The COVID-19 pandemic forces millions of teachers worldwide to engage in online teaching. Teachers are exploring and experimenting with various digital forms to deliver learning content, keep communicating with students and colleagues, and assess learning outcomes. A digital knowledge-building community gradually emerges and becomes more vivid. This note reports results from a study among honors teachers and administrators from 18 schools of a large Dutch university who all shared their problems and recommendations after the first five weeks of remote teaching, Spring 2020.
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Covid-19 made us realize that educational practices in higher education must change AND can change. A possible solution for practicing lab work is working in a remote lab: a real lab in which students and the equipment/instruments are physically apart. The concept of printed touchless electronics was taken as the leading principle for students in the Department of Electrical Engineering of a university of applied sciences. They got the assignment to write a programming code, with which they could control a robot. This robot was supposed to draw, with conductive ink, a pattern, that could function as a printed (light) sensor. The robot was situated in the lab, the students uploaded their code from home. Via a live stream, the students could follow the movements of the robot and the pen. From a didactical perspective, the goal was to find out if the selected didactical methods: teamwork and feedback via an internet platform and working with consultation hours, had the estimated effect. An interdisciplinary team of three lecturers was composed to guide the students. Students thought that the consultation hours were very helpful. The online teamwork between the students did not work so well. In the future, students would like to have more opportunities for testing and working with the remote lab.
Although learning analytics benefit learning, its uptake by higher educational institutions remains low. Adopting learning analytics is a complex undertaking, and higher educational institutions lack insight into how to build organizational capabilities to successfully adopt learning analytics at scale. This paper describes the ex-post evaluation of a capability model for learning analytics via a mixed-method approach. The model intends to help practitioners such as program managers, policymakers, and senior management by providing them a comprehensive overview of necessary capabilities and their operationalization. Qualitative data were collected during pluralistic walk-throughs with 26 participants at five educational institutions and a group discussion with seven learning analytics experts. Quantitative data about the model’s perceived usefulness and ease-of-use was collected via a survey (n = 23). The study’s outcomes show that the model helps practitioners to plan learning analytics adoption at their higher educational institutions. The study also shows the applicability of pluralistic walk-throughs as a method for ex-post evaluation of Design Science Research artefacts.
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Within this interdisciplinary project, we explore the integration of open-source databases, location-based gaming, and immersive storytelling to improve cultural heritage dissemination, interpretation and understanding of European values among younger target audiences. The students develop a game prototype which will be tested with the target audience during the project. The game is aimed to be implemented at cultural heritages sites along the heritage route of St Martin. The learning objective is to foster digital expertise, remote and virtual working proficiency, and the development of an interdisciplinary working attitude in a joint course setup of virtual workshops and MOOC-based lectures.
