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2015: ASCILITE 2015 Conference Proceedings: Globally connected, digitally enabled

 

 

 

 

The proceedings of the 2015 ASCILITE Conference: Globally connected, digitally enabled

T. Reiners, B.R. von Konsky, D. Gibson, V. Chang, L. Irving, & K. Clarke (Eds.)

Globally connected, digitally enabled. Proceedings ASCILITE 2015 Perth

Curtin University, Perth, Australia

November 29 - December 2, 2015

ASCILITE2015 Conference Website https://2015conference.ascilite.org/

Published: 27 November 2015

ASCILITE Conference - Full Papers

  • The Conceived, the Perceived and the Lived: Issues with 21st Century Learning and Teaching

    Karin Barac

    A bespoke course design framework was implemented in an Australian university to help academics convert face-to-face courses to blended or online offerings in response to increasing demand for universities to offer 21st century learning environments. While the design framework was grounded in evidence-based approaches that exemplify quality delivery, these course designs have had variable reactions from students in their implementation. As such, a student dimension to the evaluation of the framework was added and the findings from the initial pilot are reported here. It has been found that students may not be as ready for 21st century learning and teaching practices as current rhetoric implies. This paper begins to formulate a theory to help resolve this through an exploration of ideas through the lens of Lefebvre’s production of space (1991).

    Read article: The Conceived, the Perceived and the Lived: Issues with 21st Century Learning and Teaching

  • Learning design for science teacher training and educational development

    Ole Bjælde, Michael Caspersen, Mikkel Godsk, Rikke Hougaard, Annika Lindberg

    This paper presents the impact and perception of two initiatives at the Faculty of Science and Technology, Aarhus University: the teacher training module ‘Digital Learning Design’ (DiLD) for assistant professors and postdocs, and the STREAM learning design model and toolkit for enhancing and transforming modules. Both DiLD and the STREAM model have proven to be effective and scalable approaches to encourage educators across all career steps to embrace the potentials of educational technology in science higher education. Moreover, the transformed modules have resulted in higher student satisfaction, increased flexibility in time, pace, and place, and in some cases also improved grades, pass rates and/or feedback.

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  • Tensions and turning points: exploring teacher decision-making in a complex eLearning environment: Exploring teacher decision-making in a complex eLearning environment

    Scott Bradey

    Understanding how university teachers experience and respond to imperatives to integrate digital technologies into their curricula and teaching practice is essential for addressing the gap between the potential of such technologies to articulate with institutional objectives and their uptake by university teachers. This article reports on a study in a regional Australian university focused on capturing the complex ways that individual and contextual factors can interact to support or impede the integration of technology into teaching practice. The lens of cultural-historical activity theory is used to describe and interpret the complex activity of designing and teaching a blended-mode course from the perspective of an experienced lecturer. An analytical focus on emergent tensions and the identification of turning points as markers of critical encounters requiring the lecturer to make decisions and take action provides an insight into potential transformations in their thinking and practice.

    Read article: Tensions and turning points: exploring teacher decision-making in a complex eLearning environment: Exploring teacher decision-making in a complex eLearning environment

  • Navigate Me: Maximising student potential via online support

    Colin Clark, Jessica Andreacchio, Rita Kusevskis-Hayes, Jessie Lui, Shauna Perry, Ethan Taylor

    This paper reports on the development of NavigateMe, an online tool currently being trialled at the University of New South Wales. The tool is a student-centred initiative designed to support students in accessing university-wide, faculty-based and external information and support services to improve and enhance their learning and university life. Based on responses provided, an action plan is produced that allows students to reflect on their current situation and be directed to specific services and information according to their individual needs and interest at any point in their student life. The tool was developed through a collaborative and iterative process in consultation with staff, students and faculties. The tool is in the strategic plan approved by the DVC(A) and it has received significant funding from the university.

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  • Designing an authentic professional development cMOOC

    Thomas Cochrane, Vickel Narayan, Victorio Burcio-Martin, Amanda Lees, Kate Diesfeld

    While there has been a lot of hype surrounding the potential of MOOCs to transform access to education, the reality of completion rates and participant profiles has tempered this hype such that within the hype cycle MOOCs have already hit the trough of disillusionment. However we argue that embedding cMOOC design within an educational design research methodology can enable the design of authentic professional development model that can indeed demonstrate transformation in pedagogical practice. Our design model links mobile learning theory, practice, and critical reflection within an EDR methodology to create an authentic experience for participating lecturers.

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  • Investigating the effectiveness of an ecological approach to learning design in a first year mathematics for engineering unit

    Iwona Czaplinski

    This paper reports on the results of a project aimed at creating a research informed, pedagogically reliable, technology-enhanced learning and teaching environment that would foster engagement with learning. A first-year mathematics for engineering unit offered at a large, metropolitan Australian university provides the context for this research. As part of the project, the unit was redesigned using a framework that employed flexible, modular, connected e-learning and teaching experiences. The researchers, interested in an ecological perspective on educational processes, grounded the redesign principles in probabilistic learning design (Kirschner et al., 2004). The effectiveness of the redesigned environment was assessed through the lens of the notion of affordance (Gibson, 1977,1979, Greeno, 1994, Good, 2007). A qualitative analysis of the questionnaire distributed to students at the end of the teaching period provided insight into factors impacting on the successful creation of an environment that encourages complex, multidimensional and multilayered interactions conducive to learning.

    Read article: Investigating the effectiveness of an ecological approach to learning design in a first year mathematics for engineering unit

  • Community volunteers in collaborative OER development

    Irwin DeVries

    The purpose of this comparative case study is to explore and examine the practices of open course design and development community volunteers undertaken in the Open Education Resource universitas (OERu) network, an international partnership of member post-secondary institutions. With a focus on the design and development of an OER-based university-level course, the study identifies and describes features of an OERu open design and development volunteer community and compares and contrasts it to a similar community in the free and open source software (FOSS) development field.

