Search

Data about learning can support teachers in their decision-making processes as they design tasks aimed at improving student educational outcomes. However, to achieve systemic impact, a deeper understanding of teachers’ perspectives on, and expectations for, data as evidence is required. It is critical to understand how teachers’ actions align with emerging learning analytics technologies, including the practices of pre-service teachers who are developing their perspectives on data use in classroom in their initial teacher education programme. This may lead to an integration gap in which technology and data literacy align poorly with expectations of the role of data and enabling technologies. This paper describes two participatory workshops that provide examples of the value of human-centred approaches to understand teachers’ perspectives on, and expectations for, data as evidence. These workshops focus on the design of pre-service teachers enrolled in teacher education programmes (N = 21) at two Australian universities. The approach points to the significance of (a) pre-service teachers’ intentions to track their students’ dispositions to learning and their ability to learn effectively, (b) the materiality of learning analytics as an enabling technology and (c) the alignment of learning analytics with learning design, including the human-centred, ethical and inclusive use of educational data in the teaching practice. Implications for practice or policy: Pre-service teachers ought to be given opportunities to engage and understand more about learning design, learning analytics and the use of data in classrooms. Professional experience placements for pre-service teachers should include participatory data sessions or learning design workshops. Teacher education academics in universities must be provided with ongoing professional development to support their preparation work of pre-service teachers’ data literacy, learning analytics and the increasing presence of data.

© 2019, © 2019 Society for Research into Higher Education. With an increase in technology to mediate learning and a shift to more student-centred approaches, open-ended online assignment tasks are becoming more common in higher education. Open-ended tasks offer opportunities for students to develop their own interpretations of the requirements, and online technologies offer greater flexibility and afford new types of interactions with teachers and other students. This paper presents a study of students' task interpretation and self-set goals in the context of five open-ended online assignment tasks. The findings presented in this paper demonstrate the importance of a high-quality task understanding for goal setting and suggest practical implications for task design and support.

© 2019 British Educational Research Association Disparities in the technology practices, skills and knowledge of school students still exist, despite widespread investment, and use in schools. In order to understand why inequalities remain, we first need a more nuanced understanding of students’ technology practice, including understanding how their backgrounds, circumstances and experiences shape their perceptions of and engagement with technology. This paper proposes that research in the field of educational technology would benefit from a sociological framing in order to highlight how and why students use technology at school and in their everyday lives. The paper reports on a qualitative embedded case study of 13–16-year-old students in two Australian secondary schools. In-depth case studies of two selected students illustrate the complex nature of students’ technology practice. Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus and capital are used as a lens through which to view and understand inequalities in students’ technology practice. The findings demonstrate the utility of sociological theory in educational technology research by highlighting systems and structures of reproduction and transformation. Furthermore, the findings can inform an approach to teaching and learning that considers students’ varied experiences, knowledge, perspectives and backgrounds relating to technology.

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Evidence from large-scale studies of primary and secondary students’ technology practices at school over the last decade show disparities in student practices and suggest that schools need to do more to cater for all students. Research that explores the influence of social and cultural factors may be useful for understanding such inequality in student practice. Bourdieu’s theory of practice [(1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. London: Cambridge University Press] is proposed as an example of a sociological theory that can be adopted in educational technology research to move towards understanding the wider complexities of technology practice. To encourage discourse and application of Bourdieu’s sociology in the field of educational technology research, this paper provides an introduction to the theory, a review of its application in research of primary and secondary students’ technology practice and relevant conceptual work. The paper presents a conceptual framework based on Bourdieu’s theory that has been developed through two recent studies, and review of empirical and conceptual works and invites its application in future research so that it can be critiqued and further developed.

© 2017, © Australian Council for Educational Research 2017. This study aims to assess the validity of the Online Multiliteracy Assessment for students in Years 5 and 6. The Online Multiliteracy Assessment measures students’ abilities in making and creating meaning, using a variety of different modes of communication, such as text, audio and video. The study involved selecting two groups of students: the first group (n=19) was used in two pilot studies of the items and the second (n=299) was used in a field trial validating the functioning of the items and assessing the quality of the scale. The results indicated that the Online Multiliteracy Assessment has acceptable test–retest reliability; however, the fit to the Rasch model was less than ideal. Further investigation identified two important areas for improvement. First, the items assessing the higher order skills of synthesising, communicating and creating need to be more cognitively demanding. Second, some items need to be modified in order to improve their functionality.

