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The development of multidisciplinary education requires people to communicate, learn, and design beyond the boundaries of their own domains. In this research, an education design framework is developed to facilitate and support university teachers in multidisciplinary educational design. In addition, it serves as an aid to potentially transform domain-specific action-oriented knowledge into domain-integrated action-oriented knowledge by supporting knowledge co-construction across domain boundaries. The educational design framework, grounded in seamless and hybrid learning paradigms and theory on wicked problem solving, is being developed in a design-oriented educational research. This resulted in a multidisciplinary educational design game, which aims to facilitate cross-border communication, knowledge co-construction, and educational design processes during multidisciplinary educational design and improve the quality of the resulting multidisciplinary educational design.

Higher education is faced with the question of how large numbers of students can be supported to learn complex skills without increasing teachers' supervision time proportionally and while preserving, or preferably improving, quality. Practicing skills only once does not work. Students need repetitive practice, feedback, and structured support to master a skill. They need to gain insight into what went well and what could be improved, so that they can further direct their attention while practicing. However, teachers cannot provide feedback after every practice session of students because their time is scarce. To solve this problem, an online formative assessment method for interactive and practice-oriented skills' training, Pe(e)rfectly Skilled, was developed. The Pe(e)rfectly Skilled method provides structured support for self-regulation, goal setting, feedback, and reflection. This method affords practicing skills repetitively, both individually and collaboratively, at students' own time, pace, and location. In this article, theoretical and practical underpinnings underlying the Pe(e)rfectly Skilled method are described.

Novice teachers are often discouraged by the problems they encounter in their daily professional practices and they (still) feel unable to cope with. This is also reflected in high drop-out rates in the early stages of teachers’ careers. In this paper a theory-informed methodology to support novice teachers’ individual and collective professional development at the workplace is proposed. This methodology, called MirrorMe@work, strives to reduce teachers professional loneliness, increase their confidence and reduce stress, through technology-enhanced support of self- and co-regulation, (collective) reflection and knowledge co-creation processes, informed by (shared) memorable moments and critical incidents that teachers experience in their practices. Future and further research is needed to determine whether the MirrorMe@work method supports novice teachers as intended and whether this indeed reduces novice teachers’ drop-out rates.

Professional learning communities (PLC) are considered a rich environment for teacher professional development. Through a cross-case longitudinal analysis, using questionnaires, interviews and observations, we explored the effect of school context factors on the development of seven PLCs in Dutch secondary education. The study revealed the importance of a pro-active, stimulating role of the school leader, the presence of collective autonomy and skilled facilitators, the quality of the discourse and the degree of organisation and structure of meetings for PLC development. Sufficient time and space was considered indispensable by all PLCs. The findings of this study confirm and extend current knowledge on how to stimulate PLC development. Recommendations to foster PLC development were formulated providing guidelines for those involved in the implementation, development and sustainability of PLCs in schools.

This explorative study identifies information elements that are commonly perceived as important to inform initial trustworthiness assessments of colleagues within virtual project teams. Collaboration in virtual project teams heavily relies on interpersonal trust, for which perceived trustworthiness is an important determinant. Knowing what information elements are used to form a first impression of trustworthiness, one can optimize the design of personal profiles so that they support trustworthiness assessments in virtual project teams. The authors reviewed various trust-requiring online environments to determine what elements were available through profile templates. A group of 226 students with experience in virtual project teams indicated the importance of the elements thus found for the formation of a first impression of trustworthiness. On the basis of the results obtained, the authors formulated recommendations for the design of personal identity profiles in groupware environments.

The implementation of double-loop-learning-based educational scenarios in instructional design in workflow-like e-learning systems appears to be showing a gap; whereas the former assumes that processes can be reflected upon and can be modified or amended by the learners, the latter only predefines a limited set of rigid instructional processes. However, an important advantage of instructional designs implemented in workflow-like e-learning systems using modeling standards is the ease with which they can be exchanged with other (educational) institutions. The workflow environment described here aims to make learner reflection and change to instructional processes feasible while maintaining portability. We present a description of the implementation of the educational scenario of the virtual company in our workflow environment that makes use of dynamic workflow processes. Learners are provided with process building blocks, called “atomic actions,” which they can use to create and revise processes on the fly, thus supporting double-loop learning.

This study focused on the development of seven within-school PLCs during two school years. A total of 139 interviews, and 82 observations of PLC meetings formed the base for in-depth explorations, distinguishing various development levels in PLC characteristics. Using two validated qualitative classification instruments, data were collected to identify changes in characteristics and to track and describe development. This study explores the multiple way(s) in which PLCs develop through time, and looks at school context factors that might influence their development. Results indicated that all PLCs developed over time, however differently. The way the learning activities Collaboration, Reflection, Feedback and Experimentation were performed, showed a cautious development from individual to collective performance. Development from an incidental towards a systematic way of performing was not found in any PLC. No patterns in the development of PLC characteristics could be distinguished that might explain the influence of school context factors on the development of PLCs. In terms of practical implications, school leaders and others responsible for PLCs can be effective in fostering PLC development by tailoring their actions specifically to the needs of the PLC and by deploying a facilitator, granting collective autonomy, providing time and space and offering sources.