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This chapter critically examines the implications of different pedagogical perspectives, approaches, and strategies for the design and implementation of technology-enhanced learning. The key tenets of different pedagogical perspectives are unpacked, including behaviorism, cognitivism, constructivism, socio-constructivism, and connectivism, with reference to how technology can be used to instantiate them. A range of different pedagogical approaches, including collaborative learning, problem-based learning, inquiry-based learning, constructionist learning, design-based learning, and games-based learning are discussed in relation to the use of technology and the previously identified pedagogical perspectives. Pedagogical strategies at a more instantaneous level are also considered, as are the goals of technology-enhanced learning in terms of promoting authentic and meaningful learning. The critical role of the teacher when applying pedagogies using technology, as well as associated issues, are discussed throughout.

The chapters in this book focus on using different types of multimodal, multimedia, and transmedia technologies to create technology-rich learning environments that have the potential to enable higher levels of academic motivation, participation, and engagement. Developments in relatively low cost and abundant digital technologies, coupled with the improvements in contemporary learning theories and pedagogical practices, are quickly enhancing and transforming the way we teach and learn in the 21st century and changing our understanding of what it means to teach and learn in a highly web-based multimedia world. At the individual, group, and institutional levels, these technologies are being used in a variety of ways for a variety of purposes. In teaching and learning, they offer promising and innovative ways to create more interesting and enjoyable academic environments and offer more meaningful and authentic ways to better engage the senses of learners. Mayer (1997) states that multimedia-based teaching and learning offers many benefits to educators (e.g., a variety of instructional options, more effective learning, and more efficient use of instructor time especially for very large classes). This is based on the core multimedia principle posited by Mayer (2005): people tend to learn more deeply with both words and images than from words alone.

In January 2016, Georgia Tech launched a campus-wide academic initiative (“Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain”) aimed at preparing undergraduate students in all majors to use their disciplinary knowledge and skills to contribute to the major societal challenge of creating sustainable communities. The initiative calls for faculty members from all six Georgia Tech colleges to develop courses and co-curricular opportunities that will help students learn about sustainability and community engagement and hone their skills by engaging in real-world projects with nonprofit, community, government, and business partners. Affiliated courses address various aspects of the Center’s sustainable communities framework, which presents sustainability as an integrated system connecting environment, economy, and society. This chapter reports on one engineering instructor’s ongoing efforts that bring sustainability into the engineering classroom through sociotechnical project-based learning. This cornerstone design course is one of more than 100 Center-affiliated courses currently offered; the full set of Center-affiliated courses enrolls over 5,000 students per year across all six colleges. The sustainability activities introduced in the freshman design course pertain particularly to the Center’s vision that all graduates of the institute, a majority of whom will graduate with engineering degrees, are able to contribute to the creation of sustainable communities and to understand the impact of their professional practice on the communities in which they work. A situated knowledge and learning pedagogical theory is used in the Center-affiliated course, where concept, activity, and context are involved in student learning to produce useable robust knowledge. The sociotechnical project-based teaching model with contextualized design problems is used to engage students throughout the course by utilizing computer-aided-design problems that incorporate sustainability within both individual and team projects. In this chapter, the authors present the pedagogical approaches to learning, strategies, and challenges for implementation and assessment of intervention activities, and data analyses of both student reflection data and pre- and post-survey data.

To describe how a digital storytelling project used in preservice elementary literacy methods courses expands the notion of video reflection and offers an intentional zone of contact in which preservice teachers create their own idealized vision of their future classroom.

Using the multimodal text as a point of departure, each researcher used a different analytical method to approach the data, allowing for examination of different aspects of the product and process of digital storytelling. These analysis methods include theoretically driven analysis based upon theories of Bakhtin (1981) and Vygotsky (1978), metaphor analysis, and performative analysis. This chapter describes the findings from each analytic lens, as well as the affordances of the multiple research lenses.

The results of the study shed light on how preservice teachers constructed a dialogue around their beliefs about themselves as teachers and visions of their future classrooms. The space between the real and the imagined provided a critical writing space where preservice teachers were able to vision their evolving identity and make visible their negotiation of intellectual, social, cultural, and institutional discourses they encountered. These artfully communicated stories engaged preservice teachers in creating new meanings, practices, and experiences as they explored possibilities and imagined themselves in their future classrooms. In these compositions, the preservice teachers maintained, disrupted, and/or reinvented classroom contexts to accommodate their own understandings of literacy teaching and learning.

The zones of contact that were consciously created in this digital storytelling assignment allowed teacher educators to provide the cognitive dissonance which research shows makes teacher beliefs more amenable. Additionally, asking preservice teachers to engage in the type of analysis described in this chapter may prove to be a useful avenue for helping to make the negotiation that took place during the composing of the digital stories more explicit for the preservice teachers.

