Abstract
The University of Texas at El Paso has launched the TeachTech Program to help its instructors to learn and implement the applications of new instructional technologies in the university classrooms. The objectives of this chapter are to examine what faculty members have experienced after taking part in the TeachTech Program. This study employed an online interview method to solicit past and present TeachTech Program participants (N=17) to share their experiences. Participants responded to a questionnaire hosted at QuestionPro. Faculty recurrent keywords and key phrases were collected from participants' experiential narratives. Using the key phrase extraction functions from QDA Miner and WordStat has found the following phrases related to their experiences: “incorporate technology,” “collaborate sessions,” “hybrid version,” “desire to learn,” and “solve problems.” Implications and discussions were provided.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Flipped Classroom/Learning: It refers to an instructional strategy that has recently gained prominence among educational community. The innovative strategy focuses on the integration of instructional and EdTech technologies to allow the instructor to offer online resources and to gamify a class to allow students to learn actively. The strategy allows instructors to transform homework assignments to activities that student can actively participate and engage during the face-to-face class meetings.
Blended Learning: A term that is synonymous to flipped learning. It refers to the use of a combination of learning delivery approaches, such as face-to-face synchronous or online asynchronous method to allow students to learn either online or offline.
Pedagogy: This term refers to a systematic instructional method employed by an instructor to convey core subject matters to students. This term can also refer to the study of teaching methods to help an instructor to choose the most effective approach after taking into consideration students’ motivation, learning styles, social, economic, and cultural background.
Critical Reflection: A term to describe the process by which people identify the assumptions to guide their actions, locate the cultural and historical contexts of these assumptions, inquire the meaning of these assumptions, and develop different ways of actions.
EdTech: Abbreviated from educational technology. A term often refers to different types of instructional technologies (such as the Internet, mobile devices, streaming technologies, cloud storage, digital games, etc.) that are applied in classrooms ranging from K12 to higher education institutes.
Hybrid Classroom/Learning: A term that describes a technologized classroom where students study course materials delivered through connected pedagogical platforms (such as the Internet) and then interact with the instructors during the face-to-face meetings to clarify what they have learned online.
Interactivity: An important dimension of information-communication technologies (or ICTs). This term refers to the process ICT users are provided with the technical capabilities to modify communication contents and to have real-time interactions with participants in a communication process.
Text Mining: A term that refers to a growingly popular research method to process and analyse a large of textual data. This research method include the pre-processing, text categorization, clustering of documents, and extraction of keywords, key phrases, or topics. Text mining techniques also involve the use of text visualization where word clouds, graphs, and maps can be used to represent the relationships among extracted information from the corpus.
Topic Modelling: A text mining procedure, also commonly found in machine learning and natural language processing methods, to discover hidden semantic structure from the collection of documents through statistical procedures.
TF-IDF: Abbreviated from Term-Frequency-Inverse document Frequency. TF-IDF is a popular statistical term that take into consideration both the importance of a word or a phrase and their specificity.
Word Cloud: A text visualization technique that is used to graphical represent the importance of a word or a key phrase on the basis of their importance in relation to the whole corpus. A larger image of a specific word or phrase denotes its relative importance among the documents in the corpus.
Experiential Narratives: A term that refers to written or spoken account of what a person has experienced in a specific event. This type of narratives can be from a first-person or third-person perspective when describing their personal account of a particular event.
Gamification: Gamification refers to the applications of game design principles and the inclusion of game elements in non-gaming contexts. The gamification practice is also considered to be an informal umbrella term to describe the inclusion of game design elements in non-game applications such as business, education, health care, human resources, to name a few.
Online Learning: A term to describe an emerging pedagogical approach to learn at students’ premise and at students’ own pace through the integration of advanced information-communication technologies (such as Blackboard, Moodle, YouTube) either asynchronously or synchronously.