Research Study: Developing a technology enabled mentoring (TEM) framework and short course for the Australasian higher education community.

We need your help towards the above project that is being funded by the Council of Australasian University Leaders in Learning and Teaching (CAULLT). The project is being led by Dr Pranit Anand from UNSW. For more information about the project and team members please visit the CAULLT project site. (UNSW Ethics Reference: HC230120).

The research study is looking recruit people who have participated in a mentoring program regardless if that was done online or face-to-face. Participants will be asked to complete the following research activities if they agree to participate:

  • Anonymous online survey that should take approximately 15 minutes to complete.
  • Volunteer to participate in an online focus group interview that will last approximately 60 to 90 minutes
  • The link to the anonymous online survey is herehttps://unsw.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_equkYdD3YtUdWmi

4.Letter of invitation to participate – Revision 6.4.23, including any risks, harms or discomforts that participants may experience while participating in this research is included in the attached 5.Participation information sheet and consent Form – Revision 6.4.23 and 6. Participation information sheet and consent form – focus group – Revision 6.4.23 We encourage you to read the Participant Information Statement and complete the online survey.

If you have questions about the research and would like to contact the Chief Investigator please contact the following person:

Chief Investigator

Name Dr Pranit Anand
Position Senior Lecturer
Telephone +61 2 9348 1398
Email pranit.anand@unsw.edu.au

 Dr Pranit Anand PhD, MACS, SFHEA, FHERDSA

Senior Lecturer

School of Information Systems and Technology Management, UNSW Business School

Room 2076, Level 2, Quadrangle Building

UNSW SYDNEY 2052

QR code for more information about the CAULLT exploring technologies mentoring research
QR code for more information about the CAULLT exploring technologies mentoring research

Recap: AI is here to stay: It’s impact on online, flexible, and distance learning

In collaboration with EdTechNZ, FLANZ hosted a panel conversation about artificial intelligence (AI) in online, flexible, and distance learning on 18 May 2023. This online event was part of TechWeek. As our panellists for this event, we welcomed Dr Rebecca Marrone (Lecturer Learning Sciences and Development, University of South Australia), Shanon O’Connor (Director, Tōnui Collab), Dr Mark McConnell (Professional Teaching Fellow, Director Teaching and Learning Commercial Law, University of Auckland), and Dr Truman Pham (Postgraduate Director, academyEX).

We asked, ‘What impact does AI have in primary, secondary, or tertiary education and learning in the workplace?’ Our panellists came from different areas of the education sector and provided their insights from the perspective of diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and decolonisation of education.

In a well-supported event with 183 participants, Shanon, Mark, Rebecca, and Truman stated their understanding of the challenges and opportunities of AI in their educational work. As first panellist, Shanon acknowledged the potential of making learning more exciting but also outlined her concerns about Māori data sovereignty, digital inequality, and the bias resulting from the development of artificial intelligence. She made us aware of the research of Karaitiana Taiuru on Mātauranga Sovereignty. The balance between teaching students how to use AI in their workplace and how to build their digital literacy was a key concern for Mark who shared his department’s guidelines for students’ use of AI. Rebecca outlined how AI was used for personalised feedback and assessment, with the aim of creating a flexible, differentiating curriculum. Truman explained how AI, amongst offering other opportunities, can help with digital equality through its use in teacher training. We then entered into a short but lively session of Q&A in which Catherine Frost from the Ministry of Education shared insight into her and her team’s work around AI and the Curriculum.

The recording with corrected captions is available on YouTube. Additionally, the full transcript can be viewed as well as Mark’s slides and the Department of Commercial Law at University of Auckland’s guidelines for students’ use of AI.

Future FLANZ webinars will be announced here on our website where you can subscribe. If you’d like to receive an email notification when we publish announcements about new webinars, you can follow us on Humanitix.

Our next webinar will be on ‘Bicultural principles for teaching and learning online‘ with Arapera Herewini-Card and Dr Rosina Merry from Te Rito Maioha Early Childhood New Zealand and examine the principles that were developed at Te Rito Maioha. This webinar will take place on 20 June 2023.

