for teachers' activities that facilitate vocational learning can be developed. Additionally, our findings may be helpful in developing professional tools for teachers to better enable learning in new TEL settings.

Inquiry-based learning and E-learning: how to serve high and low achievers

“…Teachers primarily focus on organizing (or help organize) learning resources, running collaborative activities among students and making use of currently existing curriculum-sets (lessons) (Thousand, Villa, & Nevin, 2006). There is no doubt that all these tasks were demanding for schoolteachers (Hämäläinen & Cattaneo, 2015;TALIS, 2014). It is however this kind of competence-oriented, inquiry-based, lifelong learning experience, in particular sharing (knowledge) domain-and (education) grade-specific practices and solutions, that helps facilitate interaction between teachers or students and "knowledge scaffolds" in peer communities (Valanides & Angeli, 2008;Wu, Lee, Chang, & Liang, 2013).…”

The ‘Erfahrraum’: a pedagogical model for designing educational technologies in dual vocational systems

“…By comparing their own artefacts to those of their classmates, they had an opportunity to work on 'augmenting' and 'clustering' processes, under the guidance of the teacher. Beside the usability of the system and educational questions regarding how to 10 make the best use of the system at school (Hämäläinen and Cattaneo 2015), issues related to learning outcomes have been examined in the present project. Results indicate that mobile devices were generally considered by apprentices as easy-to-use and useful (Dehler Zufferey et al 2011;Motta, Cattaneo, and Gurtner 2013), especially to connect experiences across locations (Cattaneo, Motta, and 15 Gurtner 2015).…”

The State-of-the-Art of Collaborative Technologies for Initial Vocational Education: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Most studies focus only on one particular country (25 papers), which take country-specificities into account. Only one paper includes multiple countries, but not as a comparison (Hämäläinen & Cattaneo, 2015).…”

“…On the other hand, technology can be used to support collaboration, together with the application and practice of the abovementioned practical intelligence skills and attitudes. Specific models to exploit both these affordances of technology in vocational education have been recently elaborated (Hämäläinen & Cattaneo, 2015).…”