Non-traditional students' preferences for learning technologies and impacts on academic self-efficacy.

Blended Learning (BL) as a pedagogical approach has increased in significance during the COVID-19 pandemic, with blended and online learning environments becoming the new digital norm for higher educational institutions around the globe. While BL has been discussed in the literature for thirty years, a common approach has been to categorise learner cohorts to support educators in better understanding students' relationships with learning technologies. This approach, largely unsupported by empirical evidence, has failed to adequately address the challenges of integrating learning technologies to fit with non-traditional students' preferences, their BL self-efficacy and the associated pedagogical implications. Focusing on student preference, our study presents findings from a pre-COVID survey of undergraduate students across four campuses of an Australian regional university where students shared their learning technology preferences and the self-regulated learning that influenced their academic self-efficacy in a BL context. Findings show students want consistency, relevance, and effectiveness with the use of BL tools, with a preference for lecture recordings and video resources to support their learning, while email and Facebook Messenger were preferred for communicating with peers and academic staff. Our study suggests a quality BL environment facilitates self-regulated learning using fit-for-purpose technological applications. Academic self-efficacy for BL can increase when students perceive the educational technologies used by their institution are sufficient for their learning needs.

Focus on Fiction

[...]Plato once considered poetry (the fiction of the time) as a pale imitation of reality and a distraction from the search for objective truth (Gulley 1977: 154-169). First author Sagamba Muhira and co-author James Page give voice to a refugee boy fleeing his war-torn homeland in 'Out of Africa'. In 'Sharing Stories: Sentimentality and Sociable Reading as Articulating Concern for Animals', Clare Archer-Lean and Lesley Hawkes consider how thematic book clubs which centralise the lives of animals have the potential to generate more empathetic understandings of nonhuman animals. Using the themed book club as a method of data collection, Archer-Lean and Hawkes show that books do not just reflect the world but provide ways to articulate a reader's previously silenced interior worlds.