Technology-enhanced Learning Community Research Articles

Enabling TEL capacity across complexity

Embedding technology is now a necessary part of higher education teaching and learning policy and practice, owing to cascading effects of technological advancements and the pandemic-driven disruption of traditional teaching and learning modes (Rapanta et al., 2020, 2021). Well-designed technology enhanced learning (TEL) spaces and activities can provide experiences that are authentic, learner-centred, flexible, and equitable (Cochrane et al., 2017; Dunn & Kennedy, 2019).
 
 Despite growing supportive evidence of these benefits, university teaching and learning systems often retain legacy structures and practices where technology-enhanced, creative and flexible activities are not easily integrated or well supported (Bridges et al. 2023). These issues may be exacerbated by the perceived comfort – by both academics and institutions – offered by a ‘snap back’ to pre-pandemic settings (Bryant 2022). As institutions rethink the ways in which they enact TEL (García-Morales et al., 2021; Rapanta et al. 2021), understanding and navigating potential barriers and enablers of innovative TEL design (Bone 2022) becomes important. Within this presentation, I draw and reflect on recent projects to consider how academic development programs might facilitate TEL initiatives that are targeted and sustainable.
 
 For individual academics, approaches to teaching and learning can vary, with flow-on effects into the ways they teach, and the learning outcomes of their students (Trigwell & Prosser, 1997, 2004). In challenging, high-pressure environments, academics who teach may not have the capacity to adapt their approaches to a rapidly changing context (Bone 2021). Indeed, impacts of the pandemic highlight that academic development during times of crisis needs to be more holistic and provide adequate support for innovative change (Bone et al. 2021; Sumer et al., 2021; Mulder et al., 2022; Bone et al. in review). Enacting such holistic academic development in higher education institutions, which are highly complex (Knight 2001) but increasingly fragmented and siloed (Becher & Trowler, 2001), requires approaches to design and delivery of programs and supports that mimic and respond to this complexity (Bone & Ross 2019), and are responsive to the intents and priorities of both academics and management, and the learning needs of students.
 
 Embedding technologies into this complex curriculum environment in ways that are sustainable and equitable requires approaches that both build incentives and drivers from leadership (top-down), and reward and harness the existing enthusiasm and capacity of academics (bottom up) (Bone 2022). Building networked approaches to enable curriculum design, development and innovation can involve communities of practice, mentoring or other knowledge-sharing activities across disciplines and roles (Bone et al., 2023). Enacting these across institutional boundaries can bring together those interested in specific aspects of TEL (Narayan et al., in press) who may also feel isolated within traditional hierarchical institutional structures (Bone et al., in press).
 
 Knowledge sharing and community building has clear potential to drive positive change. As a TEL community, we must continue to advocate for teaching, learning and development spaces that emphasise collaboration and collegial knowledge-sharing, and to push for greater recognition as we work together to build the future of higher education teaching and learning.

Operational Conceptual Modeling in Building and Sustaining Technology Enhanced Learning Communities

This paper presents a systematic approach to building and sustaining technology-enhanced learning communities based on a conceptual model that enables the analysis and enhancement of digital platforms and tools that promote creativity and learning. Two such software systems are presented, and their usage is analyzed. Experimental results are also presented that demonstrate the effectiveness of the conceptual model in enhancing the learning experiences offered.

Performative Framework and Case Study for Technology-Enhanced Learning Communities

This paper employs the overarching concept of communities to express the social contexts within which human creativity is exercised and learning happens. With the advent of digital technologies, these social contexts, the communities we engage in, change radically. The new landscape brought about by digital technologies is characterized by new qualities, new opportunities for action, new community affordances. The term onlife is adopted from the Onlife Manifesto and used to distinguish the new kind of communities brought about by the modern digital technologies, the onlife communities. Design principles are presented to foster such communities and support their members. These principles constitute a framework that emphasizes the concept of performativity, i.e. knowledge is based on human performance and actions done within certain social contexts, rather than development of conceptual representations. To demonstrate the use of the framework and the corresponding principles, the paper presents how they can be used to analyze, evaluate and reframe a concrete system addressing creativity and learning in the field of cultural heritage (history teaching and learning). One of the most significant results is the adoption of principles that facilitate students’ engagement in rich learning experiences moving from the role of end-user towards the role of expert-user with the support of so called maieuta-designers. The result of this process is the use of the studied software not only to consume ready-made content but the creation of new, student generated content, offering new learning opportunities to the students. As the evaluation shows, these new learning opportunities enable students to develop a deeper understanding of the topics studied.

