Search results

Laurea UAS, Lohja campus, in Finland, has a learning environment, Yrityslabra, for business management and administration students who want to complete their studies by doing real-life business assignments. This chapter depicts the elements of a physical learning environment that have contributed to improving learning results on Laurea Lohja campus. The campus was challenged with addressing long studying and graduation times, loss of students to other campuses, difficulties in employment after graduation and lack of cooperation between Laurea and organizations. To solve these problems, Laurea Lohja created a learning environment called Yrityslabra (Business Lab). As a result of the continuing development work and material gathered (interviews, memos from teacher development meetings, student evaluation discussions, and written evaluations), five distinctive elements for a learning environment were found. These elements are: informal physical environment, informal social environment, teacher’s role as a mentor, personal learning process, and project management process. As the result of the new learning environment, students on Laurea Lohja campus, for example, have shorter graduation times, and there are less drop-outs in the middle of the studies. Students also find work in their own field of interest and do so right after graduation. Also, there is increased interest for the graduating students to further their studies at the master’s level.

This chapter illuminates the impact of providing informal learning experiences for students pursuing Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) teaching careers at a time when there is a considerable shortage of qualified teachers in America's urban centers. Preservice STEM teachers were provided with the opportunity to participate in a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant funded Noyce Internship Program prior to serving as counselors and teaching assistants in a STEM camp for underrepresented middle school students. Through the Noyce Internship Institute, participants were introduced to interactive sessions that model promising teaching practices including inquiry-based and project-based learning. This narrative inquiry examines the impact of these experiences on preservice STEM teachers' self-efficacy and highlights outcomes in three areas: increase of preservice teachers' confidence, classroom management, and strengthening their desire to teach STEM.

This chapter offers an insight into library provision and user engagement at a Secure College in Northern Ireland. It draws on findings from doctoral research carried out by Finlay (2020) which examined the role of the library in the learning experiences of people in prison. The case study described in this chapter took a multi-method qualitative approach to exploring engagement with the space, resources and informal learning programmes offered by the library. Acknowledging the many roles and functions of a prison library, this chapter focuses particularly on its relationship to formal and informal prisoner education. The strong educational ethos of Hydebank Wood College made it an ideal setting to explore the transformative educational possibilities of a well-managed and well-funded library. Following a description of the library and its services, the chapter will consider first steps into learning, informal and self-directed learning opportunities, library services in a divided society, and the importance of interpersonal relationships.

Since the completion of this doctoral research, a newly renovated Learning and Skills Centre has opened at Hydebank Wood College. This chapter includes findings from recent interviews with staff members which reveal the impetus for these changes and how the redesign of the library space has impacted upon the learning experiences of both the women and young men held at Hydebank. Taken alongside the doctoral findings, this discussion helps to show how the library space is valued within the institution and the significant role played by the library and library staff in the lives of incarcerated individuals.

Questionnaires have been devised to investigate informal learning in the workplace based on an analogy with approaches to studying in higher education. This chapter focuses attention on issues of theory by critically evaluating different models of the relationship between employees’ approaches to workplace learning and their perceptions of the workplace context. In addition, this chapter focuses attention on issues of method by critically evaluating two particular instruments that have been devised in order to measure employees’ approaches to workplace learning and their perceptions of the workplace context. We use data from an online survey in which the Approaches to Work Questionnaire and the Workplace Climate Questionnaire were administered to employees who were taking courses by distance learning with the UK Open University. Factor analyses confirmed that both questionnaires measured three distinct scales. Canonical correlation analysis showed that the employees’ scores on the two instruments shared 43% of their variance. Path analysis found evidence that variations in approaches to learning lead to variations in perceptions of the workplace climate but not for the converse relationship.

With over 4.5 million objects and specimens from both the natural and human worlds, Manchester Museum, part of The University of Manchester, is the largest University Museum in the United Kingdom. By virtue of its position within The University of Manchester, learning and research are central to Manchester Museum’s work. The Museum has a track-record of educational work, from the ‘Children’s Museum Club’, a travelling school loans service set up in 1954, to the founding of a dedicated Education Department in 1981. Throughout its long history, the Museum has always held objects and collections at the heart of its popular learning offer. More recently, the growth of the learning team led to the creation of a set of learning principles to underpin its work. These principles – that learning should be object-centred, dialogic, imaginative, personalised, multi-sensory, collaborative and exploratory – are all based on inquiry-based learning and aim to foster a research-based disposition in learners.

As a University Museum with engagement at its heart, Manchester Museum is now looking to transform the third floor of its building into a space themed entirely around ‘research’. This redevelopment, due to open in March 2015, will see the creation of a new visitor research space – ‘The Study’. This unique development will extend the successful inquiry-based learning approach used with schools and colleges, into a public research space for all visitors, with collections at its heart.

