1,720,976 research outputs found
The Role/Importance of Personal Computers to Support Learning in Higher Education
No full textBackground: This scoping study examines the degree to which students use their personal computers to support their undergraduate academic practice in their daily study habits.
Methods: Three data sources were used in this study. Computer activity data was extracted from the personal laptops of 18 third-year undergraduate students who self-reported as being skilled computer users. The second data source consisted of video data captured by four third-year undergraduate students of their personal study activity within their homes. The third dataset represented secondary data sourced from two local student surveys looking at student technology use from 2009-2012 and internationally acclaimed research-based EDUCAUSE studies also from 2009 to 2012.
Findings: Three core themes: (a) Computer-based Approach vs Paper-based Approach; (b) Production Activity vs Consumption Activity; and (c) Self-reports of Practice vs Actual Practice emerged from these datasets. An analysis of these themes revealed that for the participants involved: 1] paper-based approaches to study were preferred over digital despite the high rate of personal computer ownership and internet access; 2] students were more likely to engage in production than consumption activities using paper-based approaches to study; 3] there was a disparity between students’ self-reports of their adoption of technology compared with their actual practice of both academic and non-academic use of computer technology. In addition, students’ computer use presented a low level of alignment when compared between their academic course demands and their assignment schedule.
Discussion: The findings of this exploratory study illustrate a considerable disparity that appeared between what students thought they used computers for and what they actually did use them for. While the students’ preference for paper-based approaches could be linked to unease or lack of awareness regarding academic software, evidence suggested that dependence on paper-based approaches in undergraduate education was due to an inherent focus on paper-based ethos. At the same time, the primary paper-based approach to production and consumption activities indicated that personal computers were not as crucial to undergraduate academic study as expected. This was supported by the lack of any clear pattern regarding students’ daily computer use plotted against their course assignment schedule
Individual, Institutional and Environmental Factors Influencing Online Distance Tertiary Teaching in New Zealand
Get PDFOnline and distance teaching requires careful negotiation between the goals, beliefs and philosophy of the teacher and the inherent pedagogy of the technologies and system they are working within. While the relationships among individual teacher beliefs, experiences and technology use in online and distance teaching has been well explored, the impact of other influential factors such as institutional systems, government policies and opportunities for professional development remain comparatively under-researched. The current research addressed this gap by investigating the individual and environmental factors that influenced teaching practice in the New Zealand online and distance learning (ODL) environment at three tertiary institutions. Fifteen teachers and educational designers from two universities and one polytechnic shared their experiences of designing and teaching online through three annual semi-structured interviews held between January 2014 and July 2016. Publicly available information about strategies, policies and systems at each institution was also collected and analysed. The research used a grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2006) for initial data collection and coding, complemented by the use of Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) (Engeström, 2000) as a framework for systemic analysis of the data collected from the three institutions. The longitudinal design allowed for capture of chronological change and consideration of the dynamics and evolution of each institutional system. To further contextualise the individual and institutional changes observed, data from the wider tertiary teaching environment were reviewed, including governmental strategies, policies and funding, and international education trends. The findings are discussed in relation to the key dimensions of the CHAT model – subject, goal, tools, rules, community and division of labour, where participants provide the subject perspective for each institution. In all three cases institutional and individual goals were slightly divergent, with institutions focusing on meeting performance indicators for funding agreements, and individuals focusing on creating good teaching and learning experiences for the students. Use of technologies for teaching was mediated by institutional requirements, support and funding, and participants observed challenges in finding time to explore new technologies due to competing research and teaching pressures. Across all three institutions, staff discussed an abundance of rules impacting teaching practice, although polytechnic staff were more highly regulated than university staff. Participants reported high workloads, and challenges finding the time to meet research requirements in addition to teaching and service requirements. Teaching participants were more likely to be involved in a community of practice than educational design participants, with the most common source of professional development for teachers being communication with other teachers. The structure and division of labour for creating courses varied across institutions. The more highly regulated the relationship, the more tension there was between teacher and educational designer roles. Government policy, funding and reporting requirements were clearly felt by all participants, and changes in these requirements had clear flow on effects to teaching practice and course design throughout the research period. The findings will be useful to practitioners and researchers who are interested in the impact of systems, processes, professional development and teacher experiences on course development
Teaching analytics and teacher dashboards to visualise SET data: Implication to theory and practice