© 2019 Elsevier Inc. Online technologies can facilitate new assessment designs, where students develop, analyse and reflect upon their learning. Online multi-stage assignments provide students with opportunities to submit and share their work over an extended period in social sharing spaces such as blogging and discussion forums. This study explores the challenges experienced by students while completing online multi-stage assignments and the processes of self-regulated learning students engaged with to overcome such challenges. We present interview data from three qualitative case studies involving 34 students across two Australian universities. The results show all students experienced challenges while working on multi-stage assignments. Students engaged with both online and offline social cues to regulate their learning and overcome task challenges. We discuss the design implications and provide recommendations for further research.

© 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Emotions play a significant part in students’ learning experiences within complex educational environments. However, the impact of emotional experiences on effective learning is not straightforward. For example, being confused during learning may be perceived as an adverse event. There is, however, considerable research evidence suggesting that confusion can also be a productive aspect of a student's learning processes. Despite this, research also suggests that when confusion is persistent it can become harmful, promoting learner frustration or boredom. Key challenges for the design of interactive digital learning environments (IDLEs) are to detect and assess students’ emotions and to tailor the environment accordingly. In this paper we examine, from a review of the literature, the implications of learners’ confusion that can occur in IDLEs. Strategies for managing students’ confusion will then be discussed and examples of features enhancing learning in IDLEs will be suggested.

© 2019 Arguel, Lockyer, Chai, Pachman and Lipp. When students perform complex cognitive activities, such as solving a problem, epistemic emotions can occur and influence the completion of the task. Confusion is one of these emotions and it can produce either negative or positive outcomes, according to the situation. For this reason, considering confusion can be an important factor for educators to evaluate students' progression in cognitive activities. However, in digital learning environments, observing students' confusion, as well as other epistemic emotions, can be problematic because of the remoteness of students. The study reported in this article explored new methodologies to assess emotions in a problem-solving task. The experimental task consisted of the resolution of logic puzzles presented on a computer, before, and after watching an instructional video depicting a method to solve the puzzle. In parallel to collecting self-reported confusion ratings, human-computer interaction was captured to serve as non-intrusive measures of emotions. The results revealed that the level of self-reported confusion was negatively correlated with the performance on solving the puzzles. In addition, while comparing the pre- and post-video sequences, the experience of confusion tended to differ. Before watching the instructional video, the number of clicks on the puzzle was positively correlated with the level of confusion whereas the correlation was negatively after the video. Moreover, the main emotions reported before the video (e.g., confusion, frustration, curiosity) tended to differ from the emotions reported after the videos (e.g., engagement, delight, boredom). These results provide insights into the ambivalent impact of confusion in problem-solving task, illustrating the dual effect (i.e., positive or negative) of this emotion on activity and performance, as reported in the literature. Applications of this methodology to real-world settings are discussed.

Processing complex information during learning can trigger related epistemic emotions, such as confusion, frustration, or boredom. These emotions are likely to impact learning and it is crucial to provide learners with relevant support according to the emotions they experience. Being aware of epistemic emotions may help teachers design adaptive learning environments that help learners control their levels and durations. Within interactive digital learning environments, students are also likely to experience epistemic emotions but their detection by a teacher can be problematic because students and teachers are not co-located. However, the trace data that students produce while interacting with digital environments can be themselves useful indicators of some epistemic emotions. These data require digital learning environments offering sufficiently rich interactive features and technically capable of collecting interaction data, although these features must be primarily designed to foster high quality learning. Moreover, the uniqueness of each learning situation imposes that interpretations of observed interaction patterns to epistemic emotions do need to be determined individually for each situation.

© 2016 Taylor & Francis. Problem-based learning (PBL) in medical education focuses on preparing independent learners for continuing, self-directed, professional development beyond the classroom. Skills in self-regulated learning (SRL) are important for success in PBL and ongoing professional practice. However, the development of SRL skills is often left to chance. This study presents the investigated outcomes for students when support for the development of SRL was embedded in a PBL medical curriculum. This investigation involved design, delivery and testing of SRL support, embedded into the first phase of a four-year, graduate-entry MBBS degree. The intervention included concept mapping and goal-setting activities through iterative processes of planning, monitoring and reflecting on learning. A mixed-methods approach was used to collect data from seven students to develop case studies of engagement with, and outcomes from, the SRL support. The findings indicate that students who actively engaged with support for SRL demonstrated increases in cognitive and metacognitive functioning. Students also reported a greater sense of confidence in and control over their approaches to learning in PBL. This study advances understanding about how the development of SRL can be integrated into PBL.

