Articles in this interesting, diverse edition come from Korea, Iran, South Africa, Spain, the UK, USA, Taiwan, Turkey and Hong Kong, and deal with a range of issues affecting international Higher Education from doctoral learning (subject of the next issue, a special edition), collaborative and group education, medical education, e and blended learning including podcasting, among other concerns and developments.
In ‘Crossing conceptual thresholds in doctoral communities’ Sioux McKenna, Rhodes University, South Africa, uses theories of conceptual threshold crossing to explore supportive learning community based doctoral study, finding that it ‘encourages risk-taking and facilitates conversations across different issues and disciplines’, enables scholars to regularly ‘articulate their position’ and enhances encounters with theories and concepts. All essential for research development at doctoral level.
Postgraduates are also a focus In ‘Application of Research-Informed Teaching in the Taught-Postgraduate Education of Maritime Law’. Ling Zhu and Wei Pan from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong and The University of Hong Kong, consider applying research-informed teaching to taught postgraduate education in maritime law, finding research-teaching linkages had a positive impact on students’ learning.
Robert G. Bing-You and colleagues from Maine Medical Centre, Portland, USA; and UCSF School of Medicine, San Francisco, USA in ‘T2 (Teaching & Thinking)-in-action skills of highly-rated medical teachers: how do we help faculty attain that expertise?’ elaborate how teaching and thinking-in-action is perceived by teachers using metacognition, prior to developing faculty development programmes to improve reflection-in-action abilities while teaching, and suggest that strategies tried can enable cognitive skills for teaching expertise.
In their article ‘Willingness to adopt or reuse an e-learning system: The perspectives of self-determination and perceived characteristics of innovation’, Hsin Hsin Chang and colleagues from National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, R.O.C. investigate school teachers’ willingness to adopt and reuse an e-learning system. They demonstrate that perceived autonomy and competence have positive influences on intrinsic motivation, subjective norm and organisational policy on extrinsic motivation. Also focussing on teaching teachers, Alice Ebrahimi, Esmail Fagih, Mohammad Dabir-Moghaddam Alzahra University, Tehran, Iran; Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran; Allameh Tabatabai University, Tehran, Iran consider pre-service teachers’ perceptions of attending online asynchronous discussion forums in their article ‘Student perceptions of effective discussion in online forums: a case study of pre-service teachers’. They find teachers took part in the discussions mainly to express attitudes, beliefs and evaluations but were hesitant to express emotions, answer their peers’ questions, critique others’ views, express acknowledgements, and make references to other sources.
Liezel Cilliers from the University of Fort Hare, South Africa discusses ‘Wiki acceptance by university students to improve collaboration in Higher Education’. She looks at the relationships between designing wiki-based learning activities and student acceptance of the technology, finding most students in the study experienced the wiki as useful to improve collaboration in the course but worries remain about content being vandalised and plagiarised.
In ‘The effectiveness of PowerPoint presentation and conventional lecture on pedagogical content knowledge attainment’, Muhlise Cosgun Ögeyik, Trakya University EDİRNE/TURKEY reports on a quasi-experimental study designed to compare the effectiveness of PowerPoint presentations and conventional lecture/discussion sessions student teachers of English in terms of pedagogical content knowledge finding they preferred and achieved better with conventional sessions. Also considering a mixed mode of delivery, David Jiménez-Castillo Raquel Sánchez-Fernández, Gema M. Marín-Carrillo, Department of Economics and Business, University of Almeria, Spain look in ‘Dream team or odd couple? Examining the combined use of lectures and podcasting in higher education’ at the effectiveness of the sequential use of lectures and video podcasting in higher education. They show the influence of prior knowledge gained from lectures and effective use of video podcasts on perceived assimilation of additional knowledge, seeing the two together work well for different, interrelated outcomes.
David Duran Gisbert, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, reviews historical literature to explore the potential and the limitations of learning-by-teaching as a pedagogical approach in ‘Learning-by-teaching. Evidence and implications as a pedagogical mechanism’ and suggests findings can be used to promote opportunities for students to learn by teaching their peers, cooperative learning, peer tutoring or peer assessment.
In ‘Nurturing competitive teamwork with individual excellence in an engineering classroom’ Kant E Kanyarusoke, Mechanical Engineering Department, Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT), considers ways to nurture students’ learning, using engineering sustained experience of team working and business competitiveness awareness in a model and finding enhanced learning, particularly among those who sustained this form of learning over time rather than having breaks.
More collaborative learning is discussed by Hye-Jung Lee, Hyekyung Kim, and Hyunjung Byun, Institute for Education and Innovation, Korea; Sunmoon University, Korea and Seoul Women’s University, Korea in ‘Are high achievers successful in collaborative learning? An explorative study of college students’ learning approaches in team project-based learning’. They found high achievers’ initiative, goal orientation, social relationships, and preference for TPBL motivated them to achieve but that they were stressed in working collaboratively so high-achieving students, despite their high grades, might not successfully learn the competency for the level of teamwork and collaboration expected in TPBL.
Naomi Winstone and Darren Moore, University of Surrey, Guildford, South West Peninsula (PenCLAHRC), and University of Exeter discuss Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) in ‘Sometimes fish, sometimes fowl? Liminality, identity work and identity malleability in Graduate Teaching Assistants’, considering their perspectives when discussing teaching work. They reveal that whilst GTAs showed a lack of clarity over their identity, they are actively involved in the process of ‘identity work’ through negotiating an emerging professional identity. They occupy a ‘unique niche’ and their ‘identity malleability’ affords optimum conditions in which to engage in identity work.
Cambridge and Brighton
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