Empowering educators: a comprehensive approach to elevate online teaching excellence

In recent years, the use of digital technology in the education of health care professionals has surged, partly driven by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, there is still a need for focused research to establish evidence of its effectiveness. This study aimed to define the gaps in the evidence for the efficacy of digital education and to identify priority areas where future research has the potential to contribute to our understanding and use of digital education. We used a 2-stage approach to identify research priorities. First, an umbrella review of the recent literature (published between 2020 and 2023) was performed to identify and build on existing work. Second, expert consensus on the priority research questions was obtained using a modified Delphi method. A total of 8857 potentially relevant papers were identified. Using the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) methodology, we included 217 papers for full review. All papers were either systematic reviews or meta-analyses. A total of 151 research recommendations were extracted from the 217 papers. These were analyzed, recategorized, and consolidated to create a final list of 63 questions. From these, a modified Delphi process with 42 experts was used to produce the top-five rated research priorities: (1) How do we measure the learning transfer from digital education into the clinical setting? (2) How can we optimize the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning to facilitate education and training? (3) What are the methodological requirements for high-quality rigorous studies assessing the outcomes of digital health education? (4) How does the design of digital education interventions (eg, format and modality) in health professionals' education and training curriculum affect learning outcomes? and (5) How should learning outcomes in the field of health professions' digital education be defined and standardized? This review provides a prioritized list of research gaps in digital education in health care, which will be of use to researchers, educators, education providers, and funding agencies. Additional proposals are discussed regarding the next steps needed to advance this agenda, aiming to promote meaningful and practical research on the use of digital technologies and drive excellence in health care education.

BackgroundFormal regional Paediatric teaching was cancelled after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Local teaching was impacted upon by social distancing, rota redesign, redeployment and home working, and was completely...

Educational hub refers to centres of excellence in higher education and research whose aims are to provide high-quality education for both national and international students to enhance the competitiveness of the country. These educational hubs provide an opportunity for knowledge exchanges and innovation in local regions through education and training. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, rapid shifts were made towards online learning in education around the world. Although the lockdown is over, remote learning will likely play an increasingly prominent role in education. The adoption of scaled remote learning during the pandemic provided evidence of the importance of online learning. They offer an insight into global society, helping prepare students for an increasingly interconnected world by facilitating links between different regions. Educational hubs can be tied to distance learning and are successful in attracting international students when offering a combination of distance learning methods and innovative programs. This paper examines the phenomenon of educational hubs in higher education for international education through online learning with digital technology. New opportunities for online and distance learning within the definition of educational hubs are analyzed, and three online and blended learning models that reflect the development of educational hubs based on COVID-19 conditions of education are offered. In addition, the successful cases and experiences of distance learning hubs in China and Iran in recent years are described.

In this paper, an advanced virtual program in engineering education developed at the University of South Australia for both on-campus and offshore students is described. This extensive training program is based on a comprehensive online tutorial and comprises both face-to-face and online learning. The program provides a tailored evaluation format to ensure that all postgraduate students, including those doing coursework and research, will have appropriate exposure to updated learning skills and research resources. Although the internet is the primary resource used in this educational program, other resources, such as videoconferencing, video-taping and face-to-face lecturing, have also played a role in promoting engineering teaching and research excellence. The feedback from students in recent years has been very encouraging, and students have shown increased information literacy skills and improved researching abilities. As off-campus class numbers have increased, further development of the program to meet their requirements has been a priority.

The massive adoption of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic brought an opportunity to investigate teachers’ conceptions of excellent teaching in the context of emergency remote education. From June to August 2020, we conducted a cross-sectional study using an online questionnaire to (1) analyze teachers’ perceptions of the quality of their teaching in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, (2) identify teachers’ perceptions of the qualities of excellent online teachers, and (3) examine differences based on gender, age, previous online learning training, and work experiences. The sample consisted of 341 university teachers who worked in private and public institutions in Ecuador. Results indicate that most participants perceived online teaching was easy for them, as well as personally satisfying. However, less than half of the participants felt that the quality of their teaching and their relationships with their students had improved since the adoption of online learning. Regarding the qualities of excellent online teachers, participants indicated that being respectful, enthusiastic about their teaching and their topics, striving to become a better teacher, being humble, and being knowledgeable about their subject matter were the top five qualities excellent online teachers should have. Comparison analysis indicated gender differences in some of the items. Women tended to feel more strongly that their relationship with their students had improved since online teaching was adopted; also, they gave higher scores to qualities such as being humble, establishing rapport, being sensitive and persistent, and being understanding compared to men. There were not differences based on age. Regarding online teaching training and work experiences, we found statistical differences in the perceptions on the quality of their teaching and some of the traits of excellent online educators. We found that participants with previous training and work experiences rated more strongly qualities such as being an effective communicator, being prepared and technologically competent. We discuss the implications of these findings considering the challenges that online learning imposes on educators in many parts of the world.

