Search results

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the use of blogs as part of a formative assessment practice, to report how reflective peer‐to‐peer learning can be designed and provided in online higher education.

The research relies on a qualitative approach. The empirical setting comprised an online higher education course in which 23 students were enrolled. All students wrote individual blogs, and the analysis was done using all postings and comments from the blogs. For the analysis the ICE (Ideas, Connections, and Extension) three level classification model was used.

The designed blog exercise turned into an informal and formative type of assessment that scaffolds the students' learning, providing a reflective peer‐to‐peer technology‐enhanced learning design.

The study is limited to one online higher education course. Additional research on educational technology and e‐assessment is needed. In particular, research on the informed design of technology‐enhanced learning practices characterized by formative e‐assessment and the role of the designed use of blogs in the facilitating and enhancement of the students' peer‐to‐peer learning.

The paper demonstrates that the design and use of blogs embrace a formative assessment approach that cultivates the students' reflective peer‐to‐peer learning.

The paper provides insight into the designed use of blogs in online higher education together with the potential in formative assessment for learning. The ICE three‐level classification model provides a dynamic possibility to analyze online higher educational practices.

Prior to 2020, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Library's research services spanned multiple service points. Multiple locations were staffed by Library Student Research Assistants (LSRAs) and each location was supervised independently. While efforts to increase collaboration had been underway, much of the work and services remained siloed and often duplicated training and service hours.

With the onset of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), UCLA Library rapidly transitioned from entirely in-person to entirely online services. With multiple service points pivoting, UCLA was redundant to have multiple online desks providing Zoom appointments and that quickly became apparent. Moreover, transitioning in-person student work to remote work was paramount to providing both normal services to users and allowing LSRAs to keep jobs during a time of uncertainty and insecurity.

While the authors' original consolidation of services and implementation of shared supervision was a result of the pandemic and primarily involved online services, the authors have maintained this shared approach and collaborative vision in returning to in-person services. For the past year, the authors have offered shared in-person (at two library locations) and online services. As subject-specific library locations begin to reopen their desks, the authors continue to identify ways to leverage shared supervision and a robust referral model for those on-site services while negotiating student staffing and the need for both general and subject-specific services.

The authors present a novel approach to peer-to-peer teaching and learning and research services and shared student worker supervision with services coordinated across multiple locations and disciplines within a large academic library serving a large student population.

Customised executive education, designed for and delivered to individual client companies by Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), differs in important ways from award-bearing courses. One area in which these differences are surprisingly extensive is in the use of technology. We explore the impact of technology-enhanced learning (TEL) on course design, delivery and evaluation of customised executive education. In doing so, we contrast this form of learning with MOOCs, which use TEL in a different way, for a different audience.

We begin with the ‘two-client’ problem. In customised executive programmes, course design is done collaboratively between the HEI and the corporate client, reflecting the particular learning needs of the selected participants as perceived by the commissioning client. We find that the level of TEL in any programme will reflect the learning needs, and also the level of TEL sophistication, of both client and academics.

We then consider the successful integration of TEL into customised executive education. TEL can enrich a course great, but will also mean a loss of academic control, as a significant amount of the learning will be peer-to-peer, and much of the information-gathering can take place outside the classroom.

We conclude with the outcomes and success measures of customised executive education. The institutional disruption of TEL to the HEI is considerable, as their traditional business model is based on rewarding academics for research and for classroom-hours. This needs to be rethought where the classroom element is reduced, but there is constant online interaction with participants.

Vlogging constitutes a potential advertising channel for branded products. This paper aims to investigate the role and antecedents of the learning value, i.e. substantive (vs nonsubstantive) information processing, in consumers’ purchase behavior online.

The authors used a mixed-methods approach including qualitative data from 25 interviews, and two quantitative studies (a field study on 4,560 members of a vlogging learning community and a replication survey on 118 participants in a different context).

The results highlight the predominant role played by perceived learning due to the characteristics of the online environment. The authors further identify the components of vlog tutorials’ learning value. The findings distinguish structured from destructured learning content depending on consumers’ level of expertise.

The findings recommend developing the learning value for consumers. Managers should provide micro learning unit tutorials for expert consumers and complete structured learning units for novices based on core and additional learning components.

In contrast with traditional entertainment videos, tutorials provide added learning value that affects purchase behaviors to a greater extent. The results present in learning components that are recommended when developing learning tutorials.

