Higher Education Teaching and Learning

The University of Tasmania is moving all its lectures online, and some students aren't happy about it.

The forced transition to online university learning will mean teaching practices will be permanently changed.

Feedback is a powerful construct in the design of quality online learning, and quantified dimensions of learners’ feedback experiences can be leverage

Prior to COVID-19, the faculty at Beijing Jiaotong University (BJTU), Weihai campus, did not teach or offer courses online. But BJTU, Weihai seized th

Successfully meeting the challenges of today’s learning technology landscape requires a more reflective, more critical perspective.

First, pedagogic strategies (the ones instructional designers talk about) are based on general learning theoretical concepts: Behaviorism, Instructivism, Cognitivism, Constructionism, Constructivism, Socio-constructivism, Situated learning, etc.  There’s often an overlap between these theories that explain how people learn and how one could bring people to learn. But I have seen over the years, we often put this under the one catch-all category, or banner of Constructivism, but it’s much more than that. It’s kind of like saying ‘Pedagogy’ when it’s so much more that that.

Second, design of strategies draws a lot from general pedagogical theory, but also from specialized research, such as understanding Heutagogy, Paragogy, Andragogy, etc. And these help us to understand how we will implement different technologies to meet our learning goals.

Third, educational technology has been a driving force to develop new strategies, with the basic assumption that educational technologies can facilitate pedagogical scenarios, but often we have tried to fit the pedagogy in after the fact, not as the reason for adopting a particular tool. It’s been kind of like putting the cart before the horse (please excuse my photoshop skills).

New educational technologies are creating mounting pressures on university educators according to the recent NMC Horizon Report: 2018 Higher Education Edition.

The report – developed with input from 71 experts from around the world – identifies six trends, six challenges, and six developments that may influence the uptake of education technologies in universities and their subsequent impact on teaching and learning.

The authors note that university lecturers have always been expected to structure information into a curriculum and make it interesting for students.

Quality assurance measures can help institutions successfully bridge the gap between emergency remote instruction and quality online learning.

Teaching in the 21st century involves trying new ways to engage students, but also a willingness to change innovative practices that didn’t pan out

Intrapreneurs are toiling away in every corner of campus, from the front of the classroom to the depths of the stacks. They are flipping classrooms and entire curricula. They are writing open educational resources to help learners cut down on life-crushing debt. They are linking together tools like Zoom and Padlet to allow learners to collaborate in real time across distance like so many of them do in their professional lives. They are building competency-based education programs, prior learning assessments and stackable microcredentials to recognize learner’s mastery of knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs) regardless of where the learning occurs.

It turns out online teaching and learning aren’t inherently better or worse than the face-to-face variety — just different.