International audience; Difficulties are often an unavoidable but important part of the learning process. This seems particularly so for complex conceptual learning. Challenges in the learning process are however, particularly difficult to detect and respond to in educational environments where growing class sizes and the increased use of digital technologies mean that teachers are unable to provide nuanced and personalized feedback and support to help students overcome their difficulties. Individual differences, the specifics of the learning activity, and the difficulty of giving individual feedback in large classes and digital environments all add to the challenge of responding to student difficulties and confusion. In this integrative review, we aim to explore difficulties and resulting emotional responses in learning. We will review the primary principles of cognitive disequilibrium and contrast these principles with work on desirable difficulties, productive failure, impasse driven learning, and pure discovery-based learning. We conclude with a theoretical model of the zones of optimal and sub-optimal confusion as a way of conceptualizing the parameters of productive and non-productive difficulties experienced by students while they learn.

© 2018 selection and editorial matter, David Boud, Rola Ajjawi, Phillip Dawson and Joanna Tai. Open-ended, student-centred tasks are increasingly a feature of higher education, particularly in flexible online courses. These tasks require students to interpret open-ended requirements and independently regulate their own learning, either partly or solely online. There is much we are yet to understand about how to design and support these tasks effectively to achieve the best outcomes for students. In this chapter we consider the role of self-regulated learning in open-ended online assignment tasks, conceptualised using self-regulated learning and considering the role of evaluative judgement, and illustrated using a brief case study.

Open-ended, student-centred tasks are increasingly a feature of higher education, particularly in flexible online courses. These tasks require students to interpret open-ended requirements and independently regulate their own learning, either partly or solely online. There is much we are yet to understand about how to design and support these tasks effectively to achieve the best outcomes for students. In this chapter we consider the role of self-regulated learning in open-ended online assignment tasks, conceptualised using self-regulated learning and considering the role of evaluative judgement, and illustrated using a brief case study.

© 2018 Australasian Journal of Educational Technology. Quality teaching is a strategic objective for universities; thus, there is an expectation that university teachers design high quality learning experience for their students. The field of learning design has developed over the past 15 years as a way to support teachers in their design work. There has been significant research and development work that has focused on creating support tools to help teachers plan, develop and deliver learning experiences. However, little is known about what supports teachers access and use when they design and overall how teachers undertake their design work. This paper presents the findings from a qualitative study that investigated the types of supports 30 teachers from 16 Australian universities reported using in their design work. Data was collected from semi-structured interviews, and the results show that participants accessed a variety of supports depending on their design need. The kind of support participants accessed in their design work were colleagues, literature, workshops and seminars, conferences, institutional support services, and enrolment in postgraduate study. How participants explained using these supports can be characterised as varied, personalised, dynamic and networked. Based on these results, implications for the learning design field are discussed with recommendations for future research.

The need to improve the quality of higher education has fostered an interest in technology tools to support effective design for teaching and learning. Over the past decade this interest has led to the development of tools to support the creation of online learning experiences, specifications to underpin design systems, and repositories to share examples. Despite this significant activity, there remain unanswered questions about what shapes university teachers' design decisions and how tools can best support their design processes. This paper presents findings from a study of university teachers' design practices that identified teachers' perceptions of student characteristics, their own beliefs and experiences, and contextual factors as key influences on design decisions. The findings extend our understanding of activities fundamental to higher education teaching and inform thinking about design support tools. Design is an important, routine part of university teaching, but is poorly supported.Technology tools to support teachers design online learning experiences are needed.We identify student, teacher and contextual characteristics that influence design.These contextualise and extend an existing conceptual model of higher education.We discuss the implications for the functionality of technology design support tools.

© SAGE Publications. Confusion is an emotion that is likely to occur while learning complex information. This emotion can be beneficial to learners in that it can foster engagement, leading to deeper understanding. However, if learners fail to resolve confusion, its effect can be detrimental to learning. Such detrimental learning experiences are particularly concerning within digital learning environments (DLEs), where a teacher is not physically present to monitor learner engagement and adapt the learning experience accordingly. However, with better information about a learner's emotion and behavior, it is possible to improve the design of interactive DLEs (IDLEs) not only in promoting productive confusion but also in preventing overwhelming confusion. This article reviews different methodological approaches for detecting confusion, such as self-report and behavioral and physiological measures, and discusses their implications within the theoretical framework of a zone of optimal confusion. The specificities of several methodologies and their potential application in IDLEs are discussed.

