Learning is influenced and shaped by the contexts within which it takes place. Contextual factors such as learning environments, social networks, and the use of mobile technologies can alter learner performance, making it hard to assess and assure the true capability and competence of our learners. Our initiative explores the many ways that learning at the University of Calgary is shaped by contextual factors, and then to develop, deploy, and test a series of educational activities that make these contextual factors more explicit and a part of deliberate teaching and learning practices. Our goal is to help Calgary teachers to adopt more adaptable and robust approaches to competency-based education so they will be better placed to prepare our learners to meet the changing and emergent demands of professional and academic practice.

Purpose: The CRAWWLA project focused on what teachers (and through them their learners) do when, either by chance or by design, the learning environments they work in change. For instance, how does teaching practice change when a particular room, technology, or mentor is or is not available, or its availability changes over time. We were particularly interested in how teachers adapt their teaching practices according to changing circumstances and how teachers can deliberately add or withhold learning resources (technical, human, and environmental) to shape the learning environments they control to lead to certain outcomes.

Activities: We found that, while this is a common concern in higher education, it is rarely considered as a distinct focus of scholarly inquiry. More specifically, we found that teachers accept and adapt to changing circumstances in a somewhat fatalistic and passive way rather in a deliberate and theoretically grounded way. This was echoed in the research literature. The project focused on three areas of activity: conceptual, practical, and infrastructural. The conceptual part of the project focused on synthesizing a wide range of research and philosophy literature to develop models and frameworks of how ‘with and without’ works and how it can be used to effect different learning outcomes. The practical part focused on the use of an e-learning approach called ‘Turk talk’ where learners in online training scenarios can call on human support with their learning activities. The infrastructural part focused on how the data we capture from teachers and learners can be better used to support teaching practice.

Impact: The project has had a number of impacts: we have contributed and are continuing to contribute to our understanding of augmentation in higher education and in particular in the context of how teachers adapt to change and how they make deliberate use of augmentation in their teaching practice. We have also piloted and developed techniques in using technology-enhanced learning in ways that make deliberate and effective use of augmentation. And finally, we have developed an integrated approach to capturing and aggregating educational activity data in support of augmented teaching practices.

<< Teaching scholars program recipients