Developing online pedagogy through collaboration between academia and publishers (527) Home : Annual Conference 2014

Developing online pedagogy through collaboration between academia and publishers (527)

Public Group Active 8 years, 1 month ago

Mon, Sep 1 2014, 3:10pm – 4:10pm

Description

Universities can see a clear benefit from working collaboratively with business (Wilson, 2012) especially those involved in education, such as publishers, to innovate and improve educational resources to make them more appropriate for real-life teaching and learning contexts as well as improving scholarship overall (Fritsch and Lee, 2011). Here, we report on two universities which have worked in partnership with a major educational publisher to develop online resources to support a generic subject area, employability, and a specific discipline, accounting. The nature of digital resources allows a higher level of flexibility than traditional paper-based textbooks (Young, 2013). In pedagogical terms, how students learn from online systems is still in its exploratory stage especially as technology and the skills-set of learners are constantly changing and rapidly evolving. In our pedagogical study, a publisher provided academics at two universities access to two online learning resources, one supporting employability and the other, accounting. Both resources were integrated within business and accounting modules, respectively. The methodology of the project involved qualitative methods through questionnaires, focus groups, informal feedback and responses to assignments built around the resource and quantitative methods using learner analytics from data obtained from the online platform. Early results showed that students were highly positive about using such online resources to support their knowledge and understanding and this was reflected in their module performance. Students did encounter technical issues which in a few cases prevented them from accessing the learning materials. The resources contained a psychometric test which students take initially to self-assess their knowledge and understanding of the topic area. The results of the test automatically produce an individualized learning path and students were appreciative of this feature. Learner analytics, such as time on task, test item analysis were combined with module marks.

The collaboration between the publishers and the academics is ongoing and the initial results and the benefits to each party will be discussed during the first part of the session (10min). In the second part (20min), we will share and invite reflections from participants on how such partnerships add value to our understanding of how students learn online. We will also involve participants in a discussion around the role that learner analytics can play in sharing expertise between universities and publishers (Johnson et al, 2012).

Fritsch, D.R and Lee, R. (2011) It’s Time to Join Forces: New Approaches and Models That Support Sustainable Scholarship. The Serials Librarian, 60, 1-4. [Accessed 23 March 2014]

Johnson, L., Adams, S., and Cummins, M. (2012). Learning Analytics in The NMC Horizon Report: 2012 Higher Education Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium, pp22-25. http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/HR2012.pdf [Accessed 30 May 2014]

Wilson, T. (2013) A Review of Business–University Collaboration.https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/32383/12-610-wilson-review-business-university-collaboration.pdf [accessed 24 March 2014]

Young, J.R. (2013) The Object Formerly Known as the Textbook. The Chronicle for Higher Education. http://chronicle.com/article/Dont-Call-Them-Textbooks/136835/ [Accessed 23 March 2014]

Authors

Name	Agnieszka Herdan
Affiliation	Greenwich University
Country	United Kingdom

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replied 8 years, 1 month ago

Really looking forward to this, I am leading Northampton’s eBook integration with a big battle between direct publisher engagement and Ingram’s VitalSource platform, and also trying to work with publishers on fragmenting their assets which most are engaged with so that we can blend core text from one publisher, case studies and media from another,…[Read more]