Abstract:

This paper will address the question about how students experience learning spaces: specifically the increasing blend involving online and physical spaces. The focus here is on how students negotiate these spaces and whether the virtual spaces are necessarily fulfilling their promise of increasing interaction. Following the results of a student survey and several pre- and follow-up focus group sessions, conclusions and suggestions are presented.

Key findings are presented from a large survey of second and third year business and law students about their experiences of TEL at a post-92 university (University of the West of England). These findings are compared and contrasted with the broad themes from the focus group sessions. For example, competing tensions were discovered between the desire for event capture technologies and an apparent preference for traditional physical spaces in which lectures could take place. However, it was also discovered that these physical spaces were being significantly enhanced through the use of interactive technologies that utilised the students’ own mobile devices or via supplied devices from the institution. Further still, the much-vaunted collaborative potential of online technologies was brought into question, in-line with research by Henderson and Selwyn et al.

Other notable themes from the analysis concerning learning spaces included the affordances provided by technology; how pedagogical design was key to effective group work; how technology was more effective when it was seen as functional and how there was a need for technologies to be deployed effectively and in a timely manner (point of need), and related to this was the finding that students wanted to use appropriate and current technologies to be ‘work ready’. Descriptive data from the surveys will be presented in the session and compared alongside the thematic analysis from the focus groups.

References:
[1] “What works and why? Student perceptions of ‘useful’ digital technology in university teaching and learning’, Journal Studies in Higher Education, (Michael Henderson, Neil Selwyn and Rachel Aston, 2015).
[2] ‘Digital Natives and the Net Generation: Implications for Higher Education’ (Christopher Jones and Binhui Shao, 2011).
[3] ‘Digital natives: Where is the Evidence? British educational research journal (Helsper, Ellen and Eynon, Rebecca, 2009).
[4] ‘Digital Technology and the Contemporary University’ (N. Selwyn, 2014).

Keywords:

Space, VLE, pedagogy, on-line.