A time for everything : reviewing an institution’s virtual learning environment

This paper outlines a review carried out at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in 2013 to identify the extent to which the centrally supported virtual learning environment met current and future learning and teaching needs. A range of consultation and investigation activities occurred from May to November to encourage open stakeholder feedback as well as to allow for reflection on alternative digital technologies, systems and strategies. This resulted in the development of nine recommendations, which, following a planning phase, will commence being implemented from mid-2014.

Ezine and iRadio as knowledge creation metaphors for scaffolding learning in physical and virtual learning spaces

eZine and iRadio represent metaphors for multimedia communication on the Internet. Participating students experience a simulated Internet publishing environment in both their classroom and virtual learning environment. This chapter presents an autoethnographic account highlighting the voices of the learning designer and the teacher and provides evidence of the planning and implementation of two tertiary music elective courses over three iterations of each course. A blended learning environment was incorporated within each elective music course and a collaborative approach to development between lecturers, tutors, learning and technological designers using an iterative research design. The research suggests that learning design which provides real world examples and resources integrating authentic task design into their unit can provide meaningful and engaging experiences for students. The dialogue between learning designers and teachers and iterative review of the learning process and student outcomes, we believe, has engaged students meaningfully to achieve transferable learning outcomes.

‘Please leave your mobile phone on’ : Social educational networking in a social society : Encouraging in-class engagement at QUT across physical and virtual learning environments

Though stadium style seating in large lecture theatres may suggest otherwise, effective teaching and learning is a not a spectator sport. A challenge in creating effective learning environments in both physical and virtual spaces is to provide optimal opportunity for student engagement in active learning. Queensland University of Technology (QUT) has developed the Open Web Lecture (OWL), a new web-based student response application, which seamlessly integrates a virtual learning environment within the physical learning space. The result is a blended learning experience; a fluid collaboration between academic and students connected to OWL via the University’s Wi-Fi using their own laptop or mobile web device. QUT is currently piloting the OWL application to encourage student engagement. OWL offers opportunities for participants to: • Post comments and questions • Reply to comments
 • "Like" comments
 • Poll students and review data • Review archived sessions. Many of these features instinctively appeal to student users of social networking media, yet avail the academic of control within the University network. Student privacy is respected through a system of preserving peer-peer anonymity, a functionality that seeks to address a traditional reluctance to speak up in large classes. The pilot is establishing OWL as an opportunity for engaging students in active learning opportunities by enabling • virtual learning in physical spaces for large group lectures, seminar groups, workshops and conferences • live collaborative technology connecting students and the academic via the wireless network using their own laptop or mobile device • an non- intimidating environment in which to ask questions • promotion of a sense of community • instant feedback • problem based learning. The student and academic response to OWL has been overwhelmingly positive, crediting OWL as an easy to use application, which creates effective learning opportunities though interactivity and immediate feedback. This poster and accompanying online presentation of the technology will demonstrate how OWL offers new possibilities for active learning in physical spaces by: • providing increased opportunity for student engagement • supporting a range of learners and learning activities • fostering blended learning experiences. The presentation will feature visual displays of the technology, its various interfaces and feedback including clips from interviews with students and academics participating in the early stages of the pilot.

Three primary school students’ cognition about 3D rotation in a virtual reality learning environment

This paper reports on three primary school students’ explorations of 3D rotation in a virtual reality learning environment (VRLE) named VRMath. When asked to investigate if you would face the same direction when you turn right 45 degrees first then roll up 45 degrees, or when you roll up 45 degrees first then turn right 45 degrees, the students found that the different order of the two turns ended up with different directions in the VRLE. This was contrary to the students’ prior predictions based on using pen, paper and body movements. The findings of this study showed the difficulty young children have in perceiving and understanding the non-commutative nature of 3D rotation and the power of the computational VRLE in giving students experiences that they rarely have in real life with 3D manipulations and 3D mental movements.

Air Gondwana : Using ICT to create an authentic learning environment to teach basic negotiation skills

In recent years greater emphasis has been placed by many Law Schools on teaching not only the substantive content of the law but also the skills needed for the practice of the law. Negotiation is one such skill. However, effective teaching of negotiation may be problematic in the context of large numbers of students studying in a variety of modes and often juggling other time commitments. This paper examines the Air Gondwana program, a blended learning environment designed to address these challenges. The program demonstrates that ICT can be used to create an authentic learning experience which engages and stimulates students.

