We believe that a good way for you to extend your ideas about technology’s role in enhancing learning is to have a specific and limited goal in mind and work through a design cycle thoughtfully.
With the first stage in the design inquiry cycle, we start the design process by defining a teaching problem or challenge or opportunity that we can imagine solving.
Identify an educational challenge
What would be useful for you to work on in this unit?
Continuing the work from earlier units
If you wish, you may want to continue the work you have done so far in the Graduate Certificate in Higher Education, particularly your critique of a teaching strategy (from UNHE500) or of a unit outline (from UNHE501). Did you identify a part of the unit that you were examining that could benefit from using technology to enhance learning? Could an assignment, for example, be made more effective with the use of technology? Is there an important piece of content which you want to present in a different way?
It is fine to use your own work from previous units in this unit, but ensure you cite its source fully, as you would with any unpublished material. You may like to include extracts from previous work as elements (attachments or appendices, or components in your portfolio) to your design in this unit.
Defining a challenge from your context and experience
You may want to address a challenge from another place in your teaching. Here are some examples from past participants.
Challenge: Teaching theory, skills, use of materials and creative arts lesson planning to Education students within limited time constraints
Arts education is considered a discipline-based study area. Conceptually, disciplines can present alternative learning realities, comprising different thinking methodologies, “signature pedagogies” (Land, 2012, p. 39) and necessitating the creation of communities of practice for effective instruction. Land (2012) recommends that skill-based subjects that hold mastery at their core must have efficient modelling and ample opportunities for practice and consolidation of skills and techniques. The students in this unit are not experienced in lesson planning, and most will come to the unit with minimal or no previous Arts experience.
Challenge: Facilitating effective student engagement and enhancing learning for first year occupational therapy students in a introductory unit
An important component of first year transition pedagogy is to facilitate student engagement with content, peers and with teaching and faculty staff (Sparks et al., 2014; Wilcox, Winn & Fyvie‐Gauld, 2005). Some students in the course will have already completed some study at university and for these students, engagement is still an important element of good teaching in higher education. The challenge is to increase staff and student contact and engagement.
My challenge is to make the physiology of axonal action potential firing and conduction more accessible, engaging and student-friendly. I need to find out how best to scaffold students’ knowledge acquisition in these challenging abstract topic areas and to accommodate diverse learning capabilities (Oliver, 1999; Oliver & Herrington, 2001).
Fifteen educational challenges that were addressed by past students have been summarised by Mary in the resource Challenges identified.
Beyond ACU, here is an economics lecturer stating a challenge he had when teaching algebra, and describing the effect of the small change he made to his teaching, with a technological tool to help:
Portfolio activity:
- Identify a teaching challenge which you want to work on in this unit. Share it in Activity 01 (a forum activity): “Identify your educational challenge’ and read the teaching goals of class colleagues. Re-visit and revise your challenge and post it in your portfolio once you have concluded your investigations (next steps).
optional activity. Estimated time to complete: 90 minutes
