The Future of Education

For the last two decades one cannot overlook the fact that there have been major improvements in the area of educational technology. Schools and universities also try to accompany the evolutional pace of this new technological stance introduced in the teaching-learning process. Moreover, the spread of tablets, smartphones and social networks has accounted for an unavoidable immersion into the technological world by both students and lecturers. Hence, it has been most impossible to become indifferent to these tools which can provide valuable support to the different teaching methods. On the one hand, students, as digital natives, adhere easily and enthusiastically to these new teaching approaches. On the other, lecturers are sometimes bereft of ideas when it comes to motivating the students and introduce innovative methodologies to their own teaching. Therefore, technology enhanced learning tools can boost lecturers’ skills in regard to the use of technologies in an advanced way. The aim of this paper is to present the platform Community of Practice (CoP), which is the ultimate visible result of the Advanced use of Learning Technologies in higher education (AduLeT) project, a collaborative 3-year (2016-2019) research project funded by the European Commission, involving seven partner countries. CoP meets the standards that teaching nowadays requires aiming at providing higher education lecturers with a substantial matrix of tools and methods combined, which will grow with the increase in the number of users, and hence become more complete. We shall demonstrate the use and effectiveness of the CoP by showing some practical examples and by highlighting several insightful user experiences within the Portuguese higher education context. To establish a connection with the main target audience, we organised two workshops and a multiplier event to our institution lecturers and to lecturers from other higher education institutions, disseminating the results and involving more lecturers in this community. Thus, we intend to materialize in this paper a summary of the project, essentially, in the Portuguese perspective. During the multiplier event, we had very positive reactions from the lecturers regarding the CoP, confirming our belief of the project being an innovative and high-profile facilitator of technology advanced use within the higher education context. After this event, the participants were also asked to fill in a satisfaction survey on the use of the CoP.  In the paper, we shall then put forth and analyse the survey answers so that we reach some conclusions regarding the efficacy and applicability of the CoP.

Keywords: AduLeT, Community of Practice, educational tools, user experiences;

References:
[1] Atherton, P. 50 ways to use Technology Enhanced Learning in the classroom: practical strategies for teaching. London & Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2018.
[2] Flavin, F. Technology-enhanced learning and higher education. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Volume 32, Issue 4, 1 January 2016, Pages 632–645, URI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/grw028
[3] AduLeT project website, 2019, URI: http://www.adulet.eu
[4] AduLeT CoP. User comment, 2019, URI: https://dev.adulet.eu/ux/method-and-tool-details/10/282/en