Exploring the role of on-line discussion in academic staff development for new lecturers

Shephard, Kerry; Riddy, Paul; Warren, Adam; Mathias, Haydn

doi:10.1080/1470329032000103771

Cited by 2 publications

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“…There is some empirically-based evidence that professional development based on pedagogic research can influence teachers' teaching and student learning (Gibbs & Coffey, 2004) and in some respects the United Kingdom's national 'Professional Standards Framework for Teaching and Supporting Learning in Higher Education' is based on this principle (Higher Education Academy, 2010; Ramsden, 2008). But there are also particular skills, and research underpinnings, associated with the use of videoconferencing and related e-learning technologies and professional development for these presents particular challenges (Stein, Shephard, & Harris, 2009;Shephard, Riddy, Warren, & Mathias, 2003). The majority of teachers involved in this research were highly experienced research-active university teachers who do not necessarily recognise the need for ongoing professional development to enable them to make the best use of high-speed video-conferencing.…”

Section: Behaviourmentioning

confidence: 96%

Exploring presentation styles in higher education teaching and research situations: distance and face-to-face

Shephard

Knightbridge

2011

Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning

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Universities are increasingly using advanced video-conferencing environments to interact for teaching and research purposes at a distance and in situations that combine distant participants with those face-to-face. Those who use these technologies expect professional development support to do so but we do not yet have a comprehensive research platform on which to base this support. The research described here sought to explore research protocols that could enrich our understanding of this domain, based on exploratory quantitative analyses of presenters' behaviours and participants' perceptions of presentations. It identified a number of presenter-behaviours that may predict overall participant perceptions and that may discriminate between categories of perceived presentation quality. We conclude that this research approach may be capable of producing realistic guidelines for presenters who operate in distance settings but that these do need to address the particular circumstances in which presenters find themselves. IntroductionUniversity academics are increasingly using the Access Grid and similar presentation, teaching and networking technologies over high-speed networks (collectively, but over-simply, styled as video-conferencing), to present themselves and their ideas for teaching and research purposes at a distance. The Access Grid is a set of hardware, software, tools and architecture designed to facilitate collaboration over the Internet. It is very fast and allows presentations to be broadcast simultaneously to and from many different sites or nodes. These developments build on several decades of video-conferencing use and respond to faster networking, more sophisticated software and the experiential benefits of research and development. It should now be possible for several groups or individuals to maintain multiway video and audio communication and to share documents and their development. But anyone who has communicated in this way knows that the nature, and experience, of these online presentations varies greatly. The situation for presenters was summarised by Edberg et al. (2002) following completion of a collaborative high-performance computing course, in the USA, in the early phase of the Access Grid:

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Section: Behaviourmentioning

confidence: 96%

Exploring presentation styles in higher education teaching and research situations: distance and face-to-face

Shephard

Knightbridge

2011

Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning

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Conferencing and Workshops: a blend for staff development

Pettit

2005

Education, Communication & Information

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several hundred staff participated in a programme set up to support the Open University's mainstreaming of online teaching. One particular concern was how the programme would avoid being seen as a top-down imposition in areas of controversial change such as the move towards e-tutoring. To meet this, the programme set out to facilitate university-wide sharing of experience and practices across diverse groups of academic and learning-support staff while remaining sensitive to local needs in different parts of the organization. As part of this process, about 80 staff participated in online conferencing blended with workshops, in some cases gaining almost their first experience of online discussion. The paper draws on quantitative and qualitative data to illustrate some of the ways in which such discussion can facilitate staff development in areas of profound change.

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Exploring the role of on-line discussion in academic staff development for new lecturers

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Exploring presentation styles in higher education teaching and research situations: distance and face-to-face

Exploring presentation styles in higher education teaching and research situations: distance and face-to-face

Conferencing and Workshops: a blend for staff development

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