NOVEMBER 2013 PLACEMENT ADS

The Directed–Self Education programme (DSE) in the first year undergraduate course in veterinary anatomy seeks to support students in developing personal study and information technology skills. It also aims to move computer–assisted learning (CAL) towards offering tools for students to create a variety of computer–based materials of their own which subsequently can be repurposed by staff as teaching resources. This aspect addresses the issue that many British academics have little incentive to devote time to improving teaching through CAL methods, as innovation and excellence in teaching is not rewarded in career terms on par with excellence in research. The programme seeks to integrate a modest type of “problem–based learning” (PBL) methodology without demanding the total integration of pre–clinical with clinical teaching advocated by full–scale PBL. Since 1993 the outcomes of the programme have been that lectures in the first year veterinary anatomy course have been reduced by a third, with a slight change in the mean value of the final grades in the first year final examination in veterinary anatomy during 1994–5, as compared to the years 1991–3. Other benefits have included the rapid creation of a library of student–produced CAL which is recycled by staff into other forms of computer–based teaching. It has also led to involvement in the use of CAL by lecturers hitherto resistant to applying technology to teaching, and the vacation employment of current BVSc undergraduates from the programme in university and national projects producing CAL for medical teaching.

The outburst of COVID-19 epidemic has enforced the higher education sector to revamp customary mode of teaching and assessing students learning. This study is a portrayal of online education and intended to critically examine how online education during COVID-19 fostered a combination of favorable and unfavorable outcomes which might disrupt and redesign academic routine process. Data were collected from professors, associate professors and rectors affiliated with higher education system through focused group discussions and semi-structured interviews. The interpretivism paradigm analysis was performed to examine the data using qualitative methodology. This study delivers a comprehensive review of enduring online education mode through the lock-down tenure. It outlines details on how quality of education was ensured through online teaching-learning process, E-portal access, self-reliant technological system, online assessment, and quality standards. Findings delineated that higher education sector converted challenge into opportunity without wasting students semester and facilitated them in achieving academic quality, thereby overcoming the continuous academic distortion and subsequently ensuring the renewal of educational procedures. Results also reported numerous challenges faced by teachers and management in delivering quality education. This research refills the existing gap by adding to the literature on online education from the perspectives of key academia concerns during the COVID-19 epidemic. It also provides practical implications to governing bodies and policy makers of higher education sector

State University of New York Upstate Medical University College of Medicine

Transnational distance education has become an emerging trend in promoting academic collaboration and exchange during and after the pandemic. Guided by the learning ecology framework, we conducted mixed methods research by distributing an online survey to Chinese students (N=51) to collect quantitative and qualitative data. This helped us deeply understand their experiences and perceptions of a cross-cultural online learning environment in the United States. We applied multiple regression and thematic analysis to analyze quantitative and qualitative data. The merging of both types of data analysis indicated: the confirmation of the importance of English learning resources, the transformation of online learning practices, the insufficiency of students-to-instructors interaction, discordance of technological self-efficacy and the disadvantages of technology-assisted instruction, and discordance between the usefulness and difficulties of learning activities and assessments. We further discussed appropriate strategies and techniques to promote online teaching and learning excellence in transnational distance education.

Web-based distance learning is hampered in many cases by a failure to deliver material in a manner consistent with the ways in which students learn and instructors teach best in traditional environments (Samorski, 2002). Excellent teachers are successful because of the ways in which they mediate content and place the content within the context of the subject matter. It is not the specific content or images the successful teacher presents, but rather the manner in which they are presented and framed within the scope of the topic area. Excellent teachers teach by presenting the content and then providing the students with substantive opportunities to apply the content to real-world problems in an effort to promote critical thinking on the part of the student. This is a highly interactive process with much information being transmitted between the student and the instructor. The interchange between the instructor and the student helps the student build a knowledge base with the assistance of the instructor’s experience and expertise in the topic area. The exact nature of the interchange is not predetermined and depends to a great extent on the creativity and breadth of experience of the instructor. The successful instructor adjusts his or her interaction with the students to the learning styles best suited to them. How do we provide the learner with this important component of traditional classroom education in asynchronous distance education or technology-mediated traditional classes? Web-based instruction is rapidly becoming the preferred mode of distance education, and we must adapt our instructional interaction styles to this medium. Our students now expect more interactive and immersive materials in Web-based learning than that typically provided in the traditional classroom or correspondence distance education (Samoriski, 2002).

