Educational Solutions

Blog

A publishing space will be designed and implemented to promote techno-educational collaborations. Its main purpose is to collect, process and redistribute information to a community of people interested in the use of new educational technologies for social learning and institutional teaching in general. It will support the techno-pedagogical watch activity.

The blog will be represented by an online sharing and publication space managed by a community of scholars and practitioners of e-Learning. It will also allow readers to post comments and votes. In this way, the dissemination of information should be structured and organized by the selection of keywords, ranking levels and links, as well as via RSS feeds and mailing lists.

Development of training modules

The PLE pre-study included a survey (questionnaire performed by UNIGE in 2010), which allowed to grasp a good understanding of the elearning needs for both students and teachers. The results of this analysis permitted to construct the global structure of this proposal.

ICT skills are well known: research of information, collaboration and communication, choice-manipulationunderstanding of ICT tools, creation and management of numeric resources-documents, critical thinking, etc. A detailed analysis of students’ needs will allow to develop training modules adapted to various publics and learning situations. In the design of these training modules, we will take into account the preexisting ICT students’ skills, those they would like to develop, the web tools they are using to learn, the types of “workflow” activities they do (taking notes, searching for information, working on learning platforms, etc.). We will also ask them the amount of time, pace and training type they would prefer. During this phase, we will also use the results emerging from the techno-pedagogical watch (using experts, blogs, scientific literature) about new educational technologies. BA, MA, and PhD students of the project partners will be considered as they form populations with differing learning objectives.

Training modules will then be developed in IMS compatible format. They will be deployed through the UNIGE Learning Object Repository (LOR), which can be harvested by SwitchCollection. These resources will thus be available for all members of the Swiss academic community having an AAI connection.

Teaching coordination of these training modules will be performed by the UNIGE’s CCSP in collaboration with the UNIFR’s NTE and UNIGE’s Institute of Science Services (ISS) department.

Development of guidelines and interactive tutorials

Guidelines and interactive tutorials aim at explaining briefly (one page maximum) the usage of the PLE basic tools, including the ePortfolio.

In addition to specific technical documentation, deploying ePortfolios at an institutional level implies multiple decisions and involves various types of actors. In order to ensure coherency within and across institutions, it is necessary that decisions makers be adequately informed on pedagogical, deployment and long-term issues. Since its early days, the Eduhub SIG ePortfolio has registered a growing demand for guidelines to help master the shift in paradigm induced by the use of ePortfolios, namely the learnercentered and lifelong aspects. Therefore, the Eduhub SIG ePortfolio will produce guidelines for institutional decision makers, teaching staff and students, including subjects like:

  • student level: self-reflection, personal development plan, showcase, etc.
  • course level: learning scenarios, assessing portfolios, tutoring, etc.
  • cursus level: defining learning outcomes, working with reference lists or grids of competences (as defined in the project “TUNING Educational Structures in Europe” - http://www.tuning.unideusto.org/ and exemplified in the European Portfolio for Languages - http://www.coe.int/t/dg/portfolio/ GPS4Learning - http://www.gps4learning.com), mentoring, etc. The guideline will include a grid of competences for self-regulated learning and the organisation of an e-portfolio for students and coaches.
  • institutional level: leadership, support, guidance and training, reference material, issues related to the technical infrastructure, etc.
  • inter-institutional level: interoperability issues [information on the state of adoption of the IMS eP (ePortfolio) standard http://www.imsglobal.org/ep.html, long-term needs and decisions, etc.

Guidelines will be provided in formats suitable for dissemination in a variety of contexts: paper, web, social networks, etc. In addition, some guidelines will be completed with some specific developments on Mahara such as:

  • Tutoring and monitoring: module to enable teachers to easily track the different versions of students’ eportfolio and monitor their progress.
  • Reference lists of competences and learning outcomes (see section 4-1-6 for more details).

Soft Skills Seminars for PhD students to develop transversal competences

The purpose of these seminars is to enable PhD students to practice and develop mastery of certain categories of Web 2.0 tools and PLE, useful for their learning and research activities. The goal is to combine theoretical and practical workshops to help them first to effectively exploit all these resources essential to their academic activities and, second to develop an intelligent strategy so to become independent while these technologies continuously evolve.

The audience of PhD students is well suited for these seminars. On one hand, PhD-students form a population consuming external resources available on the Web. On the other hand, many doctoral students are involved in teaching (seminars and tutorials). Once trained, they can be a vector of active dissemination (such as "viral") for the use of PLE and ePortfolio by recommending or introducing it into their teaching practices with students.

These seminars will provide a basis for the formative evaluation process of the project aiming at improving seminars adapted for various audiences. Through the formative evaluation, these PhD seminars will help the project to estimate:

  • the adequacy of our pedagogical scenarios for more informal types of trainings
  • the impact of such trainings on ICT transversal skills development

This action will be implemented in collaboration with teachers Institute of Science Services (ISS) at the University of Geneva and Centre NTE in Fribourg. CUSO is interested that we organize two seminars per semester for PhD students, as part of a hybrid learning scenario.

Application and testing of PLE with BA students

BA students represent a large population at University, with a lot of scaffolding needs to develop ICT skills along all their cursus. With these students, we envision to introduce the use of Dashboard through formal educational activities, which will allow us to estimate:

  • the adequacy of our pedagogical scenarios;
  • the impact of such trainings on ICT transversal skills development (use of institutional and noninstitutional resources as well as between formal and informal training).

This action will be implemented in a BA course of EPFL (Automatic Control labs), a BA course of UNIFR, and a BA students course of the UNIGE ISS. In the process, we will also help some teachers (considered as pilot classes for the project) introduce activities teaching based on the Dashboard in their courses so as to disseminate the use of PLE in the academic community of teachers.

Skills referential and learning outcomes

This feature (not currently available in Mahara) would significantly help students to manage their progressions in learning and therefore promote self-reflexion and Personal Development Planning (PDP). Concretely, this feature will be implemented as a Mahara module and will allow teachers and students to perform at least the following tasks:

  • Create and manage a referential skills, add new skills, add sub skills, disable existing skills, etc.
  • Extract skill usage (i.e., how many users have a certain skill).
  • Reference skills from the repository and add them to their views.
  • Comment on somebody else skills.
  • Track their progress depending on a specific skill.

This module will also take into account all the reflexions that were made in the European Language Portfolio, GPS4Learning. In addition, the development will be realized in close collaboration with the SIGePortfolio members specialized in this field.

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