Affordances and Core Functions of Smart Learning Environments: A Systematic Literature Review

Smart learning environments (SLEs) have gained considerable momentum in the last 20 years. The term SLE has emerged to encompass a set of recent trends in the field of educational technology, heavily influenced by the growing impact of technologies, such as cloud services, mobile devices, and interconnected objects. However, the term SLE has been used inconsistently by the technology-enhanced learning (TEL) community since different research works employ the adjective “smart” to refer to different aspects of novel learning environments. Previous surveys on SLEs are narrowly focused on specific technologies or remain at a theoretical level that does not discuss practical implications found in empirical studies. To address this inconsistency and also to contribute to a common understanding of the SLE concept, this article presents a systematic literature review of papers published between 2000 and 2019 discussing SLEs in empirical studies. Sixty-eight papers out of an initial list of 1341 papers were analyzed to identify the following: 1) what affordances make a learning environment smart; 2) which technologies are used in SLEs; and 3) in what pedagogical contexts are SLEs used. Considering the limitations of previous surveys, and the inconsistent use of the SLE concept in the TEL community, this article presents a comprehensive characterization to describe SLEs through their affordances, the technologies used, and pedagogical approaches considered in the selected papers. As a result, specific core functions of SLEs are identified and explained. This work aims at ensuring a relevant knowledge base and reference toward the implementation of future SLEs.

Critical perspectives on TEL: art and design education, theory, communities and space

ABSTRACTThis paper explores three themes, emerging from the Inter-Life project, an Art and Design education and social skills project set in a virtual world. We argue that they connect with the concerns raised by critical Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) researchers at the Alpine Rendezvous workshop entitled “TEL: the Crisis and the Response.” The first theme focuses on theory and TEL. We consider Cultural Historical Activity Theory, but we strongly feel that our argument has broader application as part of the intellectual “self-defence toolkit” that researchers and practitioners in the critical TEL community need if they are to “resist” the crises arising from educational globalisation. A second theme relates to the importance of working together in research communities and joint enterprises, focused on using a joint set of tools to investigate an issue or set of issues in a systematic way. In our final theme, we focus on the significance of learning spaces. They are part of the “intellectual toolkit” with which critical TEL researchers can resist the subordination of our ideas and work to globalised interests.

Adoption of Online Network Tools by Minority Students: The Case of Students of Ethiopian Origin in Israel

Students of Ethiopian origin belong to one of the weakest sectors in the Jewish population of Israel. During their studies they have to deal with social alienation, cultural gaps, economic hardships, and racial stereotypes which reduce their chances to successfully complete their academic degree. In this respect, the present research asks whether online social media could provide those youngsters with tools and resources for their better social integration and adaptation to the academic life. For this purpose, the study was conducted in one of Israel’s largest academic colleges while adopting a design-based research approach, which advanced gradually on a continuum between ‘ambient’ and ‘designed’ technology-enhanced learning communities. The interventions applied for this study aimed at examining how they may encourage students of Ethiopian origin to expand their activities in the online social learning groups. The findings indicate that the main pattern of students of Ethiopian origin online participation was peripheral and limited to viewing only. Nevertheless, the level of their online activity has been improved after a series of two interventions, which also led to a slight improvement in indicators of their social integration and in a change in their usage of online learning groups from social to academic uses.

The role of design and enactment patterns in orchestration: Helping to integrate technology in blended classroom ecosystems

Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) researchers have been using the word ‘orchestration’ for a number of different reasons in the last years. From this variety of meanings in which it is employed, the notion of orchestration emerges as the appropriation and integration of the different available technologies in classroom practice. This paper introduces the role of patterns (i.e., recurrent solutions to common problems) and other researcher artifacts (e.g., representations of orchestration) in developing both new educational technologies and interventions that are easier to appropriate/integrate. We also discuss other open questions around orchestration, which are still being discussed in the TEL community.