This chapter focuses on learning space design for students’ technology-rich lifestyles, in particular the evolution and future of learning spaces in the United States. JISC design principles – bold, supportive, future proof, creative, and enterprising – frame discussion in the chapter’s first section, “Planning for the learning spaces of tomorrow.” The section begins with pioneering work in the field and follows with recent learning spaces (both classrooms and informal learning environments) that seek new and innovative ways for students to collaborate. Examples clearly point to students’ need for continual access to flexible, tech-rich spaces that support their work and study habits.

The chapter’s second section, “The future of learning spaces: On-demand apps and Bring Your Own Technology (BYOT),” is a case study focused on software virtualization’s influence on learning space design at Indiana University. The section brings in examples from the University of South Florida and the University of Iowa, asserting that physical and virtual learning spaces must be designed to come together seamlessly, echoing students’ on-the-go lifestyles and constant connectedness. Ultimately, the section makes a bold contention about the evolution of learning spaces: Any space can become a tech-rich learning environment, if students have access to virtualized software.

Throughout, the chapter touches on compelling questions about meeting the learning needs of digital natives: How do we challenge traditional educational paradigms? Can we flip the classroom to further the potential of all learners? What is the role of collaboration in learning? Which models will energize and inspire learners and instructors of the future?

Learning through formal and informal experiences is critical for building content knowledge, pedagogical skills, and self-efficacy/confidence for preservice teachers. teachHOUSTON offers numerous teacher enhancement opportunities outside the teacher education courses which allows preservice teachers to connect to the real world which includes being able to relate to a diverse population of students and to understand how the course content can be related to them, their families, and communities in their everyday experiences. Through formal and informal experiences such as professional development workshops, discipline specific courses, research experiences, and internships, preservice teachers have the opportunity to engage in hands-on science activities they can use with their students, develop lessons, and gain knowledge on how to deliver this content while managing their classroom. This chapter will give an overview of the formal and informal experiences offered through teachHOUSTON with a highlight on the structure and content of the six week Noyce Internship Program which engaged interns as counselors and teaching assistants in a summer STEM camp for underserved middle school students and introduces the interns to interactive sessions that model promising practices for teaching.

Social networking platforms such as Facebook have infiltrated the lives of many students, and as such it is natural to consider how they can be effectively used to enhance learning. This chapter provides a comprehensive review of social networking in education from a design perspective. Social networking is defined based on Boyd & Ellison’s seminal definition of connected profiles, and is distinguished from social media for the purposes of investigation. Facebook, Edmodo, and other social networking platforms are briefly described, before summarizing the wide variety of social networking usage reported in the research literature. The various benefits of social networking in education are distilled from the literature, including their capacity to facilitate community building, collaboration, reflection, and expedient access to learning. Issues surrounding the educational use of social networking are also organized into themes, for instance privacy concerns, distraction, cyber-safety, and technical constraints. The implications of findings from the social networking literature are synthesized into learning design and implementation recommendations. The chapter concludes with a discussion of open questions and areas for further investigation.

Due to a change in higher education and adult education ideas and practices globally that have become more learner-centered, higher education is undergoing a transformation at a rate never before seen. Education has also evolved into a lifetime endeavor as the importance of higher education and adult learning has grown. In light of the fact that it offers guidance on how people can find purpose in their lives, transformative learning theory has a prominent position in higher education and adult education. By critically examining their presumptions and expectations and updating them to support higher education students' successful learning, educators can transform their theory and practice of instruction through active and transformative learning. Adapting to the changing capacities brought on by digitization, technological advancements, growing technological connectivity, global market expansion, mobility and migration, and workplace diversity is becoming more and more difficult for higher education institutions. The idea of active and transformative learning and transformative learning strategies are discussed in detail in this chapter to help readers understand their importance and function in effective teaching and learning in the transforming world of higher education. This chapter's major contribution to Active and Transformative Learning: Digital Transformation in Education is the provision of a comprehensive guide and strategy on how to successfully incorporate digital technologies into the teaching and learning process in order to improve student engagement, knowledge acquisition, and the growth of critical thinking skills.

Meetings are conducted by increasingly age-diverse participant groups as the workforces in most industrialized economies are aging due to demographic change. There are at least three reasons why meetings constitute a particularly interesting environment to study intergenerational learning processes, defined as individuals’ joint construction of knowledge through an exchange of information with one or more individuals from different age groups. First, meetings allow us to observe a wide variety of interactions that may foster or inhibit intergenerational learning. Second, the interactions taking place in meetings reflect general organizational practices as well as social exchange and age norms. As such, meetings offer a view through the magnifying glass at the age-inclusive or age-discriminating organizational culture which is interwoven with the engagement of different generations in intergenerational learning processes. Third, organizational members use meetings as an arena for strategic interactions to negotiate their current and future status by positioning themselves in relation to their colleagues through social comparisons. This chapter particularly focuses on the latter topic and develops a conceptual model outlining the motivational and emotional coˇnsequences as well as antecedents that link social comparison processes in meetings to intergenerational learning outcomes of participants from different age groups.