Dorit Maor

Despite decades of sustained national focus in several countries (e.g., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK, and USA) recent trends in students’ course-taking and career choices suggest proportionally fewer students pursuing STEM-related study. Consequently, to address this trend, it is important to better understand factors currently related to students’ engagement, literacy and attainment in STEM subjects and vocations. Our own recent research has examined students’ science literacy and engagement in association with formal (school-based) and informal (outside of school, home-related) factors, using retrospective analysis of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data. In this study we purposefully recruited several female students enrolled in late-secondary school Physics. This selection meant that all participants were engaged in school science and likely to be considering post-secondary study in STEM, and possibly STEM-related careers. Our purpose was to hear from this select group of female science students, their stories of influences in the development of their engagement and literacy in science. In particular, we were interested in juxtaposing their stories against the explanatory regression models we had previously developed. In this way, our purpose was to test the nomothetic explanations previously offered using idiographic stories of factors related to the engagement of girls in science.

There is a need to improve supervision of higher degree students to increase completion rates, reduce attrition and improve quality. This discussion paper explores the contribution that technology can make to higher degree research supervision. It focuses on research studies that support supervision through the application of digital technology. In reviewing current research, I discuss whether web-based tools can influence the training of Higher Degree Research (HDR) students, are effective in supporting students, and can reduce breakdowns in supervisory relationships. A major trend in higher education is the re-purposing of Web 2.0 systems, not only to access knowledge collaboratively, but also to create and sustain communities of learners. In critically reviewing current research-based papers, I was able to assess the impact of web-based tools on the training and support of doctoral students. The longer-term aim of this research project is to create a digital platform that can assist postgraduate students and their supervisors.

This paper reflects on the use of the TPACK model in e-learning courses to enhance students’ ability to use technology in their learning and later in their professions and to introduce the concept of digital pedagogies . To maximize students’ learning, this model was disseminated in the design of the course, the learning activities and the assessment. The aim was to encourage students to become reflective learners and to create knowledge collaboratively. Different technological tools such as iPads, ePortfolio together with digital pedagogies were used to enhance the students’ learning experience and obtain students’ reflections and feedback on the unit. Digital pedagogies refer to teaching – learning approaches in which new technologies change the way we teach. From the thirty postgraduate students in the unit, there were different responses to digital pedagogies. Some felt it transformed their learning while others resisted and did not participate in the interactive spirit of the class.

e-Portfolios have the potential not only to act as repositories for student artefacts, but to provide a powerful tool for reflection in learning. This paper details a study within a doctoral project that investigated the use of an ePortfolio to increase engagement of pre-service teachers in the process of reflection. The learning environment utilized the PebblePad ePortfolio platform to facilitate the Enculturation Teaching Model specifically by providing exemplars of good practice, opportunities to interact with other students, and activities designed to improve reflective skills. This paper examines the reported engagement of the students with the exemplar and activity prompts used within the ePortfolio platform to facilitate reflection, and how students engaged with the ePortfolio as technology. Issues that arose throughout the implementation are also discussed. The paper concludes with recommended revisions and refinements for future iterations of similar learning environments.

A key challenge for university professionals is to identify how to construct more interactive, engaging and student-centred environments that promote 21st century skills and encourage selfdirected learning. Existing research suggests the use of real-life tasks supported by new technologies, together with access to the vast array of open educational resources on the Internet, have the potential to improve the quality of online learning. This paper describes how an authentic online professional development course for higher education practitioners was designed and implemented using a learning management system (LMS) and an open companion website. It also briefly discusses how the initial iteration was evaluated and identifies recommendations for improving future iterations of the course

Regional Australia provides fertile ground for the integration of online technologies to support the vocational education and training (VET) sector. This paper examines teachers’ beliefs about teaching with technology in a regional VET institute. VET teachers must demonstrate teaching expertise (pedagogical knowledge) and industry expertise (content knowledge) for diverse learners and contexts; however, the emergence of new digital technologies illustrates an increasing need for teachers to embrace ‘technology’ knowledge commensurate with industry practice. Recent surveys have revealed that teachers’ use of online digital technology within the VET sector is not effectively incorporated nor has it been embraced in pedagogically defensible ways. This paper adopts a mixed methods approach to understand how the epistemic beliefs of VET teachers influence their teaching and how the TPACK is applied in practice. Finally, this paper illuminates the need for professional development programmes to focus on developing teacher knowledge across all TPACK domains.

This paper outlines the planned research into the use of an ePortfolio Environment to support the development of reflection in pre-service teachers. Reflection is a key skill for teachers to possess as they continue to learn into the future. It is a doctoral research project that involves the implementation of sections of the eLearning Lifecycle model (Phillips, Kennedy, & McNaught, 2011) within a PebblePad platform. The proposed environment will include examples, activities and interactions as part of an Enculturation Teaching Model (Tishman, Jay, & Perkins, 1993). The impetus for the activities will be the sections of the Framework for Teacher Reflection (Colton & Sparks-Langer, 1993). The implementation aims to develop a teaching environment that can be used in a variety of platforms to develop reflective abilities in pre-service teachers that will be used for continued professional development.

In this paper we describe the use of learning analytics to provide indicators of students’ behaviour in technology-enhanced learning environments. We first provide an overview of the emerging field of learning analytics, and then describe a learning-analytic tool which reports student use of the Lectopia lecture capture system across the weeks of a semester, both collectively and individually. Observation of the data provided by the system enabled us to develop a set of proto-theoretical categories of behaviour, with associated algorithms to numerically identify these categories. Finally, we describe the use of the learning-analytic tool in a mixed methods approach to investigate in depth how students, with different characteristics, engage with and learn from technology-enhanced learning environments.