© 2016, Association for Educational Communications and Technology. Interest in how to support the design work of university teachers has led to research and development initiatives that include technology-based design-support tools, online repositories, and technical specifications. Despite these initiatives, remarkably little is known about the design work that university teachers actually do. This paper presents findings from a qualitative study that investigated the design processes of 30 teachers from 16 Australian universities. The results show design as a top-down iterative process, beginning with a broad framework to which detail is added through cycles of elaboration. Design extends over the period before, while, and after a unit is taught, demonstrating the dynamic nature of design and highlighting the importance of reflection in teachers’ design practice. We present a descriptive model of the design process, which we relate to conceptualizations of higher education teaching and learning, and compare with the characteristics of general design and instructional design. We also suggest directions for future research and development.

Comunicació presentada a: 9th annual International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies EDULEARN17, celebrat del 3 al 5 de juliol de 2017 a Barcelona. Designing learning experiences for students is a key responsibility of teachers. This involves designing stimulating and engaging tasks, selecting and creating appropriate resources, and deciding how best to support students to successfully complete the tasks. This is a complex process in which many factors need to be considered. Learning design research and tooling is focused on how to support this teacher design work. Existing learning design tools support the authoring and sharing of learning activities, which - if represented computationally - can also be enacted in virtual learning environments. An important part of the learning design process is thinking about what it is that students are to learn. This then informs the design of the learning activities. However, research on how to support this early phase of the learning design process is scarce. Indeed, an emerging finding from research investigating teacher design practices is that teachers’ design work exhibits some characteristics synonymous with the broader field of design. Specifically, teachers formulate and work with a design problem. But, teachers generally don’t consider their work in terms of design. Thus there is scope to encourage and support design thinking in teachers along the whole learning design process, including in the initial phase of identifying a design problem. This paper reports on a pilot study where a learning design Problem Generation Tool was created, in the form of 20 stimulus questions, to generate deeper thinking about the design problem. The stimulus questions are based on 3 foci, which are to be considered in an iterative way to think about and generate the problem: Understand the nature of the design problem and your goals (e.g, What kind of problem is this? Why is this design being done?) Map your context (e.g., Who are the students? How will the course be taught? Who will teach in this course?), Plan your design approach (e.g., What preparation do you have to do? What is your initial plan or steps you will follow for your design process?) The tool was incorporated in the Integrated Learning Design Environment (ILDE), a community platform that integrates a number of learning design tools supporting conceptualization, authoring and implementation of learning activities. The Problem Generation Tool integrated in ILDE was used with eight participants, who were already familiar with ILDE, in a workshop setting in a postgraduate program at a local University in Barcelona, Spain. Participants had between one and five or more years of teaching experience. Results showed that participants found the Problem Generation Tool helpful. The level of perceived usefulness by question varied across participants, while a few questions were not sufficiently clear and need to be revised. Overall, there was evident elaboration of the participants’ design problems thus suggesting design thinking was stimulated and identification of the design problems scaffolded. This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under RESET (TIN2014-53199-C3-3-R), the Maria de Maeztu Units of Excellence Programme (MDM-2015- 0502) and RecerCaixa (CoT project). Hernández-Leo is a Serra Hunter fellow. The Problem Generation Tool was devised from research funded by the Australian Research Council through the Discovery Project scheme (DP140100406): “Designing effective learning experiences: Investigating novice and expert teachers’ design processes” (Lockyer, Bennett, & Agostinho).

Despite significant research in the field of educational technology, there is still much we do not fully understand about students' experiences with technology. This article proposes that research in the field of educational technology would benefit from a sociological framing that pays attention to the understandings and lives of learners. Within a broader study that aimed to investigate students' use and value of technologies guided by Bourdieu's sociological theory, this article reports on qualitative embedded case study data of 12 students in years 9 and 10 from two Australian secondary schools. The article provides detailed accounts of students' experiences with technologies in various contexts with consideration of the milieu in which technology use occurred, illustrating the heterogeneous and complex network of influencing factors on students' technology practices. The findings and discussion augment the application of Bourdieu's concepts of field, habitus and capital as a tool to view and understand students' varied and complex experiences and relationships with technology. © 2014 © 2014 Taylor & Francis.

