Learning Theory-Pedagogy

Quality of education encompasses how teaching and learning is organised and managed, what is the content of learning, what level of learning is achieved, what it leads to in term of outcomes, and what goes on in the learning environment (EFA report 2002). Teachers generate a teaching strategy in order to form a bridge between their teaching activities and students’ learning covering the above points. Factors that influence the teaching and learning process are the communication between teachers and students, students’ and teachers’ characteristics such as their preferences on technology, their role in activities, their motivation and interest, university facilities such as learning space, library services, etc. and classroom ambience.

Define Purpose

Teachers often focus on a particular tool that they wish to integrate into their courses based on their preferences, familiarity with a specific tool and the current trends. However, they should firstly consider the purpose and the learning outcomes of teaching and learning and then to decide what is the best technology tool and/or service for them in order to integrate into their courses. There is a plethora of educational tools which can support teaching and learning and each of these tools has benefits and disadvantages on their use. The decision of choosing one tool and/or service against the other is difficult and pointless, if they do not establish what it is that they wish from their students to achieve, do, or understand. Thus, the first thing that teachers need to think and ask themselves are some general questions regarding the intellectual or conceptual of the learning activity, the engagement of the participants (e.g., collaboration, exchange views, independent learning) and the accomplishment of the learning activity via technology (e.g., videos, wikis, animations, blogs). In other words, they need to define the purpose of the use of technology in their teaching.

Plan the teaching and learning activity

After having a wide idea on what learning technology tools willbe useful for their teaching and how they will engage their students into learning, the next step is to plan the learning activity and/or course in more details. For example, they should think and ask themselves questions regarding the

topics, sections or material that they will cover;
connection with curriculum and skills that students need to obtain;
assessment of learning outcomes;
use of a particular tool and/or service in order to support curriculum and/or learning objectives;
frequency of the use of tool, the way that students will contribute to the activity and their engagement with learning;
technical support that they and their students will need;
level of their involvement in teaching process;
level of scaffolding they need to provide to their students;
management of their teaching; and
evaluation of the effectiveness of using a particular tool and/or service in their class or the whole year of studies cohort.

According to JISC report (2007) students wish more instructions on the way a digital tool and/or service support their learning and meet teachers’ expectations in relation to learning outcomes rather than instructions on the way that they use a particular digital tool and/or service. It supposes that students have confidence in using new digital technologies and feel comfortable with using them in their everyday life.

Note: Teachers need to test the learning activity supported by technology in their University computing environment under student access conditions, across different operating systems (mainly Windows and Mac) and/or using different web browsers (mainly Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome), before they introduce a digital learning activity to their students.

A learning activity could be based on one or a mixture of the broadly accepted theories of learning:

Note: In order to make clear the distinction between cognitive constructivism and socio-cultural constructivism, many researchers use the words cognitivism and constructivism respectively. Overall, cognitive constructivism or cognitivism is focused on how information is processed, while socio-cultural constructivism or constructivism is focused on what learners do with information to develop knowledge.

The mix of different modes of learning could be described as blended learning and it may combine the use of a variety of media and/or learning methods (Joy-Matthews, Megginson and Surtees, 2004) . Through blended learning process students are able to access knowledge from anywhere anytime while they have face-to-face lectures with their teachers. Overall, the term of blended learning may include different concepts (Driscoll, 2002) such as

the combination of web-based technology in order to accomplish an educational goal;
the combination of learning theories with or without instructional technology to produce an optimal learning outcome ;
the combination of any form of instructional technology with face-to-face instructor-led training; and
the combination of instructional technology with actual job task.

Online learning or distance learning …..

References
Driscoll, M. (2002) Blended Learning: let’s get beyond the hype, E-learning
EFA (2002). “Education for All” global monitoring report, pp. 80.
Joy-Matthews, J. Megginson, D. and Surtees, M. (2004). Human resource development (3rd Edition). London: Kogan Page
JISC (2007). Students expectations study: findings from preliminary research. Joint Information Systems Committee.

Integration of Technology by Maria Limniou is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.