Section III: Research and Scholarly Reflections on Educational Technology
This section consists of six chapters and serves as a collection of case studies and essays about SoTL projects examining teaching and/or learning with educational technology. These case studies provide readers with opportunities to reflect on how a variety of philosophical lenses, research questions, and methodologies find space within the scholarship of teaching and learning. The authors go beyond reporting scholarly results, offering personal reflection on their project design choices that maintained the focus on teaching and learning for their studies of educational technology.
In Chapter 9: Learning in Digital Spaces: Technology’s Impact on Teacher Learning and Practice, Anna Bartosik demonstrates how digital ethnography can be used to investigate self-directed professional growth of educators in open digital spaces. She grounds her work in Posthuman theory and Actor-network theory. Seeking to understand how learning and networking is understood by participants in a digital space relative to in-person environments, she finds that learner agency cannot be separated or demarcated from the technology.
In Chapter 10: Generative SoTL: Exploring AI in Inquiry, Elisa Baniassad explores the ways AI intersects with SoTL, from enabling research methodologies to reimagining educational roles and responsibilities and argues for proactive engagement with AI.
In Chapter 11: Challenging Assumptions About HyFlex Teaching with Students as Partners, Zoya Adeel, Stefan M. Mladjenovic, Kate Brown and Katie Moisse address the timely topic of hybrid-flexible learning environments in Chapter 10. Specifically, they address changes in students’ engagement and perspectives pre and post-COVID.
In Chapter 12: Scholarly Design of Interactive Instructional Videos for Online and Flipped-Class Learning, Riley J. Petillion and W. Stephen McNeil offers retrospective reflection on the motivations, design, deployment, assessment, and revision of interactive learning resources in a large flipped introductory course. This chapter contextualizes their study with theory both relevant across the academy and more specific to their discipline, and describe how their innovation was iteratively adapted in response to student feedback and environmental factors.
In Chapter 13: Using an Interactive Online Game Platform for Teaching and Learning, Rosmawati, Budianto Tandianus, and Hock Soon Seah examine the use of augmented and virtual reality for learning activities with the Community of Inquiry framework. This chapter shares how certain limitations of in-person teaching can be alleviated in a virtual space. Furthermore, the authors propose practical strategies for improving the implementation of the technology to better focus student attention to the learning of course content rather than familiarization with the technology’s user interface.
Finally, in Chapter 14: Statistically Significant: Reflecting on the use of Educational Technology in Online Introductory Statistics Courses, Rachael Lewitzky explores how pedagogy, content, and technology can be woven together in online spaces. Using content analysis with course materials and the TPACK framework (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) to deductively code semi-structured interviews of course instructors, Lewitzky uses three themes to organize the relationships between the course and the technology used to teach it.
By applying varied theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and reflective approaches, the authors in this section demonstrate how technology can shape and be shaped by pedagogical practices. They provide valuable insights into the complexities of integrating technology in ways that enhance teaching and learning. Together, they encourage readers to critically engage with both the opportunities and challenges of educational technology in diverse learning environments.
References
Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2006). Technological pedagogical content knowledge: A framework for integrating technology in teachers’ knowledge. Teachers College Record, 108 (6), 1017–1054. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9620.2006.00684.x
