Thanks to Prof Theo Andrew for drawing attention to this valuable article on the flipped lecture room. In her article in the American Society for Engineering Education’s Prism journal, Margaret Loftus tells how blended classes – mixing traditional and digital teaching – are gaining converts. Our DUT e-learning project promotes a similar blended model (aka “classroom hybridization”) described by Loftus as gaining popularity in Engineering Curricula.
Bachelor of Education programmes offered by the DUT’s School of Education have established a unique model to introduce e-elearning to students as an integral part of their first-year curriculum. The Computer Literacy component of Skills and Life Orientation, taken by all first years, familiarises students with online classrooms and so opens the door to e-learning in other subjects. In a paper presented at the DUT e-Learning Festival in December last year, School of Education lecturers Ben Tarr and Ray Holmes reported that in 2012 a total of 11 lecturers were teaching participating students in 30 online classrooms. Little wonder, then, that the BEd offerings are amongst those selected as Vanguard Programmes for 2014, as exemplars of the university’s 2015 target for the adoption of online learning.
A new report from the UK’s Open University provides a remarkable guide to innovation in e-learning and related technologies. The report is part of a series that “explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, in order to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation”.
Amongst the ten topics covered here are MOOCs (massive open online courses); Badges to accredit learning, Learning analytics; Crowd Learning, Digital Scholarship; Learning from gaming; and Citizen Enquiry.
The authors are convinced that these are the new pedagogies that might transform education. The report is succinct and readable with valuable cross-links to online resources and research papers. Available for download here:
Innovating Pedagogy 2013 : Exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment, to guide educators and policy makers.
http://www.open.ac.uk/personalpages/mike.sharples/Reports/Innovating_Pedagogy_report_2013.pdf
