De theorie-praktijk kloof is berucht in het onderwijs. Theorie moet vaak nog verregaand worden aangepast aan de eigen onderwijsomstandigheden van de docent, zeg maar aan de lokale onderwijsecologie. Aan de andere kant zit er veel vakdidactische en praktijkkennis opgesloten in het hoofd van docenten, tacit knowledge, onzichtbaar voor studenten in lerarenopleiding. Wat nu als je die theorie deels gaat genereren in de eigen klassen van docenten en leraren in opleiding? Dan wordt de theorie-praktijk kloof kleiner, kan tacit knowledge mogelijk expliciet en zichtbaar worden, en wordt er een fundament gelegd voor blijvend leren van de eigen leservaring.
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Assessment in higher education (HE) is often focused on concluding modules with one or more tests that students need to pass. As a result, both students and teachers are primarily concerned with the summative function of assessment: information from tests is used to make pass/fail decisions about students. In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to the formative function of assessment and focus has shifted towards how assessment can stimulate learning. However, this also leads to a search for balance between both functions of assessment. Programmatic assessment (PA) is an assessment concept in which their intertwining is embraced to strike a new balance. A growing number of higher education programmes has implemented PA. Although there is consensus about the theoretical principles that form the basis for the design of PA, programmes make various specific design choices based on these principles, fitting with their own context. This paper provides insight into the design choices that programmes make when implementing PA and into the considerations that play a role in making these design choices. Such an overview is important for research purposes because it creates a framework for investigating the effects of different design choices within PA.
Background: App-based mobile health exercise interventions can motivate individuals to engage in more physical activity (PA). According to the Fogg Behavior Model, it is important that the individual receive prompts at the right time to be successfully persuaded into PA. These are referred to as just-in-time (JIT) interventions. The Playful Active Urban Living (PAUL) app is among the first to include 2 types of JIT prompts: JIT adaptive reminder messages to initiate a run or walk and JIT strength exercise prompts during a walk or run (containing location-based instruction videos). This paper reports on the feasibility of the PAUL app and its JIT prompts.Objective: The main objective of this study was to examine user experience, app engagement, and users' perceptions and opinions regarding the PAUL app and its JIT prompts and to explore changes in the PA behavior, intrinsic motivation, and the perceived capability of the PA behavior of the participants.Methods: In total, 2 versions of the closed-beta version of the PAUL app were evaluated: a basic version (Basic PAUL) and a JIT adaptive version (Smart PAUL). Both apps send JIT exercise prompts, but the versions differ in that the Smart PAUL app sends JIT adaptive reminder messages to initiate running or walking behavior, whereas the Basic PAUL app sends reminder messages at randomized times. A total of 23 participants were randomized into 1 of the 2 intervention arms. PA behavior (accelerometer-measured), intrinsic motivation, and the perceived capability of PA behavior were measured before and after the intervention. After the intervention, participants were also asked to complete a questionnaire on user experience, and they were invited for an exit interview to assess user perceptions and opinions of the app in depth.Results: No differences in PA behavior were observed (Z=-1.433; P=.08), but intrinsic motivation for running and walking and for performing strength exercises significantly increased (Z=-3.342; P<.001 and Z=-1.821; P=.04, respectively). Furthermore, participants increased their perceived capability to perform strength exercises (Z=2.231; P=.01) but not to walk or run (Z=-1.221; P=.12). The interviews indicated that the participants were enthusiastic about the strength exercise prompts. These were perceived as personal, fun, and relevant to their health. The reminders were perceived as important initiators for PA, but participants from both app groups explained that the reminder messages were often not sent at times they could exercise. Although the participants were enthusiastic about the functionalities of the app, technical issues resulted in a low user experience.Conclusions: The preliminary findings suggest that the PAUL apps are promising and innovative interventions for promoting PA. Users perceived the strength exercise prompts as a valuable addition to exercise apps. However, to be a feasible intervention, the app must be more stable.
