Pacific Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning
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Re-Tooling School
Get PDFHow do we ReTool school to make it engaging, empowering and success making for all? At the same time how do we guarantee equity and access so that what our government calls “priority learners”, have the same opportunities for 3rd millennium citizenship as everybody else?
When vast tracts of what is now the Developed World, were opened up by the provision of roads, bridges and railroads, people moved from subsistence and achieved effective citizenship, locally, nationally and globally. The infrastructure that enables access to the new platform for citizenship, the internet, is analogous to the roads, bridges and railroads of yesteryear. The business of retooling requires this infrastructure as a baseline, but real efficacy and agency will only be achieved when environments are enriched by innovation on top of the essential infrastructure.
Retooling School requires a Change Pedagogy Imperative:
When essential aspects of learning are amalgamated and new media are used for the reception and delivery modes, the learner experience is completely different. It is more than possible to develop new learner agency, efficacy and leadership in learning. This journey to genuine citizenship will have three major hallmarks:
ubiquity
anywhere, anytime, any pace, any people learning
agency
the power to act -informed/empowered/enabled learners
connectedness
edgeless education, connected minds
We need to:
Provide the essential infrastructure and enrich the environment for: local, national and international citizenship of all learners
Using Video in Blended Pedagogies to Address Accessibility
Get PDFBesides being the right thing to do, creating an accessible learning experience ensures that educational institutions are providing equitable opportunities for the many students with a disability. Millions of people live with disabilities, not all of them easily visible. Video has become a major component of the digital workplace, and offers some challenges to some people with disabilities.
But not only are there ways to overcome these challenges, video itself can aid in providing an effective learning experience for all students. The most common topic to come up for increasing video accessibility is around captions and transcripts. Video unites sight and sound. Especially in an education environment, removing the sound usually makes a video mostly pointless. It’s not enough for the content to be accessible, though. The video platform itself has to be accessible if you genuinely want to increase accessibility.The key to increasing accessibility is flexibility. If you can offer students multiple choices – with captions or without, with default-size icons or with larger and higher contrast icons, live or on-demand, in person or remote – they can choose for themselves the accommodations they need to do their best work.
Many students have disabilities they may not wish to disclose. The way one person is affected by a disability may be different from how another person with a similar disability is affected. In fact, a person may feel impacted by their disability in different ways from day to day, such as when someone with chronic pain has a “good” or a “bad” day.
In this brief presentation, Grant Beevers, Senior Digital Learning Specialist with Kaltura, will outline how organisations can address accessibility through best practice in video design and publishing, whether it’s embedded video content in course design, content imported from external websites, and common use cases including personal and lecture capture
Digital Doves: Investing in Teacher Learning to Promote Student Learning
Get PDFKristin School is an independent co-educational, international baccalaureate school from early learning to Year 13, in Albany on Auckland's North Shore. Kristin School has an impeccable reputation for academic excellence and ensuring that its students are ‘Future Ready’. In 2016, after a robust school improvement inquiry, the school made the commitment to update its Learning Management System to one that was more dynamic and in line with the school’s beliefs on learning and teaching. After a robust review of systems, Kristin selected Canvas as it will allow us to grow and adapt to an ever-changing K-13 landscape.
As George Couros writes in his book, The Innovator’s Mindset (2015), with any new technological improvement or innovation that schools invest in, one of the first questions to be asked is “What is best for this learner?” (p. 21) and rightly so. In asking this question, we are inherently recognizing that in order to achieve enhanced student learning, we must first invest in teacher learning. While there is a plethora of research on teacher learning or teacher professional development, current literature points to the intersection of teacher learning and inquiry (Timperley, Wilson, Barrar & Fung, 2007, Couros, 2015). Recognizing this research and understanding that strong pedagogical practice must be at the forefront, Kristin invested in a robust, staged rollout.
Inspired by Timperley et al.’s, Ten Key Principles for Teacher Professional Learning and Development (2007), Kristin senior leadership allocated dedicated time for faculty learning with Canvas. Each faculty had a dedicated ‘Canvas Leader’ who had more in-depth training and were able to mentor their teaching colleagues. There were also different opportunities and modalities for teachers to learn from, including a course in Canvas about using Canvas, a YouTube Channel, faculty specific and general workshops, an active Twitter presence and the far-reaching Canvas Community.
