Blended learning offers a learner-centred approach that employs both in-class learning and digital technology to facilitate online learning. Such an approach is especially advantageous to adult-learners in higher education as it meets their educational needs. However, adult-learners’ participation in blended learning programmes remains challenging due to a general lack of online interaction, and no clear teaching strategies that address this concern. Literature relating to adult-learners’ educational needs and online interaction was consulted in order to design teaching strategies that foster adult-learners’ online interaction. The aim of this study is to further validate these teaching strategies, hence a multiple case study was carried out using a mixed method approach. As such, eight teachers and sixteen students from four courses across three universities in Belgium and the Netherlands were interviewed. Additionally, a questionnaire testing a pre-defined set of variables was distributed to 84 students. The results lead to a set of validated teaching strategies that help teachers to further develop their professional skills and expertise. The teaching strategies can be grouped into three categories, namely 1) the teacher's online presence, 2) collaborative learning activities and preparatory learning activities, and 3) the distribution of learning content and learning activities across online and in-class learning. An elaborate set of validated teaching strategies is included. This study aids towards teacher professional development and adds evidence-based knowledge to teaching strategies and instructional frameworks for adult-learners in higher education.
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The aim of this dissertation is to examine how adult learners with a spoken language background who are acquiring a signed language, learn how to use the space in front of the body to express grammatical and topographical relations. Moreover, it aims at investigating the effectiveness of different types of instruction, in particular instruction that focuses the learner's attention on the agreement verb paradigm. To that end, existing data from a learner corpus (Boers-Visker, Hammer, Deijn, Kielstra & Van den Bogaerde, 2016) were analyzed, and two novel experimental studies were designed and carried out. These studies are described in detail in Chapters 3–6. Each chapter has been submitted to a scientific journal, and accordingly, can be read independently.1 Yet, the order of the chapters follows the chronological order in which the studies were carried out, and the reader will notice that each study served as a basis to inform the next study. As such, some overlap in the sections describing the theoretical background of each study was unavoidable.
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Learning and acting on social conventions is problematic for low-literates and non-natives, causing problems with societal participation and citizenship. Using the Situated Cognitive Engineering method, requirements for the design of social conventions learning software are derived from demographic information, adult learning frameworks and ICT learning principles. Evaluating a sample of existing Dutch social conventions learning applications on these requirements shows that none of them meet all posed criteria. Finally, Virtual Reality is suggested as a possible future technology improvement.
