Exploring teachers' perceptions on different CSCL script editing tools

This chapter introduces the use of diagrammatic representations of learning flow patterns as a means of visualizing refinable IMS Learning Design (IMS LD) templates. It argues that the incorporation of pattern-based IMS LD templates in authoring tools, which graphically guide users to create their own learning designs, offers a solution to the problem of IMS LD constructs not being familiar to educators because of its technical nature and text-based notation. Furthermore, this solution facilitates the reuse of good practices formulated as patterns, permitting a design process that promotes potentially effective results. This issue is especially important in collaborative learning designs, in which elicitations of desired social interactions are planned beforehand. Based on these ideas, the chapter also presents Collage, an IMS LD editor which provides templates based on Collaborative Learning Flow Patterns (CLFPs), and includes an example drawn from a real scenario that show the feasibility and usefulness of the approach.

An increasing number of tools are available to support the learning design process at different levels and from different perspectives. However, this variety can make it difficult for researchers and teachers to assess the tool that is best suited to their objectives and contexts as learning designers. Several of the tools are presented elsewhere in this issue. In this article, the aforementioned tools are used as lenses to view the same learning design narrative – an inquiry-based learning lesson on healthy eating aimed at secondary-school students – from different perspectives, in a manner inspired by the plot structure of Kurosawa’s film “Rashomon”. In modelling the lesson on five tools, we uncovered similarities and differences in relation to the challenges posed by modelling a particular learning scenario, the ease of implementation of the computer-interpretable products’ output by the tools and their different target audiences and pedagogical specialities. This comparative analysis thus illustrates some of the current underlying issues and challenges in the field of Learning Design.Keywords: learning design; authoring tools; inquiry learning; personal inquiry(Published: 16 September 2013)Citation: Research in Learning Technology Supplement 2013, 21: 20057 - http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v21i0.20057

Over the past ten years, a lot of advances have been made in both the learning design and learning analytics research communities in terms of research outputs. On the other hand, these advances have not made visible impact on the everyday practices of the key stakeholders they aim to serve: teachers and learners. This paper argues that to advance both fields and to connect them into an iterative cycle of continuous improvement, we need a learning design pattern language in the Alexandrian tradition to guide learning design practice, and to connect designers’ intuitive formulation of questions about learning processes and outcomes with evidence-based questions and operationalizable questions. It further describes the pattern language and the online tool, Learning Design Studio that the authors have developed to serve as an organically extensible language and a technology platform to support learning design, and inter-professional collaboration among learning designer and learning analytics communities.

The use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in Blended education has rapidly increased in the 21st century. As a result, there is a growing interest in understanding to what extent innovative and interactive educational tools and technologies can be used for designing learning content to support Blended Learning. These tools are used in different courses, however, there is no possibility of tracking whether students are obtaining the maximum benefit. Learning Analytic tools can be used for tracking purposes. However, the data obtained from these tools alone will not offer benefits for improving Learning Designs. Therefore, it is important to build a synergy between Learning Analytics and Learning Design where it is possible to improve learner performance, engagement, interactions, and satisfaction. Accumulated research in these collaborative learning technologies has proposed and evaluated multiple models, frameworks, and implementation tools that engage learners in Blended Learning Environments. However, it is unclear to what extent the synergy between Learning Analytics and Learning Design can support Blended Learning. This paper contributes with a literature review that aims at providing an answer to this by offering insights about the context of use, technologies, types of activities, and collaboration mechanisms developed that can be used to improve Blended Learning in higher education.

This chapter details some of the different learning design models and collaboration styles that promote effective partnerships between classroom teachers and school librarians. It evaluates types of lesson designs that lend themselves most easily to teacher-librarian collaborative partnerships. It reviews partner and student activities that reflect on design elements of delivery and internalization of concepts and skills by students. The decision makers behind the technologies, those who engineer, program, record, demonstrate, and design the computing resources that are ubiquitous in learning today, are the architects for student learning. In these ways, collaborative partnerships between librarians and teachers of all grades and subjects can result in improved student performance.

ABSTRACTThe research field of Learning Design (LD) has been active for some time now, but several questions remain open for the scientific community. In particular, the article tackles issues that have been core concerns in LD over the years: (1) how to support the different phases of the LD process; (2) what representations should be used in the various steps; and (3) to what extent should digital LD tools be structured or flexible, either guiding the teacher/designer or leaving them free to pursue their own design path and style. The authors investigated these open questions through an LD tool called the Pedagogical Planner. This tool has been evaluated in authentic contexts with the goal of providing input for the ongoing debate. Evaluation has focused on the perceptions and actual usage by teachers, generating significant evaluative data to be used as a spur for further reflection on LD.

Good research design and good learning design in Technology Enhanced Language Learning (TELL) are not always compatible. One of the most problematical parts of TELL research design is the length of the researched intervention. This conceptual paper explores the implications of the Novelty Effect, which can be a negative issue for researchers, but may also provide a positive motivational affordance for teachers and learning designers. The authors present a model, based on the academic literature, of the Novelty Effect over time in TELL and suggest ways in which teachers and learning designers can take advantage of the initial boost in motivation resulting from novel use of learning technology as an affordance, promoting positive outcomes for learning objectives.