Kristin has rolled Canvas out schoolwide, from Year 1 – 13 and is fortunate to have strong teacher leaders that have embraced Canvas and have challenged themselves to not just ‘learn Canvas’, but to approach it as a core learning tool. In the Junior School, one team of teachers use Canvas as a way to differentiate the learning of students in specialist classes through the use of short videos. While in the Middle School, one of our Languages teachers uses Canvas as an integral, interactive classroom resource, where students are introduced to new concepts, are given collaborative tasks, and are linked to additional resources.
In the coming year, Kristin will continue to lean on the work of Timperley et al., with the aim of strengthening the ties between Canvas and pedagogy and initiating inquiry groups around the use of technology in teaching and learning at Kristin. Recognizing an important part of teacher learning happens when we listen to the student voice (Timperley, Kaser & Halbert, 2014), an inquiry looking into the needs of our students will help to identify further next steps. At Kristin, we believe that when teachers are empowered to trial new methodologies and embed these successfully into their everyday practice, transformational changes will occur, in not just the learning of the teacher, but the learning experiences for the student as well.
References
Couros, G. (2015). The innovator's mindset: Empower learning, unleash talent, and lead a culture of creativity. San Diego, CA: Dave Burgess Consulting.
Timperley, H., Kaser, L. & Halbert, J. (2014). A framework for transforming learning in schools: Innovation and the spiral of inquiry. Centre for Strategic Education Seminar Series Paper No. 234 https://teachingcouncil.nz/sites/default/files/49.%20Spiral%20of%20Inquiry%20Paper%20-%20Timperley%20Kaser%20Halbert.pdf
Timperley, H., Wilson, A., Barrar, H., & Fung, I. (2007). Teacher professional learning and development. Best Evidence Synthesis Iteration (BES) Report. Wellington, NZ: Ministry of Education. http://www.ibe.unesco.org/fileadmin/user_upload/Publications/Educational_Practices/EdPractices_18.pd
Practicing learner-centred and technology-enabled course (co/re)design
Get PDFThis presentation focuses on sharing a journey of practice using a series of case studies based on my experiences as a lecturer and learner within health-related tertiary education. As someone who would be very hesitant to describe themselves as ‘technical’ I share some of the ways in which curiosity, perseverance and technology-enabled transdisciplinary collaborations have enhanced the learning experiences of my students while providing incremental gains to my own capacity to learn.
Each case study is underpinned by a variety of technologies, pedagogies and philosophies which have provided not only a foundation for course (co/re) design but also associated evaluations. Demonstrating how innovative developments, triumphs, challenges, student feedback, peer insights and self-reflection have informed iterative cycles of change in my courses, I reflect on the implications for future learning design as continual shifts are made toward student-determined, learner-defined learning. 
How do we employ UDL in our own practice?
Get PDFAs learner diversity continues to grow, so does the need for institutions to ensure that the needs of all learners are considered and appropriately addressed in the learning, teaching and assessment experiences they design and develop. Creating content and providing a learning experience that is accessible for all students can be challenging. In this session, participants will be exposed to the basic principles behind Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and how this can be achieved in practice. When learning materials are well designed – the closer the parity and quality of learning experience becomes for all learners
OnTask: Connecting student data with personalized feedback
Get PDFUniversities are increasingly being expected to ensure student success while at the same time delivering larger courses. Within this environment, the provision of effective and timely feedback to students and creating opportunities for genuine engagement between teachers and students is increasingly difficult if not impossible for many instructors, despite the known value and importance of feedback (Timperley & Hattie, 2007) and instructor presence (Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 2010). Similar to other tertiary institutions, the University of Auckland has adopted various technology-enhanced learning approaches and technologies, including learning analytics in an attempt to support teaching and learning at scale. The increased use of educational technology to support learning provides a variety of data sources for teachers to provide personalised feedback and improve the overall learning experience for students. This workshop is targeted to teachers interested in the use of learning data to provide personalized support to learners. Participants will have a hands-on opportunity to use the open-source tool OnTask (Pardo, et al. 2018) within some common teaching scenarios with a synthetically generated data set. The facilitators will also share and discuss how OnTask is currently being used in universities to support student experience, teaching practice and course design. As this is a hands-on workshop, participants must bring a laptop computer to work with the online tool and the prepared scenarios.