Interlinking educational resources and the web of data

PurposeResearch in the area of technology‐enhanced learning (TEL) throughout the last decade has largely focused on sharing and reusing educational resources and data. This effort has led to a fragmented landscape of competing metadata schemas, or interface mechanisms. More recently, semantic technologies were taken into account to improve interoperability. The linked data approach has emerged as the de facto standard for sharing data on the web. To this end, it is obvious that the application of linked data principles offers a large potential to solve interoperability issues in the field of TEL. This paper aims to address this issue.Design/methodology/approachIn this paper, approaches are surveyed that are aimed towards a vision of linked education, i.e. education which exploits educational web data. It particularly considers the exploitation of the wealth of already existing TEL data on the web by allowing its exposure as linked data and by taking into account automated enrichment and interlinking techniques to provide rich and well‐interlinked data for the educational domain.FindingsSo far web‐scale integration of educational resources is not facilitated, mainly due to the lack of take‐up of shared principles, datasets and schemas. However, linked data principles increasingly are recognized by the TEL community. The paper provides a structured assessment and classification of existing challenges and approaches, serving as potential guideline for researchers and practitioners in the field.Originality/valueBeing one of the first comprehensive surveys on the topic of linked data for education, the paper has the potential to become a widely recognized reference publication in the area.

Multimodal learning and teaching corpora exchange: lessons learned in five years by the Mulce project

In order to make replication possible for interaction analysis in online learning, the French project named Mulce (2007-2010) and its team worked on requirements for research data to be shareable. We defined a Learning & Teaching Corpus (LETEC) as a package containing the data issued from an online course, the contextual information and metadata, necessary to make these data visible, shareable and reusable. These human, technical and ethical requirements are presented in this paper. We briefly present the structure of a corpus and the repository we developed to share these corpora. Related works are also described and we show how conditions evolved between 2006 and 2011. This leads us to report on how the Mulce project was faced with four particular challenges and to suggest acceptable solutions for computer scientists and researchers in the humanities: both concerned by data sharing in the Technology Enhanced Learning community.

Research Proposal for the Application of Critical Discourse Analysis to the Study of Learning Cultures

This desk-based study explores, on the basis of a critical realist perspective, the possibility of integrating the concept of learning cultures within the scope of critical discourse analysis. It proposes a theoretical framework to support and guide the use of textual analysis in the study of learning cultures and highlights new opportunities to study technology-enhanced learning communities and communities of practice, leveraging on corpora analysis and metaphor individuation procedures.

Supporting Accessible Technology-Enhanced Training: The eAccess2Learn Framework

During the last years, the design and development of technology-enhanced training systems for disabled groups of learners has attracted the attention of the technology-enhanced learning community. However, although a number of such systems have been designed to meet accessibility needs and preferences for those groups, most of them anticipate special-purpose e-training material and keep their e-training activities local to the particular system in use. As a result, neither reuse of existing digital training resources (widely available nowadays in web-based repositories) nor sharing of best technology-facilitated training practices among the communities of educational practitioners and training organizations is supported by these systems. Within this context, in this paper, we present the eAccess2Learn Framework which aims at providing tools and services that facilitate the design and development of accessible e-training resources and courses that bare the potential to be interexchanged between different e-training platforms and programs, thus making them potentially exploitable and reusable between different disabled user groups.

Developing Accessible Cyberinfrastructure-Enabled Knowledge Communities in the National Disability Community: Theory, Practice, and Policy

Since publication of the Atkins Commission report in 2003, the national scientific community has placed significant emphasis on developing cyberinfrastructure-enabled knowledge communities, which are designed to facilitate enhanced efficiency and collaboration in geographically distributed networks of researchers. This article suggests that the new cyberinfrastructure movement may not fully benefit those participants with disabilities, unless closer attention is paid to legal mandates and universal design principles. Many technology-enhanced learning communities provide geographically distributed collaboration opportunities that expand the inclusion of diverse peoples and help close the digital divide. However, to date, most collaboratory efforts have not emphasized the need for access among people with disabilities nor meeting minimum standards for technological accessibility. To address these concerns, this article reports on two pilot collaboratory studies that explore the role advanced information, communication, and collaboration technologies play in enhancing geographically distributed collaboration among specific research and applied networks within the national disability community. Universal design principles inform the design of the collaboratory and its use and our efforts to ensure access for all. Data for this article come from Web-based surveys, interviews, observations, computer logs, and detailed, mixed-methods accessibility testing. Emerging results suggest that with deliberate and systematic efforts, cyberinfrastructure can be more accessible and generate benefits among persons with disabilities. The authors provide lessons learned and recommendations for future research, policy, law, and practice.