Teachers' Voice on eLearning as an approach to quality in higher education

Teachers’ voice on eLearning as an approach to
quality in higher education
NanYang
nan.yang@unitn.it
Doctoral School in Psychological Sciences and Education
University of Trento
Barcelona, 26th - 27th, September 2013
Thursday, September 26, 13

Sep 26, 2013
Teachers’ voice on eLearning as an approach to quality in higher education
NanYang, nan.yang@unitn.it
Outline
• Introduction
• Research question
• Research design
• Initial ﬁndings
2

Sep 26, 2013
3
EFA Global
Monitoring Report
EducationforAll
2 0 0 5
THE QUALITY
IMPERATIVE
Education for All
At the Heart of education
UNESCO
Access
Value
Quality
Competitiveness
Internationalization

Sep 26, 2013
What do we mean by “Quality”
in Higher Education?
4

Sep 26, 2013
Complex “Quality”
• Value-lade Concept (Harvey & Green, 1994)
5

Sep 26, 2013
Learning Design for eLearning Quality in Higher Education - from teachers’ perspective
Complex “Quality”(cont.)
• Three levels of Quality (Zhang, Jin, Shi, 2009)
6
Micro
Meso
Macro HE system contribute the society
Innovative Talents Cultivation
Teaching & Learning
Scientiﬁc Research
Social Service

Sep 26, 2013
7
Why eLearning for quality?

Sep 26, 2013
8
Driver & Tool for Pedagogic Innovation
(Ehlers & Schneckenberg, 2010)

Sep 26, 2013
Why focus on Teachers?
9

Sep 26, 2013
• The core of complex quality - Teaching & Learning
• Teachers and students are the key stakeholders
• Teachers have transformational leadership in T&L
10
“the development of a concept of quality and
its implications for the teaching strategies of
educational professionals have not been
taken care of sufﬁciently” - Ulf-Daniel Ehlers

Sep 26, 2013
Research Question
• What are university teachers’ perception of
quality in the teaching and learning process?
• Do they adopt eLearning and why?
• How do they improve the quality with(out) the
help of eLearning?
11

Sep 26, 2013
Research design
12
Critical Realist &
Constructionism
Interpretivism
Grounded Theory
Interviews
Class Observation
1. Ontology &
Epistemology !
2. Theoretical
Perspectives
3. Methodology!
4. Methods/
Techniques
Research Design

Sep 26, 2013
Research Design (cont.)
13
Analysis
Collect
Design
Initial Data collection
Interviews: 17 university teachers (from China, Italy, UK )
13 for campus based learning; 4 for distance learning (DL)
Class Observation:
1. Postgraduate level on B2B marketing
2. Undergraduate level on Media and Communication
Online Course Data (screenshots, focus on the design):
1. DL, postgraduate level, linguistics and TESOL
2. DL, postgraduate level, PGCE
3. DL, postgraduate level, international education

Sep 26, 2013
Initial ﬁndings
Teachers’ perception of quality
14
Pedagogic approach
Socratic method
Exciting and related to people’s real life
experience
Multiple levels of learning targets
Cohesive pedagogic process
Content
Frontier knowledge
Accessible content (DL)
Attractiveness
Relevance on learners’ previous knowledge
Coherent content design
Multimedia
Learning Outcome
Apply knowledge in real situation
(metaphor: hammer)
Deep understanding
Digital literacy skills
Collaborative learning
Be open and think critically

Sep 26, 2013
“when you start receiving questions that really challenge you and challenge the knowledge that you
have presented, then I think you have done, you serve a better job because they really start to see
the application of each single topic and more than single concept they are required, a logic of
discussing or a logic behind the subject.” - cognitive science
“When you teach to the students, most of them have high understanding where you teach during
the course and of course they have high ﬁnal evaluation because they really understood what you
were teaching” - economics
“Not only learn how to develop software using a particular programming language but also
understand the idea/logic/rule behind the programming language so that it’s easier to learn a new
language” - computer science
“The important thing is to understand the idea behind the mathematic formulas and know how to
use these statistics methods in certain contexts” - statistics
15
Deep understanding