Facilitating student self-direction in a blended learning environment

Business postgraduate education is rapidly adopting virtual learning environments to facilitate the needs of a time-poor stakeholder community, where part-time students find it difficult to attend face-to-face classes. Creating engaged, flexible learning opportunities in the virtual world is therefore the current challenge for many business academics. However, in the blended learning environment there is also the added pressure of encouraging these students to develop soft managerial or generic skills such as self-reflection. The current paper provides an overview of an action-research activity exploring the experiences of students who were required to acquire the skills of self-reflection within a blended learning unit dominated by on-line learning delivery. We present the responses of students and the changes made to our teaching and learning activities to improve the facilitation of both our face-to-face delivery as well as the on-line learning environment.

Helping undergraduate students across disciplines and cultures actively engage and collaborate as equal members of a community of scholars : peer review within an e-learning environment

At the international level, the higher education sector is currently being subjected to increased calls for public accountability and the current move by the OECD to rank universities based on the quality of their teaching and learning outcomes. At the national level, Australian universities and their teaching staff face numerous challenges including financial restrictions, increasing student numbers and the reality of an increasingly diverse student population. The Australian higher education response to these competing policy and accreditation demands focuses on precise explicit systems and procedures which are inflexible and conservative and which ignore the fact that assessment is the single biggest influence on how students approach their learning. By seriously neglecting the quality of student learning outcomes, assessment tasks are often failing to engage students or reflect the tasks students will face in the world of practice. Innovative assessment design, which includes new paradigms of student engagement and learning and pedagogically based technologies have the capacity to provide some measure of relief from these internal and external tensions by significantly enhancing the learning experience for an increasingly time-poor population of students. That is, the assessment process has the ability to deliver program objectives and active learning through a knowledge transfer process which increases student participation and engagement. This social constructivist view highlights the importance of peer review in assisting students to participate and collaborate as equal members of a community of scholars with both their peers and academic staff members. As a result of increasing the student’s desire to learn, peer review leads to more confident, independent and reflective learners who also become more skilled at making independent judgements of their own and others' work. Within this context, in Case Study One of this project, a summative, peer-assessed, weekly, assessment task was introduced in the first “serious” accounting subject offered as part of an undergraduate degree. The positive outcomes achieved included: student failure rates declined 15%; tutorial participation increased fourfold; tutorial engagement increased six-fold; and there was a 100% student-based approval rating for the retention of the assessment task. However, in stark contrast to the positive student response, staff issues related to the loss of research time associated with the administration of the peer-review process threatened its survival. This paper contributes to the core conference topics of new trends and experiences in undergraduate assessment education and in terms of innovative, on-line, learning and teaching practices, by elaborating the Case Study Two “solution” generated to this dilemma. At the heart of the resolution is an e-Learning, peer-review process conducted in conjunction with the University of Melbourne which seeks to both create a virtual sense of belonging and to efficiently and effectively meet academic learning objectives with minimum staff involvement. In outlining the significant level of success achieved, student-based qualitative and quantitative data will be highlighted along with staff views in a comparative analysis of the advantages and disadvantages to both students and staff of the staff-led, peer review process versus its on-line counterpart.

Solo life to Second Life : the design of physical and virtual learning spaces inspired by the drama classroom

This paper explores the design of virtual and physical learning spaces developed for students of drama and theatre studies. What can we learn from the traditional drama workshop that will inform the design of drama and theatre spaces created in technology-mediated learning environments? The authors examine four examples of spaces created for online, distance and on-campus students and discuss the relationship between the choice of technology, the learning and teaching methods, and the outcomes for student engagement. Combining insights from two previous action research projects, the discussion focuses on the physical space used for contemporary drama workshops, supplemented by Web 2.0 technologies; a modular online theatre studies course; the blogging space of students creating a group devised play; and the open and immersive world of Second Life, where students explore 3D simulations of historical theatre sites. The authors argue that the drama workshop can be used as inspiration for the design of successful online classrooms. This is achieved by focusing on students’ contributions to the learning as individuals and group members, the aesthetics and mise-en-scene of the learning space, and the role of mobile and networked technologies. Students in this environment increase their capacity to become co-creators of knowledge and to achieve creative outcomes. The drama workshop space in its physical and virtual forms is seen as a model for classrooms in other disciplines, where dynamic, creative and collaborative spaces are required.

