Page - 100 - in Radical Solutions and Open Science - An Open Approach to Boost Higher Education

106 J.Cullen combiningfacetofaceteachingwithawiderangeofdigitaltools,withdifferenttools beingapplied fordifferentpedagogicpurposes.Forexample, ‘mind-mapping’ tools aimtosupport students to linkconceptsandvisualise them;simulationsareapplied to help students develop problem-solving and ‘trouble-shooting’ skills; wikis are applied to support collaborative learning and student blogs to disseminate the con- tent created by students in their assignments. A recent development has been the migration of the ‘flipped classroom’ approach fromK12 education to the higher educationsetting.Flippedclassroomsreplaceeducator-generatedclasscontentwith student-generated content. Students are required to complete preparatoryworkand bring it to the classroom,where it is used to support greater interactivity between students asagroupandbetweenstudents and their teachers (Berrett, 2012).Adher- ents of theflipped classroomapproach argue that it offers a number of advantages overconventional formsof teachingand learning. It allowsstudents to learnat their own pace; it frees up class time for critical review and problem-solving; it pro- vides studentswithmoreopportunities to learn ‘twenty-first-century’ skills that are more relevantwith regard to subsequent job searching—and it fosters studentown- ershipof their learningandtheir learningcontent.This, in turn, is linkedtoevidence of greater student engagement, improved peer learning and interaction, improved creativity and self-confidence, increased student performance and higher levels of student satisfaction (Wilson,2014;Vasilchenkoet al., 2017). Equally, the increasing popularity of Personal Learning Environments (PLE’s) in the educational field has been seen as evidence of the increasing adoption of a ‘constructivist’ pedagogy that emphasises a shift in the role of the educator from transmitterof information to facilitatorofknowledgeproduction.AsAtwell (2007) argues, throughPLEs, students—formerly consumersof knowledge—becomepro- ducers, throughcreatingandsharingcontent.Typically,PLEsbundletogetherdiffer- enttools—includingsocialmedia,wikis,blogs,multimediaandsharingplatforms— inordertoaggregatedifferentlearningservicesthat, togetherenablelearnerstobuild andmanage their own learning spaces, under their control, bring together different sourcesandcontexts for learningandbridgeeducational institutional environments withtheworldoutside.OtherwritersmakeanexplicitconnectionbetweenPLEsand prosumerism. PLE’s enable students to choose the services and applications they need to generate or consume content. They actively participate in determining the aims and delivery of their learning experience. The diversity of tools embodied in a PLE supports awide range of flexibility that learners can use to their advantage to customise the structure, content and delivery of educational services according to theirownpersonalneedsand ‘learningstyles’. In thisway, the learnermakes the transition fromapassive recipient of information to the ‘protagonist’ of a learning experience.Theprocessingof informationcanbemanagedbyeach learnerusinga set of tools that they choose, allowing each learner to tailor the learningprocess to theirownneedsandcircumstances (Kompenet al., 2019). A further indication of this increasing shift towards engaging students asmore active co-creators and co-producers of their learning is the recent move towards