Webinar recap: Impact of COVID on students in Aotearoa

Michael Cameron from the University of Waikato provided insight into the impact of COVID-19 on students in Aotearoa New Zealand on 18 April 2023. Together with Barbara Fogarty-Perry (Otago Polytechnic) and Gemma Piercy (University of Waikato), he was part of a research team that administered an international survey to students during the lockdown in 2020. They published their results in JOFDL last year in the article “The Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Higher Education Students in New Zealand”.

The survey brought to light logistical aspects, students’ feeling towards their emergency online studies, and their feelings while being in lockdown. Being mainly a quantitative survey as part of a larger international research project that collected responses from students in 62 countries, we can often only speculate about the ‘why’ behind their answers. Nevertheless, it was important to capture the data and be able to compare it with students in other countries.

The recent article “Enhanced or diminished attitudes: University students’ agency” by Maggie Hartnett, Cheryl Brown, Dianne Forbes, Dilani Gedera, and Ashwini Datt was shared during the webinar and provides additional insight into students’ experiences during the pandemic.

You can access the recording, the full transcript, and Michael’s slides.

Our free 2023 webinar series continues in May and June with the following two webinars:

New publication: Developing online teaching in higher education: Global perspectives on continuing professional learning and development

Dianne Forbes (University of Waikato) and Richard Walker (University of York) are pleased to provide a new publication of interest to FLANZ members, Developing online teaching in higher education: Global perspectives on continuing professional learning and development, a collection of approaches designed to support continuing professional learning and development (CPLD) of online teachers.

As editors of the above volume, we are pleased to bring to the attention of FLANZ members a collection of approaches designed to support continuing professional learning and development (CPLD) of online teachers.

In the spirit of learning from the COVID-19 pandemic, the book is dedicated to the students and teachers who made the rapid transition to online learning during the pandemic, and to those who lead in this space. For FLANZ members, long accustomed to teaching and learning online, the pandemic was not necessarily a sudden pivot, but rather an opportunity to share and extend longstanding knowledge and experience of online education. Those with an interest in developing teachers’ capabilities as online instructors will likely find much interest within the 16 chapters.

The book is focused on online teaching in the higher education sector. However, readers can determine the extent to which developing teachers’ pedagogical and technical capabilities may be a similar challenge across all sectors of education. Continuing professional learning and development (CPLD) has never been more important, not only for teachers who are new to online teaching but also for experienced teachers seeking to refresh and extend our online teaching practices. There is no universally accepted approach to CPLD for online teaching and diverse methods are needed to address wide-ranging development requirements. In our book, we present a CPLD model to capture diverse sources of support and learning development, across institutional boundaries, within institutions, at programme team levels, and for individual teachers. We explore how CPLD provision can address multiple needs and how different sources of support can be effectively combined to provide a coherent experience.

 

CPLD ecological support model for online teaching

Our book presents a collection of perspectives from around the world on how educators have been supported to teach effectively online. Authors from nine countries across Asia, North America, South Asia, the Pacific and Western Europe, have contributed chapters to share their approaches to online teaching development. Each chapter addresses the central question of the book: What continuing professional learning and development (CPLD) opportunities do teachers require to help them to develop their online teaching practice?

We hope FLANZ members will consider the collective evidence from this volume to be a useful contribution to the conversation around effective and sustainable learning for online teachers. Of interest to readers will be:

  • institutional frameworks and toolkits for CPLD
  • peer support networks, communities of practice, and cross-cultural mentoring
  • implementation of professional accreditation pathways
  • open education initiatives, MOOCs and resources
  • learning from theory and experiences of staff from different institutions and disciplines worldwide.

Forbes, D. & Walker, R. (Eds.) (2022). Developing online teaching in higher education: Global perspectives on continuing professional learning and development. Springer https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-19-5587-7

 

Event: Bicultural principles for teaching and learning online

Arapera Herewini-Card and Dr Rosina Merry are two of the editors of ‘Bicultural principles of teaching and learning online | Ngā mātāpono kākano rua o te mahi ako tuihono’, a resource that sets out eleven principles for teaching and learning online in a bicultural delivery environment.

In conversation in our webinar, Arapera and Rosina will share insight into the principles that provide kaiako with an understanding of online teaching expectations that embrace tikanga principles and practices throughout their online teaching and how these can be applied.

These bicultural principles were originally developed, trialed, and refined by kaiako at Te Rito Maioha Early Childhood New Zealand, and are applicable to other tertiary contexts. Come along to this conversation to learn from and with Rosina and Arapera.