The QUT innovation space : a trans-disciplinary learning environment for entrepreneurship education : final report

In the current climate of global economic volatility, there are increasing calls for training in enterprising skills and entrepreneurship to underpin the systemic innovation required for even medium-term business sustainability. The skills long-recognised as the essential for entrepreneurship now appear on the list of employability skills demanded by industry. The QUT Innovation Space (QIS) was an experiment aimed at delivering entrepreneurship education (EE), as an extra-curricular platform across the university, to the undergraduate students of an Australian higher education institute. It was an ambitious project that built on overseas models of EE studied during an Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) Teaching Fellowship (Collet, 2011) and implemented those approaches across an institute. Such EE approaches have not been attempted in an Australian university. The project tested resonance not only with the student population, from the perspective of what worked and what didn’t work, but also with every level of university operations. Such information is needed to inform the development of EE in the Australian university landscape. The QIS comprised a physical co-working space, virtual sites (web, Twitter and Facebook) and a network of entrepreneurial mentors, colleagues, and students. All facets of the QIS enabled connection between like-minded individuals that underpins the momentum needed for a project of this nature. The QIS became an innovation community within QUT. This report serves two purposes. First, as an account of the QIS project and its evolution, the report serves to identify the student demand for skills and training as well as barriers and facilitators of the activities that promote EE in an Australian university context. Second, the report serves as a how-to manual, in the tradition of many tomes on EE, outlining the QIS activities that worked as well as those that failed. The activities represent one measure of QIS outcomes and are described herein to facilitate implementation in other institutes. The QIS initially aimed to adopt an incubation model for training in EE. The ‘learning by doing’ model for new venture creation is a highly successful and high profile training approach commonly found in overseas contexts. However, the greatest demand of the QUT student population was not for incubation and progression of a developed entrepreneurial intent, but rather for training that instilled enterprising skills in the individual. These two scenarios require different training approaches (Fayolle and Gailly, 2008). The activities of the QIS evolved to meet that student demand. In addressing enterprising skills, the QIS developed the antecedents of entrepreneurialism (i.e., entrepreneurial attitudes, motivation and behaviours) including high-level skills around risk-taking, effective communication, opportunity recognition and action-orientation. In focusing on the would-be entrepreneur and not on the (initial) idea per se, the QIS also fostered entrepreneurial outcomes that would never have gained entry to the rigid stage-gated incubation model proposed for the original QIS framework. Important lessons learned from the project for development of an innovation community include the need to: 1. Evaluate the context of the type of EE program to be delivered and the student demand for the skills training (as noted above). 2. Create a community that builds on three dimensions: a physical space, a virtual environment and a network of mentors and partners. 3. Supplement the community with external partnerships that aid in delivery of skills training materials. 4. Ensure discovery of the community through the use of external IT services to deliver advertising and networking outlets. 5. Manage unrealistic student expectations of billion dollar products. 6. Continuously renew and rebuild simple activities to maintain student engagement. 7. Accommodate the non-university end-user group within the community. 8. Recognise and address the skills bottlenecks that serve as barriers to concept progression; in this case, externally provided IT and programming skills. 9. Use available on-line and published resources rather than engage in constructing project-specific resources that quickly become obsolete. 10. Avoid perceptions of faculty ownership and operate in an increasingly competitive environment. 11. Recognise that the continuum between creativity/innovation and entrepreneurship is complex, non-linear and requires different training regimes during the different phases of the pipeline. One small entity, such as the QIS, cannot address them all. The QIS successfully designed, implemented and delivered activities that included events, workshops, seminars and services to QUT students in the extra-curricular space. That the QIS project can be considered successful derives directly from the outcomes. First, the QIS project changed the lives of emerging QUT student entrepreneurs. Also, the QIS activities developed enterprising skills in students who did not necessarily have a business proposition, at the time. Second, successful outcomes of the QIS project are evidenced as the embedding of most, perhaps all, of the QIS activities in a new Chancellery-sponsored initiative: the Leadership Development and Innovation Program hosted by QUT Student Support Services. During the course of the QIS project, the Brisbane-based innovation ecosystem underwent substantial change. From a dearth of opportunities for the entrepreneurially inclined, there is now a plethora of entities that cater for a diversity of innovation-related activities. While the QIS evolved with the landscape, the demand endpoint of the QIS activities still highlights a gap in the local and national innovation ecosystems. The freedom to experiment and to fail is not catered for by the many new entities seeking to build viable businesses on the back of the innovation push. The onus of teaching the enterprising skills, which are the employability skills now demanded by industry, remains the domain of the higher education sector.

