ABSTRACT
Professional development (PD) is a key element for enhancing the quality of academic teaching. An increasing number of PD activities have moved to blended and online formats, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the desire, potential, and need for collaboration among educators to learn from innovative and best practices, several institutions have started to pool their resources and expertise together and have started to implement cross-institutional and cross-national online professional development (OPD). The questions of what type of a (cross-)institutional OPD educators might prefer, and whether educators learn effectively from (and with) peers in such cross-cultural context have not been adequately explored empirically. In this case-study across three European countries, we explored the lived experiences of 86 educators as a result of a cross-institutional OPD. Using a mixed methods design approach our pre-post findings indicated that, on average, participants made substantial gains in knowledge. In addition, several cultural differences were evident in the expectations and lived experiences in ODP, as well as the intention to transfer what had been learned into one's own practice of action. This study indicates that while substantial economic and pedagogical affordances are provided with cross-institutional OPD, cultural differences in context might impact the extent to which educators implement lessons learned from OPD.
ABSTRACT
Social media continues to influence the online behaviours of humans in some of the most profound ways. Furthermore, COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted immense opportunities that socialmedia provides to keep people connected and engaged through difficult circumstances. Unfortunately, it also attracts various dubious users, eager to take advantage to the anonymity of these platforms to conduct unethical and illegal practices. Typical computing studies courses do not focus on developing the skills and attitudes to enable students to work in a globalised environment, and certainly do not focus on exposing many of the social challenges in our societies. Authentic learning experience are not common. An activity was created between the UOW College Australia and UOW College Hong Kong where students from these respective institutions collaborated with each other to identify, explore and suggest a social media-based solution to challenges faced by a NGO located in a third country, that is, not located in Australia or Hong Kong. This gave students to experience working with each other, and through that navigate the various linguistic, cultural and other norms and differences. They also had to identify and communicate with a NGO from a third country, in many cases who had their own linguistic, cultural and other norms about work and communications. This paper will discuss some of the knowledge, skills and attitudes that can be gained from engaging in cross border collaborative social projects. It will also outline some of the challenges and opportunities that exist in establishing these types of learning activities.
ABSTRACT
Complex health and medical contexts demand not only responsive, mutable research but also responsive, flexible pedagogies. Arguing for a shift from the dominant conception of pedagogy as a pre-planned, linear scaffold, this article proposes instead an approach—called Lego™ Learning—that re-conceptualizes instructional content as self-standing, short-term units or modules, much like Lego™ bricks. Because such modules have self-contained learning objectives and corresponding tasks, they can be shifted within a course or across courses as-needed. This approach allows rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) instructional content to respond to, and prepare students for, the ever-changing exigencies and contexts of RHM-related work. It also encourages collaborations across classes, institutions, and other contexts. In this entry, we frame our discussion around four learning outcomes and teaching practices that can be facilitated through this approach, and we provide an extended example of an ongoing cross-institutional partnership that employs Lego™ Learning.
ABSTRACT
Social media continues to influence the online behaviours of humans in some of the most profound ways. Furthermore, COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted immense opportunities that social media provides to keep people connected and engaged through difficult circumstances. Unfortunately, it also attracts various dubious users, eager to take advantage to the anonymity of these platforms to conduct unethical and illegal practices. Typical computing studies courses do not focus on developing the skills and attitudes to enable students to work in a globalised environment, and certainly do not focus on exposing many of the social challenges in our societies. Authentic learning experience are not common. An activity was created between the UOW College Australia and UOW College Hong Kong where students from these respective institutions collaborated with each other to identify, explore and suggest a social media-based solution to challenges faced by a NGO located in a third country, that is, not located in Australia or Hong Kong. This gave students to experience working with each other, and through that navigate the various linguistic, cultural and other norms and differences. They also had to identify and communicate with a NGO from a third country, in many cases who had their own linguistic, cultural and other norms about work and communications. This paper will discuss some of the knowledge, skills and attitudes that can be gained from engaging in cross border collaborative social projects. It will also outline some of the challenges and opportunities that exist in establishing these types of learning activities. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.