This chapter provides an overview of the space reimagining that has occurred in a mid-size library that serves both the life and social sciences at a large research university. Projects are introduced that have transformed physical and virtual spaces from preprogrammed areas and services designed to serve librarian-defined needs to an open and flexible architecture that better incorporates and facilitates the projects, ideas, and interest-driven learning initiated by users. As we move from “library as place” to “library as platform” (Bennett, 2003; Weinberger, 2012), the library becomes a central location for users to connect with and learn from one another, create and remix, display and discuss their work, and capture and preserve community knowledge.

The authors examine various initiatives in the library to demonstrate the role of library space. Each initiative is framed as a case study to illustrate how librarians have responded to user needs and the impact that these changes have had on management in libraries.

The change in focus to “library as platform” requires flexible and flat library management, additional staff roles, and changing paradigms of library space and skills.

This chapter adds to the body of case studies examining what the library of the future could look like in practice as well as theory.

Using a navigational metaphor, this chapter introduces readers to the sometimes stormy seas of implementing new learning technologies into a course, especially those that have pre-existing design flaws (lack of rigor, accountability, content and time constraints, etc.). In addition to presenting what we feel are some best practices in using iOS devices, we analyze nearly 600 students’ reactions to these devices related to how they were used in a 100 level survey style course. For every student who told us that they were “awesome” or helped them “learn and discover new things through [the] course,” there were multiple students who felt that “they are damaging [the] learning experience because they are distracting.” The central argument of this chapter is that without engaging in a dialectic course (re)design process that puts the affordances of the learning technology in conversation with classic principles of instructional design, the utility of adding iOS devices will be limited at best and distracting at worst. The instructors in the course described here did use the devices in a variety of ways and many students were satisfied with the learning experience. However, for others, the combination of the course being too easy and too forgiving along with putting the Internet into students’ hands was a recipe for incivility and off-task uses of technology.

This paper aims to explore the usage of academic social networking sites (ASNSs) among the research scholars in Central Universities of Delhi, India.

A structured questionnaire was designed and personally distributed among 200 research scholars in Central Universities in Delhi in May 2016. Of this, 180 filled-in questionnaires were personally collected by the investigator, eliciting a response rate of 90 per cent.

Findings of the study reveals that research scholars have knowledge of ASNSs. ResearchGate and Academia are the most used ASNSs among research scholars. ResearchGate is used the most for connecting to other research scholars, and Academia is used for sharing and following research. Additionally, ASNSs help research scholars in research and learning and to share research ideas and experience. Finally, research scholars find ASNSs time-consuming and have cited data security as main concern for using academic social networks.

The findings of the study show that potential uses of ASNSs in Indian libraries are slow compared to the libraries of developed countries and some of the developing countries. It is suggested that universities under study may realize the benefits of ASNSs and incorporate these tools in their websites to enhance faster transfer and retrieval of information.

The results also stress upon the responsibility of research supervisors to accord knowledge of ASNSs among research scholars and encourage them to join and use ASNSs efficiently and effectively for building professional connections and collaborations in their research area.

The study is significant because it represents one of the earliest works to shed the light on the current level of use of SNSs and ASNSs by research scholars in Central Universities in Delhi, which are in primitive nature. They provide space for self-expression, research updates, expert advice, connecting with fellow scholars, creating and joining events and discussions, presenting their views on a particular topic, finding collaboration on projects, finding jobs and much more.

ASNSs have further promoted the open source movement. The paper apprises the academic stakeholders about the unique features, adoption, acceptability and usage of ASNSs for research work, exchange of information and collaborations, so that more productive and quality research is produced. The findings will also guide research scholars to find popular ASNSs, so that they can build more academic connections.

The pandemic-induced global shift to remote learning calls for rethinking the foundations of design for higher education. This watershed moment in global health and human interaction has accelerated changes in higher education that were long emergent and amplified specific deficiencies and strengths in pedagogical models, causing institutions to reevaluate current structures and operations of learning and campus life as they question their vision and purpose. Since physical space has largely been taken out of the equation of university life, it is evident that fresh design research related to this new normal is required.

This qualitative research study speculates on new possibilities for the future of campus, based upon insights and inferences gained from one-on-one interviews with faculty and students in multiple countries about their personal experiences with the sudden shift to the virtual classroom. The longer the mode of physical distancing stretched through Spring 2020, these phone and web-enabled dialogues – first with faculty (teachers) and then with students (learners) – lead to a deeper, more nuanced understanding of how the notion of the campus for higher education was itself morphing in ways expected and unexpected.