References
Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2010). The first decade of the community of inquiry framework: A retrospective. The internet and higher education, 13(1-2), 5-9.
Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of educational research, 77(1), 81-112.
Pardo, A., Bartimote-Aufflick, K., Shum, S. B., Dawson, S., Gao, J., Gaševic, D., Leichtweis, S., Liu, D., Martínez-Maldonado, R., Mirriahi, N. and Moskal, A. C. M. (2018). OnTask: Delivering Data-Informed, Personalized Learning Support Actions. Journal of Learning Analytics, 5(3), 235-249
MESH360: Developing Meaningful Authentic Critical Care Simulation
Get PDFParamedics deal with a variety of emergency situations, ranging from natural disasters to road traffic accidents. Higher education providers need to critically explore how to best prepare student paramedics for high risk, unforeseen events that require critical awareness and diagnostic problem-solving capabilities. Hi-fidelity mannequin based simulation is a widely adopted and proven technique for clinical training and critical care response education (Kaufman, 2010). However, traditional mannequin based simulation in isolation limits a meaningful learning context and authentic real-world assessment influences.
The MESH360 project involves a collaborative transdisciplinary team of designers and educational researchers, in the design of XR to enhance student and professional paramedic training to prepare practitioners for the environmental stressors and critical care decisions involved in high-risk situations.
This presentation explores the third iteration prototype design stage of an immersive reality (XR) enhanced simulation project in critical healthcare higher education. To promote student engagement through innovative learning tasks, XR was employed to introduce critical elements of patient and practitioner risk and stress by creating a learning environment that more authentically simulates these elements.
Design Based Research (DBR) provided a structure within a four-phase iterative framework (McKenney & Reeves, 2012) when designing the XR learning environment (Cochrane et al., 2017). Using DBR, the project explored the impact of mobile XR enhanced simulation for novice and professional paramedics. This project explored the development and implementation with an enhanced simulation scenario involving a virtual helicopter ride and an immersive simulated patient rescue.
The project used mixed methods to triangulate qualitative and quantitative data within the design. We measured participant stress by recording heart rate (HR) followed by subjective qualitative participant responses and feedback (Pre and post participant surveys, and post focus group). The thematic analysis showed a positive and enthusiastic experience by the students. Whilst some thought there was room for increased helicopter fidelity, all students believed that XR provided a more authentic experience. This presentation will demonstrate the methods and user reaction of this prototype study.
This is the third iteration prototyping a DBR project that explores the development of an immersive reality framework for enhanced critical care simulation for educating paramedics within an authentic learning environment. A learning solution was implemented into an educational setting offering context to real-world learning within an engaging authentic environment. The next stages of the research will iteratively evaluate and refine prototype immersive reality learning environments, comparing the impact upon both novice and expert paramedics. This will inform the next phase of the DBR project that will focus upon the development of design principles for a transferable design framework.
References
Cochrane, T., Cook, S., Aiello, S., Christie, D., Sinfield, D., Steagall, M., & Aguayo, C. (2017). A DBR Framework for Designing Mobile Virtual Reality Learning Environments. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology (AJET), 33(6), 54-68. doi: https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.3613
Kaufman, D. (2010). Simulation in Health Professional Education. In D. Kaufman & L. Sauvé (Eds.), Educational Gameplay and Simulation Environments: Case Studies and Lessons Learned (pp. 51-67). Hershey, PA, USA: IGI Global.
McKenney, S., & Reeves, T. (2012). Conducting educational design research. London: Routledge
Reflections on the use of Design Thinking and Service Design Tools to Improve Student Experience of an Online Learning Environment
Get PDFOnline learning technology offers many benefits to students and educators, but at the same time presents challenges and issues which can cause negative student experiences. These negative experiences may severely affect student learning, particularly for students who are studying remotely and may have complex causes. How does a small organisation understand, maintain, and enhance the student experience of increasingly complex online learning environments in an atmosphere of increasing student expectations?
