Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning

The provision of stand-alone, web-based materials is one way of making language and academic skills support for first-year students accessible, flexible, and more or less permanently available. "Writing in Subject Areas" is a web-based resource developed at Monash University in Australia to facilitate students' transition to the kinds of thinking and writing valued in higher education. The research and pedagogy underpinning the site is based on the significance for first-year students of understanding: (1) textual structures; (2) discursive processes; and (3) institutional practices in the academy. Using a common template, the site provides materials for ten subjects in four faculties. The current paper discusses the student evaluation of the resource, elicited via questionnaire from almost 1,000 respondents over two years. In 2005, 29% of students at the University were international and so the learning needs of this group are of particular interest. The paper compares the international to the local student response on a series of key issues. The results suggest significant differences between the two student cohorts. While the resource's usefulness was commended by both groups, the international student cohort was more likely to use all elements and to be more motivated, even while finding it more difficult than local students. The difficulty was found to be more pronounced for a subgroup of offshore students. The study concludes by reinforcing the benefit of theoretically grounded and specially targeted assistance. Further, it underscores the need for ethnographically inspired investigations by staff providing online teaching and academic support for diverse cultural groups.

The widespread participation of international and new migrant Chinese students in Western universities has raised fresh issues regarding how these students adapt to new learning cultures where critical thinking and interaction are emphasized and online learning is integral to many courses. This paper reports research in a New Zealand university about the ways in which Chinese students operated in online discussions, and it examines the influence of the computer-mediated communication (CMC) medium and the curriculum on their learning. The study found that a major benefit for Chinese students was their increased participation which arose from the text-based, asynchronous and virtual characteristics of the medium; this mitigated some issues relating to language competence. Chinese students found that reading and writing messages helped them develop their thinking and understanding. The debate, with its controversy and argument was not motivational, but the assessed nature of the activity was highly influential. The research also found that, despite their lack of familiarity with online discussions, the Chinese students adapted and responded successfully to this new learning context.

A crucial challenge in the teaching and learning of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in developing non-Western countries is the irrelevance of much Western learning content, materials, tools, and methods from the perspectives of local communities. Our approach for designing an ICT course is based on the concept of ethnocomputing — finding culturally suitable entry points for understanding, utilizing, and producing ICT in a relevant way. In order to study the feasibility of our approach, we designed a contextualized introductory programming course with Tumaini University, Tanzania, and offered it to second-year undergraduate students in teacher education in the academic year 2004–2005. The approach was to encourage students to create programs that would meet the needs of their own local communities. The course made extensive use of learning technologies, such as robotics, to concretize the first steps in understanding ICT. We applied an ethnocomputing-based analysis to three aspects: (1) the development process of the course; (2) the role of learning technologies in the course; and (3) students' contextual learning outcomes. First, representation, utilization, and appropriation appeared at various stages in the development of the course. These included unexpected spin-offs for local communities, such as the introduction of educational robotics to assist young patients in a rural hospital. Second, contextual relevance of learning technologies — digital learning materials, the robotic I-BLOCKs, and the Jeliot program visualization tool — was analyzed by the CATI model, and the results indicate their relevance at all the four levels of the model: Contextualization, Application, Transfer, and Import. Third, student learning outcomes were observed by using content analysis of questionnaires and interviews. There is evidence that students developed a contextual understanding of ICT, especially at the application level of the CATI model. Overall, the study indicates that an ethnocomputing-based analysis can be used for designing needs-based ICT education by analyzing its feasibility with various operationalizations of the ethnocomputing concept. Moreover, research results envisage new components and methods for an entirely contextualized undergraduate curriculum of ICT.

It has been argued that the reuse of educational resources will contribute to the development of economies of scale in which users, both learners and teachers, can create, source, and share knowledge and information. Central to this objective are Learning Object Repositories (LORs) that can support resource reuse within and across learning communities. The uptake and use of LORs by communities will be influenced by a number of sociocultural factors that are difficult to distinguish and solve, since they involve a number of interrelated, tacit variables. In this article, we discuss three case studies outlining a range of actual and potential cultural issues affecting the implementation of LORs. We present a framework that can support systematic identification of these issues in the design and development stage and guide future implementations.

Designing software alongside ethnobotanists and Indigenous owners and practitioners of traditional knowledge, brings to light a range of issues which expose some of the assumptions underlying both Western ethnobotany and software design. In collaborating over the development of software to facilitate the use of digital objects in knowledge work, issues of knowledge politics, accountability, ontologies, and epistemologies arise. This paper discusses the ways these issues, in a particular context, led to the development of a flexible, ontologically flat, epistemologically open, ethnobotanical software design.

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of the use of learning technologies in Adult Basic Education and Training (ABET) programs at the University of South Africa (UNISA). Since 1946, when UNISA became a distance education provider, the University has included the use of various technologies such as print-based study guides, radio, audiocassettes, and CDs, as well as traditional printed notes and textbooks. UNISA has also added videocassettes, telephone teaching, computer-based audio-graphics systems, fax, videoconferencing, email, the internet, and computer-based multimedia in the teaching and assessment of its learning programs (including ABET). The demand for these technologies has been necessitated by the multicultural profile of the University's students. The paper examines the value of this range of technologies. In the South African context, the "low tech" options are much more robust and are used effectively to provide support for a diverse range of learners.