La Trobe University, like many Australian universities, states that it values honest academic endeavour (Academic Integrity Policy 2011), and it can provide examples of good teaching practice in the areas of academic integrity, proper acknowledgment and avoiding plagiarism. Rather than relying on the chance that individuals will just develop good practices, this university has recently taken a more systematic approach to teaching students and staff about academic integrity and providing resources to ensure a consistent message and application of acknowledgment conventions. This systematic approach was made possible through the University’s curriculum reform program, the Design for Learning. By positioning academic integrity and acknowledgment as issues of curriculum, La Trobe has created an educational opportunity and reduced the focus on punishment. Furthermore, the mandate to deliver academic integrity programmes to all commencing students and staff and to provide consistent guidelines supports the development of awareness that academic integrity is a whole of university responsibility – everybody’s responsibility. This paper reviews one university’s progress towards aligning academic integrity, with the intention to inform those who are interested in developing an integrated academic integrity education.

The practical study about a design of collaborative learning in chemistry class

List of international hydrological decade stations of the world. Vol. 1: Quadrilingual: English/French/Spanish/Russian. 1969. 148 p. $ 12; £ 3.60; 48 F. (Studies and reports in hydrology, 6.) Unesco, Paris

An intelligent content strategy for the enterprise

With the growing availability and wide distribution of low-cost, high-performance 3D imaging sensors, the image analysis community has witnessed an increased demand for solutions to the challenges of activity recognition and person identification. We propose an integrated framework, based on graph signal processing, that simultaneously performs both tasks using a single set of features. The novelty of our approach is based on the fact that the set of features used for activity recognition accommodates person identification without additional computation. The analysis is based on the extracted structure-invariant graph (skeleton). The Laplacian of the skeleton is used both to identify the person and recognize the performed activity. While person identification is achieved directly from the analysis of the Laplacian, activity recognition is obtained after transformation, into the graph spectral domain, of the vectorized form of the skeletal joints 3D coordinates. Feature vectors for activity recognition are then derived, in this domain, from the covariance matrices evaluated over fixed-length sequential video segments. Both classification tasks are implemented using linear support vector machines (SVM). When applied to real activity datasets, our approach shows an improved performance over the existing state-of-the-art.

The rich and varied nature of the information with which to characterise signatures gives rise to a number of issues which must be addressed for a viable signature verification system to be implemented. However, signature verification solutions do not generally make effective use of these multiple sources of information and may miss the opportunity to implement a sophisticated signature verification system utilising a diverse range of sources of description for signatures. In order to achieve a successful combination of information sources and types, the problem of combining disparate forms of signature information, including both continuous and discrete features, and parametric and signal-based methods of signature representation must be addressed. The utilisation of a number of different sources of identifying information is commonly described in terms of multiple experts, where each individual expert is defined as a single set of features or classifier type and the overall system is formed by a combination of these experts. The combination of different sources of information about a signature, in the form of different feature sets and classification methods, provides an opportunity to develop an improved level of verification compared to the use of a single set of descriptors. In order to investigate this multiple expert architecture empirically, eleven experts are considered, formed from both static and dynamic signature data, with the intention of using complementary sources of information about a signature. (4 pages)

Blended learning is defined as an educational model or a way of teaching that combines in-person education with online education. In recent years, due to its great potential, this type of teaching applied to higher education has aroused great interest on the part of professionals and academics. This growing interest has been reflected in the rapid growth in the number of publications on blended learning and higher education. This article seeks to contribute to the knowledge base by presenting an integrated overview of this growing body of literature, and to this end the authors use bibliometric techniques. As a basis for the analysis, 2,477 relevant articles in the Scopus database were selected. The descriptive results obtained show rapid growth in the number of articles published over the years, a dominance of publications associated with developing and emerging countries, and the leading role of social sciences. An analysis of the co-occurrence of terms allows us to establish four areas of interest: 1) Covid-19 and the challenges and opportunities it poses, 2) the effectiveness and performance of blended learning, 3) the organization and design of blended learning, and 4) the technological tools and forms of delivery of blended learning. An analysis of the overlay visualization of terms makes it possible to establish the evolution of the topics of interest in the research over the years. Initially, interest focused on issues relating to the organization and design of blended learning. Currently, interest is focused on Covid-19 and the challenges it poses.

In the field of teaching and learning, education or learning design is currently receiving considerable attention in the literature and in discussions amongst academics and practitioners. Different methods for capturing and sharing designs that incorporate pedagogically sound practices have been researched and promoted, including design patterns. Despite the numerous documented benefits of using design patterns in education, they have failed to become widely established within the teaching and learning community. In this paper the authors discuss the genesis of design patterns in education and outline the action research journey which resulted in the selection of design patterns as their preferred method to document and share effective learning design practice. They also review the barriers to design pattern usage and consider the question of whether design patterns are still relevant in the current discipline of teaching and learning. Finally, they present a way forward for design patterns and their integration into the world of professional learning.