Design Thinking and Service Design tools were used by the Learning Innovation and Insights (LII) Team at NMIT to examine their value in understanding and enhancing a challenging fully online course to improve student experience. This Action Research intervention had a profound effect on our thinking and practice as learning designers and technologists. Use of the user-centred Design Thinking tools and techniques challenged unwritten assumptions and helped the team gain understanding of the key factors and issues affecting the experience of the students on this course, and prioritise the change strategy required to improve it. The Service Design approach helped understanding of the students’ changing needs over time. The artefacts produced by the tools proved helpful in untangling complexity, helped the team discuss and gain a shared understanding of the issues, and communicate issues to other stakeholders within the organisation.
There are significant implications for future practice of the LII Team at NMIT:
Design Thinking tools will be embedded in standard practice in the LII Team.
A widening priority from Learning Design to Learning Environment Design.
A refocus in the priority of LMS development from UI Design to UX Design, within a Service Design context.
A focus on adoption and use of “empathising” and listening tools and skills.
This presentation will focus on the use and impact of Design Thinking and Service Design tools and techniques such as the Hypothesis Map, the Journey Map, the Stakeholder Map, Personas and Extreme Users
When do salps bloom? Engaging Primary students in underwater citizen science
Get PDFWhen do Salps bloom? In this MBIE Curious Minds funded project we sought to address the growing need to involve people at a young age in learning involving active scientific research, to enhance societal understanding of science and technology and promote careers in STEM/STEAM to groups traditionally less represented. We engaged Leigh Primary School children with Salp research led by Dr Moira Decima from NIWA, and with citizen science through involvement in the co-design of a mobile app to report salp (marine invertebrate) sightings in coastal and underwater environments in our case study site: Goat Island Marine Reserve. The goal of the project was to engage students in cutting-edge marine science research and conservation; and in technological development through the co-design of a mobile app to report salps sightings in local coastal environments.
Salps constitute essential prey items for multiple species of fish (including commercially important species like Hoki and Oreos), and can play a major role in ocean biogeochemistry by enhancing carbon (CO2) sequestration. In addition, the presence and extent of population blooms has increased in some parts of the world, presumably as a consequence of global warming, making these organisms sentinels of climate change. They are also unique in New Zealand because they seem to predictably bloom during the summer in coastal areas, yet this information is anecdotal and hence constituted a real opportunity to involve Leigh School to contribute to globally-relevant marine research. Important to local communities, the presence and abundance of these organisms affects tourist and local enjoyment of marine habitats, as low densities can result in attractive items for underwater experiences, but high densities render diving, fishing, boating and other water activities problematic.
Students participated in a series of face-to-face events, including two visits to the Goat Island Marine Discovery Centre (University of Auckland); vlogging with Dr Decima while leading the RV Tangaroa on the #SalpPOOP (Salp Particle expOrt and Oceanic Production) research voyage; snorkelling at Goat Island Marine Reserve; and learning presentations by Leigh School children during SeaWeek 2019, where students presented their learning, enjoyed a sausage BBQ, and tried out virtual reality experiences designed to learn about salp research and marine conservation in general. We also engaged with Goat Island Dive & Snorkel dive instructors and selected customers during the app co-design phase to gain app prototype feedback.
A mobile application (salpcount.nz) following a citizen science engagement framework that will allow data collection of salps in New Zealand was created with input from Leigh School students and selected Goat Island Dive & Snorkel customers and instructors, and with the engagement of multiple partners and through a hands-on educational program. Leigh School students were able to learn about an interesting marine biology topic relevant to them, while contributing to an application that will hopefully produce data through citizen science on the patterns and frequency of salp blooms around New Zealand. Here we report on this case study project highlighting what worked and what we learned, and some implications for future practice
Responding to emergencies: There’s an app for that.
Get PDFOur cellphones have become more than just a communication tool. This presentation will explore the use of cellphone applications in the emergency response and prehospital care within New Zealand. Three distinct groups of applications are identified. The first are apps used by community first responders, the second group, are apps used by paramedics in the prehospital environment, and finally apps which we can all use in disaster preparation and response. These apps also support the education of paramedicine students when they are undertaking simulations and planning exercises.