Education Commons^™

Honors Colleges, Transdisciplinary Education, And Global Challenges, Paul Knox, Paul Heilker

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

The authors contend that the most significant comparative advantage of honors colleges is the combination of gifted and motivated students from every academic discipline and interdisciplinary curricula that train students to integrate diverse perspectives. The authors discuss how to harness this advantage to provide a truly transdisciplinary education through collaborative, project-based learning, both on campus and beyond. They assert that honors colleges are in a unique position to circumvent the siloed structures of academia by convening multidisciplinary groups of students guided by faculty from a wide range of disciplines. Doing so can help reimagine undergraduate education to address urgent and …

Unveiling The Process Of Collaborative Learning Through The Use Of Digital Whiteboard Historical Action Logs, Hua Leong Fwa

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced many educational institutions to transit from face-to-face to online delivery of lessons. Precluded from meeting face-to-face in a classroom due to pandemic curbs, a digital whiteboard affords both teacher and learners to be collaborating and completing a task from home instead. In this paper, we first used a survey to assess learner’s acceptance and use of digital whiteboard. We next web-scraped and visualized historical action logs recorded by the digital whiteboarding tool to uncover the process of problem-solving between and within the teams. This is significant as social-loafing and free-riding are typically difficult to detect …

Collaboration: Definition And Structure, Claire Scoular, Daniel Duckworth, Jonathan Heard, Dara Ramalingam

Assessment and Reporting

The definition of any skill or construct is essential prior to the assessment, teaching, or development of pedagogical resources in relation to the skill. The ACER collaboration framework is designed to support researchers and educators with a clear definitional model from which to base their understanding and development of the skill. This collaboration framework has been developed to address the challenges associated with teaching and assessing collaboration. While there are many definitions of the skill, which are outlined in the first part of this document, few provide a means to operationalise collaboration in the classroom. This framework is designed to …

Global Perspective-Taking: Extending Interdisciplinary Pedagogies Into International Classrooms, Tami S. Carmichael

English Faculty Publications

As William Newell observed, in order to obtain an excellent undergraduate education, it is necessary for students to move between disciplinary and interdisciplinary educational experiences; additionally, he claims it is essential that "students also…shuttle back and forth between the classroom and the outside world" (Newell, 2010, p. 12). This movement, both intellectual and physical, promotes the development of the perspective-taking that can help students better understand, and potentially begin to address, complex global issues (Newell, 2001). If moving between disciplines and beyond the classroom into the physical world (and back) could have an impact on students' perspective-taking development, what might …

What’S Brewing? A Statistics Education Discovery Project, Marla A. Sole, Sharon L. Weinberg

Publications and Research

We believe that students learn best, are actively engaged, and are genuinely interested when working on real-world problems. This can be done by giving students the opportunity to work collaboratively on projects that investigate authentic, familiar problems. This article shares one such project that was used in an introductory statistics course. We describe the steps taken to investigate why customers are charged more for iced coffee than hot coffee, which included collecting data and using descriptive and inferential statistical analysis. Interspersed throughout the article, we describe strategies that can help teachers implement the project and scaffold material to assist students …

Using Social Annotation Tools To Foster Collaborative Learning, Tian Luo, Fei Gao, Yanyan Sun

STEMPS Faculty Publications

Social annotation (SA) allows learners to highlight and comment on web pages and share annotations with each other online. Despite its potential in promoting collaborative learning, how to integrate it into educational settings has not been fully studied. This study aims at introducing and exploring three different ways of incorporating SA-based activities into an online course: (a) peer review; (b) annotated discussion; and (c) collaborative reading. Students participated all three SA- based activities and took a survey at the end reporting the effectiveness of these activities. In this proposal we reported the initial findings of student participation in the three …

Designing Microblogging-Based Class Activities, Tian Luo, Fei Gao

STEMPS Faculty Publications

Microblogging tools such as Twitter have been frequently adopted in educational settings to facilitate learning. This study examined how a microblogging tool, Twiducate, was incorporated into a graduate-level class of ten students. During the 1.5 hour lesson, students participated in a series of Twiducate-supported collaborative and reflective activities. The analysis of in-class discussion transcripts, text-based posts on Twiducate and a pre- and post-test survey results revealed that students were highly engaged in classroom collaborative learning and there is a high level of interaction. Students reported the challenges of using microblogging tools, such as the possibility of creating distraction and disorder …

Reconsidering Instructional Design With Web 2.0 Technologies, Fei Gao, Kun Li, Tian Luo, Jamie Smith

STEMPS Faculty Publications

Emerging technologies such as Web 2.0 afford interconnections, content creation and remixing, which provide rich opportunities to for more personally meaningful, collaborative, and socially relevant learning (Greenhow, Robelia, & Hudges, 2009). Web 2.0 and other emerging technologies offer new possibilities of designing collaborative activities that engage learners in meaningful learning (Chai & Tan, 2009; Cress & Kimmerle, 2008).

Despite the enthusiasm of integrating Web 2.0 technologies into learning environment design, researchers found that few instructors know the pedagogies that could lead to productive innovation (Collis & Moonen, 2008). This symposium consists of one theoretical paper and three case studies that …

Enhancing Classroom Learning Experience By Providing Structures To Microblogging-Based Activities, Tian Luo, Fei Gao

STEMPS Faculty Publications

Microblogging tools such as Twitter have been frequently adopted in educational settings to facilitate learning in recent years. Although the original purpose of microblogging tools is to connect with others in a wide network and instantly share what is happening to them with the rest of the world, educators have vigorously attempted to repurpose the utilization of the tool and integrate it into various educational settings to promote student learning.

The purpose of this study is to examine student learning experience under a set of structured microblogging-based activities and to identify the affordances and constraints of the technology. Students participated …

Blessed Unrest: The Power Of Unreasonable People To Change The World, Stephanie Pace Marshall

Publications & Research

In her keynote address at the 2008 NCSSSMST Professional Conference, Dr. Stephanie Pace Marshall addresses what work can be done with the collective resources of its Consortium members which beg to be shared and connected--and also explores what the source of "...our Blessed Unrest that will give us the courage to become unreasonable advocates for our children and for STEM transformation?"