Web-based distance learning is hampered in many cases by a failure to deliver material in a manner consistent with the ways in which students learn and instructors teach best in traditional environments (Samoriski, 2002). Excellent teachers are successful because of the ways in which they mediate content and place the content within the context of the subject matter. It is not the specific content or images the successful teacher presents, but rather the manner in which they are presented and framed within the scope of the topic area. Excellent teachers teach by presenting the content and then providing the students with substantive opportunities to apply the content to real-world problems in an effort to promote critical thinking on the part of the student. This is a highly interactive process with much information being transmitted between the student and the instructor. The interchange between the instructor and the student helps the student build a knowledge base with the assistance of the instructor’s experience and expertise in the topic area. The exact nature of the interchange is not predetermined and depends to a great extent on the creativity and breadth of experience of the instructor. The successful instructor adjusts his or her interaction with the students to the learning styles best suited to them. How do we provide the learner with this important component of traditional classroom education in asynchronous distance education or technology-mediated traditional classes? Web-based instruction is rapidly becoming the preferred mode of distance education, and we must adapt our instructional interaction styles to this medium. Our students now expect more interactive and immersive materials in Web-based learning than that typically provided in the traditional classroom or correspondence distance education (Samoriski, 2002). The TALON learning object system is a series of repurposeable learning object templates based on styles of teaching and learning as described by Dunning et al. (2003). These flash-based templates allow instructors to design and execute interactive learning objects in approximately 10% of the time required to create them from first principles, because the use of them requires little or no alteration of existing source code or writing of additional code (Abtar, Dunning, Harvinder, & Halimatolhanin, 2004; Dunning et al., 2004). The fact that the learning objects are based on the successful learning styles experienced in the traditional classroom ensures that the student is both engaged and allowed to build a knowledge base about the content being covered.

Stearns Center-Digital Learning is committed to supporting excellence in online education, to meet/exceed research-based quality standards for online teaching and learning. To help Mason faculty and departments identify online quality, we have piloted a self-assessment tool for faculty, “How Does My Online Course Show Quality?” The quality indicators in the self-assessment represent standards that are research-based and recognized by leading organizations for online quality, e.g., Online Learning Consortium and Quality Matters. The self-assessment presents quality indicators for 9 categories for Online Course Design (1. Course Overview and Navigation; 2. Learning Outcomes; 3. Accessibility; 4. Course Materials & Resources) and Online Teaching & Learner Support (5. Instructor Presence & Communication; 6. Learning Activities; 7. Grading and Feedback; 8. Learner Support; 9. Technology Support). For each category, we provide a list of possible examples showing evidence for quality. In the self-assessment, faculty first reviews the indicators and examples; then prepares a brief narrative for each of the 9 quality categories, describing the specific evidence for quality in their online course; identifying a stand-out practice from their course for each category; and listing anything that they would like to improve, enhance, or explore before teaching the online course again. The Online Teaching & Learner Support categories of the self-assessment may be used separately, for faculty teaching an already-developed online course. The self-assessment framework also may be revised for use as a peer-review tool, for departments to review quality of online courses and online teaching.

The TCM spirit cultivation theory of the old is both extensive and profound. It can not only provide guidance to the establishment of the TCM spirit cultivation system of the old under the aging background, but also provides vast development prospects to develop the TCM spirit cultivation education of the old in medical college. Some particular measures to be taken are as the followings: to establish relevant courses about the TCM spirit cultivation education of the old as a specialty course for clinical medicine about gerontology, nursing and rehabilitation therapeutics; students participate in social practice program in community, retirement organization and geriatric ward; to integrate teaching resources and set up the excellent teachers' team; to ensure teaching process designs scientific, including the improvement of teaching methods, diversified styles of assessment and online courses design. Key words: Traditional Chinese medicine; Education of spirit cultivation; Healthy aging

This systematic literature review aims to investigate whether blended learning can become the hallmark of educational excellence. The study documents and reviews articles related to blended learning from 2014 to 2021, sourced from accredited national and international journals accessible through Google Scholar, ScienceDirect, and ResearchGate. The results reveal that blended learning plays a crucial role as a solution for teaching and learning activities during the COVID-19 pandemic and the 21st century. It has the potential to become an icon of educational excellence; however, successful implementation requires alignment of institutional goals, educators, students, and parents. The implications of this study underscore the significance of embracing blended learning as a creative and innovative approach to adapt to the challenges of the pandemic and beyond.
 Highlights:
 
 
 Blended learning as a transformative solution: Blended learning emerges as a vital approach to seamlessly integrate traditional face-to-face teaching with online education, presenting a transformative solution to adapt to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.
 
 
 Educational excellence in the 21st century: The systematic review showcases blended learning as a potential icon of educational excellence, offering a pathway to foster innovative and creative learning environments that align with the demands of the 21st-century education landscape.
 
 
 Key success factors for implementation: The study emphasizes the significance of goal alignment among institutions, educators, students, and parents, highlighting that successful implementation of blended learning hinges upon the collaboration and synchronization of all stakeholders.
 
 
 Keywords: Blended Learning, Educational Excellence, COVID-19 Pandemic, Systematic Literature Review, Online Education