Search results

The chapter discusses pedagogical models of digital learning in the United Kingdom with a focus on online and blended learning, rolled out as a case study in one university. The chapter appraises the effectiveness of the model that implemented and foregrounded the evidence in the wider literature on models of digital learning in higher education. The chapter provides thematic analysis and methodological opportunities for the improvement of practice and presents a set of implementation implications and pitfalls to avoid for higher education institutions in Africa. Furthermore, a number of trends regarding the blending of learning and communication synchrony in digital learning have also been identified.

This chapter seeks to identify the challenges faced by virtual teams and offers solutions to meet those challenges. Basic underlining concepts behind virtual teams are provided along with the most popular forms of virtual teams. Organizational, crowdsourcing, and peer production/online communities are the most common forms of virtual teams. Understanding these basic concepts will help HRD and HRM professionals to develop virtual teams that are suitable for middle- and low-skilled workers. The chapter also presents the various types of communication technologies used in virtual along with the pros and cons associated with each type.

The literature on non-traditional classroom environments claims that the changed emphasis in higher education teaching from the lecturer to students has intensified the global focus on student-centred learning, prompting colleges and universities globally to introspect, re-examine, and re-structure their pedagogical approaches in an attempt to align with national educational policies, and to position themselves favourably with potential students in an increasingly competitive higher education environment. This is an environment that now relies heavily on digital learning technologies, which has provoked scholars such as Heick (2012) to perceive the change to the virtual as one that makes higher education institutions accessible from anywhere – in the cloud, at home, in the workplace, or restaurant. The COVID-19 crisis has reinforced the need for this flexibility. These forces have put universities and colleges under pressure to implement new teaching approaches in non-traditional classroom settings that are appropriate for, and responsive to, the COVID-19 crisis and students in terms of learning and social support. This chapter identified and appraised key teaching approaches. It is evident that there are three key teaching approaches that higher education institutions have adopted for delivering learning in an emergency and in a student-centred fashion. The three approaches, which include the time and place dispersion, transactional distance, and collaborative learning approaches, embrace social support because they are grounded in social constructivism. Academics need to be fully committed to the role of social support giving – that is, emotional, instrumental, informational, and appraisal support – in order to foster student wellbeing and cognitive development as students learn together but apart in non-traditional classrooms. The hurried manner in which teaching and learning practices in many higher education institutions have been moved to the online format has led academics to violate many key principles of the approaches they have adopted. And this situation is borne out in the case study discussed in Chapter 8 of this volume. A review of current remote teaching and learning practices is required if academics are to embrace the full principles of the approaches that are appropriate for teaching and learning in non-traditional classroom contexts.

Online courses and self-directed and asynchronous learning may not be the best for everyone. Individuals possess a number of different learning styles and life circumstances when they enter higher education. Technology is but one answer to addressing these diverse needs and providing choices to students. Technology should be employed in a way that does not replace this system of choice but enhances it and provides individuals with other opportunities for achieving educational goals. The ideal for higher education lies somewhere in-between the purely digital and purely traditional modes of educational delivery. Lost in this capitulation of higher education to the enrollments of distance education is student success. This chapter will explore challenges to distance education student retention and persistence, disseminate the theoretical construct of the Dynamic Student Development Metatheodel, and apply specific student success strategies to distance education. These strategies include intrusive advising and asynchronous advising techniques. This chapter will conclude with how these advising techniques and strategies can facilitate increased student persistence through engagement with academic advisors using asynchronous approaches that move beyond the traditional temporal, didactic strategies employed by most higher education institutions.

The chapter discusses how student engagement can be facilitated through educational designs that make conscious use of various online communication technologies. The discussions are based on cases from the practice at the Danish Master Programme in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and Learning (MIL), where students from all over Denmark within a networked learning structure are studying in groups combining on-site seminars with independent and challenging virtually organized project periods. The chapter discusses the involvement of students as co-designers of how courses and learning environments unfold, and deals with the development of students’ information literacy. Various teacher roles are addressed, as implementing new educational technology requires teachers who are flexible and aware of the different challenges in the networked environment. The aim of the chapter is to discuss the application of new technological possibilities in educational settings inspired by problem- and project-based learning.

Mediated communication can be thought of as a mediated discourse, involving the knowledge of language, symbols, metaphors, and shared meaning. We describe here a funded study where we investigate the effectiveness of text messaging as a learning tool for higher level courses and provide insight into the use of texting as a supplemental, yet critical learning tool in the teaching and learning process. The design, based on the Vygotskian constructivist paradigm, where learning can happen in social and collaborative interactions, assesses three types of communication within student groups, (1) face-to-face (FTF), (2) using only Instant Messenger (IM), and (3) using only cell phone texting. For analyzing the IM and text exchanges we follow the recommendations of Thurlow (2003) using thematic referential coding schemes. Using the concept of Grice (1975), we detect the presence of conversational maxims and implicature and also the presence of adjacency pairs (Sacks, Schegloff, Jefferson, 1974), indicating turn-taking in IM and texting conversations. Results from content and conversational analyses indicate that while there is an innate preference for FTF discussions among participants, participants felt that IM and texting would be useful if used intermittently and as a supplementary learning tool in classrooms to mediate discussions. Participants also felt that IM and texting focused them on tasks and despite any frustrations with the technology they did gain a shared understanding of the subject matter and gained new and conceptual knowledge. The findings from this research can be used to explore the use of an additional dimension of learning in school and university classrooms.