Blended learning extension in a global collaborative learning environment

The advancement of technology and the internet have created global collaborative learning opportunities and changed learning and teaching in any discipline around the world, including in developing countries. The availability of web-based resources and high-speed internet infrastructure has extended the opportunities to conduct blended learning and new ways of distance learning beyond virtual class room webinars. The aim of this exploratory paper is to review the challenges and opportunities for increasing student engagement in virtual learning. A reflective analysis of international collaborative learning case studies, published articles and practices in virtual learning is used to explore the extension of blended learning organised and participated by institutions from multiple countries. The lessons learnt from flexible learning delivery in professional practice courses in Property Education are used to evaluate potential extensions of blended learning implementation in a global context.

The influence of a novel simulated learning environment upon student clinical subjective refraction performance: A pilot study

Background: Optometry students are taught the process of subjective refraction through lectures and laboratory based practicals before progressing to supervised clinical practice. Simulated learning environments (SLEs) are an emerging technology that are used in a range of health disciplines, however, there is limited evidence regarding the effectiveness of clinical simulators as an educational tool. Methods: Forty optometry students (20 fourth year and 20 fifth year) were assessed twice by a qualified optometrist (two examinations separated by 4-8 weeks) while completing a monocular non-cycloplegic subjective refraction on the same patient with an unknown refractive error simulated using contact lenses. Half of the students were granted access to an online SLE, The Brien Holden Vision Institute (BHVI®) Virtual Refractor, and the remaining students formed a control group. The primary outcome measures at each visit were; accuracy of the clinical refraction compared to a qualified optometrist and relative to the Optometry Council of Australia and New Zealand (OCANZ) subjective refraction examination criteria. Secondary measures of interest included descriptors of student SLE engagement, student self-reported confidence levels and correlations between performance in the simulated and real world clinical environment. Results: Eighty percent of students in the intervention group interacted with the SLE (for an average of 100 minutes); however, there was no correlation between measures of student engagement with the BHVI® Virtual Refractor and speed or accuracy of clinical subjective refractions. Fifth year students were typically more confident and refracted more accurately and quickly than fourth year students. A year group by experimental group interaction (p = 0.03) was observed for accuracy of the spherical component of refraction, and post hoc analysis revealed that less experienced students exhibited greater gains in clinical accuracy following exposure to the SLE intervention. Conclusions: Short-term exposure to a SLE can positively influence clinical subjective refraction outcomes for less experienced optometry students and may be of benefit in increasing the skills of novice refractionists to levels appropriate for commencing supervised clinical interactions.

Design a simulated multimedia enriched immersive learning environment (SMILE) for nursing care of dementia patient

This thesis is to establish a framework to guide the development of a simulated, multimedia-enriched, immersive, learning environment (SMILE) framework. This framework models essential media components used to describe a scenario applied in healthcare (in a dementia context), demonstrates interactions between the components, and enables scalability of simulation implementation. The thesis outcomes also include a simulation system developed in accordance with the guidance framework and a preliminary evaluation through a user study involving ten nursing students and practicioners. The results show that the proposed framework is feasible and effective for designing a simulation system in dementia healthcare training.

The development of a clinical learning environment scale

Within nursing, there is a strong demand for high-quality, cost-effective clinical education experiences that facilitate student learning in the clinical setting The clinical learning environment (CLE) is the interactive network of forces within the clinical setting that influence the students'clinical learning outcomes The identification of factors that characterize CLE could lead to strategies that foster the factors most predictive of desirable student learning outcomes and ameliorate those which may have a negative impact on student outcomes The CLE scale is a 23-item instrument with five subscales staff–student relationships, nurse manager commitment, patient relationships, interpersonal relationships, and student satisfaction These factors have strong substantive face validity and construct validity, as determined by confirmatory factor analysis Reliability coefficients range from high (0 85) to marginal (0 63) The CLE scale provides the educator with a valid and reliable instrument to evaluate affectively relevant factors in the CLE, direct resources to areas where improvement may be required, and nurture those areas functioning well It will assist in the application of resources in a cost-effective, efficient, productive manner, and will ensure that the clinical learning experience offers the nursing student the best possible learning outcomes