Wing Shui 吳永水 Ng

Critical Design Factors of Developing a High-quality Educational Website: Perspectives of Pre-service Teachers

In the design of a high-quality educational website, little research can be found to consider teachers’ point of views in the literature. Teachers are important stake-holders in the educational field. To achieve a more holistic discussion on the issue, a group of 70 pre-service teachers were invited to express their opinions on critical design factors of developing a high-quality website. Results show that web designers should put high emphasis to ease users’ browsing experience by providing a good web navigation system. The educational website should also be appealing by appropriately manipulating multimedia elements including color, graphics, fonts and typography. The multimedia learning principles should further be applied to enhance the educational purposes of the website. Among various areas of web design principles, audio was considered as less important in the design of an educational website.

Enhancing Teacher Assessment Literacy Using a Blended Deep Learning Approach.

Assessment literacy refers to educators’ understanding of the principles and practices of sound assessment. It has been considered as a critical professional requirement in educational system since it to a great extent affects students’ learning. However, research has shown that both pre-service and in-service teachers are weak in assessment literacy and lack confidence to implement effective assessment. The main reasons of unsatisfactory assessment literacy among teachers are the limited pre-service assessment education and a lack of research on the pedagogies on assessment education. To enrich effective practice of assessment literacy education, a blended deep learning approach for educating teacher assessment literacy was applied in this study. The strategy combined a face-to-face component for content-based teaching and an online learning component for process-based teaching. The online learning component with the focus on peer assessment engaged participants in a deep learning of assessment. Participants expressed that they had obtained an in-depth understanding on assessment literacy and particularly on peer assessment. They had developed better confidence and are willing to implement peer assessment in their future teaching. This study provides a case of using a blended learning approach on assessment education for reference.