Entries by IUTcore

CSU Thinkspace: Using Media Articles within the Blogspace to Enhance Discourse in Accounting Education

This paper examines the potential of blogs to instil professional skills and perspectives that undergraduate accounting students require to become competent professionals in a global economy. Blogs provide a compelling platform for engaging teachers and students in discourse on media articles that examine real world accounting challenges, fallacies, and questionable practices. Blogs are an effective online learning technology that encourages critical thinking, reflection and formative feedback. Making use of CSU Thinkspace as a learning platform in an undergraduate accounting subject, preliminary evidence regarding the effectiveness of blogging for developing professional understandings and higher order thinking skills, is discussed.

Beyond PBL: Using New Spaces and Learning Design to Improve Student Outcomes

Many universities seek to deliver an authentic learning experience for students by utilizing a Problem Based Learning (PBL) model. Over three years, we redesigned a paramedic pharmacology subject using PBL concepts and, in doing so, found we had journeyed beyond established PBL models. The new approach uses several different student experiences and learning spaces to implement PBL, including collaborative, research, simulation, online and off-campus spaces. Initial data also suggest high levels of student satisfaction. The “multi-space” approach to PBL subject would be suitable for further rigorous evaluation of the educational design and outcomes.

Communal Learning in a Virtual Village

This paper will discuss the collaborative teaching and learning methods used in our UU204 “Pacific Worlds” Course at the University of the South Pacific (USP)— a generic undergraduate course offered online at the 200 level. The course draws on a discussion forum called talanoa, as well as matai assessment. The latter draws on Pacific arts such as singing, dancing, painting and poetry, which students can utilize to depict a contemporary issue affecting their community, nation or the Pacific region. Under previous modes of learning, through face-to-face and print, the students were still separated by the vast Pacific Ocean. Now, however, this distance has been bridged by the “virtual village” of online learning.