Themed Paper Presentations: Online Pedagogies and Lessons for Learning
Students’ Perceptions of the Usefulness of the Flipped Classroom Pedagogy in an Open Distance e-Learning University
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Micheal M Van Wyk
In recent decades, the student-centered learning approach has shown significant learning gains and has reformed teaching styles in many higher education institutions globally. In moving away from the lecture model, many educators are paying attention to the Flipped Classroom Pedagogy. The flipped classroom promotes an environment that increases the interaction between the students and teachers and engages the students in learning through application and practice. This study explores to what extent does a Flipped Classroom Pedagogy as an approach support and enhance Economics student teachers’ information literacy competency and critical thinking skills in learning to teach a teacher education course at an open distance learning university. This study used an explanatory quantitative research design. A closed structured questionnaire, Flipped Classroom Pedagogy Questionnaire was used to collect data. A purposive sampling of Post Graduate Certificate of Education and Baccaluareus Education student teachers, who were learning to teach economics education in open distance elearning (ODeL) environments were selected and participated in this study. Data was collected consisting of student teachers’ views of FCP to enhance their self-directive learning. Findings indicated that the FCP as an e-learning tool is a student-centered approach, which needs careful planning and preparation of activities for students to take responsibility for their own learning and that the teacher played a crucial role in decision making to out-of-class and in-class activities to enhance self-directed learning. To accomplish self-directed learning teachers must ensure to support and motivate students to come prepared for the class
TBLT to Improve Interpersonal Communication Skills of Beginning Chinese
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Fan Zeng
The development of beginning learners’ interpersonal communication skills in Modern Standard Chinese/Hanyu may face different opportunities and challenges in a synchronous online learning environment. To define key terms, first, as a mode of distance education, synchronous online classes are delivered via audio-graphic platforms, which often carry functions of speaking, video cameras, pre-loaded images, texts, and various tools and indicators. Second, the phrase “interpersonal communication” in this review refers to two-way communication taking place in a synchronous online learning environment, that includes not only oral communication in the second language (L2), but also other forms of spontaneous responses to exchange meaning or construct interpersonal relationships, such as using body language, texts and pictures. This aspect of language skill has been specifically addressed by task-based language teaching (TBLT), a language teaching approach that emphasizes the design of tasks in order to enhance learners’ communication skills in second language acquisition (SLA). Last, beginning learners of the target language, are defined according to the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), and the NCSSFL-ACTFL Can Do Statements. This literature review will present and analyse existing literatures on four focusing areas and synthesise findings to offer suggestions on teaching practices.
Spanish on Your Time: The Asynchronous Online Language Classroom
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Matthew Barrile
When it comes to teaching world languages, conventional wisdom says we should provide as many contact hours as possible. After all, how will students produce output in the target language if they do not have a chance to congregate with their peers and practice it? With e-learning we face additional challenges: student schedules (especially if our students are adult distance learners) and the lack of a physical space both inhibit the traditional notion of "contact hour" and put into question the success of building classroom community. However, these should be viewed as assets; I argue that an asynchronous format for the online language course has numerous benefits to effectuate a complete shift in learning agency: the asynchronous online language course makes for a student-centered format in which the learners are in charge of their own knowledge. I discuss design tips and best practices for an asynchronous online language course, ways to ensure that students are aware of self-regulated learning, and what tools and activities can be implemented so that students build community as well as excel in the development of their oral skills and listening comprehension in the target language. The asynchronous online classroom is always available and extremely flexible; it enables, in effect, students to study Spanish on their time while still being able to interact and engage with their peers on a daily basis.
Lessons from Graduate Study of Complexity Performance of Industrial Problem Domain Algorithm
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Emanuel Sylvester Grant
Graduate studies have outcomes that bridge the gap between the directed learning at the undergraduate level and the world of professional research. At the graduate-level of education two outcomes are desirable; the students acquire depth of knowledge in the academic topics covered and connection between the academic topic and real world applications of those academic topics. One such topic is that of the analysis of algorithms to address efficiency of their application in specific problem domains. In a recent graduate course on the analysis of algorithms, teams of students were assigned a project to research an industrial problem application. The project required an analysis of the algorithms and tools used in the problem domain. This report documents one team’s effort with this project. The purpose of this report is to identify the benefit of assigning project of this nature and predict evolving strategies in graduate pedagogy. The open source Hadoop is the implementation of the paradigm Map-Reduce for large-scale data processing. In this paper, the algorithm’s word count, the number of words in a document or passage of text, were chosen since Map-Reduce is considered the most common platform to run this type of algorithms. The experiments showed interesting results and encourage more comparisons and improvement to enhance the algorithm performance.