In this ever changing world, managing our ecosystem and creating a sustainable future seems to be one of the biggest challenges facing humanity. This challenge is further enhanced by ignorance or apathy of people toward the concept of sustainability. In most cases, students who are our future generation are left without any insight, commitment or even understanding their role and responsibility toward creating any meaningful beliefs and actions related to sustainability. Sustainability education is becoming crucial, mainly for young generation so that they have an understanding of concepts such as economic prosperity, resource equity, energy uses, and environmental health and concerns. While educating them on sustainability begins in institutions of education, it is important that sustainability education is well entrenched in the curriculum and everyday practice of their lives. This chapter introduces the volume series on sustainability where authors from different parts of the world narrate their own experience of imbibing sustainability into their curriculum and teaching sustainability to students.

This chapter acknowledges the current dearth of direct evidence of student learning and discusses the limited value academic and co-curricular transcripts (CCTs) provided to students, educators, and employers.

This chapter studies the myriad outlets in which students acquire useful academic and non-academic skills outside of the grade point system. Disadvantages in the arbitration and secular nature of the common transcript are also addressed.

Exploring and responding to the concerns from a diverse chorus of higher education constituents and calls for increased accountability and improved student learning in higher education, this chapter proposes the development of an outcomes-based CCT, as an extension of the traditional CCT, to take advantage of the rich and numerous learning opportunities within the living laboratory of co-curricular experiences where students repeatedly demonstrate and hone their skills and competencies throughout their collegiate experience.

The chapter discusses a number of examples and models of what such a program might look like and provides insights and suggestions as to how it could be implemented thoughtfully and effectively. It also explores several of the benefits and challenges associated with implementing an outcomes-based CCT.

Active and transformative learning (ATL) challenges the new era of teaching and learning in higher education. In this chapter a systematic approach to ATL theories and methodologies is provided. Authors provide a unique methodological framework for the integration of active learning practices in modern higher education curricula. This chapter also provides an integrated context for the overall discussion of the phenomenon in the volume. The recent arrivals of new disruptive artificial intelligence-enabled technologies such as OpenAI, ChatGPT, DeepAI and others are only few aspects of a new challenging era for the teaching, learning, innovation and sustainability in the higher education.

The European Forum for Enhanced Collaboration in Teaching (EFFECT, 2015–2019) (EFFECT, 2019), a project co-financed by the European Commission, through its Erasmus+ programme, has been exploring effective methods for university teachers’ development at the European level, including pedagogical staff development “modules” to support inclusivity and citizenship in teaching and learning practice. Throughout the project and in this chapter, the authors have taken “inclusivity” to convey an attitude and appreciation for principles which inform “inclusion” as a practice – in the context of reflective and reflexive practice the words become largely interchangeable.

The way academic staff teach is of critical importance in any reform designed to enhance inclusion and citizenship in higher education. Conveying these values-related topics in an academic context hardly lends itself to a traditional pedagogical training model. Promoting inclusion means stimulating discussion, challenging stereotypes and unconscious biases, as well as improving educational and social frameworks. The Change Laboratory methodology (Engeström, 2001) was chosen for the pedagogical staff development workshops under EFFECT, with a view to engaging teaching staff in a deeper reflection about the topics and about their teaching practice. Change Laboratory is an intervention-research methodology that aims at reconceptualizing activity: it intends to provoke authentic reactions, responses and disagreements among the participants and provides opportunity for them to work together to reimagine their activities and to identify “concrete” solutions that address persisting issues in their practice. The theory takes a broad conceptualization of “activity” and “practice,” which is not specific to the education sector or the “classroom.” The Change Laboratory is a methodology designed to support the “expansive learning cycle” described by Engeström and as such can be understood as a theory of change which the EFFECT project team applied to a pan-European higher education learning and teaching context.

In 2017, the project team designed and implemented four physical, face-to-face pedagogical staff development workshops on inclusivity and citizenship skills based on this methodology, attended by over 100 participants from across Europe. In 2018, the workshop model was adapted to a virtual learning environment and three online sessions on inclusivity and citizenship skills for higher education teaching staff were offered.

The pedagogical staff development workshops enabled participants to use open reflective questions to provoke discussion about the challenges faced in their own learning and teaching contexts, think about their pedagogical practices and identify their unconscious biases. Most of the participants rated the workshops as very good and innovative, and considered the methodology an effective vehicle for promoting meaningful open discussion.

In this chapter, the authors reflect on the design, implementation and lessons learnt from the pedagogical staff development workshops on inclusivity and citizenship skills. The authors propose a set of recommendations for individual teaching staff and institutional leadership to consider when addressing continuous professional development for inclusivity and citizenship.

This chapter explores the use of Lesson Study (LS) as a strategy for co-constructing pedagogical knowledge and draws on data from a series of interviews with student teachers. Sixteen student teachers, undertaking a postgraduate teacher training program in higher education in England, engaged in LS as an official assessment of their ability to jointly plan, deliver, and evaluate a lesson. LS is thus seen to promote an intense collaborative working relationship between participating student teachers that engenders fresh opportunities for learning. It is argued, then, that this approach can challenge the prevalent model of individually led professional development by facilitating a space for the co-construction of pedagogical knowledge. LS is also explored for its potential to bridge the theory-practice divide by enabling participant student teachers to generate theory from practice.