No full textTeaching Analytics (TA) is an emergent theoretical approach that combines teaching expertise, visual analytics, and design-based research to support teachers' diagnostic pedagogical ability to use data as evidence to improve teaching quality. The thesis is focused on designing dashboards to help teachers visualise Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) data as a form of TA for improving the quality of teaching. The research examined the role of TA by deploying customisable dashboards to support teachers in using data to design and facilitate learning. The researcher carried out an integrated literature review to explore the notion of TA and SET data. Moreover, a Data Science Life Cycle model was proposed to guide teachers and researchers using SET data to improve learning and teaching quality. The research comprised several phases. In phase I, a simulated data technique was used to generate SET scores that informed the development of a preliminary teacher dashboard. Phase II surveyed teachers' use of SET data. The survey results indicated that more than half of the participants used SET for improving teaching practice. The research also showed that participants valued the free-text qualitative comments in SET data. Hence, phase III collected real free-text qualitative comments in SET data on students' perceptions of a previously tutored course. The survey results further indicated that although teachers were unaware of a dashboard's value in presenting data, they wanted to visualise SET data using dashboards. Phase IV redesigned the preliminary dashboards to present the real SET data and the simulated SET scores. Finally, phase V carried out usability testing to evaluate teachers' perceptions of usability and usefulness of the teacher's dashboards. Overall, the result of the usability study indicated the perceived value of the teacher's dashboards
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Individual, Institutional and Environmental Factors Influencing Online Distance Tertiary Teaching in New Zealand
No full textOnline and distance teaching requires careful negotiation between the goals, beliefs and philosophy of the teacher and the inherent pedagogy of the technologies and system they are working within. While the relationships among individual teacher beliefs, experiences and technology use in online and distance teaching has been well explored, the impact of other influential factors such as institutional systems, government policies and opportunities for professional development remain comparatively under-researched. The current research addressed this gap by investigating the individual and environmental factors that influenced teaching practice in the New Zealand online and distance learning (ODL) environment at three tertiary institutions. Fifteen teachers and educational designers from two universities and one polytechnic shared their experiences of designing and teaching online through three annual semi-structured interviews held between January 2014 and July 2016. Publicly available information about strategies, policies and systems at each institution was also collected and analysed. The research used a grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2006) for initial data collection and coding, complemented by the use of Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) (Engeström, 2000) as a framework for systemic analysis of the data collected from the three institutions. The longitudinal design allowed for capture of chronological change and consideration of the dynamics and evolution of each institutional system. To further contextualise the individual and institutional changes observed, data from the wider tertiary teaching environment were reviewed, including governmental strategies, policies and funding, and international education trends. The findings are discussed in relation to the key dimensions of the CHAT model – subject, goal, tools, rules, community and division of labour, where participants provide the subject perspective for each institution. In all three cases institutional and individual goals were slightly divergent, with institutions focusing on meeting performance indicators for funding agreements, and individuals focusing on creating good teaching and learning experiences for the students. Use of technologies for teaching was mediated by institutional requirements, support and funding, and participants observed challenges in finding time to explore new technologies due to competing research and teaching pressures. Across all three institutions, staff discussed an abundance of rules impacting teaching practice, although polytechnic staff were more highly regulated than university staff. Participants reported high workloads, and challenges finding the time to meet research requirements in addition to teaching and service requirements. Teaching participants were more likely to be involved in a community of practice than educational design participants, with the most common source of professional development for teachers being communication with other teachers. The structure and division of labour for creating courses varied across institutions. The more highly regulated the relationship, the more tension there was between teacher and educational designer roles. Government policy, funding and reporting requirements were clearly felt by all participants, and changes in these requirements had clear flow on effects to teaching practice and course design throughout the research period. The findings will be useful to practitioners and researchers who are interested in the impact of systems, processes, professional development and teacher experiences on course development
Investigating Factors and Characteristics of the Use of e-Collaboration Tools in Research Collaboration
No full textResearch collaboration, which is the working together of researchers to achieve a common goal of producing new knowledge, is worthy of investigation. Mattessich et al. (2001) identified twenty factors that influence the success of research collaboration. This exploratory investigation used Mattessich et al’s (2001) model to measure the perception and degree of collaboration amongst researchers from the Otago region of New Zealand. A mixed-method research design, using both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, was employed to assess a number of collaborations in the Otago region.