Sep 26, 2013
16
large class problem
“for master students, the thing I do is they are in charge. One chapter each person then we
will discuss when we have questions, so I see some problematic things... So in these
participation moment, with understanding and we can exchange (ideas). It's interesting, but
you can't adopt in (the class with) 140 students” - psychology
“I have 250. So I cannot use this method because the class at least at the beginning,
but in the end, after half of the course, half of the people is gone.The last one that
stays, they are the people that really interested in the class. So with them, you can do
more individualized job” - philosophy
“I prefer classes maybe more like 20 students, then you should have quality teaching as that
point means interacting students, making them think, giving them things to challenge them,
but you can't really do that with 200, 300 students” - neuroscience
“The idea of workshop, it would be interactive, students could ask the questions, but because
of the numbers, we have to slightly change the way that we teach them now. So we can't
make students do presentation because it's just too big, it just won't work.” - media study
Reality: Quality Gap

Sep 26, 2013
Why they use eLearning?
17

Sep 26, 2013
18
Encourage learners’ participation
“I usually have discussions with people and you can't have an easy discussion with 190
people, just by saying: what anybody think? But where I asked it in front of 190 people, they
will do it by sending you a tweet. So it's just a different way of taking questions”
Necessary tutorial session for international students
“It's just a strategy because there are many our students not in the UK all the time, they go
home, go oversees, so often having some kind of virtual space is the only way you going to do
it really, face to face is not possible”
Track students’ learning progress
“I can follow their learning process by using the forum, by using exercises I assigned to them,
they have to solve some problems, to solve some issues, the basics of the lectures of the topics
where studied during the frontal lessons”

Sep 26, 2013
Why they don’t use eLearning?
19

Sep 26, 2013
20
Primitive understanding
“I think that I would like to hear something from you because it's your speciality, to tell me
why read books and take notes in the old fashioned way helps you memorize and
understand much better than read on the computer, I will never be able to read Google
books, we are never able to take some notes in aWord document”
Lack of ﬁnancial support
“...depends on how much money you have for the class, here, sometimes, they do some
eLearning, especially the past, they try more than now...if they have only limited amount of
money that give you the possibility to do the forum but nothing else, they would never give
me an assistant to do this if I offer this opportunity, it's me that completely for free”
Lack of eLearning expertise
“The quality of teaching that I can give online, in my view, less than I can give in the
class. So in the end… Maybe this is because I am not comfortable with this type of
interaction; I prefer the real life interaction. So in the end I dropped it.”

Sep 26, 2013
How to improve the quality of
teaching and learning?
21

Sep 26, 2013
22
Update assessment method - ﬁght with plagiarism
“I immediately understood that it was a completely different situation. Students
copy all the time and some in a very bad manner like cut and copy and other
do better work trying to rephrase what they see in Internet. So I stopped.Then I
started doing the same, giving them a very large question but they have to write
the paper in the class, but they start to copy again, they had pieces of paper or
they stole this sheet that university gives them, so they started cheating
again...So I stopped with this method, and now I do very open question but I
decide the questions and they don't know, every time I change my questions, so
they cannot prepare to do a speciﬁc material and bring to the class.”

Sep 26, 2013
23
Teach how to learn - balance of quantity and quality
“I reduce the amount of topics I addressed but I tried to make the topics I addressed
where they understood. It wasn't just a survey of the topic because I sort of change my
idea from giving an overall survey of the topic to let the people intuitive, from this, actually
get the students to fully understand how I would approach one specific topic and maybe
leave them on their own to address all the topics in the similar way”
Give a man a fish and you feed him for
a day.Teach him how to fish and you
feed him for a lifetime - Lao Zi

Sep 26, 2013
Special Thanks to...
• prof. Patrizia Ghislandi (supervisor in my PhD study)
• prof. Grainne Conole (tutor in my abroad period)
• Dr. Palitha Edirisingha (tutor in my abroad period)
• Dr. Juliana Elisa Raffagheli (post-doc in the team)
24

Sep 26, 2013
25
Thank you and welcome to any comment!
NanYang
nan.yang@unitn.it
Take Home Message
To use eLearning as an approach for
quality, the important thing is to know how
to add value from technology to pedagogy
rather than just throw it in

Teachers' Voice on eLearning as an approach to quality in higher education

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