Register for free for this webinar on 20 June 2023 at 1pm NZST.

Presenters

Profile photo of Arapera Herewini-Card Arapera Herewini-Card, Masters of Indigenous Studies. BTch (ECE).
Pouhere Kaupapa Māori | Senior Advisor Māori
Te Rito Maioha Early Childhood New Zealand

Arapera is of Māori descent and is responsible for ensuring that Te Rito Maioha (ECNZ) maintains its bicultural integrity by providing cultural leadership through integrating tikanga Māori (protocols), and kawa Māori (customs and practices) across the organisations programmes. Growing knowledge and learning of the language, culture and identity of the indigenous peoples of Aotearoa, New Zealand is Arapera’s commitment to her ancestoral line.

Profile photo of Dr Rosina MerryDr Rosina Merry
Director Teaching, Learning and Research – Kaitohu Akoranga me Rangahau
Te Rito Maioha Early Childhood New Zealand

Rosina is the Director of Teaching, Learning and Research for Te Rito Maioha (ECNZ) and is an Adjunct Professor UNITAR International University. She has the overall responsibility for the oversight and management of academic and research strategy for undergraduate, graduate, and post graduate programmes. This role also includes managing the quality, compliance, and national consistency of teaching, learning, and research delivery of Te Rito Maioha ECNZ)’s qualifications.

Through her doctoral study, Rosina developed a conceptual model, which supports initial teacher education providers to understand how student teachers integrate digital technology into their teaching practice. She has a passion for e-learning with a particular focus on student engagement and lecturer presence. Rosina’s research interests include the use of technology in the delivery of teacher education, language culture, and identity in online learning spaces and integrated curriculum.

Feature image by Sophie Turner on Unsplash of snowcapped Mt Taranaki.

Webinar recap: Female pioneers of online learning

For International Women’s Day, 8 March 2023, ODLAA and FLANZ hosted a webinar which showcases women’s role in online learning, including open, distance, and flexible learning. For this event we welcomed Dr Susan Bainbridge and Dr Norine Wark, authors of The Encyclopedia of Female Pioneers of Online Learning as our panellists. This landmark book is the first volume to explore the lives and scholarship of women who have prominently advanced online learning.

A lively event with 43 participants, we heard how Susan and Norine approached the work with the exciting stories of women pioneers. Susan and Norine outlined their research study and explained how the book evolved as they approached more women who agreed to participate in interviews. It is fascinating to listen to this webinar, finding out first about the search for the women pioneers in the research project, but also their reflections, the wins, and the challenges they faced over the years, including gender issues. Social justice was the prime motivator for all the pioneers interviewed.

You can watch the recording of the webinar and also view the full transcript.

Event: AI is here to stay: Its impact on online, flexible, and distance learning

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has come to the forefront of the conversation with the release of ChatGPT at the end of November 2022. Since then, we’ve seen more and more AI tools being talked about, including those that create images, help write text, and make our lives easier.

What does this all mean for education be it primary, secondary, or tertiary? What about learning in the workplace? Our panellists come from different areas of the education sector and will provide insight into the impact of AI on online, flexible, and distance learning, looking at it from the perspective of diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and decolonisation.

Register for free for this session on Thursday, 18 May 2023, 11-12 NZST to learn from our panellists and engage in a conversation with them.

Our panellists

Evo Leota-Tupou

Evo serves on the EdTechNZ Executive Council and is Director of Pacific Kids Learning (PKL). She is mum to five who are the reason why PKL started. Evo is a social entrepreneur, content producer, and founder of Pacific Kids’ Learning (PKL), an EdTech and Edutainment organisation dedicated to empowering children through digital stories and merging cultural practises, song and dance with technology.

Dr Rebecca Marrone

Rebecca is a Lecturer: Learning Sciences and Development for the Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning (C3L) at the University of South Australia Education Futures. Her research is primarily in the fields of creativity, educational psychology and human and artificial cognition across varying educational contexts. Rebecca serves on the organising committee for the Empowering learners for the Age of AI conference and the 1st International Conference on Change and Complexity in Learning.

Dr Mark McConnell

Mark is a Professional Teaching Fellow in the Department of Commercial Law at the University of Auckland Business School, where he also serves as the Department’s Director of Teaching and Learning. Mark has been involved in research projects relating to learning analytics to inform learning design, and vicarious learning through the use of videoed tutorials. Recently Mark has been leading his Department’s response to student use of AI tools such as ChatGPT.

