Themed Paper Presentations: Agency and New Learning
Using the "Tech Start-Up" Concept to Train, Engage, and Inform Students
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Stephanie Coopman, Ted Coopman
Research suggests that incorporating social media into the college classroom can promote student collaboration and connections with the larger community. Integrating an experiential learning approach creates a space for student engagement, expertise development, application, and reflection. Students become their own agents of learning as they assume the role of informed and critical social media producers. Undergraduate and graduate students were enrolled in an upper-division online activity course organized as a technology company start up at a public university in the U.S. Students participated in an academic department's social media team, publishing a weekly newsletter and producing and curating content for multiple social media outlets designed for public and university audiences, a website for the department's students, and a career portal. Students found the entrepreneurial approach to the team both liberating and challenging as they engaged with each other and the communities in which they were embedded. Students came to recognize and embrace the multifaceted nature and ubiquity of learning opportunities. In addition, they developed key transferable skills, including effective writing, social media literacy, critical thinking, teamwork, problem solving, decision making, self-management, and leadership. Future steps include applying the model to additional outreach projects, as with developing stronger ties with alumni, and developing a toolkit for other university units interested in creating similar course structures that bring a start-up experiential learning framework to social media production.
Student Characteristics, Design Features and Outcomes in Blended Learning at The Maldives National University
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Niuma Mohamed
This paper investigates the effectiveness of a blended learning environment through analyzing the relationship between student characteristics/background, design features and learning outcomes, followed by identifying the factors (among the learner characteristics and blended learning design features) of blended learning effectiveness leading to quality blended learning in higher education environment. A survey was administered to purposively selected 75 students (who will be taking blended classes during the academic year 2018) from 12 outreach centres located in different atolls in the Maldives to gather data on student characteristics/background, design features and learning outcomes. The final semester evaluation results were used as a measure for performance as an outcome. The online self-regulatory learning questionnaire for data on learner self-regulation, the intrinsic motivation inventory for data on intrinsic motivation and other self-developed instruments for measuring the other constructs were used. Pearson correlation was used to identify the factors of blended learning effectiveness. The results showed that blended learning design features (technology quality, Moodle & resources, and face-to-face support) and learner characteristics/backgrounds (attitudes and self-regulation) predicted student satisfaction as an outcome. The results indicate that some of the learner characteristics/backgrounds and design features are significant predictors for student learning outcomes in blended learning.
Pedagogies for Sustainability: How Should Educators Respond to Environmental Degradation?
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Humphreys
Global environmental degradation is the greatest public welfare problem of our age. It calls for a public education endeavour in its broadest sense, one involving not just the academy and students but the global public. Ecopedagogy offers the prospect of a new curriculum, a radical approach to education that resists those political and economic structures that generate environmental problems while working with social movements to generate an alternative politics. It challenges those engaged in environmental education to rethink how they teach agency to students and what the role of the educator should be in teaching citizens to think through how they should respond to environmental degradation. This paper explores the relevance of the concept of ecopedagogy as a teaching model. It presents some examples of teaching on agency and environmental issues from Open University environment modules that encourage students to evaluate what their role should be in responding to global environmental degradation.
The Capstone Experience: Five Principles for a Connected Curriculum
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mitch Goodwin
This paper’s focus is the redesign and re-imagining of a selection of final-year capstone units in the Bachelor of Arts program at the University of Melbourne. We describe the five principles that were our blueprint for reinterpreting the capstone as a sequence of authentic, reflective, creative, celebratory and networked experiences. Further, we view connectedness as having broader social and industrial implications beyond just purely disciplinary knowledge. Therefore, we see a need for capstone subjects to incorporate authentic experiences that emphasise creativity, social mindedness and critical awareness. We designed the Arts Capstone Experience Project through a reflective practice over time rather than in advance as a prescriptive roadmap. Our priorities are also informed by the Faculty's strategic emphasis on active learning, critical thinking and leadership, and, more recently, student wellbeing. Capstone experiences can be the most challenging yet satisfying experiences in a degree because performance is tested not only before teaching staff and peers but also in public spheres, both familiar and newly acquired. Students reaching the capstone are expected to have a solid theoretical grasp of their chosen discipline and, ideally, to be capable of using their learning critically and creatively as they move into new realms. Sharing insights into the challenges and successes of the curriculum (re)design process, we hope to embolden other teachers and learning designers to pursue change in their own programs. We believe strongly that connected, productive and meaningful capstone experiences are vital for all students emerging into an increasingly complex and rapidly changing world.