This study employed an online survey instrument based on the Wilder Inventory (Mattessich et al., 2001). Forty-nine researchers from different disciplines in the Otago region completed a 42-item survey about their experience with research collaboration. Survey results were used to identify strengths and weaknesses in the Otago researchers’ collaboration and to establish baseline data for future comparisons. Thirteen in-depth interviews were conducted with researchers who had been involved in collaborative research. Researchers from different sectors were interviewed individually. During these interviews, the preliminary outcomes from the online survey data were used to encourage the researchers to recall particular events about their collaboration, how they felt at the time and to reflect on these experiences. Qualitative data were analysed for emergent categories and themes, and were used to explore the status of collaboration amongst Otago researchers.
The twenty factors mentioned in Mattessich et al. (2001) can be useful in evaluating the success of research collaboration. According to the Wilder Inventory guidelines (Mattessich et al., 2001), nine factors scored high (4 – 4.3) indicating strengths in the Otago researchers’ collaboration, eleven factors fell within the borderline area (3 – 3.9) and no factors scored lower than 2.9 indicating no weaknesses in their collaboration. However, interview findings showed that new technologies are still not utilised as they could be in the area of research collaboration. The findings of this study may help Otago researchers to enhance the strengths and work on weaknesses in their collaboration
The Role/Importance of Personal Computers to Support Learning in Higher Education
Get PDFBackground: This scoping study examines the degree to which students use their personal computers to support their undergraduate academic practice in their daily study habits.
Methods: Three data sources were used in this study. Computer activity data was extracted from the personal laptops of 18 third-year undergraduate students who self-reported as being skilled computer users. The second data source consisted of video data captured by four third-year undergraduate students of their personal study activity within their homes. The third dataset represented secondary data sourced from two local student surveys looking at student technology use from 2009-2012 and internationally acclaimed research-based EDUCAUSE studies also from 2009 to 2012.
Findings: Three core themes: (a) Computer-based Approach vs Paper-based Approach; (b) Production Activity vs Consumption Activity; and (c) Self-reports of Practice vs Actual Practice emerged from these datasets. An analysis of these themes revealed that for the participants involved: 1] paper-based approaches to study were preferred over digital despite the high rate of personal computer ownership and internet access; 2] students were more likely to engage in production than consumption activities using paper-based approaches to study; 3] there was a disparity between students’ self-reports of their adoption of technology compared with their actual practice of both academic and non-academic use of computer technology. In addition, students’ computer use presented a low level of alignment when compared between their academic course demands and their assignment schedule.
Discussion: The findings of this exploratory study illustrate a considerable disparity that appeared between what students thought they used computers for and what they actually did use them for. While the students’ preference for paper-based approaches could be linked to unease or lack of awareness regarding academic software, evidence suggested that dependence on paper-based approaches in undergraduate education was due to an inherent focus on paper-based ethos. At the same time, the primary paper-based approach to production and consumption activities indicated that personal computers were not as crucial to undergraduate academic study as expected. This was supported by the lack of any clear pattern regarding students’ daily computer use plotted against their course assignment schedule
Teaching analytics and teacher dashboards to visualise SET data: Implication to theory and practice
Get PDFTeaching Analytics (TA) is an emergent theoretical approach that combines teaching expertise, visual analytics, and design-based research to support teachers' diagnostic pedagogical ability to use data as evidence to improve teaching quality. The thesis is focused on designing dashboards to help teachers visualise Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) data as a form of TA for improving the quality of teaching. The research examined the role of TA by deploying customisable dashboards to support teachers in using data to design and facilitate learning. The researcher carried out an integrated literature review to explore the notion of TA and SET data. Moreover, a Data Science Life Cycle model was proposed to guide teachers and researchers using SET data to improve learning and teaching quality. The research comprised several phases. In phase I, a simulated data technique was used to generate SET scores that informed the development of a preliminary teacher dashboard. Phase II surveyed teachers' use of SET data. The survey results indicated that more than half of the participants used SET for improving teaching practice. The research also showed that participants valued the free-text qualitative comments in SET data. Hence, phase III collected real free-text qualitative comments in SET data on students' perceptions of a previously tutored course. The survey results further indicated that although teachers were unaware of a dashboard's value in presenting data, they wanted to visualise SET data using dashboards. Phase IV redesigned the preliminary dashboards to present the real SET data and the simulated SET scores. Finally, phase V carried out usability testing to evaluate teachers' perceptions of usability and usefulness of the teacher's dashboards. Overall, the result of the usability study indicated the perceived value of the teacher's dashboards
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
- …
