What’s in a name: Dimensions of social learning in teacher groups

Induced by a literature review, this paper presents a framework of dimensions and indicators highlighting the underpinning aspects and values of social learning within teacher groups. Notions of social networks, communities of practice and learning teams were taken as the main perspectives to influence this social learning framework. The review exercise resulted in four dimensions: (1) practice, (2) domain and value creation, (3) collective identity and (4) organization. The indicators corresponding to these dimensions serve as the foundation for understanding social learning in practice. The framework of dimensions and indicators can be of assistance for researchers as well as teacher groups that aim to assess their views on social learning and analyse whether these views fit the learning goals of the group, or that adjustments are required. In this way, learning processes within groups of teachers can be improved.

Education and self-regulation of learning for gifted pupils: Systemic design and development.

Gifted pupils differ from their age-mates with respect to development potential, actual competencies, self-regulatory capabilities, and learning styles in one or more domains of competence. The question is how to design and develop education that fits and further supports such characteristics and competencies of gifted pupils. Analysis of various types of educational interventions for gifted pupils reflects positive cognitive or intellectual effects and differentiated social comparison or group-related effects on these pupils. Systemic preventive combination of such interventions could make these more effective and sustainable. The systemic design is characterised by three conditional dimensions: differentiation of learning materials and procedures, integration by and use of ICT support, and strategies to improve development and learning. The relationships to diagnostic, instructional, managerial, and systemic learning aspects are expressed in guidelines to develop or transform education. The guidelines imply the facilitation of learning arrangements that provide flexible self-regulation for gifted pupils. A three-year pilot in Dutch nursery and primary school is conducted to develop and implement the design in collaboration with teachers. The results constitute prototypes of structured competence domains and supportive software. These support the screening of entry characteristics of all four-year old pupils and assignment of adequate play and learning processes and activities throughout the school career. Gifted and other pupils are supported to work at their actual achievement or competency levels since their start in nursery school, in self-regulated learning arrangements either in or out of class. Each pupil can choose other pupils to collaborate with in small groups, at self-chosen tasks or activities, while being coached by the teacher. Formative evaluation of the school development process shows that the systemic prevention guidelines seem to improve learning and social progress of gifted pupils, including their self-regulation. Further development and implementation steps are discussed.

Self-regulated learning and social media – a ‘natural’ alliance? Evidence on students’ self-regulation of learning, social media use and student-teacher relationship

Article is available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17439884.2015.1064953.

Evaluation Framework EFI for Measuring the Impact of Learning, Education and Training

This article introduces the Evaluation Framework EFI for the Impact Measurement of learning, education and training: The Evaluation Framework for Impact Measurement was developed for specifying the evaluation phase and its objectives and tasks within the IDEAL Reference Model for the introduction and optimization of quality development within learning, education and training. First, a description of the Evaluation Framework for Impact Measurement will be provided, followed by a brief overview of the IDEAL Reference Model. Finally, an example for the implementation of the Evaluation Framework for Impact Measurement within the ARISTOTELE project is presented.

The role of learning design and learning analytics in MOOCs

The last couple of years there has been a lot of attention for MOOCs. More and more universities start offering MOOCs. Although the open dimension of MOOC indicates that it is open in every aspect, in most cases it is a course with a structure and a timeline within which learning activities are positioned. There is a contradiction there. The open aspect puts MOOCs more in the non-formal professional learning domain, while the course structure takes it into the formal, traditional education domain. Accordingly, there is no consensus yet on solid pedagogical approaches for MOOCs. Something similar can be said for learning analytics, another upcoming concept that is receiving a lot of attention. Given its nature, learning analytics offers a large potential to support learners in particular in MOOCs. Learning analytics should then be applied to assist the learners and teachers in understanding the learning process and could predict learning, provide opportunities for pro-active feedback, but should also results in interventions aimed at improving progress. This paper illustrates pedagogical and learning analytics approaches based on practices developed in formal online and distance teaching university education that have been fine-tuned for MOOCs and have been piloted in the context of the EU-funded MOOC projects ECO (Elearning, Communication, Open-Data: http://ecolearning.eu) and EMMA (European Multiple MOOC Aggregator: http://platform.europeanmoocs.eu).

Mobile authoring of open educational resources for authentic learning scenarios

The proliferation of smartphones in the last decade and the number of publications in the field of authoring systems for computer-assisted learning depict a scenario that needs to be explored in order to facilitate the scaffolding of learning activities across contexts. Learning resources are traditionally designed in desktop-based authoring systems where the context is mostly restricted to the learning objective, capturing relevant case characteristics, or virtual situation models. Mobile authoring tools enable learners and teachers to foster universal access to educational resources not only providing channels to share, remix or re-contextualize these, but also capturing the context in-situ and in-time. As a further matter, authoring educational resources in a mobile context is an authentic experience where authors can link learning with their own daily life activities and reflections. The contribution of this manuscript is fourfold: first, the main barriers for ubiquitous and mobile authoring of educational resources are identified; second, recent research on mobile authoring tools is reviewed, and 10 key shortcomings of current approaches are identified; third, the design of a mobile environment to author educational resources (MAT for ARLearn) is presented, and the results of an evaluation of usability and hedonic quality are presented; fourth, conclusions and a research agenda for mobile authoring are discussed.