As an educational developer I seem to spend most of my time involved in either professional development, or the use of technology, and frequently both. This issue of Innovations in Education and Teaching International reflects this dual focus.
We begin with an article from O’Neill and McNamara which describes an approach to supporting graduate teaching assistants in their teaching which involved educational developers working with academics from a range of disciplines.
Hibbert and Semler provide a comprehensive overview of the UK’s Professional Standards Framework for teachers in the post-secondary sector. Their discussion of issues and debates about the role of formal qualifications in delivering faculty development will be of interest in the UK but perhaps even more interesting to those beyond who may be contemplating the impact of such a national approach.
Several articles in this issue are concerned with the use of online support for professional development and the support of online teaching. The first of these is Romeu, Guitert and Sangra who explore the use of technology to enable a group of faculty to collaborate, since this is in the context of a fully online university, this makes particular sense. The lessons learnt from this case study may be of interest to readers who are more often working in a face-to-face session as well as those who spend their time in cyberspace.
In the second article in this section, Paskevicius and Bortolin used a combination of online and face-to-face events and activities to provide an extensive nine-month faculty development programme. This blended method was used to build and sustain a community of practice, successfully engaging the participants over time.
Jones and Gallen in the third article on this theme, addressed the challenge of providing peer observation in a synchronous online discussion. Their emphasis on reflection and dialogue was key to their success.
We end this issue with some articles focusing on the use of technology as a teaching tool. Martin-Gonzalez, Chi-Poot and Uc-Cetina describe an investigation into the use of an augmented reality system. While the focus of their use was in teaching Euclidean vectors, their findings may have relevance and application for others.
Wang and Huang provide an analysis of different modes of cloud services that can be used to support collaborative learning. They compare single and multi-user modes. This brings to the fore the tensions between students working alone (single mode) and working in groups. In this case the groups can all access the same document simultaneously, thus bringing a requirement for them to develop their abilities to work as a team and to negotiate their output.
Next, we have an account by Stockwell of a successful attempt to help students from one homogenous culture to gain a better understanding of other cultural contexts. The means to do this was through a web-based tool. While this was a pilot study, the lessons learned may be of great interest to others grappling with the issue of teaching cultural awareness, particularly in a context of a homogenous culture.
Finally, Zainuddin and Attaran share their findings from an evaluation of the use of the flipped classroom. Their study adds to the knowledge in this area as they explored which aspects of the flipped classroom were of most benefit to different groups of students. Their work will be of interest to others embarking on the flipped classroom or who advise others to do so.
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