The emergence and growth of research in cognitive neuroscience over recent decades has led to important discoveries about how the brain and mind work. These discoveries have potential implications for the use of educational technologies and provide insight into possibilities for improving student learning in digital environments. Despite the promise of the emerging field of educational neuroscience, it is difficult to translate findings from the laboratory to the physical or virtual classroom. The articles in this special issue of AJET are attempts to bridge this gap. We hope that this special issue will serve as a catalyst for further work on the translation of foundational research on the brain and mind to learning design and teaching with educational technologies.

© Australasian Journal of Educational Technology 2016. Research on incidence of and changes in confusion during complex learning and problem-solving calls for advanced methods of confusion detection in digital learning environments (DLEs). In this study we attempt to address this issue by investigating the use of multiple measures, including psychophysiological indicators and self-ratings, to detect confusion in DLEs. Participants were subjected to two intrinsically confusing insight problems in the form of visual digital puzzles. They were asked to solve problems while their eye trajectories were recorded and these data were triangulated with self-ratings of confusion and cued retrospective verbal reports. All participants had a significant increase in fixations on relevant (i.e., related to the solution) and not-relevant areas at an early stage of the problem-solving process. However, only fixations on not-relevant areas were positively correlated with confusion ratings. Moreover, participants who significantly solved the problem differed in their fixations duration on relevant and not-relevant areas from non-solvers. The importance of early detection of confusion and the affordances of emerging technologies for this purpose are discussed.

The rapid and pervasive implementation of e-learning across education sectors has led researchers and practitioners to examine the pedagogical implications for these learning environments. The technologies, and the contexts in which they are used, provide both opportunities and complexities in how teaching and learning might occur. This complexity and discussion about quality in teaching led to the emergence of a research and development field, known as learning design, concurrent to the developments in e-learning. The field of learning design emerged, in the early 2000s, in an effort to reconceptualise teaching and learning practices to effectively make use of technology and to share those practices in such a way that educators could reuse and/or adapt the ideas of others in their own contexts. The work in this area has ranged from the development of technologies that support the reuse of designs, investigation of how designs can be documented and represented for interpretation by others, and examination about how teachers apply learning designs for their e-learning contexts. This chapter defines the field of learning design and describes the context in which it emerged. The chapter then describes the development work within the field, which primarily focuses on frameworks, repositories and tools to support teachers in their learning design practice. Finally, the chapter reviews the research and considers new directions and compatible areas of inquiry for the field

In this paper we present a learning analytics conceptual framework that supports enquiry-based evaluation of learn- ing designs. The dimensions of the proposed framework emerged from a review of existing analytics tools, the analy-sis of interviews with teachers, and user scenarios to under- stand what types of analytics would be useful in evaluating a learning activity in relation to pedagogical intent. The proposed framework incorporates various types of analyt- ics, with the teacher playing a key role in bringing context to the analysis and making decisions on the feedback pro- vided to students as well as the scaffolding and adaptation of the learning design. The framework consists of five di-mensions: Temporal analytics, tool-specific analytics, cohort dynamics, comparative analytics and contingency. Specific metrics and visualisations are defined for each dimension of the conceptual framework. Finally the development of a tool that partially implements the conceptual framework is discussed. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Aims: To assess the acceptability and potential efficacy of an online healthy lifestyles program for parents of overweight, or at risk of overweight, preschool-aged children. Methods: A pilot trial was conducted within a regional area of New South Wales, Australia. Two cohorts totalling 47 dyads were recruited. Primary outcomes were parental self-reported perceived knowledge and parental proxy-reported behaviour of their child. Data analysis was completed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (v 16). Results: At follow up (10 weeks) parents reported high acceptability of the program. Changes in the hypothesised direction were reported for all parental perceived knowledge and parental and child behavioural outcomes. Conclusion: This is the first study to describe the acceptability and potential efficacy of an online healthy lifestyles program for parents of preschool children. The Time2bHealthy Program offers a viable option for parental involvement in obesity prevention programs targeting young children. Given the online nature of the program it has the capacity to be utilised within metropolitan, regional and rural areas of Australia.

