Technology-enhanced and Collaborative Learning : Affordances, Approaches and Challenges

Technology-enhanced, collaborative and blended learning settings can promote more effective approaches to teaching, learning and assessment when context, agency and individual characteristics are taken into account. This book presents critical insight into the theoretical and practical progress made towards establishing effective, valid and reliable strategies for using and evaluating such approaches, and the challenges and implications of doing so.

Topics explored include technology-enhanced learning and student evaluations; student engagement and the perception of teaching quality; instructional design and assessment strategies; blended network and mobile technologies for enriching learning and for monitoring and assessment; and the motivations of students to engage with evaluation. Contributors examine issues such as the underlying variabilities in student evaluation of teaching; the implications of inherited cultural and pedagogic practices for educators using collaborative and blended learning; and the international empirical progress in research to understand and measure interactions between cognition, successful learning, and individual difference in technology-augmented settings.

This book will be an essential resource for international researchers and undergraduate and postgraduate students wishing to gain a deeper understanding of the leading perspectives and insights into technology enhanced, blended and collaborative learning, as well as for practitioners and policy makers interested in technology applications in education and training in varied pedagogical and cultural settings. This book was originally published as a special issue of Educational Research and Evaluation.

Michele Notari teaches and researches at the University of Teacher Education in Bern, Switzerland. He has published in key journals in the area of technology-enhanced learning, a book and several book chapters related to collaborative learning using participative technologies. His current research focus is on using mobile and wearable technologies for learning.

Stewart Martin is Professor of Educational Research at the University of Hull, UK, where his research interests include the educational use of digital technology; immersive virtual reality; images of the self; psychometrics; cognition, learning and technology; and educational leadership and organisational change. He is a National Teaching Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy, and has published widely in the field of technology and education, is visiting professor at several international universities and is a member of the Editorial Board for the journal Educational Research and Evaluation.