Lori Lockyer

Handbook of Research on Learning Design and Learning Objects: Issues, Applications and Technologies

Designing effective learning experiences is a significant challenge for educators. While there is a wide range of expert advice available for technology supported teaching and learning, translating theories and good practice principles into practice can be a daunting task. The Handbook of Research on Learning Design and Learning Objects: Issues, Applications and Technologies provides an overview of current research and development activity in the area of learning designs in terms of teaching perspective and technological advances. This essential reference brings together xxx studies that encompass the latest research of leaders in the field to provide an up-to-date and complete picture of the subject.

Integrating Social Networking Technologies in Education: A Case Study of a Formal Learning Environment

The concept of Internet-facilitated social networking is not new - we have evidence of the development of the concept and the technologies over decades. However, Web 2.0 technologies and the emergence of social networking sites has expanded accessibility and use beyond levels that may have been thought imaginable just two or three years ago. These developments have been accompanied with calls to integrate the new technologies and experiences of social networks within formal education. Yet, there is limited research on the potential or outcomes of such initiatives. This paper presents a case study that examines the technology and experience in a formal education context.

Informing Pedagogical Action: Aligning Learning Analytics With Learning Design

This article considers the developing field of learning analytics and argues that to move from small-scale practice to broad scale applicability, there is a need to establish a contextual framework that helps teachers interpret the information that analytics provides. The article presents learning design as a form of documentation of pedagogical intent that can provide the context for making sense of diverse sets of analytic data. We investigate one example of learning design to explore how broad categories of analytics—which we call checkpoint and process analytics—can inform the interpretation of outcomes from a learning design and facilitate pedagogical action.

Technological diversity: An investigation of students' technology use in everyday life and academic study

Generational generalisations regarding how students interact with technology have been used in recent times to prompt calls for radical changes to the delivery of teaching in higher education. This article reports on a study aimed to investigate first‐year students’ technology access and usage in two contexts of use: everyday life and academic study. A survey was delivered to first‐year students across seven faculties of an Australian university during the second semester of the 2008 academic year. A total of 470 respondents met the criteria for this study. The findings suggest a wide diversity of usage of technologies with the usage rates of technology in academic study being generally lower than those in everyday life. These findings indicated that generational generalisations are not useful in informing the design of learning and teaching in higher education. However, there are questions regarding reliability of current survey‐based methods to examine students’ technology use and the level of diversity discovered across both contexts of use. This suggests that further in‐depth research into how students shape technology to suit their lives is required to gain a greater understanding of how technology can effectively support teaching and learning.

A study of teachers' integration of interactive whiteboards into four Australian primary school classrooms

Interactive whiteboards (IWBs) have become increasingly available in Australian primary schools. However, little is known about how they are being integrated by teachers into their teaching practices. This paper reports on a study of the introduction of IWBs into an Australian public primary school. Data were collected for one day per week over two school terms, involving four classroom teachers. Data collected included a log of time allocation, lesson observations and a series of interviews with the teachers. The study found that participants used IWBs to a varying extent over the course of a teaching week, with lessons that integrated the use of IWBs tending to focus on literacy and numeracy. The technology was readily incorporated into the classroom environment by teachers and considered easy to use. Teachers adopted a range of pedagogical approaches when using the IWBs and these approaches were consistent with those they usually employed in their teaching.

Ict in higher education: evaluating outcomes for health education

This paper presents an investigation that examined and compared the effectiveness of collaborative tutorial activities carried out in both web-based and face-to-face learning environments within an undergraduate health education subject. Effectiveness of the different learning environments was measured in terms of observed learning outcomes, analysis of learner interactions and reported perceptions of the learners regarding their experience. Results demonstrated that web-based environments, with embedded collaborative activities, can effectively foster rich learning experiences that result in attaining positive learning outcomes.

Measuring effectiveness of health education in a Web-based learning environment: A preliminary report

ABSTRACT Driven by claims of efficacy, flexibility and resource effectiveness, higher education is increasingly utilising the Web as an instructional tool. The claims for pedagogical effectiveness are often just that – claims — and appear not to have been proven in the reality of subject presentation and evaluation. Thus, it is necessary to examine assumptions regarding the benefits of Web‐based instruction in terms of effectiveness. This article discusses aspects of an investigation which examined and compared the effectiveness of HIV/AIDS related collaborative tutorial activities carried out in both a Web‐based learning environment and a face‐to‐face class situation within an undergraduate health education subject. Effectiveness of the pedagogical strategy and the different learning environments were measured in terms of observed learning outcomes and reported perceptions of the learners regarding their learning experience. Preliminary results based on measured learning outcomes related to the subject m...

Learning designs and learning analytics

Government and institutionally-driven reforms focused on quality teaching and learning in universities emphasize the importance of developing replicable, scalable teaching approaches that can be evaluated. In this context, learning design and learning analytics are two fields of research that may help university teachers design quality learning experiences for their students, evaluate how students are learning within that intended learning context and support personalized learning experiences for students. Learning Designs are ways of describing an educational experience such that it can be applied across a range of disciplinary contexts. Learning analytics offers new approaches to investigating the data associated with a learners experience. This paper explores the relationship between learning designs and learning analytics.

A conceptual framework linking learning design with learning analytics

In this paper we present a learning analytics conceptual framework that supports enquiry-based evaluation of learning designs. The dimensions of the proposed framework emerged from a review of existing analytics tools, the analysis of interviews with teachers, and user scenarios to understand what types of analytics would be useful in evaluating a learning activity in relation to pedagogical intent. The proposed framework incorporates various types of analytics, with the teacher playing a key role in bringing context to the analysis and making decisions on the feedback provided to students as well as the scaffolding and adaptation of the learning design. The framework consists of five dimensions: temporal analytics, tool-specific analytics, cohort dynamics, comparative analytics and contingency. Specific metrics and visualisations are defined for each dimension of the conceptual framework. Finally the development of a tool that partially implements the conceptual framework is discussed.

Understanding the design context for Australian university teachers: implications for the future of learning design

Based on the premise that providing support for university teachers in designing for their teaching will ultimately improve the quality of student learning outcomes, recent interest in the development of support tools and strategies has gained momentum. This article reports on a study that examined the context in which Australian university teachers design in order to understand what role design support tools and strategies could play. In‐depth interviews were conducted with 30 academics across 16 Australian universities. The findings suggest that most Australian university teachers have a high degree of flexibility in their design decisions suggesting that opportunities exist for learning design tools and strategies to be adopted.