Teachers' Appreciation of a Collaborative Environment on LOs (original) (raw)

Learning Through Collaborative Creation of Knowledge Objects in Teacher Education

2011

This contribution presents an empirical study of object-oriented collaboration. The participants are groups of teacher students, who work on knowledge objects (e.g., didactic materials, study materials and guidelines for teachers) intended to address problems identified at schools where they pursue their internships. The knowledge creation approach to learning, which places collaborative creation of knowledge objects at its core, served as a guide for the pedagogical design, which includes specifications of the collaborative activities and tools utilized. We collected different types of data. Analyses followed three lines of investigation: analysis of group interactions, of concepts and ideas uptake, and of object co-construction and development. Findings show various degrees of idea sharing and of co-elaboration of object iterations. These findings assist us in formulating recommendations for future research and pedagogical design, especially with regard to pedagogical settings, an...

Improving the Usefulness of Learning Objects by Means of Pedagogy-Oriented Design

International Issues and Solutions, 2009

Learning Objects (LOs) are increasingly considered potentially helpful to improve teachers' work and to spread innovation in the school system. Their technological roots, however, often make them scarcely appealing to the teachers. A key issue to tackle in order to boost their diffusion is to make them closer to actual teacher's work by emphasising pedagogical aspects. To this end, we propose a typology of LOs that allows teachers to highlight differences in the pedagogical approach embedded in their productions, hence sharing not only content but also educational competence. Moreover, in order to allow re-user teachers to explicit and share the pedagogical experience gained while reusing some material, we suggest to endow repositories with ad hoc facilities, such as comments and itineraries related to the repository's LOs. Comments would allow people to share narrations of experiences of use, while learning itineraries would point out logical connections of various kinds among small groups of LOs, hence helping the users overcome the content fragmentation induced by the granularity of LOs. These proposals are described and exemplified by drawing from our training experience.

Supporting teachers' SRL in a collaborative environment for sharing Learning Objects

This paper analyses the potential to support the development of selfregulated learning (SRL) abilities offered by a collaborative environment for teachers sharing learning objects (LOs). SRL consists in a set of crosscurricular abilities which allow learners to make the most of their learning by controlling the aspects involved in it. The collaborative environment considered is based on our pedagogical conception of LOs, which includes teachers' methodology and experience, so as to model the evolving nature of educational materials and turn the re-use of LOs into a learning occasion for teachers. Within such a view, supporting SRL becomes an essential feature for our collaborative environment. This analysis allowed us to spot strengths and weaknesses of the environment as concerns SRL, and to devise some changes that could improve teachers' learning experiences within it.

Teaching, designing, and sharing: A context for learning objects

2005

This article describes a professional development model and a set of tools intended to increase teachers' capacity for the design of instructional activities using learning objects. It then reports preliminary findings from studies involving teachers (n=41) who participated in the professional development workshops based on the model. Findings suggest that participants saw many potential benefits of using online resources in support of teaching, including their convenience and currency. In terms of creating learning activities for their students, the most common use mentioned was for enrichment purposes. Analyses also showed that participants seemed to prefer to use small granularity resources. However, despite this enthusiasm, post-workshop usage was generally low. Participants also identified barriers in using online resources. These included lack of technology access and literacy, and difficulties in managing the overabundance of resources and their varying quality. Participants also mentioned the importance of accessing online resources for research purposes.

From Learning Objects to Educational Itineraries: Helping Teachers to Exploit Repositories

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2008

In this paper we describe an experience with the construction of educational itineraries based on Learning Objects (LOs). The experience was carried out with a group of 130 trainee teachers of secondary school using LODE, a collaboration environment associated with a repository of LOs, aiming to facilitate teachers' work with LOs and the exchange of pedagogical experience. From the discussion of this activity we derive some suggestions to improve the LODE environment and to increase teachers' opportunities to make the sharing of LOs an occasion of professional growth.

Internet repositories for collaborative learning: Supporting both students and teachers

The first international conference …, 1995

Most efforts to create computer-supported collaborative learning environments have been focused on students. However, without providing appropriate integration of collaborative activities into curricula, these efforts will have little widespread impact on educational practices. To improve education through technology, learning environments for students must be integrated with curriculum development tools for teachers to create an integrated collaboration-oriented classroom. This paper describes how software tools for ...

Why do teachers get to learn the most?: A case study of a course based on student creation of learning objects

e-jist, 2005

A common report from anecdotal writing over many generations of educators is that it is the teacher who usually learns the most during the process of gathering content materials, designing, teaching and evaluating student performance. In this project we address this issue by developing an innovative instructional design in which collaborative groups of students working at distance create, share and assess learning content (in the form of learning objects) with their peers through online learning portals. The results of this process are assessed via surveys, discussions, reflective essays and peer evaluations. We conclude that instructional models based upon student construction of content and orchestration of learning activities can reduce instructor workload, provide opportunity for students to acquire new skills while increasing their subject content knowledge, and create a lasting legacy of re-usable learning objects.

Including collaborative learning designs in a Learning Object Repository

A learning object repository (or LOR) is presented as a mechanism which facilitates the organisation and reuse of collaborative learning scenarios, using metadata and ontologies. The main design concern here is making it easy for authors and learners to work with the LOR while creating or using learning environments. Three views of the repository are proposed: a reusable storage structure, a dynamic system and an artefact for building collaborative learning environments.