Group items tagged

"A growing number of studies have been carried out to understand learning and teaching activities in online learning environments (OLEs) and to design effective OLEs for meaningful learning in higher education. Although there were a small number of studies to provide research trends in educational technology in regards to research topics, methods, and researchers, more research is necessary to help educators to understand new trends and issues of OLEs in higher education. This study intends to provide an overview of practical and theoretical issues pertaining to OLEs by analyzing literature recently published in peer-reviewed journals. The present study qualitatively analyzed research questions and purposes to identify themes of OLEs in higher education. The OLE research topics were grouped into three major themes: (1) participants, (2) micro-level environments, and (3) macro-level environments. The findings are followed by discussion of an ecological approach as a new theoretical framework to guide future OLE research and practice."

n the learning technology field there is no shortage of research questions- but there is a shortage of research funding. Learning technology researchers are increasingly being required to address issues of impact in order to attract funding. At the beginning of the project, they must anticipate the potential impact of their research on end users, beyond the realms of scholarly citations, and put in place measures to demonstrate that impact. This is a particular challenge, especially in a field that in its infancy was prone to adopt a non-critical 'evangelical' stance to learning technology. The field is maturing however, both in its methodological and theoretical approaches, and it would seem pertinent (if not imperative!) that learning technology researchers be proactive rather than reactive with regards to mapping out what impact means in the context of learning technology research.

"The existence of 'Learning Styles' is a common 'neuromyth', and their use in all forms of education has been thoroughly and repeatedly discredited in the research literature. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that their use remains widespread. This perspective article is an attempt to understand if and why the myth of Learning Styles persists. I have done this by analyzing the current research literature to capture the picture that an educator would encounter were they to search for "Learning Styles" with the intent of determining whether the research evidence supported their use. The overwhelming majority (89%) of recent research papers, listed in the ERIC and PubMed research databases, implicitly or directly endorse the use of Learning Styles in Higher Education. These papers are dominated by the VAK and Kolb Learning Styles inventories. These presence of these papers in the pedagogical literature demonstrates that an educator, attempting to take an evidence-based approach to education, would be presented with a strong yet misleading message that the use of Learning Styles is endorsed by the current research literature. This has potentially negative consequences for students and for the field of education research."

"When researchers selectively report significant positive results, and omit non-significant or negative results, the published literature skews in a particular direction. This is called 'reporting bias', and it can cause both casual readers and meta-analysts to develop an inaccurate understanding of the efficacy of an intervention. This paper identifies potential reporting bias in a recent high-profile higher education meta-analysis. It then examines a range of potential factors that may make higher education learning and teaching research particularly susceptible to reporting bias. These include the fuzzy boundaries between learning and teaching research, scholarship and teaching; the positive agendas of 'learning and teaching' funding bodies; methodological issues; and para-academic researchers in roles without tenure or academic freedom. Recommendations are provided for how researchers, journals, funders, ethics committees and universities can reduce reporting bias"

"This systematic literature review was undertaken primarily to examine the role that print and digitally mediums play in text comprehension. Overall, results suggest that medium plays an influential role under certain text or task conditions or for certain readers. Additional goals were to identify how researchers defined and measured comprehension, and the various trends that have emerged over the past 25 years, since Dillon's review. Analysis showed that relatively few researchers defined either reading or digital reading, and that the majority of studies relied on researcher-developed measures. Three types of trends were identified in this body of work: incremental (significant increase; e.g., number of studies conducted, variety of digital devices used), stationary (relative stability; e.g., research setting, chose of participants), and iterative (wide fluctuation; e.g., text length, text manipulations). The review concludes by considering the significance of these findings for future empirical research on reading in print or digital mediums."

"BITE: Recipes for remarkable research is an edited field book capturing the research, learning and experiences of an international network of scholars studying effective and creative research environments. The book encapsulates what it is that enables remarkable research, and offers, as Professor Lizbeth Goodman says, "practical, evidence-based instantiations of ideas and innovations" as well as theoretical knowledge. It is set out as a recipe book, with supporting academic papers and case studies"

"This presentation provides an overview of the existing research on online higher education, including prior research on four-year colleges, CCRC's research on two-year colleges, and implications in terms of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and hybrids. It also discusses the notion of online course outsourcing, and the contrasting notion of a coherent curriculum that supports students throughout college to graduation."

"This research project explored good examples of how academic and professional staff are working together in new ways to deliver the best possible student experience.The project addressed the question of how and why these models of good working practices seemed to work well. The research investigated how the change management process was perceived and managed by the key stakeholders, as well as the role of the management, leadership and governance arrangements. Key stakeholders included students as well as staff, and the research considered how the student voice was and is heard in the development of these models. "

This is an ESCalate research project that aims to research employer perceptions of graduate employability. The project aims to research employer perceptions of graduate employability. There has been insufficient recent systematic research undertaken into

"This interdisciplinary journal aims to focus on the exchange of relevant trends and research results as well as the presentation of practical experiences gained while developing and testing elements of technology enhanced learning. So it aims to bridge the gape between pure academic research journals and more practical publications. So it covers the full range from research, application development to experience reports and product descriptions."

"Providing an innovative, research-focused approach to nineteenth-century disability studies, undergraduate history students at Swansea University combine the use of archival resources with blogging to publicly disseminate their work. Here, Professor David Turner reflects on the multiple teaching and learning approaches to 'Researching and Re-telling the Past'."

Researchers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) launched the Innovative Learning Environments project to turn an academic lens on the project of identifying concrete traits that mark innovative learning environments. They sifted through and categorized the research on learning science, documented case studies, and compiled policy recommendations they hope will transform the current system.

"This workshop was funded as part of one of HEA Social Science's strategic priorities 2013 - 14 'Teaching research methods'."

"Lecturers with formal teaching qualifications are valued by students far more highly than those who are active researchers, says a major survey that is likely to reopen the debate over the need for compulsory teacher training."

EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS) is an organisation for universities and research institutions worldwide. The organisation is both an information service and a forum for raising and discussing issues around the mission of modern universities and research ins

80 Research briefings on various aspects of learning and teaching

"This screencast captures a research presentation given by the Assistant Director of Rice's Center for Teaching Excellence, Betsy Barre. As Co-Chair of the Committee on Teaching's Subcommittee on Teaching and Course Evaluations, she performed a review of the research literature on student ratings of instruction, and this presentation is a summary of that literature review. Please feel free to jump ahead to the portions of the presentation that are of most interest to you, using the time indices below. If you have further questions, please consult the selected bibliography on the CTE website here: http://cte.rice.edu/studentevaluations"

Thought provoking blog post from David White. Some interesting ideas that have come out of interviews related to his Digital Residents and Natives and Open Edducational Resources research, viz the "emergency collaboration" 24 hours from coursework submission (I'm sure that goes on a lot in Swansea) and Google> Wikipedia> References which is a popular technique with students but is kept hidden because of the overt discouragement of academics for Google and Wikipedia as valid academic research tools. I've personally never had a problem with either G or W in my own learning. Am I prejudiced against them in my students' learning?

"Information literacy-the ability to find, evaluate and use information effectively-is an essential skill set. The authors examine how assignments such as case analyses and research reports help business students master these abilities and provide examples of how analytic rubrics with measurable outcomes are particularly suited to assessing these skills. Also demonstrated is how librarians enhance and support student learning of information literacy by teaching in-depth research skills. Working together, professors and librarians can give students a solid foundation in the information-handling skills they need to be effective and productive in the workplace today."

For some staff, teaching in British universities often takes second place to research. If we want to keep our reputation, this can't go on says Craig Mahoney