Teachers have a crucial role in bringing about the extensive social changes that are needed in the building of a sustainable future. In the EduSTA project, we focus on sustainability competences of teachers. We strengthen the European dimension of teacher education via Digital Open Badges as means of performing, acknowledging, documenting, and transferring the competencies as micro-credentials. EduSTA starts by mapping the contextual possibilities and restrictions for transformative learning on sustainability and by operationalising skills. The development of competence-based learning modules and open digital badge-driven pathways will proceed hand in hand and will be realised as learning modules in the partnering Higher Education Institutes and badge applications open for all teachers in Europe.Societal Issue: Teachers’ capabilities to act as active facilitators of change in the ecological transition and to educate citizens and workforce to meet the future challenges is key to a profound transformation in the green transition.Teachers’ sustainability competences have been researched widely, but a gap remains between research and the teachers’ practise. There is a need to operationalise sustainability competences: to describe direct links with everyday tasks, such as curriculum development, pedagogical design, and assessment. This need calls for an urgent operationalisation of educators’ sustainability competences – to support the goals with sustainability actions and to transfer this understanding to their students.Benefit to society: EduSTA builds a community, “Academy of Educators for Sustainable Future”, and creates open digital badge-driven learning pathways for teachers’ sustainability competences supported by multimodal learning modules. The aim is to achieve close cooperation with training schools to actively engage in-service teachers.Our consortium is a catalyst for leading and empowering profound change in the present and for the future to educate teachers ready to meet the challenges and act as active change agents for sustainable future. Emphasizing teachers’ essential role as a part of the green transition also adds to the attractiveness of teachers’ work.
Denim Democracy from the Alliance for Responsible Denim (ARD) is an interactive exhibition that celebrates the journey and learning of ARD members, educates visitors about sustainable denim and highlights how companies collaborate together to achieve results. Through sight, sound and tactile sensations, the visitor experiences and fully engages sustainable denim production. The exhibition launches in October 2018 in Amsterdam and travels to key venues and locations in the Netherlands until April 2019. As consumers, we love denim but the denim industry, like other sub-sectors in the textile, apparel and footwear industries, faces many complex sustainability challenges and has been criticized for its polluting and hazardous production practices. The Alliance for Responsible Denim project brought leading denim brands, suppliers and stakeholders together to collectively address these issues and take initial steps towards improving the ecological sustainability impact of denim production. Sustainability challenges are considered very complex and economically undesirable for individual companies to address alone. In denim, small and medium sized denim firms face specific challenges, such as lower economies of scale and lower buying power to affect change in practices. There is great benefit in combining denim companies' resources and knowledge so that collective experimentation and learning can lift the sustainability standards of the industry and lead to the development of common standards and benchmarks on a scale that matters. If meaningful, transformative industrial change is to be made, then it calls for collaboration between denim industry stakeholders that goes beyond supplier-buyer relations and includes horizontal value chain collaboration of competing large and small denim brands. However collaboration between organizations, and especially between competitors, is highly complex and prone to failure. The research behind the Alliance for Responsible Denim project asked a central research question: how do competitors effectively collaborate together to create common, industry standards on resource use and benchmarks for improved ecological sustainability? To answer this question, we used a mixed-method, action research approach. The Alliance for Responsible Denim project mobilized and facilitated denim brands to collectively identify ways to reduce the use of water and chemicals in denim production and then aided them to implement these practices individually in their respective firms.
This project develops a European network for transdisciplinary innovation in artistic engagement as a catalyst for societal transformation, focusing on immersive art. It responds to the professionals in the field’s call for research into immersive art’s unique capacity to ‘move’ people through its multisensory, technosocial qualities towards collective change. The project brings together experts leading state-of-the-art research and practice in related fields with an aim to develop trajectories for artistic, methodological, and conceptual innovation for societal transformation. The nascent field of immersive art, including its potential impact on society, has been identified as a priority research area on all local-to-EU levels, but often suffers from the common (mis)perception as being technological spectacle prioritising entertainment values. Many practitioners create immersive art to enable novel forms of creative engagement to address societal issues and enact change, but have difficulty gaining recognition and support for this endeavour. A critical challenge is the lack of knowledge about how their predominantly sensuous and aesthetic experience actually lead to collective change, which remains unrecognised in the current systems of impact evaluation predicated on quantitative analysis. Recent psychological insights on awe as a profoundly transformative emotion signals a possibility to address this challenge, offering a new way to make sense of the transformational effect of directly interacting with such affective qualities of immersive art. In parallel, there is a renewed interest in the practice of cultural mediation, which brings together different stakeholders to facilitate negotiation towards collective change in diverse domains of civic life, often through creative engagements. Our project forms strategic grounds for transdisciplinary research at the intersection between these two developments. We bring together experts in immersive art, psychology, cultural mediation, digital humanities, and design across Europe to explore: How can awe-experiences be enacted in immersive art and be extended towards societal transformation?
