An Online Professional Education Seminar

When: Monday, March 28 – Tuesday, May 31

Online/flexible time schedule, 2 to 4 hours participation per week with different levels of difficulty for beginners and advanced participants.

Optional residential meetings: March 30, April 20, May 31, 18:00 – 20:00 at Deree – The American College of Greece (6 Gravias Street, Aghia Paraskevi)

Registration fees: €230
€200 for the ACG community

Language of Instruction: English

The seminar

The Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) intensive course aims at helping practitioners to better understand digital skills, online training and professional development through networks and communities. The eight-week course combines three optional face-to-face residential meetings with carefully designed “online” learning activities and peer collaboration. This crash course addresses vocational training priorities, emergent digital trends and behavioral patterns that help professionals implement technologies in their organizational context.

The term “technology enhanced learning” encompasses all uses of information and communications technologies in learning and teaching. This course aligns with a particular aspect of technology enhanced learning, which is “networked learning” in which there is promotion of connections between learners, one-to-one, or one-to-many; connections between learners and teachers; and connections between members of groups and communities and the social networking that takes place on the Internet. This view of technology enhanced learning as “networked learning” puts an emphasis on the “human” aspects of technology in learning, and highlights the need to consider the educational and training values that underpin the use of technology. 

Participants

The course is particularly appropriate for trainers, human resource managers, career mentors, community advocates, instructional designers, professional development consultants, and educators that aim at enhancing their e-skills. 

Course Topics

Designing for Technology Enhanced Learning  

Designing for technology enhanced learning (TEL) is based on brain research and the affordances of technologies. It involves creating challenging learning tasks, making sure that students have access to the right tools and resources, and ensuring there are appropriate opportunities for them to learn with and from each other.

Implementing Technology Enhanced Learning  

The course outlines the available tools and main issues relevant to the implementation of technology-enhanced learning (TEL) – the link to overall educational aims, the relationship between innovation and practice, the importance of user engagement, the nature of TEL research, and the characteristics of the local context, and the nature of TEL as a catalyst for change.

Identity, Communities  of  Inquiry and Networks

A Networked Self examines self-presentation and social connection in the digital age. The course brings together new work on online social networks by leading scholars from a variety of disciplines. The focus rests on the construction of the self, and what happens to self-identity when it is presented through networks of social connections in new media environments. The weekly schedule is structured around the core themes of identity, community, and network culture.

The Practitioner as E- Researcher

The term “e-research” indicates an emerging field in which advanced technologies are applied to existing professional praxis. This course will examine some of the trends in this new field and will lead participants in the use of accessible technologies for carrying out evaluations and critically reflect into technology enhanced learning and new digital trends. Using e-Research, practitioners can work “smarter not harder” from desk-to-desk within and between organizations. 

Learning Outcomes: E-skills

At the end of this course, participants will be able to

• Discuss briefly learning theories and concepts related to technologies and brain research: Cognitive load, networked learning, connectivism and communities of practice.​
• Understand approaches to learning and teaching: acquisition, learner-centered/tutor-centered, formal/informal, deep and surface learning, situated learning, authentic learning, and enculturation.
• Think about the potential models for the alignment of learning to learners’ needs, learning design, learning activity, assessment, media choice, and communication technology use.
• Comment on relevant issues that relate the impact of networked technology and a globalized network society on the changing role of learners and teachers in wider learning contexts: blurring of boundaries of authority and ownership, between theory and practice, between home and work.
• Make a well informed decision in the development of a learning community and the ability to recognize and utilize individuals' contributions in group processes and to articulate concepts, negotiate tasks and persuade or influence others based on evidence.
• Demonstrate personal commitment and professionalism in identifying, positioning and showing initiative in making themselves available as a resource for practice in a technology enhanced learning community of relevance to their profession.
• Use of networked technologies/tools to seek out leading edge practice and research and judge the potential of new ideas, insights and technology application in order to work “smarter” not “harder”.
• Practice in a variety of interactive communication situations: synchronous groups; asynchronous groups; social media; effective oral and written communication of complex ideas and arguments, using a range of media and communications technologies to collaborate and construct online training.
• Evaluate the application of technological decisions in the design and support of learning activity and assessment.

Prerequisites

Proficient in the English Language (Not official certification needed)

Computer literate (Word, Internet, mobile applications)

Assessment

The successful participant must complete 70% of the assignments.

Instructor: Dr. Chryssa Themelis

Dr. Chryssa Themelis is an associate researcher at Lancaster University, doctoral advisor at Bolton University and an expert of technology enhanced learning (TEL). She works as a researcher/trainer for EU projects such as Erasmus + and coordinates the annual VocTEL conference aiming to promote TEL in Greece. In 2007, Hellenic American Union awarded her school of foreign language with a Certificate of Recognition. She holds a BA  in Economics from Deree, a MSc in Networked Learning and a PhD in the field of “E-research and Technology Enhanced Learning” from Lancaster University (department of educational research). Studied at Harvard school of education, action research, and her research interests focus on vocational e-learning, gamification, research methods and wearable devices. She belongs to the Networked Learning conference reviewers’ committee and the British Journal of Educational Technology reviewers’ panel.  Her research material is published at books, peer-reviewed journals and presented at several conferences in the UK, Denmark, Spain, the USA, and Greece.

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Registration

To register and for additional information please contact Voula Kyriakopoulou at the Deree School of Graduate & Professional Education, 
​tel: 210 600 9800 ext. 1332, e-mail: [email protected]