At the heart of this study lies the question – Has COVID-19 killed the campus? This study suggests that it has not. However, campuses are now on a path of uneven evolution, and risk shedding the good with the extraneous without eyes-wide-open rethinking and responsive planning. This two-part qualitative analysis details the experiments and strategies followed by educators and students as the pandemic changed their ways of teaching and learning. It then speculates out-of-the-norm possibilities which campuses could explore as they navigate the uncertainty of future terms and address paradigm shifts questioning what defines a post-secondary education.

This paper draws inferences from discussions limited to the first 100 days of the pandemic. This on-the-ground aspect as the pandemic continues is its strength and its limitation. As Fall 2020 progresses across global campuses, new ideas and perspectives are already reinforcing or upending some of this paper's speculations. This researcher is already engaged in new, currently-ongoing research, following up with interviewees from Spring 2020, as well as bringing in new voices to delve deeper into the possibilities discussed in this paper. This follow-up research is shaping new thinking which is not reflected in this paper.

Design practitioners have long-shaped campuses on the belief that the built “environment is the third teacher” and that architecture fosters learning and shapes collective experience. Educators recognize that a multiplicity of formal and informal interactions occur frequently and naturally across campus, supporting cognitive and social development, collegiality and well-being. Even today's digital-native-students perceive the inherent value of real interpersonal engagement for meaningful experiences. This research study offers new planning and design perspectives as institutional responses to the pandemic continue to evolve, to discover how design can support what lies at the core of the campus experience.

Designing learning environments is increasingly about mediating between the interactions in real and virtual space of largely self-organising learning communities. Traditional ways of briefing designers are less and less proficient, as the demands made on space become less timetabled, more probabilistic. ‘learning landscapes’ ¹ are proposed in which clusters of activity can be seen to be taking place across a field, that activity can be browsed, audited and fully engaged with. Such organic flows of interest and concentration are hindered by traditional demarcated space models, and attempts to enable the flows through ‘flexible’ interlinking of rooms fail.

There is evidence ² that the organic interactions between learners grow exponentially when these learners are connected together as virtual communities in open, robust virtual platforms. But this works best when these interactions are grounded from time to time in real places. How can designers best provide spaces that support learning in real and virtual space? Should design teams be composed of people with skills in devising real and virtual space?

Increasingly the answer is ‘yes’, and this places strains on procurement processes. Built form can take a long time to deliver. So can virtual platforms take time to devise and make operable. Can these processes be aligned? The concepts for RMIT’s Design Hub, a physical design research platform, were developed through research conducted twelve years before the building was completed. Many of the gap years were taken up with establishing the financial basis for constructing the Hub. During this time the concepts were validated by testing with various potential user groups, and a further tranche of international investigations validated the level of innovation being sought. The process for RMIT’s Swanston Academic Building (SAB) was smoother and shorter, but it involved a year in which a ‘learning landscape’ concept was moulded through intensive work with user client focus groups.

Neither of these projects has a virtual doppelganger, though both have sophisticated and evolvable IT systems. The Hub embeds a process of curating research interaction and dissemination that is hampered by this fact. The mediated learning landscape of the SAB falls short of the originating concepts, – because space constraints did not allow for an undivided, flowing landscape. A well designed virtual counterpart could have provided what the insertion of walls has obscured. Should all future innovative learning and researching environments have a virtual counterpart from the outset?

There is an emerging trend for such paired environments in creative city thinking and in museums. Surely briefing and procuring real and virtual environments in tandem will enliven future space use in universities?

The purpose of this paper is to analyse everyday interactions in a workplace from the point of view of organisational learning, informal learning and peer learning, as well as the possible relationships that can be established between all three.

Insights from nine months of ethnographic study provided an operational definition of equality in an organisation, a better understanding of interactions and informal learning between peers, and about psycho-social determining factors or contexts that favour the exchange of knowledge in an organisation.

The findings demonstrate the importance of articulating the three elements (organisational learning, informal learning and peer learning) in a joint interpretative framework. With the results generated, it is proposed to move away from the traditional organisational learning based on knowledge and know-how, to a new perspective focused on sharing and participatory opportunities. In other words, without opportunities to participate, without the support and equal access, the fostering of informal learning can be debatable in terms of democracy.

The results bring the authors closer to being able to design workplace learning strategies that carefully includes the value of participation opportunities and the influence of a dynamic concept of equality. The ethnography in a hospital setting has allowed the authors to gain a better understanding of the contribution of informal learning to the organisation. The focus on the social context and the roles of relationships in informal learning offers new insights into a complex phenomenon.