Over the past few decades, education systems, especially in higher education, have been redefined. Such reforms inevitably require reconsideration of operational notions and definitions of quality, along with a number of related concepts. This reconsideration aligns with the core of higher education reforms: improving efficacy and compatibility with emerging social demands while adapting to competitiveness and accountability trends. As primary players in the teaching and learning process, online tutors have a protagonistic role and, therefore, must be equipped with a suitable set of competencies and attributes in addition to content knowledge. This quantitative research aims to analyze the perceptions of 250 online tutors working in European higher education institutions, distributed in 5 knowledge areas: Business, Education, Humanities, Sciences and Health. This descriptive and exploratory nonexperimental study reveals the technological and pedagogical skills and competencies that online tutors consider fundamental for effective online teaching and proposes professional development actions to ensure quality online teaching.
Robot tutors provide new opportunities for education. However, they also introduce moral challenges. This study reports a systematic literature re-view (N = 256) aimed at identifying the moral considerations related to ro-bots in education. While our findings suggest that robot tutors hold great potential for improving education, there are multiple values of both (special needs) children and teachers that are impacted (positively and negatively) by its introduction. Positive values related to robot tutors are: psychological welfare and happiness, efficiency, freedom from bias and usability. However, there are also concerns that robot tutors may negatively impact these same values. Other concerns relate to the values of friendship and attachment, human contact, deception and trust, privacy, security, safety and accountability. All these values relate to children and teachers. The moral values of other stakeholder groups, such as parents, are overlooked in the existing literature. The results suggest that, while there is a potential for ap-plying robot tutors in a morally justified way, there are imported stake-holder groups that need to be consulted to also take their moral values into consideration by implementing tutor robots in an educational setting. (from Narcis.nl)
MULTIFILE
Described are the results of an investigation in the appreciation of distance learning, limited to a case study with an online lab-experiment. Together with other educational institutes and companies Fontys University of Applied Sciences participated in a number of projects in which distance learning courses were developed. Some courses have been integrated in the regular curriculum. Our study was set up to get insight into the appreciation of students for this way of learning, especially concerning online lab-experiments. By using surveys and interviews after the students accomplished either a regular course or a distance learning course on the same object we tried to get a better understanding of how students used the course and appreciated it. Also we wanted to know whether an online lab-experiment is more or less effective than a regular one. Preliminary data analyses have shown that the appreciation of an online lab-experiment is dependent on a number of items, like the educational contents of the experiment itself, the way accompanying theory is presented, possibilities of doing the experiment in an alternative way, the organization around the experiment etc. It appears also that students give serious suggestions on developing other online lab-experiments.