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  • A ‘participant first’ approach to designing for collaborative group work in MOOCs

    Kulari Lokuge Dona, Janet Gregory

    This paper discusses the learning design of two Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), the Carpe Diem MOOC and the Autism MOOC, both of which were designed and delivered by Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. The authors propose a set of principles to guide the design and development of MOOCs where the intent is to facilitate interaction and peer support between participants. They present details of how these principles were enacted in the design of the Carpe Diem MOOC and the Autism MOOC, particularly in the design of groups, and suggest that these principles can be viewed as a ‘participant first’ approach to design. Key elements of this approach include accessibility, navigation, clarity and consistency, purposeful use of tools and resources and effective support to enable participants to engage easily in collaborative work in MOOC environments.

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  • Building graduate attributes using student-generated screencasts

    Jessica Katherine Frawley, Laurel Evelyn Dyson, Jonathan Tyler, James Wakefield

    There has been an increasing emphasis in recent years on developing the “soft” skills, or graduate attributes, that students need once they finish their university studies in addition to the specific domain knowledge of their discipline. This paper describes an innovative approach to developing graduate attributes through the introduction of an optional assignment in which first-year accounting students designed and developed screencasts explaining key concepts to their peers. Screencasts have been used in recent years for teaching but the approach of students, rather than teachers, making screencasts is far less common. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of student surveys showed that, in addition to improving their accounting knowledge and providing a fun and different way of learning accounting, the assignment contributed to the development and expression of a number of graduate attributes. These included the students’ ability to communicate ideas to others and skills in multimedia, creativity, teamwork and self-directed learning.

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  • Self-organising maps and student retention: Understanding multi-faceted drivers

    David Gibson, Matthew Ambrose, Matthew Gardner

    Student retention is an increasingly important yet complex issue facing universities. Improving retention performance is part of a multidimensional and deeply nested system of relationships with multiple hypothesised drivers of attrition at various sample sizes, population clusters and timescales. This paper reports on the use of a self organising data technique, Kohonen’s Self Organising Map, to explore the potential retention drivers in a large undergraduate student population in Western Australia over a six-year period. The study applied the self-organizing method to two point-in-time data sets separated by 18 months and was able to identify a number of distinct attrition behaviour profiles appropriate for creating new tailored intervention.

    Read article: Self-organising maps and student retention: Understanding multi-faceted drivers

  • New applications, new global audiences: Educators repurposing and reusing 3D virtual and immersive learning resources

    Sue Gregory, Brent Gregory, Denise Wood, Judy O'Connell, Scott Grant, Mathew Hillier, Des Butler, Yvonne Masters, Frederick Stokes-Thompson, Marcus McDonald, Sasha Nikolic, David Ellis, Tom Kerr, Sarah de Freitas, Helen Farley, Stefan Schutt, Jenny Sim, Belma Gaukrodger, Lisa Jacka, Jo Doyle, Phil Blyth, Deborah Corder, Torsten Reiners, Dale Linegar, Merle Hearns, Robert Cox, Jay Jay Jegathesan, Suku Sukunesan, Kim Flintoff, Leah Irving

    There continues to be strong interest among established, experienced academic users of 3D virtual environments for their sustained educational use. Consistent with global trends, they plan to further develop and optimise existing applications, reuse skills and experiences gained to develop new applications, and to share and reuse existing virtual resources. This is against a background of varied support from institutions, colleagues, students, funding bodies and also changing understanding and awareness of virtual environments and virtual reality by the general community as a result of consumer developments such as the popularity of multi-user online role playing amongst both children and adults, and the acquisition of technologies by companies with deeply entrenched technologies. At the same time, the ongoing development and availability of new multiuser virtual environment platforms, associated peripherals and virtual reality technologies promise new and exciting opportunities for educators to collaborate with researchers on a global scale, while also exploring the affordances of these technologies for enhancing the learning outcomes for an increasingly diverse and distributed student population.

    Read article: New applications, new global audiences: Educators repurposing and reusing 3D virtual and immersive learning resources

  • Conditions for successful technology enabled learning

    Michael Henderson, Glenn Finger, Kevin Larkin, Vicky Smart, Rachel Aston, Shu-Hua Chao

    This paper reports on the findings of a 16 month project funded by the Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching. The project utilized an iterative mixed method design to investigate (a) what digital technologies are used and valued by students and educators for learning, and (b) the different factors within the ‘ecology’ of the university that contribute to these successful uses of digital technology. In total 2838 students and staff across two Australian universities and a further 114 leaders from all 39 Australian universities participated in the project. Through large scale surveys and in depth case studies thirteen ‘conditions for success’ were identified that appeared to stimulate, support, and/or sustain specific success stories. These conditions relate to different aspects of the ‘ecology’ of higher education – from individual skills and attitudes through to institutional policymaking. This paper describes the conditions for success, and concludes with challenges to the higher education sector.

    Read article: Conditions for successful technology enabled learning

  • To type or handwrite: Students' experience across six e-Exam trials

    Mathew Hillier

    This paper reports on students' experience of e-Exams as collected via surveys undertaken in conjunction with a series of optional live trials of an open source, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) based e-Exam system in six mid-semester undergraduate examinations during 2014 at The University of Queensland, Australia. A set of surveys were conducted prior and following each exam that covered ease of use, technical issues, comfort, confidence, time, typing versus handwriting prowess. Responses to Likert items were compared between those students who elected to type and those that handwrote their exam. Insights as to which issues proved significant for students will prove useful to institutions looking to implement computerised exams.

    Read article: To type or handwrite: Students' experience across six e-Exam trials

Showing 1–13 of 124 articles