There are movements internationally towards curricula that incorporate values and citizenship education. In Australia, this movement has been illustrated with the adoption of a national curriculum in values education. This has arisen from the perceived need for citizens to hold values around the rights and responsibilities of functioning within a democracy. The Making News Today programme has been designed to develop a range of literacies enabling learners, for example, to read the media beyond the interests of the elite. The programme incorporates a journalistic process for television news production for middle school students using laptop and handheld video technologies, with embedded ethics and values education. The article reports on an analysis of the implementation of this programme with middle school students in Australia with reference to student adoption of ethical stances in the journalistic process and the implications for the use of this project in developing ethics, values and citizenship as ...

Generational generalisations regarding how students interact with technology have been used in recent times to prompt calls for radical changes to the delivery of teaching in higher education. This...

Aim: The purpose of the present study was to describe preliminary research preceding the development of an online educational program for parents of preschool-aged children who are overweight or at-risk of overweight. Methods: The study consisted of an evaluation of current health-related websites and four focus groups with typical-end point users. It was conducted in one metropolitan region in New South Wales. Twenty-seven participants were recruited for the focus groups. The focus groups aimed to investigate the thoughts and opinions of participants towards an online educational program. Focus group transcripts were analysed using logico-inductive analysis procedures. Results: The evaluation of the websites revealed that most were largely repositories of information and did not provide guidance on how to practically implement the information into everyday life. Several themes emerged from the focus groups, including: usability and readability; credibility; inclusiveness; personalisation and practical help in modifying current behaviours. Conclusions: The present study highlights many of the limitations in current online programs/websites and interventions targeting preschool children. We have attempted to address these in the design and development of the Time2bHealthy Program. The present study describes the first step in the development of a novel and innovative initiative that has the potential to make a contribution to long-term health of preschool children and their families.

Interactive whiteboards (IWBs) have become increasingly available in Australian primary schools. However, little is known about how they are being integrated by teachers into their teaching practices. This paper reports on a study of the introduction of IWBs into an Australian public primary school. Data were collected for one day per week over two school terms, involving four classroom teachers. Data collected included a log of time allocation, lesson observations and a series of interviews with the teachers. The study found that participants used IWBs to a varying extent over the course of a teaching week, with lessons that integrated the use of IWBs tending to focus on literacy and numeracy. The technology was readily incorporated into the classroom environment by teachers and considered easy to use. Teachers adopted a range of pedagogical approaches when using the IWBs and these approaches were consistent with those they usually employed in their teaching.

This study explored the concept of social capital in higher education contexts by investigating student discussion forum activity and academic performance. To address these aims online discussion forum logs, student marks and teaching delivery method (blended or fully online) data were extracted from the universities learning management system (LMS). Student social network centrality measures were then calculated from the course discussion activity and correlated against student academic performance for each delivery mode. Drawing on social capital and social network theories the analyses identified that in comparison to low performing students the high-performing group held more central positions in their networks and tended to establish dense social connections with students of a similar academic ability. It was also observed that the relationships formed in blended teaching units were of a greater intensity and reciprocity than those established in fully online teaching units indicating a higher level of social capital was reached. This difference in the amount of available social capital between the two teaching modes suggests that students in blended units have comparatively greater access to resources embedded within the network, which in turn can be mobilised to assist them in their academic endeavours.

The transformation of our lives through new technologies and globalisation presents educators with the challenge of helping students to develop the skills and competencies that will enable them to function successfully in this dynamic society. This article reports on a single-case pilot study conducted to trial and evaluate an educational program and support resources. The purpose of this research was to explore whether this educational program implemented within a technology-rich environment, incorporating teaching and learning strategies based on constructivist approaches, supports the development of multiliteracies. A Grade 10 English class in a high school in New South Wales, Australia participated in the educational program that involved the analysis, construction and evaluation of media and news items. The study addressed the question of how the participation in a media analysis and production curriculum unit, influences the development of multiliteracies. Students’ understanding and use of ...

Advancements in online technologies have facilitated a convergence of distance and campus‐based learning and, thus, offer new opportunities for all students through better access to resources, increased interaction between staff and students and greater flexibility in place and time. However, the transition to online teaching and learning presents new challenges as the roles and expectations of both staff and students evolve. An online teacher must create a coherent learning experience for students with whom they may not meet face‐to‐face and, therefore, must develop new support strategies that maintain motivation and encourage interaction. Adapting student‐centred approaches to the online environment has required the development of new skills and changes to teaching practices. This paper presents an analysis of the changed environment for teachers and learners in a post‐graduate coursework programme based on constructivist principles that has moved from predominately on‐campus delivery to online mode. Th...