Hanna Teräs

Collaborative online professional development for teachers in higher education

Enhancing teaching quality has become a priority for many universities. The need for high-quality professional development for university teachers is therefore crucial. Earlier research has indicated that isolated workshops often fail to result in significant changes in teaching practice. It has been suggested that the desired transformation requires changes in perceptions of educators, not merely learning new techniques. Reflective, collaborative long-term professional development that is integrated in the everyday activities of the educators has proven to be a promising approach; however, research that addresses how this can be implemented in online learning is scarce. This study investigates the learning experiences of seven educators who participated in a collaborative, authentic e-learning-based online professional development programme. Narrative analysis is used for examining the experience of the participants during the programme and the perceived impact on their professional growth. The results suggest that while collaborative online professional development can be challenging due to the different learning needs, expectations and preferences of the participants, it can potentially lead to significant professional growth. Instead of accommodating different learning preferences, emphasis should be given to supporting the development of self-regulation skills and strengthening the facilitation of collaborative learning.

Self-guided Exploration of Virtual Learning Spaces

Virtual learning spaces provide the opportunity to create authentic, immersive and high-fidelity experiences for learners; often enhanced with new technology to increase the interaction and perception with the learning space. Instead of creating mock-ups in classrooms, educators are able to recreate a controlled replica of the real world, i.e. scenarios and situations can be created that are difficult or impossible to achieve otherwise. However, an unrestricted and unsupervised exploration imposes challenges to monitor the learner, offer supportive guidance and provide formative feedback. Preliminary studies demonstrated that different approaches are able to engage the learner, create an intrinsic motivation and therefore provide curiosity to drive the self-paced learning; yet the use-case-based exploration is not transferred to a framework including a comprehensive tool for education. In this chapter, we demonstrate the prototype of the nDiVE framework, which combines authentic education, gamification, emerging technology and design principles used in the game industry to create an engaging learning space for students and workers.