Factors Affecting the Successful Implementation of an E-Education Policy and Community Engagement: Acquiring 21st Century Skills Through E-Learning

Introduction

This section will describe the general perspective of the chapter and end by specifically stating the objective.

The plethora of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) around currently have changed the lives of everyone tremendously (Ratheeswari, 2018), especially in education. These emerging technologies, such as multiliteracies, introducing learning by design projects and frameworks (Kalantzis & Cope, 2012), as well as gamification, are becoming more prevalent in global classrooms. Since these are leading to an inquiring mindset in school systems and schools, traditional literacy pedagogies are shifting toward game-based pedagogy, which supports the call towards addressing 21st century learners (C21 Canada, 2017).

Likewise, an international journal article on pedagogies by Cope and Kalantzis (2009, p. 164) examined the changing landscape of new literacies teaching and new “learning, revisiting the case for a ‘pedagogy of multiliteracies’ ”. It also described “the dramatically changing social and technological contexts of communication and learning”.

Therefore, within such contexts, there is a need to study ways for engaging learners in meaning-making, perhaps with some element of visual design. Multimodal ways of learning can offer insights for reinventing traditional literacy pedagogical boundaries and establish new ways and practices for building knowledge. “There is considerable enthusiasm in many quarters for the incorporation of digital games”, media and technologies into the classroom as part of the learning process, and the capacity of computer “games to engage and challenge players, present complex representations and” student experiences, as these can get students’ brains working and foster perceptions of collaborative, creative and authentic learning, as well as promote deep meaningful learning (Beavis, Muspratt, & Thompson, 2015, p. 21).

For example, the idea of youth learning from video games is echoed by contemporary research on intertextuality in video games (Duret & Pons, 2016), recognizing the benefits and challenges of integrating video games in classrooms as a pedagogical strategy to gain literacy skills (Beavis, et al., 2015). An analysis of three international case studies in the chapter by Uribe-Jongbloed, Espinosa-Medina and Biddle (2016, p. 143) addressed the relationships that existed “between intertextuality and cultural transduction in video game localization.” The “former refers to the dual relationship established between texts and previous texts available to” potential readers. By focusing on integrated Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) concepts in a digital game, strides can be made towards improving K-12 STEM education (DeCoito & Richardson, 2016).

In a “poster presentation at a scientific meeting” on a new perspective in the cognitive science of effortless attention and action, Hommel (2010, p. 121) “offered a new theoretical framework on stimulus and response representation (the later theory of event coding”), together with supportive data. Hommel (2010) also highlighted that many researchers argued that meaningful learning, including critical thinking, and decision-making in video games may model engaging and effective instructional techniques for grounding attention in action control and the intentional control of selection.

In terms of what works when bringing research into practice regarding differentiation in Ontario classrooms, Sider and Maich (2014, p. 1) suggested that “the reality of implementing classroom-based differentiated instruction can be challenging. One” of the effective literacy teaching strategies that teachers can use for supporting the literacy “learning needs of a range of students” in the inclusive classroom is by using research on technology-supported teaching and learning (Goosen, 2019a; b; c).