Lina Pelliccione

Promoting the scholarship of teaching through reflective e‐portfolios in teacher education

This study focuses on the goal of enhancing student reflection and learning with the key objective being to determine whether a structured reflective tool can enhance students’ ability to engage in a reflective cycle. A case study approach was adopted involving three cohorts of first year teacher education students in an Australian university over three years. The study found that the reflective tool assisted students to structure their reflections in a more cohesive manner, that without such a guide the majority of the students’ comments were descriptive and their reflective comment tended to be at a superficial level.

Differing Student Views of Online Learning Modes across Two Programs in an Australian University.

Purpose – Aims to investigate reactions to online delivery, student perceptions of the rates and depth of participation, and levels of engagement with the learning process in a Western Australian University.Design/methodology/approach – The sample for this study comprised 108 students who were enrolled in both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. An interpretative method was adopted using a case study approach, with groups of internal and external students within one education department. This method was more appropriate than a more quantitative approach.Findings – The results indicated that, while the students were technically competent overall, issues associated with equity and access varied between the groups and also between students enrolled in the same units. The sample had also re‐conceptualised the notion of “personal” which moved beyond simple physical proximity to enable the students to create their own community of learners.Originality/value – Addresses the challenge for universities and in...

Educational Design for MOOCs: Design Considerations for Technology-Supported Learning at Large Scale

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a recent trend in the field of online learning. Their potential distinctive educational innovation is attributed mainly to their “Massiveness” and “Openness” dimensions. These two characteristics introduce new educational design considerations for accommodating the challenging demands of “Massiveness” and “Openness.” This is particularly pressing, since commonly recognized “shortcomings” of MOOCs, such as high participant drop-out rates and low levels of participant engagement and motivation, have been associated to the educational design of MOOCs. Within this context, this chapter discusses issues related with the educational design of MOOCs with emphasis to cultural and motivational issues, presents an analysis of existing educational design frameworks and/or guidelines for MOOCs and, finally, proposes an ADDIE-based educational design considerations framework (EDCF) for MOOCs, which incorporate the “Massiveness” and “Openness” requirements.

VET in Schools: The adoption of National Training Packages in a secondary school setting

Growing pressure is being placed on schools, as students, employers and governments look at the economic, demographic and vocational environments of the present, and expect schools to adequately prepare students for an ever widening post-school vocational future. A major factor contributing to the lack of adoption of any new innovations is the entrenched attitudes of the teaching staff and a reluctance to change. In differing forms, Vocational Education and Training programs have been circling the change process in Australian schools since 1930, yet still are in the adoption and implementation phase rather than having become institutionalised and embedded in the life of schools. It is clear that the way teachers construct meaning for innovations is a major factor in whether innovations are institutionalised in schools. However, this paper also investigates the influences of organisational culture, infrastructure, leadership and policy on the adoption of National Training Packages and their components in a West Australian case-study school.

Implementing Teaching Model Templates for supporting Flipped Classroom-enhanced STEM Education in Moodle

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education has been associated with the need for cultivating students’ inquiry and problem-solving skills by exploiting appropriate student-centered teaching approaches. At the same time, the Flipped Classroom (FC) model has been proposed as a blended learning means to enhance such teaching approaches by effectively reallocating their learning activity distribution towards maximizing student engagement and scaffolding by the teachers. In order to reap the benefits of FC-enhanced teaching approaches when designing and delivering their STEM learning interventions, however, teachers (especially novices) could benefit from having access to “generic” teaching model templates that they can adjust in their specific needs. In this context, we have introduced a set of FC-enhanced teaching model templates focusing on two widely used STEM-appropriate teaching models, i.e., the Inquiry- and Problem-based teaching models. Capitalizing on this, the contribution of this chapter is the presentation of the implementations of the aforementioned teaching templates in Moodle, a widely used open source Learning Management System. The anticipated added value of the proposed adaptable Moodle templates is to provide support to (novice) STEM teachers, not only in their educational design (through the use of the proposed FC-enhanced teaching model templates), but also in the delivery of their lessons and/or educational scenarios.

Evaluation of Lesson Plan Authoring Tools Based on an Educational Design Representation Model for Lesson Plans

Lesson plans (LPs) are a commonly used method for capturing and disseminating teaching practice within online teachers’ communities. Nevertheless, there are no commonly accepted and appropriately designed models for representing LPs. This shortcoming is also mirrored in the existing LP authoring tools, with each of them accommodating a different subset of the overall LP elements. To address this issue, we have proposed an educational Design-driven LP Representation Metadata Model (LPRM) which (a) comprises and extends a range of existing dimensions to model LPs and (b) is structured based on the ADDIE Educational Design Model. Capitalizing on this, the contribution of this chapter is the critical evaluation of a set of widely used LP authoring tools in terms of the level of accommodation they offer for the elements of the proposed LPRM. The findings of evaluation are used to highlight shortcomings and to propose guidelines for driving future implementations of LP authoring tools, towards enhancing the capacity of teachers to robustly capture and share their teaching practice.