Shanon O’Connor (Ngāti Porou me Ngāi Tahu)

With a background in both technology and education, Shanon is the founder and Director of Tōnui Collab, a charitable trust committed to creating equitable STEMM learning opportunities for rangatahi in Te Tairāwhiti so that their potential to be science and technology future problem solvers and innovators can be realised. Shanon has a Masters in Contemporary Education. Her Masters investigated the engagement of kōhine Māori in kaupapa Māori aligned tech education.

Dr Truman Pham

Truman is the Postgraduate Director at academyEX (previously The Mind Lab). He also teaches and supervises the blended/hybrid Master of Contemporary Education. His current research areas are applications of Artificial Intelligence in education and teachers’ self-identification of leadership. His PhD research was about industrial intelligence control which has now been applied in electric vehicles, wind turbines, and robotics. Truman was chair of EdTechNZ and is currently a member of its Executive Council.

Partnership

We are pleased to partner with EdTechNZ on this session and offer it as part of the TechWeek23 programme.

EdTechNZ logo

 

Feature image by Robert Anderson on Unsplash

ChatGPT in Education: New Resource on FLANZ Professional Pathways

Following the November 2022 launch of ChatGPT, a large language artificial intelligence chatbot, a huge amount of information, comment and discussion has been published. And not unexpectedly, some of this information and comment has been written using ChatGPT itself.

Early readers were not always aware of whose writing they were reading and even now, months later, more sophisticated uses are being harnessed which make the line between writing from a human and writing from ChatGPT difficult to distinguish from each other. Therein lies the problem. This has huge implications for the Education sector, among many others.

Students have ChatGPT available as a tool to assist their writing, which is disrupting the traditional models of assessment such as essay writing, while teachers now have a tool to streamline writing their lesson notes, course developers have a tool for writing new content quickly and consistently for any defined audience, and markers have a tool for assisting their feedback on submitted written work. ChatGPT is available, and it is up to educators to now determine how to best manage with this new player in the marketplace.

There are already 596,000,000 entries listed in a search on <ChatGPT> on Google and it is only 3½ months after the initial release of this software. To help you successfully navigate your way in this rapidly growing information resource on ChatGPT, Alison Fields (InfoSolutions Ltd, FLANZ Executive member) has provided you with a curated list of useful resources providing a solid introduction to AI in general, and ChatGPT in particular, in Education. This list is available in the FLANZ Professional Pathways under Current Topics: ChatGPT in Education.

Webinar on the impact of COVID on students in Aotearoa New Zealand on 18 April 2023

The coronavirus pandemic and associated move to online learning for students in higher education has been disruptive and challenging. In this FLANZ webinar, Dr Michael Cameron reports on the New Zealand arm of an international survey of higher education students (n = 147). Using quantitative and qualitative data from the survey, they found that students coped reasonably well with the disruption to their studies and were generally satisfied with how their lecturers and institutions responded to unanticipated lockdowns.

In comparison with the global sample, New Zealand students demonstrated a higher level of satisfaction. New Zealand students reported the highest satisfaction with recorded video lectures, whereas the global sample preferred real-time teaching. Many New Zealand students felt that their studies were negatively affected, and vulnerable groups such as students with low financial resources were the most severely affected. Moreover, students reported a range of negative emotions during lockdown that suggest mental health impacts may be a concern.

The results indicate that clear communication from authorities, reducing the uncertainty for students, and ensuring that vulnerable groups are appropriately supported, may be the best avenues to reduce negative impacts on students during future significant disruptions to study, whether pandemic-related or otherwise.

This webinar is based on the JOFDL article by Michael Cameron, Barbara Fogarty-Perry, and Gemma Piercy and gives you the opportunity to ask your own questions and learn more about this study.

Presenter

Michael CameronDr Michael Cameron is Professor of Economics in the School of Accounting, Finance and Economics (SAFE) at the University of Waikato. He is also a Research Associate in Te Ngira – Institute for Population Research. Michael’s current research interests include a range of topics in population economics, financial literacy, and economics education.

 

 

 

 

Registration

Register for free for this webinar on 18 April 2023 at 13:00 NZST.